A fresh sob tears its way out of my throat. The roaring hum of the distant thermal vents swallows the sound.
He fell backward with terrifying force. He clawed at his own throat, his skin tearing under his own fingers. The softness in his eyes vanished, replaced by a wide, primal panic I had never witnessed before.
I rushed forward to help him. I grabbed his heavy arms, shouting his name into the dark water, begging him to tell me what was wrong.
He ripped himself out of my grip with enough force to throw me backward.
Then, he looked at me. Not as a savior, not as a friend, and certainly not as a lover. He looked at me the way a starved, feral trench hound looks at a bleeding fish. He bared his terrifying, serrated teeth. He forced his face into a monstrous snarl and snapped his heavy jaws inches from my face.
He wanted me to know I was prey.
He wanted me to know I was a fool for ever thinking a shark of the deep could look at a Vael and desire anything other than a meal.
Then he turned his broad back on me and dove into the crushing black, leaving me alone on the edge of the world.
"Why?" I whisper to the empty ocean.
The word travels out into the abyss and vanishes. The silence of the trench is not peaceful tonight. It's heavy. A stone door slammed shut in my face.
My mother used to tell me dark stories when I was a fry. She told me the predators of the deep play with their food beforethey eat it. She said they amuse themselves with the bright, ornamental things of the reef until they get bored and swim away to find a real hunt.
Maybe Kael got bored.
Maybe the novelty of a rebellious betta wore off. Maybe he looked at me in the dim light of the Anvil and decided I was a vain, useless, colorful thing talking too much about a world he hated.
"No," I say aloud, shaking my head to reject the toxic thought.
Kael doesn't lie. That is the one absolute truth I know about him. He is a brutal, efficient creature of the dark. He is honest. If he were done with me, he would have told me. He would have looked me in the eye and ordered me to go back to the light. He would not have panicked. He would not have clawed at his own throat as if he were dying.
Something terrible happened to him.
I look down into the black water. It resembles an open mouth waiting to swallow me.
Maybe he was sick. Maybe the sweet surface fruit reacted with his deep-sea biology. Maybe I hurt him.
The rising panic flares hot and bright in my chest. I push off the basalt stone, intending to dive. I need to go down there. I need to plunge into the abyss, find his family's cave in the Outskirts, and ensure he is alive.
But I stop at the edge of the drop-off.
I stop because the terrifying snap of his teeth surfaces in my mind. The dead emptiness in his black eyes when he lunged at me paralyzes my muscles.
And I stop because I'm afraid.
The fear is a cold stone in my gut. If I dive into the abyss and find only a mindless monster, the last shard of my heart will pulverize into dust. If I remain here on the edge of the shelf, Ican preserve the fragile illusion that there is some logic to his disappearance. Some reason beyond my own foolishness.
Another current cycle bleeds away in the freezing water. Above, the surface moon shifts. The pale light filtering down fades to nothing. My body trembles with violent, uncontrollable shivers. My core temperature is dropping, a dangerous, creeping numbness that threatens to still my fins entirely. Hypothermia is a slow, silent killer.
I have to return to the city.
My trembling hand reaches into my woven kelp satchel. Numb fingers brush against the smooth white bone comb. I brought it down here again, a pathetic hope burning in my chest. I wanted to feel his hair one more time. I wanted to gather the courage to finally ask him what his touch on my neck truly meant.
I pull the comb from the satchel.
I wedge the delicate bone into a narrow crack in the basalt. It stands upright, a stark white marker in the crushing gray gloom. A message to the empty water. A flag planted on abandoned territory.
I was here. I waited.
I turn away from the dark.
