"The Tide shifted the silteverywhere, Kael. It doesn't mean you have to stay out until the pressure starts making your head go soft." She stares at me, her dark eyes narrowing. "You've got that look again. The one where you're thinking about things that don't have meat on them."
"I was just observing the reef," I mutter, shoving a stray crab back into the mesh.
Jora huffs, a puff of bubbles escaping her gills. "The reef is for the Vaels. Let them have their songs and their pretty lights. We have the trench. You spend too much time staring at the sun, little brother, and you'll forget how to see in the dark."
She's right, of course.
In our family, I am the helper. I fix the nets and map the vents while my siblings fight for territory. I keep the machinery running while the others dream of blood and glory.
We reach our family cave, a deep, narrow fissure in the basalt. My younger brothers are already there, wrestling in the silt, their tails snapping with the clumsy strength of youth. The cavesmells of salt, old iron, and the pungent musk of shark-mer. It's honest. It's home.
But as I set the net down and begin the mindless, repetitive work of sorting the catch, my mind drifts back to the red.
That violent, impossible crimson.
The betta-mer looked like a creature made of the Deep-Burn, that strange, flickering orange bleeding from the cracks in the earth where the water turns to scalding steam. Or perhaps he was like the stories of the Fallen Suns, the great wooden carcasses that occasionally tumble from the surface, wreathed in a dry, devouring light that even the ocean cannot immediately swallow.
I think of my own dull hands, my gray fins, the scarred stone of our city. I am a shadow. He is the sun.
"Kael!" Jora snaps, nudging me with a powerful fluke. "The crabs aren't going to sort themselves. Stop daydreaming."
I blink, refocusing on the dull gray shells. I am Kael. I am the helper. I fix things. I endure. I stay in the dark where it's safe.
But as I work, the water feels thinner than it did yesterday. And I know, with a quiet, sinking certainty, that I am going to return to that boundary line. Not because I'm hungry.
Because I want to see if the sun is still there.
Our home is not a place of comfort.
The caves of the Basalt-Kin are carved into the side of a massive underwater plateau, a vertical city where status is measured by how much pressure you can withstand. The loweryou live, the stronger you are. My family dwells in the middle-tiers, high enough to feel the surface but deep enough that the water stays a constant, bone-chilling cold.
After the evening meal, a loud, bloody affair where my younger brothers tear into raw meat with snapping jaws, I slip away.
"Going to scrape the vents again?" Rusk asks, picking a thin bone from his teeth. "You're obsessed, Kael."
"Someone has to keep the heat running," I say.
"Let the grit pile up. Come spar with us."
"I am not a fighter, Rusk."
He laughs, a sound like a landslide. "No. You're a rock. A boring, reliable rock."
I ignore him. I leave them to their violence.
I swim up, past the residential fissures, past the hunting grounds, toward the shelf. The ascent is a slow shedding of weight. As I rise, the crushing pressure of the city begins to lift. In the trench, I am the scraper of grates. But as the water turns from slate to a bruised, twilight purple, I become something else.
I become a ghost.
The water changes taste first. The metallic tang of the deep vents fades, replaced by something sweeter, cloying and fresh with life. It warms against my skin, a temperature that feels feverish to a creature of the cold.
I hate the shallows. They feel thin. Exposed.
I slow my ascent as the silhouette of the reef rises out of the gloom above me. It looks like a fortress of calcified bone, glowing with the artificial bioluminescence of the Vaels. The noise hits me next. It is a constant, thrumming vibration of thousands of tiny lives moving, eating, and swimming in their designated lanes.
I keep low, belly-dragging through the silt, letting the darkness of the drop-off swallow my outline. I am not huntingfor meat, but the instinct is the same. I move with a predator's silence, my senses extending outward, reading the water for a disturbance.
I scan the boundary line.
