"Vaelis is not happy to be alive," I say. My voice drops so other guards won't overhear. "Vaelis is happy when he is admired. Vaelis is happy when he is safe and the world makes sense. Look at him right now. Does that look like a mer who is safe?"
Taren looks. Vaelis nods slowly at something Elder Soryn said, his expression entirely serene.
"He looks calm," Taren decides.
"He lookssedated," I counter bitterly.
I don't tell Taren about the smell. The scent of sulfur that still clings to Vaelis despite his best efforts to scrub it away. It's faint, but it's there. An acrid, chemical burn that has no business anywhere near the Reef. I don't tell him how Vaelis flinched yesterday when I reached to smooth a tangle in his fins. He recoiled like my hands were too rough for him.Myhands. The same hands that have untangled knots from his hair since we were fry in the nursery pools.
Vaelis is keeping secrets.
And Vaelis is a terrible liar. Whatever he's hiding is wearing the mask for him.
"I need a break," I say, dropping the heavy sorting slate onto the counter.
"Shift starts in ten," Taren protests, his brow creasing.
"I won't be long."
I don't swim straight into the plaza. I wait in the shadow of the armory archway, watching. Finally, Vaelis turns from the Council. He bows to Elder Soryn, the gesture too deep, too eager. He swims away from the bright center, heading toward the residential spires.
I count to twenty. Then, I follow.
I'm not a Watcher, not one of the Council's silent spies. But I was trained as a guard. I know how to disappear. I use the reef's ambient noise to mask my own movements, pressing my body to the upper ridges, slipping through the decorative arches where the shadows run deepest.
Vaelis doesn't go home.
He swims right past his door, his movements gaining a sudden, rigid purpose that turns my stomach cold. He angles downward, toward the old maintenance tunnels. The abandoned filtration systems the city left to decay years ago.
Those tunnels lead to the boundary.
He hesitates at the dark entrance, his head jerking left, then right. The frantic look of a thief checking for witnesses. Then his fingers find a narrow crevice in the stone, a loose block hidden behind a cluster of dead, gray fan-coral. He pulls out a woven kelp satchel.
My breath hitches.
He slings the bag over his shoulder, gives the water one last, paranoid sweep with his golden eyes, and vanishes into the tunnel's black mouth.
I wait until the water stills. Then I descend to the crevice.
It's empty, but the fine silt is disturbed. I reach inside, my fingers brushing the cold, damp stone. Something is wedged in the back. Something he missed or left behind.
I pull it into the light.
It's a shard of rock, but not Reef stone. Not the pale, porous limestone of our home, nor the smooth basalt of the upper shelf.
It's obsidian. Glass-black, heavy in my palm, with razor-sharp edges.
I turn it over. It's warm from the inside. It radiates a faint, chemical heat that prickles against my skin.
This is trench rock. Deep trench. The kind of volatile stone that forms near the active vents, in the crushing dark where the water is poison and the pressure can grind a mer's bones to powder.
The name is a breath of horror in the water. "Vaelis."
A cold dread coils in my gut, heavy as a stone. This is wrong. Vaelis is the mer who panics if a rough current musses his hair. He fills his quarters with silk so fine it could tear on a sharp look. He prefers filtered light. He keeps secrets from me, but he has always been an open book when it comes to his comforts.
And he is keeping a piece of the trench's black heart in his wall.
I shove the warm, sharp rock into my patrol belt. Its chemical heat burns through the leather, a frantic alarm against my hip. A physical reminder of a betrayal I still don't understand.
