Chapter 9
The Bleeding Signal
Vaelis
The sea measures time in currents, not light. It marks the passing of hours by the subtle shifts in pressure, the rhythmic falling of organic silt from the world above, the slow leaching of warmth from your bones until the freezing cold becomes a permanent part of your marrow.
I've hovered over the flat basalt stone of the Anvil for three complete current shifts.
My hands are empty. My body trembles.
I stare into the pitch-black of the abyss where Kael vanished. I stare until my golden eyes burn and my vision swims with phantom gray shadows, hoping one of them will solidify into the heavy, scarred shape of the mer I was beginning to love.
He's not coming back.
I lower myself onto the hard stone, wrapping my arms around my chest to hold my ribs together. My sternum is cracked wide open.
I replay the horrific moment a thousand times in my head, searching the memory for a mistake. I search for a slip-up, a wrong word, a sudden movement to explain the sheer violence of his departure.
I arrived at the Anvil exactly when I promised. I left my scales bare of the ridiculous pearl dust, true to his request. I brought him the sweetest fruit from the high gardens, wanting to give him another taste of the sun.
The way he looked at me when I offered the fruit burns in my mind.
His black eyes were soft. They held a raw, terrifying vulnerability, making my breath catch in my throat.
He reached out and covered my hand with his heavy fingers.
His skin was rough like sandpaper, but his touch was gentle.
He held my hand for a lingering, agonizing second.
He ate the fruit.
And then, he broke.
A fresh sob tears its way out of my throat. The roaring hum of the distant thermal vents swallows the sound.
He fell backward with terrifying force. He clawed at his own throat, his skin tearing under his own fingers. The softness in his eyes vanished, replaced by a wide, primal panic I had never witnessed before.
I rushed forward to help him. I grabbed his heavy arms, shouting his name into the dark water, begging him to tell me what was wrong.
He ripped himself out of my grip with enough force to throw me backward.
Then, he looked at me. Not as a savior, not as a friend, and certainly not as a lover. He looked at me the way a starved, feral trench hound looks at a bleeding fish. He bared his terrifying, serrated teeth. He forced his face into a monstrous snarl and snapped his heavy jaws inches from my face.
He wanted me to know I was prey.
He wanted me to know I was a fool for ever thinking a shark of the deep could look at a Vael and desire anything other than a meal.
Then he turned his broad back on me and dove into the crushing black, leaving me alone on the edge of the world.
"Why?" I whisper to the empty ocean.
The word travels out into the abyss and vanishes. The silence of the trench is not peaceful tonight. It's heavy. A stone door slammed shut in my face.
My mother used to tell me dark stories when I was a fry. She told me the predators of the deep play with their food before they eat it. She said they amuse themselves with the bright, ornamental things of the reef until they get bored and swim away to find a real hunt.
Maybe Kael got bored.
Maybe the novelty of a rebellious betta wore off. Maybe he looked at me in the dim light of the Anvil and decided I was a vain, useless, colorful thing talking too much about a world he hated.
"No," I say aloud, shaking my head to reject the toxic thought.
Kael doesn't lie. That is the one absolute truth I know about him.
He is a brutal, efficient creature of the dark.
He is honest. If he were done with me, he would have told me.
He would have looked me in the eye and ordered me to go back to the light.
He would not have panicked. He would not have clawed at his own throat as if he were dying.
Something terrible happened to him.
I look down into the black water. It resembles an open mouth waiting to swallow me.
Maybe he was sick. Maybe the sweet surface fruit reacted with his deep-sea biology. Maybe I hurt him.
The rising panic flares hot and bright in my chest. I push off the basalt stone, intending to dive. I need to go down there. I need to plunge into the abyss, find his family's cave in the Outskirts, and ensure he is alive.
But I stop at the edge of the drop-off.
I stop because the terrifying snap of his teeth surfaces in my mind. The dead emptiness in his black eyes when he lunged at me paralyzes my muscles.
And I stop because I'm afraid.
The fear is a cold stone in my gut. If I dive into the abyss and find only a mindless monster, the last shard of my heart will pulverize into dust. If I remain here on the edge of the shelf, I can preserve the fragile illusion that there is some logic to his disappearance. Some reason beyond my own foolishness.
Another current cycle bleeds away in the freezing water.
Above, the surface moon shifts. The pale light filtering down fades to nothing.
My body trembles with violent, uncontrollable shivers.
My core temperature is dropping, a dangerous, creeping numbness that threatens to still my fins entirely. Hypothermia is a slow, silent killer.
I have to return to the city.
My trembling hand reaches into my woven kelp satchel.
Numb fingers brush against the smooth white bone comb.
I brought it down here again, a pathetic hope burning in my chest. I wanted to feel his hair one more time.
I wanted to gather the courage to finally ask him what his touch on my neck truly meant.
I pull the comb from the satchel.
I wedge the delicate bone into a narrow crack in the basalt. It stands upright, a stark white marker in the crushing gray gloom. A message to the empty water. A flag planted on abandoned territory.
I was here. I waited.
I turn away from the dark.
The ascent is a blur of physical exhaustion and emotional desolation. I abandon my usual stealth. I ignore the kelp lines, the silent patrols. I let the rising thermal water drag my heavy, useless limbs upward.
When I cross the boundary line, the texture of the water changes. It becomes warmer, sweeter, and thicker. The taste of my home, a taste I once craved, now curdles in my gills. I have to fight the urge to retch.
The shining city is asleep. The bioluminescence dims to a rhythmic, dreamlike pulse.
I swim through the old maintenance tunnel, emerge into the dark shadows of the Silt District, and swim up toward the high residential spires.
I expect to be caught. A part of me craves it.
Arrest me, I direct the thought at the empty plaza.
Put me in a holding cell. Give me a physical reason to stop this ceaseless, agonizing movement.
But no one stops my ascent. The guards are positioned on the outer perimeter, their backs to the city, their faces turned outward into the dark. They are hunting monsters.
They don't know the monster is already inside the city walls, and I'm a broken Vael mourning a shark.
I reach my private quarters.
I slide the heavy stone door shut behind me and collapse onto my woven sleeping ledge. I don't wash the heavy, metallic scent of the trench from my skin. I want to keep this last piece of him with me, even if it is the scent of the place that rejected me.
I curl my body into a tight ball, wrapping my long fins around myself for a fragile, useless sense of security, and I close my aching eyes.
But sleep does not come.
I listen.
I press my ear to the cold stone wall, straining for a low hum. I listen for a deep vibration in the rock. I listen for anything, any sound resembling the deep, heavy voice that has become the center of my world.
There is only the suffocating, perfect silence of the reef.
Days bleed into one another like water into silt. The passing of currents becomes meaningless. I stop marking their shifts. I stop attending the communal meals in the grand plaza, letting the other Vaels' chatter wash over me like background noise.
I exist in a waking fog, a gray fugue where colors have lost their saturation and sounds have become muffled.
I go to my mandated restoration shifts, moving through the motions with mechanical precision.
I polish the decorative Bone Chimes in the central gardens until my fingertips protest. I nod at the passing elders, my face carefully blank.
I force a hollow smile when Taren tells a terrible joke near the armory, the sound of my own laughter like grinding stones.
I'm the perfect, exemplary Vaelis.
But inside my own mind, I'm screaming.
Every dark shadow cast by the coral structures mimics his broad shoulders. Every shift in the water pressure makes my head snap around, expecting a pale face and a scarred, outstretched hand.
He never comes.
"You look terrible," Mira says.
We hover in the back of the armory, organizing the heavy hunting spears. It has been a full week since I left the bone comb on the Anvil. A week since the crushing silence began.
I look up at her. My golden eyes are gritty and swollen from lack of sleep. My scales are dull because I refused to wear the ceremonial pearl dust. I look like a fading ember, slowly losing my light.
"I'm fine," I say, my voice raspy from disuse. "Just tired from the restoration shifts."
"You're not fine," she says, her tone leaving no room for argument.
She puts down her heavy slate clipboard and swims over to my side of the rack. Her expression is strange today. It's soft and pitying, but a hard, nervous edge of frustration hides beneath the surface.
"You haven't eaten a full meal in four days, Vaelis," she says, her eyes scanning my face with clinical precision. "You're losing weight. Your trailing fins are tearing at the edges because you are not grooming them."
"I don't care," I mutter, turning back to the spears, my movements stiff and unnatural.
"You're mourning," she says.