My stomach drops into the abyss.
The vents. The chemical heat clings to everything down there.
"I was cleaning the lower filters near the thermal exhaust," I say quickly, the lie spilling from my lips with practiced ease. "One of the younglings got stuck; I had to go in and—"
"You never clean the filters, Vaelis," she cuts in. Her voice is entirely flat. Stripped of all emotion. "You pay the younglings your rations to do it so you don't chip your scales. I thought you had a headache?"
I open my mouth to argue. I prepare to spin another intricate web, to weave another layer of noise to keep her satisfied.
But she turns away.
"Go wash up," she says over her shoulder, not looking back at me. "You smell like the trench."
She doesn't wait for an answer. She swims away toward her own quarters, her movements sharp, rigid, and angry.
I float there in the bright, artificial light of the hallway, a cold dread settling heavily over my bones.
She did not ask why I smelled like the trench.
She did not ask who I was with.
She stopped asking.
And staring down at my red coloring, still sparkling vividly against the reef water, the implication is infinitely worse.
Chapter 6
To Silence a Monster
Mira
Thesilencethatmeanstrouble has a specific flavor. Not the absence of sound, but the wrong kind of presence.
I have spent my entire life memorizing the rhythm of the reef. I know the morning hum of cleaner-shrimp clicking over coral spires. I know the midday gossip of patrol shifts changing in the plaza. I know the heavy, settling sigh of evening tides. More importantly, I know Vaelis. I know when he is genuinely asleep, not pretending to avoid conversation. I know the exact frequency of his anxiety when Elders' attention lingers too long.
But this new silence radiating from him is different.
It's not the silence of peace. It's the silence of a door closing and locking from the inside.
"You're staring again," Taren says. He nudges my shoulder with his elbow. We hover near the armory racks, sorting through newly forged spear-tips for the afternoon boundary patrol.
"I am observing," I correct him. My eyes remain fixed on the central plaza.
Vaelis is there. He stays near the edge of the elders' council ring, listening to Soryn drone on about restoration of the outer kelp beds. Vaelis despises these lectures. Usually, he shifts his weight every few minutes. He checks his reflection in polished bracers. He signals me from across the plaza with tiny, bored flicks of trailing fins.
Today, he is perfectly still.
He looks polished. That is the only word for it. Not in his usual way, covered in layers of pearl dust and shimmer-oil tocatch artificial light. His scales are completely bare today. He looks raw. Dangerously, aggressively red.
And yet, he is smiling.
It's not the sharp, practiced smile he gives Council members when he wants them to leave him alone. It's small, private. The corners of his mouth are turned up, his eyes soft and distant. It is the smile of someone hearing a song no one else in the city can hear.
"He's doing better," Taren says, following my line of sight. "You should be relieved, Mira. A month ago you were ready to tie him to his sleeping ledge to keep him from drifting off."
"He isnotdoing better," I snap. I shove a blunt spear-tip into the reject pile with unnecessary force. "He's doing… something else."
Taren sighs, a long, suffering sound. "Let it go. The collapse shook him up. He survived a near-death experience. Maybe he's happy to be alive."
