Chapter 5
Nerida
The sky screams.
It’s a sound that vibrates in the roots of my teeth, and a roar that dwarfs the breaking of any wave I have ever known.
Thunder. It tears through the roof, shaking the timber bones of the structure around us.
And with that violent crescendo, the artificial sun in the ceiling flickers, buzzing like a dying insect, and finally succumbs.
The bathroom plunges into suffocating blackness.
For a heartbeat, there is nothing. The world simply ceases to exist, leaving only the ringing in my ears and the sudden, frantic rhythm of the human beside me. Then, my biology answers the dark.
Deep within my cells, the ancient chemistry of the trench ignites.
The bioluminescence on my skin, a pale, pulsing map under the harsh electric glare, suddenly flares into a brilliant, sharp glow.
Azure lines and constellations swirl across the slope of my chest, spiraling down the length of my new, strange legs, and pooling in the delicate webs between my fingers.
I’m no longer just a girl in a bathroom but a ghost of blue fire in a dead room, a living constellation illuminating the tiles.
“Dammit,” Jack hisses from the darkness.
Then, another death occurs. The low, constant hum that vibrates through the floorboards. The machine that breathes cold air into this dry box sputters and cuts out.
The silence that follows is heavy, almost physical.
Without the machine pushing back the storm, the atmosphere in the house shifts instantly.
The air grows thick, pressing against my skin with a wet, suffocating weight.
The humidity skyrockets, turning the room into a swamp within seconds.
To a human, it might have been stifling, a miserable oppression of heat and moisture, but to me, it’s strangely comforting.
It feels like the pressure of the deep, like the heavy, crushing blanket of the ocean wrapping around me once more.
My skin, which begins to itch with dryness, greedily drinks in the moisture.
I push away from Jack. My legs are still trembling, these new, unstable stilts of bone and meat feel so alien compared to the powerful thrust of a tail.
Yet the darkness gives me confidence. I do not need eyes to see—in the absence of light, my other senses sharpen.
I can feel the air currents swirling around the doorframe, the heat signatures radiating from the walls, and the electric charge of the storm lingering in the air.
I stumble out of the bathroom, my wet feet slapping against the tile.
“Hey! Wait!” Jack’s voice is sharp, laced with a panic that tastes sweet in the air.
A beam of yellow light cuts through the gloom like a handheld artificial sun. It sweeps wildly, jaggedly, catching the wet sheen of my shoulder, the curve of my hip, and the blue pulse of my markings. It dazzles me for a moment, blinding and harsh.
I ignore him. The need to understand my confinement is stronger than his command. I need to know the dimensions of my cage.
Crossing the threshold into the hallway, the texture beneath me changes.
The floor is wood here, smooth and varnished, cool against the sensitive, uncallused soles of my feet.
I trail my hand along the wall, my fingers reading the wallpaper’s texture, the raised floral patterns that mean nothing to me.
A damp smear left by my touch marks my passing, a glistening trail like that of a sea snail.
To my right, an open door reveals a room filled with shelves. I drift inside, drawn by the smell of dust and decay.
Rectangles of paper and cardboard line the walls in the thousands.
Books. I’ve seen them in the wreckage of ships, bloated and dissolving into white pulp, but here they are dry, brittle things.
I reach out, my glowing fingertips brushing the spines.
They smell of dead trees and glue. I pull one free, the motion clumsy.
It falls from my hands, hitting the floor with a flat, disappointing thud.
“Don’t touch those,” Jack says, his voice coming from the hallway behind me.
The beam of his light dances nervously around my feet, avoiding the upper parts of my body as if looking at me directly would burn him.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” he continues, stepping closer, his heat radiating at my back. “Or break something. That’s a first edition.”
I don’t care about his editions. I move to a small table near the window.
Rain lashes against the glass, trying to get in, trying to reach me.
On the table sits a box with dials. I touch it.
It’s warm, retaining the heat of its recent life.
A radio. It hums with faint, dying static, a sound like the distant crashing of surf, then falls completely silent.
I tap it with a claw… no, a fingernail. The hard keratin clicks sharply against the plastic casing.
“Nerida, please.”
Jack is hovering now, trying to herd me, moving side to side like a triggerfish guarding its territory, trying to block my path without actually touching me. He is afraid to touch me.
I spin around.
The movement is too fast for my new equilibrium.
Gravity here is a harsh mistress, dragging me down in ways water never does.
I stagger, my hip bumping hard into a side table.
A ceramic lamp wobbles dangerously, but I don’t fall.
I catch myself, my toes gripping the rug, my muscles firing in a sequence I didn’t know I possessed.
I’m in the main room now. The living room.
It’s larger, a cavern filled with soft shapes and the smell of old fabric and lemon polish.
Thunder cracks again, closer this time, shaking the floorboards beneath us.
In the flash of lightning from the window, I see his silhouette, tense, rigid, and holding the flashlight like a weapon he doesn’t know how to use.
I corner him there, between a heavy, floral-patterned sofa and the wall.
Then I step into his space, and he recoils. Humans have such strange rules about distance. In the ocean, space is binary: you are either far enough away to be ignored, or close enough to be eaten or mated with. There is no polite middle ground.
I lean in, my face inches from his. The blue light from my skin casts his features in a ghostly, underwater relief, turning the hollows of his eyes into deep pools. I see the sweat beading on his forehead in the sudden, oppressive heat. I flare my nostrils, inhaling deeply.
“You smell,” I comment. My voice is raspy, a sound like grinding stones, not used to the dry air. “You smell of fear and salt.”
I can hear the dry, nervous swallow in his throat.
He retreats a half-step before the wall stops him.
He raises the heavy flashlight, putting it between us like a shield, but he keeps the beam pointed firmly at the floor.
The reflected glare washes upward, turning his face into a stark, shadowed mask.
“You need to stay in the bathroom,” he says, his voice straining for authority, cracking on the last syllable. “You’re… you’re not stable, Nerida. You’re naked. You’re dripping on the carpet.”
I really look at him. This soft, pink thing wrapped in cotton is trying to command the tide. He thinks the carpet matters. He thinks his rules apply to a creature that has hunted in the dark before his ancestors learned to make fire.
I laugh. It’s a dark, rippling sound, a noise that bubbles up from a chest that had, until recently, held gills. It is a sound that belongs in a cave, not a living room.
“I stay where I want,” I tell him, testing the words, feeling them roll over my tongue. “This is a small cage. I will walk its length.”
The room’s chemistry changes. The sharp tang of fear in his scent spikes, acrid and sour, but then it curdles into something else. Something heavier, with a taste of iron, heat, and musk.
He’s looking at me. Not at my face, but at the light.
His eyes, wide and dark, trace the glowing azure patterns that swirl down my neck, over the swell of my breasts, and across the flat expanse of my stomach.
The bioluminescence pulses in time with my heart, fast, rhythmic, and alive.
It betrays my adrenaline and predatory excitement.
I see his pupils dilate, he’s hyperaware of my nakedness.
I have no shell to hide the soft meat or scales to deflect his gaze.
In his world, this is vulnerability. In mine, it’s efficiency, but I’m not ashamed.
Shame is a human invention, a useless burden.
It’s a predator. He is the one who is flustered, the blood rushing to his face, his breathing becoming shallow and rapid, and whose heart is hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs, a drumbeat calling out to me.
The gap between them closes. A heavy, furnace-like heat radiates from his body, cutting through the chill of the room. The craving for that warmth overrides the lingering exhaustion.
A pale, glowing palm presses flat against the center of his chest.
His shoulders jerk backward. A harsh breath catches in his throat, but the rest of his body remains entirely frozen, pinned by the contact.
The glowing hand shoves hard against his sternum. The new, uncoordinated muscles lack their usual power, but the sudden force is enough. His calves strike the edge of the armchair. He tips backward, crashing heavily into the cushions.
The pursuit is immediate. One bare knee sinks deep into the upholstery right between his thighs, caging him against the backrest. The heavy flashlight slips from his grip, clattering against the floorboards and rolling away.
The yellow beam points uselessly at the baseboards, leaving the space illuminated entirely by the blue bioluminescence pulsing across the skin.
Cold, damp fingertips drag slowly down the placket of his flannel shirt. The feverish heat of his skin bleeds straight through the heavy fabric.
The glowing face tilts sideways, observing the rapid pulse hammering at the base of his throat.
The human body beneath the shirt is entirely defenseless.
No scales guard his ribs. No claws rest at the ends of his fingers.
The soft, unarmored reality of his flesh makes no sense.
This same fragile, unprotected man had somehow waded into the violent surf, hauled dead weight out of the tide, and carried it all the way to safety.
“Why?” I whisper, the word barely more than a breath.
I press my palm flat over his heart, feeling the frantic thump-thump-thump beneath my fingers, a bird trapped in a cage of bone.
“Why did you save me, human?”