by Elsa Jade
“You never minded when I was a monster,” she reminded him.
“Or when you weren’t,” he murmured. Before she could ask him what he meant by that, he continued brusquely, “One more deep breath. Then all power to our descent. If we avoid Cretarni detection, survive impact with the water’s surface, and maintain life-support for our dive, we’ll be at the Abyssa’s shrine before the Cretarni launch another round.”
Her breaths sounded loud and fearful in her own ears, as if she was already underwater. Suddenly, the lack of energy from the Space Invader icons on the screen seemed ominous. If they were saving up all that firepower, they could easily aim some of it at the runabout. Relying on being too small and obsolete seemed like a questionable plan. But it was what they had.
She watched, tense, her breaths so shallow she didn’t even notice that the air was fading. The runabout was a tiny blip on the screen, plunging rapidly toward the seemingly flat line that marked the surface of the Tritona sea. But she knew from her previous visit that those waters were anything but calm. The runabout had only one small viewport, and the transparent plasteel showed the black void turning to fire as they plunged through the atmosphere and started to burn.
But they’d be extinguished soon enough...
Even though it didn’t matter—hadn’t mattered the last two times she’d crashed either—she held her breath and clenched her butt cheeks as if that would stop her ship from coming apart around her. Instead they pierced the transition between sky and water without incident, like a shooting star fading without a wish.
The view out the small round viewport went instantly from the white of spray and steam to the blue-green of sunlit water—and Tritonan blood—to the darker blue of deeper water.
And a heartbeat after that, it was black as space again.
“That was easier than I’d planned,” Sting murmured. “All indicators look good, and we’ll have enough power to make it to the Abyssa’s shrine.” He slanted a glance at her, those unlikely dimples flashing again. “And back.”
For the first time, the runabout creaked, as the pressure intensified. Lana stared uneasily at the systems panel. On the screen, all the Space Invader ships had disappeared; the mineralized water interfered with the runabout’s sensors. As if they were alone in all the universe.
“Sting?”
His pale gaze shifted to her. “Your tone makes me want to run away, even here in the deeps with an enemy armada lurking above.”
She wrinkled her nose at the dimple peeking out. “Why didn’t you abduct me when you had the chance?”
The momentary flicker of those silver lenses told her he wasn’t ready to reveal his true eyes. “You didn’t want to be abducted.”
She glowered at him. “You pretend you don’t understand words when is suits you.”
“I know what want means.” Despite his shielded eyes, a light flickered behind, turning them to storm clouds.
She held her ground—such as it was. “So you would have left me on Earth?”
“Isn’t that what you told me you wanted?”
For so long, she’d felt constrained by the strange zaps that had flashed like distant lightning through her life. And when it got worse, she’d given up on wanting anything except to survive. Now, she was finally free of the power she’d never asked for, and she still couldn’t say what she wanted?
There was nothing left to blame.
She took the deepest breath of her life. “I want—”
The runabout rocked hard, tossing her into Sting’s thick shoulder. An instant too late, the proximity alarm blared.
He’d caught her with one long arm, and now he shoved her back into her seat, locking the restraint harness fast. “Remember whatever you were about to say.”
Another smash, and the runabout spun completely on all axes. She would’ve thrown up but she was too terrified.
As the small ship settled, listing sideways, she asked, “Did we lose power?”
“Partly. We were hit.”
“By what?”
He boosted the echolocation on the runabout— Just as a gigantic blob coalesced in a ghostly afterimage an instant before slamming into them again.
She held back a shriek. “You call yourself a monster? That is a monster!”
“Boundary beast.” Sting started reducing the last of their power. “It patrols the edges of the Abyssa’s realm. It seems vexed.”
“Oh, you think?” She eyed the dimming screens. “How will we see it?”
“We can’t stop it anyway. Making ourselves less of a threat might calm it.”
She sucked in a snarky response. But really, how could she get any smaller?
The hiss like her annoyed breath kept going, and she glanced over her shoulder to follow the noise. “Uh, Sting?”
“I would’ve taken you,” he announced. “I didn’t want to leave you on Earth. I wanted to claim you for my own. But according to the Intergalactic Dating Agency handbook—”
Her heart pounded. “Wait, hold that thought. We’re sinking.”
He followed her gaze. “Beast must’ve gotten a fang into our armor.”
Of course it had fangs. What sort of self-respecting boundary beast didn’t have fangs?
“Can we repair the damage before a breach?”
He shook his head. “Not without welding that will anger the beast.” Despite the threat of another lethal jolt, he got up from his seat and went to stick his hand in the widening spray of water. This time, she was not pleased to see his dimples. “We’ll have to swim.”
“Swim?” She couldn’t help the squeak in her voice. “It’s way too deep and dark. And oh by the way, there’s a boundary beast out there.”
As he gazed at her, the shield over his eyes flicked away, and she was left staring at his unmasked eyes. “This is what I am,” he quietly. “Will you come with me?”
She stared down at the wet, webbed hand he held out to her through the ever-widening spray of seawater. He’d reduced the ship’s power to almost nil, and in the remaining pale glow, the mist wasn’t a rainbow, but a luminous moonbow of silver and pearl.
So this had always been her choice: to resign herself to sinking or just dive in.
She slipped her hand into his.
In moments, he’d checked her external gill, reduced their datpad output to almost zero so as not to rile the beast more, and hustled her out the airlock. She didn’t even have time to ask if the pressure at this depth would instantly crush her. She could only hope that her e-suit, her Tritonan ancestry, and the plentitude of snacks from Thomas would make her dense enough to resist crushing.
They ejected into Tritona’s sea.
It was cold, so cold. And dark, so dark. For a panicked heartbeat, she was drifting in space again, only this time there were no stars.
Except… As her eyes adjusted even after the relative dimness of the runabout, tiny sparkles of light bloomed in the void. She’d seen bioluminescence before, of course, both on Earth and Tritona, but this was something else, something so eerie and otherworldly and hauntingly beautiful that she knew she’d never forget it no matter how much longer she lived.
The “stars” floated through the void, seemingly random and not constrained by any laws of celestial mechanics, but powered only by their hungers—for something to eat, for a mate, and maybe for whatever other answers lurked in the vastness of the abyss.
Despite the darkness and though she’d lost her echolocation, she sensed the monster gliding through the depths, blanking out the star creatures beyond.
Unable to speak, afraid to risk even the minimal power of a message on her datpad, she could only tug at Sting’s hand and point. When he nodded back at her, she realized she could see better than seemed possible at these depths. Not only were there individual stars of bioluminescent sea creatures, but entire gossamer galaxies drifting through the void, sending out their own little messages of light and life into the darkness.
For safety, Sting had bound her to hi
m with a tow line from his enviable battle skin pockets, and she tried to make herself streamlined as he pushed clear of the runabout. She glanced over her shoulder just as the spaceship released a massive white stream of bubbles—and disappeared.
Had the boundary beast…eaten it?
She managed not to gulp down her gill in terror, but it was a close thing. The pressure around her was like a hand holding her tight.
But Sting’s hold was tighter.
He hauled her away from the monster. Oh god, they were going deeper. Her frantic sips of breath barely found oxygen in the surrounding water. Not a great time to hyperventilate.
She peered back one last time to see a big bubble of air drifting upward as the beast burped out the air it had swallowed.
Tucking herself against Sting’s muscled chest, she faced the darkness.
Chapter 19
He took them deep, deeper than he’d ever been.
When he’d come to the Abyssa’s grotto so long ago, he’d stopped, as all the Tritonyri warriors did, at the shrine. Though the Abyssa hadn’t spoken to him, he’d seen the light, almost as bright as the sun at this depth, and then he’d turned around and left without his omen.
At the time, it had seemed appropriate for a monster like him to get no blessing. This time, he didn’t bother waiting for a grace that would never come. He swam past the carved columns representing all the creatures of Tritona’s waters and plunged into the heart of the chasm.
This time, the Abyssa would answer the Phantom and the fire-witch.
To his shock, after descending near vertical for long enough to leave him uneasy, the waterway abruptly twisted and widened, emerging into a huge, spherical cavern bisected by the mirrored curvature of the interface between water and air. He surfaced with Lana into the fresh air.
They floated for a moment, pivoting slowly in bewilderment, and Lana let her gill dangle from its cord around her neck. “This looks like the core of the Atlantyri.”
It did, although instead of a segmented churning wheel of artificially imposed tides, here the water swept in a slow, elegiac whirlpool—powered by what, he couldn’t tell. Long streamers and wide blooms of bioluminescent algae lit the cavern softly, but somehow it was almost painful to his eyes and he couldn’t seem to close his third eyelids.
Because he wanted to see it all, this hidden heart of his world. And some part of him wanted to be seen by the Abyssa.
He licked his lips. “This water has never been touched by Cretarni toxins. It is pure.”
“And warmer than I would’ve thought. Must be a hydrothermal vent.” Though she was still tethered to him, Lana drifted an arm’s length away. “Some of these specimens are the same extinct species we found in the Atlantyri.” She spun in the water to flash a wide smile at him. “Sting, this is amazing! There’s enough cloning and breeding stock here to revive the ocean decades sooner than the Tritonesse had estimated. The council rep will have no reason not to approve Tritona’s return to the intergalactic community.”
“No reason except the Cretarni armada,” he reminded her. Hating the way her smile sank, he channeled his fury into a mighty pulse sent outward in a bell that made the water dance around them.
Her eyes widened. “You’re yelling at your goddess.”
“I’m using my words.”
He sent another and another until the mesmerizing swirl of the pool was a crosscurrent storm of white-capped waves.
Until underneath, a bright glow ignited.
“Sting,” Lana hissed. “Be quiet.”
With a final sullen ping, he subsided.
The light kept rising in a bell of its own that reached across a third of the submerged cavern.
Reeling Lana to his chest, he backpaddled clear of the light’s outer ring. The algae flickered, as if in greeting, just as the bell broke the surface.
And kept rising.
Lana gasped. “Your goddess is…a jellyfish?”
The rounded bell—several times larger than the runabout—shimmered with myriad lights across the spectrum, and the descending tentacles went so deep that even with the scintillating inner illumination, the longest filaments faded into the dark. As the tentacles drifted in the swirl of water, the lights flickered and pulsed.
“Not a jellyfish,” he murmured. “A crystalized data gel.”
Lana made a choked noise, but he couldn’t look away from the lights. They seemed to call to him…
The voice—not words spoken aloud—surfaced in his mind like thousands of bubbles on the water.
‘Titanyri.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Nul’ah-wys.’ Fire-witch.
That—aimed at Lana—made him swivel to put her behind him though there was no place in the cavern out of reach of those tentacles. He’d never seen such a massive data gel crystalized and free-roaming, hadn’t realized it was possible. To maintain its state, those quantum optic cables had to be pulling massive amounts of geothermal power directly from the sunken volcano at the center to the Abyssa’s chasm maze.
Except there was no Abyssa, was there? No true omens, no words of hope. Just this…
In his frozen fury, Lana edged out from behind him. “What are you?”
‘We are Abyssa.’
Beneath their floating feet, bubbles formed images in the water, almost too fast to comprehend. Hundreds—no, thousands—of Tritonesse over the centuries, shrunken by age or twisted from war wounds or weakened by toxins, descending with their last breaths into the chasm to join the memories and the dreams of what their world could’ve been/might be again.
“They gave their minds to this crystal,” Lana murmured.
‘Together, we hoped to end the fighting.’ The words reverberated and echoed with all the Tritonesse voices. ‘From here, we sent strategy and soldiers—’
“You sent us,” Sting growled. Ignoring Lana’s gurgle of alarm, he sent a hard ping at the crystal. “You told the Tritonesse to make weaponized monsters.”
‘Not monsters. Marvels.’
Lana cleared her throat. “Ah, something might’ve gotten lost in translation over the centuries. Why have you stayed hidden here? They needed you above.”
‘As the waters soured and life faded in the deeps, we could no longer leave this chamber. When our daughters stopped coming, we could only send an echo of ourselves, carrying our message of hope for the future.’
“The omens,” Sting murmured. “Not a blessing. Just corrupted, fragmented data.”
Bobbing closer to him, Lana touched his shoulder, not supporting herself, more like holding him back. “You told the Tritonesse how to bioengineer a weapon called a light switch that can electrolyze an ocean. How do we disarm it?”
Ah yes. The reason why they’d come, which had nothing to do with his existential angst. Grudgingly, he ducked his shoulder behind her to give her space for her questions.
‘The nul’ah-wys…’ In the sonographic voice of the Abyssa crystal, the word shimmered across multiple meanings in Sting’s head—fire-witch, light switch, power surge—until finally settling like a pebble on a riverbed as burning tide. ‘The burning tide was not a weapon.’
“That’s not what the Cretarni said,” Lana prodded. “They claimed the Tritonesse stole it.”
‘We did,’ the Abyssa said. ‘We knew it could be a nearly endless source of pure energy for our world. Not just an end to this war, but an end to the need for all war.’
“It’s going to end this war,” Sting growled. “Right now, the Cretarni are raining down fire with it, and every place it touches, the sea dies.”
The Abyssa crystal chimed in sorrow. ‘We dreamed the nul’ah-wys would call the storm to bring light to all the lands and purify the waters, flooding all hearts with a promise.’
“What promise?” Lana’s question was so soft it barely whispered across his honed senses even though he right beside her.
But the Abyssa answered, ‘To at last unite this world.’
Again, the words sp
arkled with diverse facets: peace, home, ours.
Lana drew a shivering breath. “I was the fire-witch. But I could never do what you’re saying.”
‘You are the nul’ah-wys.’
She shook her head. “The Cretarni stole it back. That’s how they are attacking us.”
‘They could not change what you are. Only you.’
Sting struggled to grasp the meanings, even as the words melted from his grasp like pudding in saltwater. “Lana still has her power? But the Cretarni took the components from her.” Except while they’d separated the biogen elements from her blood, they hadn’t killed her; they’d wanted more—blood from her bones. “Before we found Earth, her zaps were getting stronger because she was coming into her power. And now she’s rekindling.”
Lana swept her hands once in a gesture of denial that sent her drifting away from him. “But the Cretarni said they took my power.” Her voice rose, striking small white caps from the cavern pool. “They said that they’d leave me…”
“Leave you what?” He reached for her.
But she evaded him. “Nothing. They’d leave me as nothing.”
“No matter what your powers, you would never be nothing,” he said softly. “Not to your mother and your friends, not to your world. And not to me.” While she floated there, each breath leaving her in staccato concentric rings expanding outward, he watched her. “Unless…that is what you want.”
When she raised her anguished gaze to him, the black centers were so wide they reflected the crystal light and blanked like his. “The power I had always seemed to make things worse.”
He considered, then nodded. “And yet this is your chance to make it better.”
The voices of the Abyssa crystal were implacable. ‘You are nul’ah-wys, in your bones, in your heart, in your breath. The tide rises. Rise with it, or drown.’
Lana was shaking so badly that the ringed waves emanating from her almost overlapped each other, their amplitude increasing exponentially. “But we saw what the Cretarni are doing with that power. There’s no way I could do that myself.
“They reinforced the electrolyzer elements they took from you with their plasma cannons to amplify the power.” He pointed at the waves shivering from her. “You just need a source of power to focus and aim your waves.”
