I start at the very ends. The comb snags immediately on a knot of salt and grit, but I work through it slowly, patiently teasing out the tangles the sea has tied.
Kael goes unnaturally still beneath my hands. It is the absolute stillness of an apex predator allowing a cleaner-shrimp to enter its mouth. It's a complete suspension of his inherent violence, a surrender of his blind spot, an intensely, overwhelmingly intimate act.
For a long time, the only sound between us is the low, thrumming roar of the hydrothermal vents and the soft, rhythmic snick of the comb moving through his heavy hair.
"You spend so much time fixing things down here," I say quietly, watching the dark strands begin to smooth and shine under my hands. "You fix the nets. You fix the geothermal grates. The boundary walls. You never fix yourself."
"I am not broken," Kael rumbles, the sound vibrating up my arms. "I am functioning."
"There is more to life than function, Kael."
"Not down here."
"Maybe that's exactly the problem."
I finish with a final, long stroke, using my bare fingers to sweep his heavy hair back from his face.
It completely changes him. Without the wild tangle shadowing his eyes and softening his features, the sharp, aristocratic lines of his cheekbones are starkly visible. He looks severe, yes. Dangerous, absolutely. But there is a fierce, undeniable nobility to him the silt and the mess had kept hidden.
I swim around to the front of him, holding up the silver mirror again.
"Look," I say softly.
Kael stares. The glass holds his sight captive. He doesn't look away. He studies the ordered dark of his hair, the way the severe, striking lines of his face are framed instead of hidden. A deep confusion marks his features, his brow furrowing as he tries desperately to reconcile the monster he believes he is with the creature captured in the silver frame.
"It's tidy," he says finally. The word sounds foreign in his rough mouth, a piece of surface slang he does not normally speak.
"It's handsome," I correct him, my voice dropping to a whisper, a secret offered in the roaring dark.
Kael snorts, a harsh, guttural sound that breaks the quiet spell. "Handsome is a word for things that do not have to hunt for their next meal."
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.
