Page 23 of Currents of Desire

I grab the jar of deep salt and kick the door open. The wind nearly rips it off its hinges. I am soaked to the bone in three steps.

I take the stairs two at a time, slipping on the wet wood, scraping my shin, scrambling up on hands and knees. I don’t feel the pain. Then I burst through the front door, slamming it shut against the gale outside. The house is dark, shaking under the storm’s assault.

“Nerida!” I shout, my voice echoing in the gloom.

Silence.

I run to the bathroom.

She’s there, still in the tub, but she isn’t moving. Her head is lolled back against the tiles, her eyes closed. The water is still, the surface unbroken. Her skin is a terrifying, flat gray, the cracks on her shoulder now gaping wounds that ooze a thick, dark fluid into the bathwater.

“No,” I breathe out. “No, no, no.”

The lid sticks, my wet hands slipping against the glass before it finally gives way. Concentrated brine hits the back of my throat, so sharp it makes my eyes water.

"Nerida." I grip her shoulder. Her skin is like river stone in winter.

I tip the jar, sending dark blue crystals tumbling into the stagnant bathwater. They hit the porcelain with a heavy, hollow clink.

"Wake up," I whisper, plunging my hands in to stir the dissolving salt. "Come on, dammit. Wake up."

The crystals dissolve instantly, turning the bathwater a deep, indigo blue. The smell fills the small room, the scent of the deepest, darkest ocean.

I stare at her, holding my breath, bracing for a reaction. Bracing for the burn. The scream.

CHAPTER 9

Nerida

There is no darkness in the dry place. Darkness is a comfort—the velvet weight of the deep trench, the embrace of the abyss where I was born. This is not that. This is a blinding, static gray.

I’m floating in a void where the current is dead. My skin, once a semi-permeable membrane that tasted the salt and silt of the world, has turned into a prison of hardened clay. I can feel the fissures spreading across the delicate flesh of my shoulders, spiderwebbing down the ridge of my spine, snapping the microscopic fibers of my being one by one. The air is a thief, a greedy, invisible parasite. It steals the moisture from my lungs, the slick protective film from my eyes, and the very song from my throat.

I’m becoming dust, a statue of ash, crumbling in an empty museum.

Time is losing its meaning. There is only the sensation of shrinking, of my essence evaporating into the dry, hostile atmosphere. I try to reach out with my senses, to find the electromagnetic hum of living things, but my reception is dead. The world is silent.

Then, a vibration. Distant, distorted, like a whale call vibrating through miles of heavy silt or the thrum of a ship’s engine far above the thermocline.

Wake up.

It’s a command, desperate and terrified.

Then, the universe explodes.

It isn’t water that hits me. It’s liquid lightning, the concentrated essence of the crushing dark, the heavy, metallic taste of the Mariana, distilled into a shock so potent it feels like a physical blow. Jack dumps the salt.

The reaction is instantaneous and violent. It’s a chemical shock, a collision of elements that should not exist in this surface world. My back arches off the porcelain before my mind can register the command to move. My spine bows to the breaking point, every vertebra popping as the energy slams into me.

A scream tears from my throat, a raw, jagged shriek of agony.

The water hisses, churning around me. I open my eyes to a harsh, hyper-clear reality. The bath is no longer water; it has turned a violent indigo, heavy and slick as motor oil.

It doesn't soothe the cracks in my flesh. It invades them. The liquid sinks into my exposed nerves, igniting a searing, chemical burn that tears through my body, burning the sickness out of me from the inside out.

I thrash, my legs slamming against the sides of the tub with a sound like a gunshot, splashing the heavy, blue fluid onto the tiled walls. Fire strips the sickness from my cells, a scouring agony that leaves me gasping.

“Breathe!” Jack’s voice. It cracks with panic and smells of fear.