Chapter 20
G reta felt it the moment the words left his mouth — a quiet, internal pressure, like a second heartbeat ticking behind her ribs. Not painful yet, but unmistakably there. A countdown.
Sixty minutes.
She knew it instinctively, the same way she knew how much air was left in a failing drone battery. The Malquarans had wired the knowledge straight into her changed body.
She swallowed, pink scales catching the moonlight as she sat up straighter on the coral ledge. “Sixty minutes?”
Klari nodded once, grim. “From when we mated. No mist means no pause between rounds. You stay like this — aquatic, dependent on the transfer — until the next mating resets the clock. If we miss the window…” He didn’t finish.
He didn’t have to.
Greta let out a slow breath, tail still loosely woven with his. “Then we don’t miss it. We find somewhere safe, we mate again, and we buy ourselves another hour. Input, output, survival.”
A faint smile ghosted across his face at her pragmatism. He leaned in and kissed her before standing and pulling her up with him. “We should get back into the water. More hiding places there. We can make it in five minutes if the currents stay calm.”
“Lead the way,” she said, squeezing his hand. “I’ve got your back.”
They slipped off the ledge together and dove into the open water.
For the first thirty seconds everything felt perfect. The sea welcomed them — cool, dark, alive with faint bioluminescence. Klari kept her hand firmly in his, their tails moving in sync with powerful strokes.
Her pink scales gleamed like rose quartz in the filtered moonlight. She could feel the new strength in her body, the way her tail cut through the water with almost no effort. Their fingers stayed laced tight, a silent promise that they would not be separated.
Then the current hit.
At first it was nothing more than a gentle tug — a subtle shift in pressure against Greta’s side, like an invisible hand brushing past her. She felt it as a slight drag on her tail.
“Klari,” she said, squeezing his hand a little tighter. “Do you feel that?”
He nodded, thumb stroking once across her knuckles in reassurance. “I feel it. Just a current. Stay close.”
They kept swimming.
The tug grew stronger.
It became a steady pull, then a firm resistance, as if the water itself had decided it no longer wanted them moving forward together. Greta’s tail had to work harder to maintain their course. She glanced at him again.
“It’s getting worse,” she said, voice tightening. “I can feel it pulling on my tail. ”
Klari’s brow furrowed, silver markings flickering with concentration. “Hold on to me. Don’t let go.”
Their joined hands started to slip.
Not all at once. Just a fraction. The pads of their fingers lost a little traction as the water between their palms grew more insistent, pushing, separating. Greta instinctively squeezed harder.
“Klari—my hand?—”
“I’ve got you,” he growled, tightening his grip until their knuckles pressed painfully together. “Just keep swimming with me. We’ll push through it.”
But the current only deepened, becoming a slow, inexorable force that began to angle them sideways. Their tails brushed more urgently, trying to stay aligned, but the water was fighting them now.
“Klari, it’s pulling harder,” she said, a note of alarm creeping in. “I can’t?—”
“I know. Stay with me. Just stay with me.”
The current turned violent.
In a single, merciless instant the invisible wall became a roaring maelstrom. It wrenched their hands apart with brutal force, as if the sea had simply grown tired of pretending to be gentle. Greta’s fingers tore free from Klari’s grip.
“Klari!” she screamed, the sound warped and distant even though he was right beside her only a heartbeat earlier.
“Greta—!” His roar cut through the chaos for one desperate second. “Hold on?—!”
Then the world spun.
She tumbled end over end in absolute darkness, no up, no down, no sense of direction. The sea had become a violent, directionless force, flinging her away like a piece of driftwood. She reached blindly for him, claws extended, but her hand closed around nothing but cold, rushing water.
He was gone.
Then her physicist brain kicked in.
Stop fighting. Read it.
She forced her body to go limp, letting the current take her. The tumbling slowed almost immediately. She focused on the physics — pressure gradients, flow lines, the way the water compressed against one side of her body more than the other.
There was a pattern.
A spiral. She oriented herself to the strongest pressure, used her tail like a rudder, and stopped resisting the main flow.
The current caught her cleanly and shot her forward like a bullet through a tube.
Time lost meaning. Ten minutes? Fifteen? She had no way to tell. The water roared past her gills, pink scales flashing faintly in the occasional stray bioluminescent speck.
She kept her arms tight to her sides, tail streamlined, riding the invisible force the way she would ride a failing prototype through turbulence — observe, adapt, survive.
Eventually the pressure eased. The current spat her out like an afterthought, dumping her into still, colder water.
Greta hung suspended in darkness, chest heaving, trying to get her bearings. The timer inside her ticked louder now — uncomfortable, insistent.
She guessed she had maybe forty minutes left, perhaps less. The comfortable warmth of the afterglow with Klari was already fading into something sharper, more urgent.
She turned in a slow circle, tail flicking.
Far behind her she could actually see the current now — a faint, winding tunnel of disturbed water glowing with stirred-up phosphorescence, twisting through the black like a living vein.
That was her road back. If she could follow it, she could find Klari.
But the darkness stretched in every direction. No telling what was out there. Maybe she should stay here. Wait for him to come find her.
Something caught her eye below.
In the distance, barely visible, something enormous loomed out of the seabed. Half-buried in sand, angular lines that definitely weren’t coral or rock. Faint metallic gleams caught stray light in ways organic shapes never did.
A wreck. A massive, ancient wreck.
Greta’s gills flared as she stared at it, the timer ticking steadily in her blood.
She glanced back at the glowing current tunnel, then forward again at the dark silhouette of the wreck.
“Klari…” she whispered into the water, voice lost in the vastness.
The choice hung in front of her — swim back along the current and expose herself to all the dangers out there. Or wait here for him.
Her tail gave a single powerful flick.
She started for the wreck.