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Thanks to a study Jack had made me type up, I knew seahorses were carnivores and preferred plankton, shrimp, and copepods. The males carried the babies, and most species mated for life.
On paper, they were strange little beasts, yet here, in their element, they were magical.
Neri tapped my shoulder, wrenching my attention from the seahorse to her face. She pointed at the surface and gently unwound the seahorse’s spiny tail from around her thumb. Passing it to me on a buffet of water, she kicked off with a flex of her powerful core, leaving me on the reef while she caught another breath.
I’d never been more in awe of her.
I’d spent hours timing her breath holds in the pool, yet I hadn’t appreciated the freedom it gave her out here. To swim unencumbered. To be just like the fish who belonged here. The fish she believed she was.
While waiting for her to return, I placed the seahorse back near its crevice. I didn’t have the guts to put my hand into its home, but the creature fanned the fins on its back and vanished without a trace.
I lost myself to the chaos.
All around me life bloomed. Luminous prawns and cheeky crabs, flounder fish burying themselves in sand, and a shoal of yellowfin goatfish spiralled in the distance. A drifting piece of seaweed tangled itself on some coral, revealing a seadragon hiding in its folds.
I wished I had a camera.
I wanted to capture this insane day, this insane world.
Neri tapped me on the shoulder, making me flinch.
Twisting to catch her eyes, I frowned.
She’d put on a mask.
Her eyes blinked behind the clear covering, and the strap around her head did its best to trap her dancing seaweed hair.
My pulse crept higher as she waved the diving knife I’d used on Ethan in my face.
Why the hell does she have a knife?
Bubbles rushed from my regulator as I fought with questions I couldn’t ask. Cursing the lack of ability, I shrugged. What?
Twisting, she used her monofin to spiral on the spot, pointing toward the edge of the reef in the blue-hazy distance.
A flicker of something grey.
Is it Sapphire?
I had no idea what the hand gesture was for a dolphin. Had her pod come to see her? Did they know The Fluke’s engine? Perhaps they’d been waiting just off the reef since last night, patiently waiting to see Neri.
Giving me a come-hither wave, Neri kicked her fin and cut through the water. I jumped off the bottom and swam behind her. Without flippers of my own, I wasn’t nearly as fast, but I focused on my breathing. On the effort it took to inhale and exhale, following her path through the reef, keeping my legs far away from stinging coral and my feet from venomous stonefish.
When we reached another sandy area, I sank to the bottom and shrugged again.
Neri hovered above me.
Holding up her finger, she kicked toward the surface. She broke the water above, her fin swaying backward and forth as her head remained in the world where humans were meant to exist.
She stayed up there longer than I expected and another flicker of grey whipped my attention to the murky depths beyond the atoll.
Shit.
Every muscle in my body froze.
I went rigid.
I forgot how to breathe.
