Sweetness didn’t exist in Saltgrave.
Every day, we harvested glowing minerals deep inside a twisted labyrinth of jagged tunnels. Our chisels hacked at the rock, barely making a dent while each strike inflamed the cuts on our hands that never had enough time to heal.
My bones throbbed. My muscles cramped. And at night, my mind echoed with the screams of inmates buried alive beneath collapsing tunnels. The only thing more devastating than their cries was the unnerving silence when they stopped.
The daily scratches I’d etched into my cell wall had grown in number, a defiant shrine to the length of my captivity.
Three whole years.
I should stop counting. I had no chance of a pardon. But I liked the control, as if time might stop if I did. And I couldn’t let it.
After the first year, when the terms of my father’s agreement expired without the debt paid in full, I lost the last stirrings of hope for anything outside of this prison.
My family’s home was gone forever. The promise I’d made was broken. And while my heart and soul withered in anunderwater cage, my mind raged. I relived those last days over and over; my bitterness was like a fever that wouldn’t break.
I hated what I’d become. Losing my freedom, and knowing those who’d chained me still roamed free, was almost too much to bear. However, time scarred the wounds. I didn’t believe I’d ever leave Saltgrave. But I was learning how to live inside it.
And thankfully, I had Sirena.
A few inmates had come and gone from my wing of the prison, but she’d been my longest companion.
She’d arrived thrashing, her siren song thrumming with the tale of her innocence. The lyrical sound echoed off the walls, pulling me toward the bars with a mesmerizing force. But the guards were unaffected. The glowing discs at their belts flared brighter, absorbing her lure as they shoved her into the cell and jabbed her with a shockwave stick. I’d curled into myself then, her song falling silent as I remembered the agony that had once pulsed through my hand from the same weapon.
She was so quiet after that. I thought she’d died, and the guards would return to collect her body. But then she moaned a vow of vengeance that spoke to my soul. And we became fast allies.
Sirena had made the fatal error of singing for one man while another watched. A man who wanted to own her and twist her lure into something vile. Someone rich, well-connected, and used to getting what he wanted. When she denied him, he accused her of a crime. Saltgrave gave her a cell.
Both of us were locked away for wrongs we didn’t commit. Both bottling enough anger to boil the sea.
Sirena pressed herself closer to the bars as the guards approached our cells. Her auburn hair drifted around her shoulders and skimmed the top of her prison-issued kelp wrap. Acirclet of inked thorns ringed the base of her throat, and in its center, the essence of her siren song glowed like a gold coin beneath her skin. Her indigo scales mirrored the color of her eyes as she met my gaze across the passage.
Another day in the mines.
The guards slipped the shackles over our bruised wrists and herded us through the shadowed tunnels until we joined the line of inmates entering the frozen catacombs.
Saltgrave loomed at our backs like a barnacle-encrusted monster. Black sand shifted beneath our tails, littered with broken shells and the bones of those who’d fallen on the barren swim from the monster’s mouth to the mines.
I stared at one of the bones, half-submerged in the sand, my gaze unfocused as the line slithered forward. The current was colder today, numbing my fingers. I rubbed them together as a guard swam down the queue of prisoners.
Beyond this prison, a war raged, threatening to bring the merfolk kingdom to its knees. The sea witch, Tivara, had harnessed the magic I’d unleashed in the comb and used it against the Sea Queen’s defenses. So far, she hadn’t succeeded in draining the kingdom’s magic or seizing full control, but the queen was losing the fight.
Ancient enchantments had once shielded the kingdom, netted into the coral spires of the palace reef. But the wards were failing.
Expansive grottos of lush flora and sunken temples had already been overrun. There were whispers of mass evacuation, and some had already fled the heart of the realm, now traveling the currents in search of safer sea.
Whenever I thought about what the witch had done, guilt and anger tightened like a vise inside my chest. Not only hadI failed to save my home, but I’d also helped to start a war. I might’ve saved my friends and the crew aboard the ship, but every day I endured the burden of knowing others were now at risk because of me.
And that burden would only get heavier. When the last of the kingdom’s enchantments faded, Sirena’s teasing prophecy would come true.
We’ll all be dead soon.Or worse, enslaved to an evil sea witch.
I’d rather perish in a mine collapse.
I spent the day assigned to a newly excavated tunnel, deeper inside the twisted rock than I’d ever traveled. Such was the fate of the traitor who’d aided Tivara. The guards took pleasure in giving me the hardest tasks, pairing me with murderers and brutal criminals in the darkest tunnels.
There was no one to watch my back, and I had a few scars to show for it. But I’d given a few too.
Today, though, my fingers were useless from the cold. My arms were sore, and the glacial current made my chest ache as if icicles had frozen around my ribcage. When you were this deep in the mines, even the depraved kept to themselves.
