Page 20 of Music of the Ocean

Submerged.

In water.

Completely submerged.

As in, not an air pocket in sight.

Yet, he was alive. Or something like alive. But there was water everywhere, that was for damned fucking sure. The harness, no longer restraining him, splayed uselessly beside his body, its straps waving like the arms of a beached cephalopod.

Fragments of the shuttle drifted everywhere. Insulation had been torn into ribbons. Fractured polycarbonate panels. Wiring uncoiling in slow, writhing tangles. The light came in sideways, fractured into shifting lanes by the current. The water suspended the shuttle’s wreckage like the contents of a snow globe mid-shake.

Saxby rotated slowly, weightless.

Time to get out of here and… And do what he didn’t know, but he’d deal with the repercussions later. Saxby took another breath, and the effort sent a blossom of bubbles surging from his throat, but no pain followed. No suffocation, no starburst of panic.

Instead, he felt a cool, tingly expansion in his chest, like the inhale before a scream, but different. Colder, deeper, oddly intimate.

Something opened in his neck, a flex and snap just beneath the skin, and he felt water flood into a chamber he hadn’t known existed. Water, no air. He coughed, or tried to, but instead of drowning, his body drew in the fluid, parsed it, and cycled it out again.

Realization hit Saxby with a second shockwave. He was actually breathing. Under water. He turned awkwardly in the ruined cabin, hands pawing at his neck. His fingers found ridges there, hot and tender, and when he pressed too hard, they snapped closed like the mouth of a shell.

No, no, no, no, no. Holy hell. He had gills. Those were really damned gills!

He jerked his hands back, heart hammering, and then touched them again, more gently this time. The ridges pulsed with each breath, flexing in time with a new rhythm.

Saxby’s mind scrambled to catch up. The shuttle was dead, a coffin sinking to the bottom of the ocean, but he was alive, utterly and impossibly alive because he had gills and could breathe under water. He trembled, not from fear but shock.

He was transforming just as Vance had said. Right then. That second, actually. The water tasted of blood and ozone and something metallic, but it was also sweet, oxygen rich, and nourishing. He inhaled again, and his panic faded, replaced by a giddy, disbelieving wonder.

He was different. He was something new.

He was not fully human anymore. A spike of panic shot straight down his spine. Well, hello, there was the damned fear. His mind screamed in protest. This was impossible.

It had to be nothing more than a hallucination brought on by trauma or hypoxia or a fucking brain-eating parasite he’d picked up and Medical had somehow missed.

But there was no denying the gills nor the way his body flexed and pulsed with every breath. He couldn’t comprehend the utter normalcy with which his lungs and throat and those new organs worked in tandem to keep him alive in an impossible environment.

No, not normalcy—adaptation. He was adapting to the ocean, to this pressure and chill and lightless blue, in a way that should’ve taken eons but had happened in less than three days.

The skin along his forearms prickled. The bones of his hands felt unfamiliar. His joints moved with a new, rubbery fluidity. He glanced at his hand. Shit. Was that webbing between his fingers?

Even as he had that thought, his vision recalibrated, and the darkness of the deep no longer seemed so impenetrable. Shit, yup, that was webbing. It was as clear as day what he was looking at.

While he was considering what the webbing meant, strange new instincts whispered to him. How to orient himself, how to glide, how to taste the water for traces of danger or food.

Taste the water?

The fuck? He thrashed in said water, spinning wildly, desperate to find some part of himself, some proof that he was still Saxby, still the same person who’d boarded the shuttle only moments before.

Saxby froze mid-thrash. The same space shuttle he’d stolen from a starship and crashed on a planet’s surface that he hadn’t had permission to be on. Oh gods, he was cooked. So cooked. What was past cooked? Incinerated? Carbonized?

Forget achieving a captain’s rank, he’d be lucky not to end up in a military prison for the rest of his life.

Or in a lab.

Saxby shuddered. Yeah, no thanks. Hard pass. He’d rather stay right here in the ocean. Although, the fucking water was why he was currently in the shit. What the ever-loving fuck was happening with him?

Looking up, he noticed the torn and warped hull of the shuttle. A quick glance confirmed the dead control panel. A memory rose of his own hands on the controls, the hull temperature spiking, the ship’s AI screaming warning after warning as he tore through atmo and straight into the drink.