Chapter 5
Maelis
The silt hung so thick around me it felt like swimming inside a dust storm. My torch barely cut through the haze; the beam bounced back at me, scattering into useless white glare.
I forced myself to close my eyes and count. One… two… three… Slow breaths, steady breaths. My regulator hissed in, hissed out. Each bubble tickled my face before racing upward, desperate to reach the surface I couldn’t get to.
The pressure gauge on my cylinder mocked me. The needle had slid deep into the red. Not empty yet, but close. I did the maths automatically – depth, stress consumption, tank size. Ten minutes if I stayed calm. Half that if I didn’t.
The wall where the entrance had been loomed like a tombstone. My lifeline – the guideline – vanished beneath a slab of rock as though it had never existed. I tugged once more out of sheer desperation, but it stayed buried. My pulse thudded harder, too fast, stealing air I couldn’t spare.
I clenched my fists. Stop. Think. That was what every instructor drilled into us. Panicked divers died. Calm divers sometimes lived.
But calm was a joke in a sealed cave with only a handful of breaths left.
The vibrations reached me then. A faint tremor in the rock that brushed against my mask. I froze, straining to listen. Not stone this time. Not collapse. A voice, faint but unmistakable, distorted by water.
A man. He was able to talk underwater, which could only mean one thing: he was a finman. The voice sounded familiar, but I couldn't be sure.
I banged the nearest rock with my fist, three sharp thuds. My knuckles stung, but the sound carried. Again, three thuds. Then I clutched the regulator in both hands, as if holding it tighter would coax more air from it.
The silt shifted as he pulled at the rubble outside. I couldn’t see him, but I felt his presence through the water, the stubborn persistence of someone who refused to let go. For a heartbeat, hope flared bright enough to make me dizzy.
Then the regulator sputtered. Just once, a hiccup in the steady hiss.
My blood turned to ice. The tank was almost done.
Dark spots drifted at the edges of my vision, and it took all my strength not to rip the mask from my face in panic. I pressed my fist against the rock one more time – weak now, barely more than a tap.
I was out of time.
The regulator wheezed again, a hollow rattle that sent dread clawing up my spine. My lungs screamed for more, but I forced them to take tiny sips, stretching the last dribbles of air.
Then – light.
A thin beam lanced through the rubble, slicing into the murk. Rock scraped against rock outside, followed by a sudden rush of bubbles as a stone shifted free. Water swirled into the gap, pulling silt away, widening just enough to reveal a wedge of green skin.
His face pressed through the crack, algae filaments streaming behind him like ribbons. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating, but then his eyes locked on mine – sharp, steady, anchoring me.
It was him. I had hoped it... but here he was, the alien whose name I didn't even know. The finman who'd predicted the storm I hadn't foreseen. He smiled at me, but his expression was tense.
"I will get you out of there."
His lips moved before the words reached my ears. It all felt very surreal. Maybe I was hallucinating him. I wouldn't be surprised, given my desperate state.
"How much air do you have left?" he asked, his gaze intense.
I couldn't talk, unlike him, so I just shook my head dejectedly.
He got the message. His eyes widened. He looked at the regulator, then peered into the dark cave behind me.
Maybe his vision was better than mine, but even with the torchlight, I hadn't seen another exit.
The tunnel quickly became too narrow for me to swim.
I was trapped. I didn't need the alien to tell me that.
The regulator hissed a last thin stream, then fell silent. My lungs convulsed, desperate, dragging only seawater against the seal of my mask. Black specks swarmed the edges of my vision. I reached out, grasping for something, anything-
He grasped my hand in a strong grip that I would never have been able to escape from and pulled me towards the hole. I wouldn't fit through it. No way. Neither would he. It was pointless.
My lungs burned with a fierce pain. Then his face was there, centre of my diminishing vision. His eyes bored into me, steady, commanding: trust me.
He tore the regulator from my mouth. I tried to fight him, thrashing with panic, but he caught my jaw in one firm hand. And then his mouth sealed over mine.
Air surged into me. Not from the failing tank, but warm and rich, fed from his own lungs. My chest expanded, my vision cleared. A sob of relief slipped into the bubbles between us.
When he drew back, his gills flared wide, fanning the water. He inhaled deep, filtering the sea as though it were nothing, then bent to me again. Another rush of life, another kiss that left me shaking.
I clutched his arm, nails digging into slick green skin, terrified he might stop. But he didn’t. Again and again, he gave me breath, each exchange binding me closer to him, even as the rocks held me fast.
Alive, but not free. Not yet.
We couldn't stay like this forever. He'd managed to squeeze his head and one arm through the hole, but that meant he was now just as trapped as I was. If he wanted to continue clearing the rubble, he'd have to stop breathing for me.
The world had narrowed to a rhythm: darkness pressing in, the crush of rock around me, and then his mouth sealing over mine to deliver another precious rush of air.
Each time, my lungs burned a little less, my panic ebbed a little more.
Each time, I realised just how close we were, how much of my survival now depended on him.
I should have been terrified of the alien pressed against me, of his sharp teeth and the strange tendrils that drifted from his skin. Instead, I was terrified of him leaving.
The cave groaned again, a vibration that rattled my bones. Pebbles sifted down from the ceiling, bouncing off my mask. I flinched, my chest tightening all over again. My hand closed around his wrist, hard, begging him not to go, not to leave me alone in the dark.
His eyes caught mine through the haze of silt, glowing faintly with their own light. He shook his head, firm, steady, and pressed his mouth to mine again. Another gift of air, another reprieve.
The regulator floated uselessly at my shoulder now, hose limp. My tank was dead weight. I wanted to strip it off, to squeeze through the gap, to fight free – but the rubble held me too tight. I couldn’t move without the rock biting into my ribs and hips.
Helpless. If I thought about it too much, the panic would rise again.
Instead, I fixed my gaze on him. The finman.
My unlikely lifeline. He shifted his shoulders against the crack, testing the stones, and I felt the pressure change as he tried to widen the gap.
Every scrape echoed through the water, but the boulders refused to yield.
This was pointless. We were trapped in a moment, a continuous rhythm that couldn't go on for much longer. At some point, he would realise that he couldn't both give me the air I needed and free me at the same time. We couldn't stay like this forever. Would he give up on me?
I was human. I wasn't the same species as him. If he was anything like Kelon, his former leader, he'd run.
His lips met mine again and I sucked in the offered air greedily.
Then I noticed it. The bubbles. The same ones that had lured me down here in the first place. Some weren’t vanishing into the water – they were gathering above, trapped against the jagged ceiling of the cave.
An air pocket.
I jabbed my finger upward, desperate for him to understand. He frowned, then followed my gaze. His eyes widened in understanding. Then he nodded. He gave me another kiss of air.
With the last of my strength, I kicked upward, wriggling past the rubble until my head broke the surface.
Air. Stale, sour, tinged with minerals. But I wasn't going to complain. I could breathe.
This bubble wouldn't last long, but it was enough to keep me breathing for a moment. Hopefully, it would be enough time for him to create a larger hole.
"Do you have enough oxygen up there?" he called through the water. His voice sounded like it was coming through a long tunnel.
"Yes." I was amazed I could speak. "I think so."
In truth, I didn't know the oxygen concentration of this air bubble. But my lungs weren't straining, which was a good sign. I hoped.
I turned, heart pounding, to the shadow in the crack. He’d wedged his head and shoulders through, gills flaring in the gloom.
He smiled at me. “You are safe. For now.”
My laugh came out broken. “Not exactly the pep talk I wanted.”
He tilted his head, teeth flashing. “Then tell me what you need to hear, human.”
“My name’s Maelis,” I said hoarsely. “And I’m not giving up. Tell me you're not giving up on me. Tell me you won't leave me down here.”
Something flared in his eyes. "Never."
I believed him.
And for the first time since the collapse, I believed that I might yet return to the surface. Alive.