Chapter 5 #3
He reaches out, his hand covering mine as he takes the mirror. His fingers are like warm sandpaper against my smooth knuckles. He stops staring at his own reflection. With a slow, deliberate twist of his wrist, he turns the glass until it catches my reflection instead.
I freeze.
The mirror reveals exactly what I have been trying so hard to ignore all night.
The pearl dust on my shoulders is smudged and chaotic.
My fins are flared wide. But it's my color that arrests me.
In the strange, ultraviolet light of the deep vents, I am not just red.
I am screaming. I burn against the absolute darkness of the trench like a distress flare, impossibly bright, impossibly exposed, an open wound.
Staring at the reflection, the old, familiar sickness curls tight in my stomach.
"I hate it," I whisper.
The confession slips out into the water before I can lock it away.
Kael lowers the mirror, his black eyes shifting immediately from the glass to my face. "The mirror?"
"The color," I say, my voice bitter and brittle. "I used to love it, but now... Look at me, Kael. I am a beacon. I'm a target painted directly onto the water."
I turn away from him, unable to stare at the reflection or the pity surely rising in his eyes.
"There are rumors in the city," I say to the dark water, wrapping my arms around my chest. "About a military draft.
They say there are plans of attack from the depths.
A cold war coming to an end. The Vaels are demanding a final confrontation to stop the trench from hunting us after the Mourning Tides.
The commanders are putting the Red mers on the very front lines of the boundary patrols.
They say it's because we can fight. They say it's because we are strong.
They call it 'Command Red.' It means: Look here. Shoot here. Eat here."
My laugh sounds like shattered coral. "I was born a target. It's arrogance to think I can ever hide. I come down here, into your dark, and I look like blood in the water waiting to happen."
Silence follows, heavy as the pressure itself. Then, a massive displacement of water.
Kael is there. He doesn't touch me, but his sheer presence forms a solid wall of heat at my back, blocking out the cold of the trench entirely.
"You are not a target," he says, his voice a low, vibrating growl.
"You don't understand," I snap, spinning around to face him. The violent motion sends crimson hair whipping across my vision. "You are pale. You are stone. You are seamlessly part of the water. You belong to the dark. You do not know what it is like to—"
He reaches out.
His hand, scarred and broad enough to crush my skull, hovers mere inches from my face.
He doesn't make contact, but the intense heat of his skin radiates through the small distance between us, warming my cheek.
He slowly traces the line of my jaw in the water, not touching, only following the path of my skin.
"In the deep, there are still those with color," Kael says, his voice dropping to a register vibrating directly in my marrow, "and their color is likewise intentional. It is obviously not for hiding."
I stop breathing entirely.
"Then what is it for?" I whisper, my lips parting.
"It's for warning," he says, his eyes locked onto mine, fierce and unyielding. "It says: I am here. I am dangerous. I am burning."
He moves his hand, finally, closing the tiny gap and pressing his rough palm flat against my cheek.
The contact is electric. It's shocking. His skin is coarse and the friction sends a violent shiver straight down my spine.
"You are not a lure, Vaelis," he murmurs, his thumb brushing the very corner of my mouth. "You are a signal."
"A signal for what?" I breathe, my eyes fluttering shut at the sensation of his thumb tracing my lower lip.
"That the water is alive." His voice is a rough rasp. "That there is something in the dark worth burning for."
I open my eyes and stare at him. My heart is hammering against my ribs so violently the vibration must carry through his palm.
My whole life has been an apology for my own light.
I have learned to fold my fins, to soften my edges, to paint myself with pearl dust to fade into the reef's acceptable shades.
Here, at the crushing bottom of the world, a creature whose kind is supposed to devour mine is looking at my screaming color as if it is something sacred.
"I'm not dangerous," I force out, though my voice cracks on the words, betraying the lie. "Not truly. Not down here."
Kael's hand travels down the column of my throat, his scarred fingers settling with deliberate weight over the frantic pulse jumping beneath my skin. It is a claim, not a caress.
"You are to me," he says.
The words hang in the water between us.
This has nothing to do with his teeth or his strength. He is talking about the way I have unraveled him. The way I have convinced a creature born to the crushing dark to sit still for a comb. How I have taken a predator and made him look into a mirror.
I lean into his touch. I can't stop myself. The heat of his palm is the only anchor keeping me from floating away into the chaotic vent-light above.
"Kael," I breathe.
He leans in.
The motion is slow, deliberate. For a single, impossible heartbeat, I think he will kiss me.
I want it with a sudden, sharp violence that borders on pain.
I need to know what the rough terrain of his mouth feels like against my own.
I need to know if he tastes of iron and blood, or the clean, brutal salt of the trench.
His lips pause, a breath away from mine. The heat of his exhalation ghosts across my skin. I tilt my chin up, chasing the contact, my eyes closing as I wait for the inevitable strike.
But he stops.
He pulls back. It is barely an inch of water, but it feels like the crushing pressure of the entire trench has rushed between us.
His discipline, that iron-forged control, clamps down on the moment, severing it with brutal efficiency.
He removes his hand from my throat, though his eyes remain locked on my mouth, black and bottomless with a hunger that makes my stomach clench.
"The current," he says. His voice is rough gravel, strained. "It's shifting. You need to return to the light before it turns fully."
The rejection is cold, but the raw desire still radiating from him is a heat that grounds me in the chaos.
He's right. The vents are no longer a sanctuary.
We are two impossible anomalies in a field of poison, and somewhere above us, the summer feast is ending.
"Right," I say, straightening my spine and pulling my shoulders back. The bitter cold rushes in to fill the space where his hand rested, a sudden, hollow ache in its place. "The current."
My fingers feel clumsy as I gather the mirror and the comb, stuffing them back into the satchel at my hip. They feel heavier now, weighted down with the memory of his hand in my hair, the heat of his palm against my throat.
The ascent is a silent ascent. It's a silence charged with unspoken things. We move in perfect, awful sync, my body anticipating his every movement even as I force myself to keep a careful distance.
When we finally reach the gap in the kelp line, Kael stops.
He remains firmly in the shadow of the deep, as he always does, a creature of the pressure and the gloom.
"Tomorrow?" I ask, hovering right on the threshold of the city's faint, sickly-sweet glow.
Kael shakes his head slowly. "Basalt-Kin patrols are doubling for the end of the feast. Wait two days."
"Two days," I repeat. The words feel like a stone in my throat, an eternity of surface noise and pearl dust.
I turn to leave, the water feeling thin around me.
"Vaelis," he says.
I stop, looking back over my shoulder at the shadow he casts, a piece of the trench itself given form.
"Leave the pearl dust at the reef," he says, his voice low and possessive. "Next time."
A wave of warmth blooms violently in the center of my chest, fierce and bright enough to rival the vents below, a signal just for him.
"Okay," I whisper. "No dust."
I slip through the gap in the kelp and back into the territory of the Vael Reef.
The physical transition is jarring. The water here is thin, tasteless, and entirely too warm, like breathing in another mer's stale exhalation.
The bioluminescent lights of the city are painfully bright, stinging my eyes after the honest gloom of the trench.
I swim fast, keeping my body low to the coral structures, hugging the shadows as I dodge the last few drunken revelers return home from the central plaza.
I am halfway to my residential spire when she appears.
Mira.
She's waiting perfectly still near the entrance to our quarters, a blue predator.
Her arms are crossed tightly over her chest, and her cerulean tail is twitching with a sharp, rhythmic agitation.
She's not looking toward the plaza where the last of the crowd is dissipating.
She's looking directly at the dark path leading to the outer wall.
The path I am currently swimming up.
I freeze for a microsecond, then violently force my body to keep moving forward. Casual. You are Vaelis. Vaelis the exemplary.
"You missed the closing ceremony," she says as I draw near. Her voice is deceptively light, but her eyes are hard as flint.
"I had a headache," I lie smoothly, offering a tired, apologetic smile. "The pressure changes from the warming water. You know how I get."
Mira stares at me. She doesn't buy a word of it. She comes closer, invading my personal space in a way she hasn't since we were hatchlings. She doesn't look at my face. She looks at my hair.
My heart skips a painful beat.
"I took the large feast ornaments out. They were heavy, likely the reason I had a headache—"
"No," she says. "It's not that."
She leans in. She inhales sharply, sniffing the water directly around my shoulders.
"Absolutely foul," Her nose wrinkles in disgust. "You smell like sulfur."
My stomach drops into the abyss.
The vents. The chemical heat clings to everything down there.
"I was cleaning the lower filters near the thermal exhaust," I say quickly, the lie spilling from my lips with practiced ease. "One of the younglings got stuck; I had to go in and—"
"You never clean the filters, Vaelis," she cuts in. Her voice is entirely flat. Stripped of all emotion. "You pay the younglings your rations to do it so you don't chip your scales. I thought you had a headache?"
I open my mouth to argue. I prepare to spin another intricate web, to weave another layer of noise to keep her satisfied.
But she turns away.
"Go wash up," she says over her shoulder, not looking back at me. "You smell like the trench."
She doesn't wait for an answer. She swims away toward her own quarters, her movements sharp, rigid, and angry.
I float there in the bright, artificial light of the hallway, a cold dread settling heavily over my bones.
She did not ask why I smelled like the trench.
She did not ask who I was with.
She stopped asking.
And staring down at my red coloring, still sparkling vividly against the reef water, the implication is infinitely worse.