Chapter 8 #2
The water holds the scent of blood and torn meat. My younger brothers, Rusk and Torin, tear into a massive carcass. Jora sharpens a bone spear against the wall. Mother rests on the high ledge, her scarred tail draped like a dark tapestry of violence.
They turn as one.
This is when I would announce myself. The low thrum that means Family. Safe. Return.
I open my mouth.
Silence pours out.
Rusk stops chewing immediately. He swallows a massive mouthful of raw bone and cartilage. His black eyes narrow with sharp suspicion, the corners of his mouth twisting in a sneer.
"You look like you wrestled a surface propeller," he grunts. The shape of his words forms on his lips, though the sound is entirely lost to me. "Where have you been? The lower vents are completely clogged. The ambient pressure is dropping."
I try desperately to answer him.
The poison. I can't speak. My lips move frantically. My throat spasms with the intense effort of pushing air through my paralyzed syrinx.
Nothing comes out. Not a croak. Not a hiss. Not even the wet click of air bubbles escaping my gills.
Rusk frowns, tilting his heavy head. "What's wrong with you?"
I try again, genuine panic rising in my chest. I point aggressively to my throat. I point frantically toward the cave entrance. I aggressively mimic the motion of drinking, of violently choking on venom.
Jora laughs. A harsh vibration rattles the stone floor, but my dead ears register absolutely nothing.
"Look at him," she says, turning completely away from her spear work. "He's playing children's games. What is it, Kael? Did your little betta-mer friend finally decide to stop wasting your time with foolish games? Did he take your tongue as a trophy?"
The cruel mention of Vaelis hits me like a physical blow to the ribs.
He did not know. He was tricked. He is innocent. The scream burns in my frozen throat.
"Speak up," Mother commands coldly from the high ledge. Her voice creates a heavy, oppressive pressure in the water pressing heavy against my scales. "I tolerate your useless wanderings, Kael, but I absolutely do not tolerate insubordination or silence. Report your status immediately."
I swim forward, growing frantic. I grab Rusk's arm, shaking him to get his full attention. I point desperately to my ears, then directly to my open mouth. I shake my head violently back and forth.
Help me. I can't hear you. I can't speak.
Rusk's response is a violent shove, a territorial warrior's immediate reaction to uninvited contact. He doesn't do it gently. He does it to make a point.
"Get off me," he snarls, the shape of the words sharp in the dead water. "Stop twitching like a dying bait-fish."
The force sends me crashing into the rough stone wall. The brutal impact rattles my teeth and scrapes a long line of scales from my shoulder. The dull ache of the injury is another sensation in the overwhelming void of silence.
"He's sick," Torin says, swimming closer and aggressively sniffing the water around my head. "He smells like… nothing. He smells exactly like dead water. He has lost his hum."
"He's completely useless, is what he is," Jora corrects him.
She swims over to me, her scarred face looming uncomfortably close to mine.
She grabs my heavy jaw in her strong hand, squeezing the bone hard enough to leave deep bruises.
She peers clinically into my open mouth, her black eyes searching for a cause she can't comprehend.
"There is nothing physically blocking his airway," she reports, releasing my jaw with a disgusted shove.
"He's biologically locked up. He probably swam entirely too close to the bright surface and got his brain scrambled by the bends.
Or maybe he finally realized he has absolutely nothing worth saying to us. "
She turns her back on me completely, dismissing me with a flick of her powerful tail.
"Get down to the lower vents, Kael," she says dismissively over her shoulder. "If you are not going to talk, you can at least do the heavy labor."
I stare at her retreating back. My desperate, silent pleas mean nothing. The frantic gestures are the useless flailing of a broken tool.
They don't understand the severity of the injury.
They don't care enough to look deeper.
To my family, I am not a brother. I am a blunt tool currently malfunctioning. In the trench, if a tool doesn't work perfectly, you don't waste precious calories trying to fix it. You discard it in the dark.
I look to Mother on her high ledge. She is watching me with cold eyes. Her face is a mask of ancient stone and disapproval.
"You are disrupting the pack meal," she says, her expression completely devoid of maternal warmth.
The water pressure shifts with the force of her words, a sensation my broken ears can barely detect.
"If you are physically broken, go to the jagged-rocks until you mend yourself.
Don't you dare bring your weakness back into this cave. "
The jagged-rocks. The barren, exposed shelf where we send the old and the dying to be consumed by the hounds.
A slow, agonizing death sentence.
My chest completely caves in.
Family. The word is a bitter taste in my dead throat. I was never family. I was the largest shadow who cleared the grates so their hands stayed clean. The silent wall who absorbed their complaints because their own voices were too loud and arrogant to hear one another.
Now that I physically cannot hear, I am nothing. The space I occupy has been emptied.
I back away from the center stone. Each movement is a mechanical function, a disconnected command to a body that no longer feels like my own.
I don't go down to the lower vents.
I go to my sleeping niche in the back of the cavern. The water here is still. Stagnant.
I reach under the heavy slab of stone where I hide my few collected possessions. My fingers brush past sharpened tools and spare knives. They search the dark until they find it: the smooth, cold metal handle of the silver mirror.
I pull it out.
I hold the glass up to the dim, ambient light of the cavern.
The reflection staring back is a stranger. A monster. My black eyes are wide, hollowed-out pits. My mouth is a thin, trembling line of despair. The pale skin of my throat is a mess of dark bruises and fresh blood from where I clawed at the numbing ice.
You were dragging him down into the dark.
The thought is not my own. It is the echo of my family's judgment.
The echo of my own deepest fear. I look at the distorted mirror, and the memory of Vaelis holding it burns in my mind.
The way he smiled when I touched his face.
The way his golden eyes lit up when I told him he was a signal. I'm not that. I'm dead static now.
If I stay here, I will die. Slowly. My family will watch me wither, or Rusk will grow tired of my silence and end me with a single, efficient blow. And if I try to go back to the boundary wall...
Vaelis belongs to the light. To the glittering plaza where his laugh bounced off coral spires, where silk flows around him like water, where his beauty is a treasure, not a death sentence.
He belongs to a world built on songs, on intricate lies, on the gentle hum of voices that never freeze in the dark.
If I go back to him like this—silent and broken—what will he see?
He will not see the shadow who pulled him from the collapse.
He will not see the monster who taught him the taste of real darkness.
He will see a pathetic creature. A burden.
A mute beast whose hands once held him but now tremble with uselessness.
I will become the monster he was always taught to fear.
I can't do that to him. The thought of his golden eyes clouding with pity, of his gentle hands trying to care for something this broken, is a worse poison than any witch could brew.
I press the heavy silver mirror flat against my chest. The glass is freezing against my bare skin, a cold anchor in the dead water. It is the last piece of him I am allowed to keep.
I can't stay in the trench. I can't go back to the Reef.
There is only one direction left for a creature with no voice and no pack.
The Blue.
The open ocean. The vast, terrifying wasteland beyond the continental shelf where the deep water runs wild and the floor drops away into the true abyss. It's a place for exiles. For broken things that cast no shadow and have no sound.
I grab the heavy iron scraper from my patrol belt. It's the only thing I have ever truly been good at holding.
I take the silver mirror.
I take nothing else.
I slip out of the dark niche. I don't say goodbye to the pack. I am not welcome.
I swim slowly past my family. They don't even look up from the bloody carcass. Rusk violently fights with Torin over the last piece of prime meat. Jora tests her sharp spear against her thumb. Mother is already sleeping once again on the high ledge.
I am already a forgotten ghost to them.
I leave the cave. I leave the Outskirts entirely behind.
I turn my broad back on the Reef, ignoring the faint, mocking glow of the surface where Vaelis is living his bright, beautiful life without me.
I turn my face toward the endless, empty dark of the abyss.
And I swim into the silence.