by Elsa Jade
***
How far or long they went she wasn’t sure. It seemed like an eternity and a million miles—or nothing. She was a passable swimmer after many summers on yachts and catamarans, but he wrapped a tether from his battle skin around her and hauled her through the darkness like a torpedo.
This must be what it felt like to bronc-bust a boundary beast.
By the time a faint glow appeared ahead, she realized her dizziness and double vision were gone. When she looked at Coriolis, the strata of auras were still there but she could focus on the top one with the stormy eyes.
When he glanced at her, he didn’t have to ask for her to know he was making sure she was still okay. And when she nodded, she didn’t need to say a word for him to understand her determination.
They rocketed through the void toward the light.
When they burst into the grotto, after as long and far as they’d been going down, for a moment she wondered if they’d somehow gone inside out and ended up on top of an airy mountain above the drifting clouds. They were still underwater, but the diffuse glow in the whorls of geothermically heated currents was almost as bright as sunlight. In that glare, the farther walls seemed to fade away, leaving only a lone peak—with a black hole at its heart.
Coriolis reeled her close against his chest, and they hovered in the water like birds on the wing.
“The true abyss,” he murmured, his voice carrying strangely on the invisible flow.
Afraid to break the gill seal—and with nothing to say anyway—she just looked down into the well. Lacey light, like the threads on her dive skin, spiraled down down down into the wishing well. But the patterns weren’t merely organic; they were fractal, engineered and computational, like circuit boards.
This wasn’t just some primitive oracle, she realized. Which of course made sense. The Abyssas of the time had sent out the sophisticated exodus ship with cryogenically preserved samples of life on Tritona. The Atlantyri had crashed on Earth, true, but that was after it had crossed the voids of space. The Abyssa—or whatever was down there now—was receiving AI-assisted data carried by all the currents of the Sea. The Sea that touched everything, everywhere on Tritona.
Wonder almost made her swoon again, and she clung to Coriolis with all her might.
Gently, he unwound her arms from his neck. “Claim your omen, kharea.”
He called her sweet, but she needed to be strong. She held his hand for another moment as she let herself drift an arm’s length away. Her dive skin calibrated weight and buoyancy to let her body float without effort, but it was her psyche that seemed to soar.
She could ask anything, whisper her desires to the deep heart of this world.
Except… She’d had all that already, on Earth.
Rich and powerful and beautiful. The memory of the words stung. Had that been the monster rising in Lana?
As soon as she thought it, Marisol hated herself for the malevolence. She was not a Tritonesse to fear whatever Lana was becoming. She knew her friend was not a monster.
And if she was… Well, monsters needed friends to fight for them too.
She stared down the dark maw of the well and felt the words rising in her own throat. “What do I need to live? What do I need to save Tritona?”
As she spoke—gurgled, more like—the gill let out a little stream of bubbles past her eyes, but she didn’t panic. It was just air.
The fractal threads shimmered as if absorbing the soundwaves of her words, and her heartbeat caught the same pulse.
The reply rose from the abyss in an answering vortex of obsidian bubbles carried on a sound that enveloped her body like whale song. Tears sprang into her eyes. Though there were no words, her body and mind absorbed the meaning as if she was tuned to the resonance of the omen.
In the projection of bubbles and soundwaves, she glimpsed a familiar shape. Nothing from her life on Earth, despite all those years of having everything. Of course not. The shape was a reflection of the man beside her.
Her heartbeat faltered, dropping the pulse of the omen. And the projection stuttered too, like a camera losing focus. The omen tried to reconnect with her, flooding her with bursts of light and song like dreams in her waking mind. She saw through the auras of him, outside and in, deeper…
Deeper yet, to the heart of him. A broken heart. Corrupted by some musky spice gone bad.
The taste burned on the back of her tongue. The breath of rising desire, sunken, withering.
Coriolis, like his world, was dying…
The insight ripped into her like savage teeth, and she gagged at the pain, worse than any of the blistering hives of lethal water allergy. To find what she needed to live, only to lose him?
Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop…
She sucked in a breath to scream at him for what he’d given to her, unasked, when she’d only asked for her life.
He’d given his heart.
And now he was dying.
With the first blast of her cursing cry, the gill popped off her nose and mouth. Water rushed in, cutting off her words.
And her breath.
From a distance like lightyears, Coriolis’s anguished shout reached her but couldn’t touch her through the omen’s uncompromising revelations. At her panicked flail, the cloak-like folds of the battle skin clamped viciously around her, refusing to let the salty water in.
As she’d refused love.
Why why why? As the weight of a world’s tears crushed her, she tried to remember why she’d been so closed off. Cold, distant, heartless.
No, that last wasn’t the accusations of the Abyssa. Those were the words of her schoolmates, her lovers, the others who’d wanted more from her than she could give. Money, access, distinction—all that she’d been able to offer from the Wavercrest foundation. But of herself… There’d been nothing.
Because it was here, on Tritona, waiting for her.
If she could conjure it out of the darkness.
Body, heart, soul.
She’d given so much to so many, but she’d always held back that last bit, knowing body, heart, soul that she didn’t belong. She couldn’t give what she didn’t have.
Give now.
As she gave up, the silver shield around her surrendered, and the mountaintop glow winked out as if it had never been. The hot, black water rushed through her nose and mouth, into her lungs and belly, flooding every cell.
The dark deluged her consciousness too as she fell into the void.
Tighter than her own skin, strong arms wrapped around her.
Coriolis.
Screaming at her to hold on—never let go—he sped upward toward the distant meniscus of the grotto pool’s surface, every powerful stroke of his body through the water sparking tiny stars in the drowned night.
This is what you need to live.
They rose into the light and air so hard that his whole body cleared the water before they splashed down again, and then he struck out toward the shore, his arm wrenched tight—never let go—over her breasts, chanting her name with every stroke.
She’d spewed up most of the water by the time he hauled her up on the rock into the carved embrace of a many-tentacled octopus creature. If only she had that many arms—
She lunged at him, holding him tighter than he’d held her, her face buried in his neck just below the flutter of his gills.
“Marisol?” He tipped her chin back, his gaze searching hers wildly, as if about to start mouth-to-mouth.
So she kissed him. Climbing up into his lap, kicking free of the dive skin skirt to wrap her legs around his waist, she kissed him as if he was all she needed to live. Lips, breath, need, all throbbing with the pulse of the deep.
He finally wrenched back with a wheeze. “Marisol… How?” Fingers trembling, he combed back the loosened strands of her braid, his touch lingering just beyond the feathery structures of her gills. “You are Tritonesse—”
Ignoring his breathless wonder, she slapped his hands away. “Why?�
� she cried back. “Why didn’t you tell me that you bonded with me?”
He winced, and something inside her—body, heart, soul— wilted. He didn’t want it…
“I didn’t want you to feel entangled.” He reached for her again—never let go—but she evaded him. “You thought your Tritonan blood was a disease,” he reminded her. “You didn’t know you’d claimed me, and you said you wanted to leave.”
“After we found answers about the Atlantyri and its treasures and its influences on descendants.” She scrambled backward, sprawling awkwardly on the slack wrinkles of her cloak. Oh, now it didn’t want to obey her… “None of which will matter to you if by claiming you I kill you!”
He stood at attention, a soldier being reprimanded. “It shouldn’t have happened,” he said stiffly. “No claimings have been recorded in the last century or more. It was always the oldest, strongest Tritonyri who were vulnerable to claiming. Which makes sense in evolutionary terms, since a claiming let the Tritonesse keep the worthiest mates in the depths. But over the war years, we lost so many fighters that none of the remaining Tritonyri experienced the breath of rising desire chemically altering to the united breath.”
“Except you.” Of course she’d known he was strong and sexy, but… “So, are you—what?—a king now?”
His jaw tightened. “Saving my world is all that matters.”
Black water seemed to rise in her again, choking her, leaking from her eyes—tinged with the mineral tang of unrequited la’ah-wy like wet, broken stone, like blood. “Coriolis—”
A shriek from just above her heart silenced her for a moment.
Glaring at him, she warned, “This fight isn’t over.” Clawing at the unobtrusive pocket on her battle skin, she wrenched out the small datpad. Keeping her gimlet stare locked on him, she growled, “A hie kharea-wy. Unless the world is coming to an end right this moment, I need—”
“Good morning to you too, Tritonesse-rey,” Captain Flaude’s cheerful voice was strained. “The mating storms are breaking untimely and uncommon fierce, and it seems the planetary sensor grid is offline. Since I have the commander’s datpad—”
She passed her device to Coriolis.
“I’m here, Flaude,” he said with an uncanny calm like the pool behind them. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re on the Bathyal. Before the grid went down, we caught what might’ve been a sensor echo, maybe extrapolated old readings from the buffer AI.” He hesitated. “Or maybe…”
Coriolis was already on his feet, lifting her up. “We rise to serve. Hold on.”
The link severed with another fainter shriek.
She grabbed his shoulder. “What is the maybe?”
Coriolis’s jaw set in a grim line. “The only sensor readings the buffer AI is tasked with scanning for are spaceships.” His gray eyes gleamed like hematite and promised blood. “Cretarni ships.”
Chapter 16
How? He’d just asked that of Marisol as her gills bloomed like a hundred delicate crimson florets. And now, as they raced back through the citadel, he asked himself the same as he visualized Axis ships descending again through Tritona’s thrashing skies.
Knowing the season of intense storms was beginning, one of the first tasks he’d assigned was reinforcing the planetary security grid. It was impossible that they’d lost power in the first big blow.
“If Captain Flaude is orbiting with Lana on the Bathyal, who will come get us?”
“There’s another way.”
She didn’t pester him, wisely saving her breath for their pounding run through the strangely empty corridors of the Tritonesse’s halls.
He’d tried to leave Marisol in the shelter of the grotto. It was one of the deepest and thus most secure places on the planet. Considering she’d almost drowned before her gills appeared, she would be weakened, vulnerable.
He’d told her that, commanded her to stay. She’d nodded. And when he’d hauled her up against his chest to kiss her once, maybe for the last time, and turned to go, she was right on his heels.
And he could only be fiercely, wrongly ecstatic.
This fight wasn’t over.
The ceremonial hall also was empty, although the rocks still quivered with the aftermath of the Tritonesse’s rage at poor Lana. While none of the Tritonesse-ra had the same destructive sub-acoustic power as the legends of old, taken altogether, they had a bunch of soundwaves that lingered still. Taking a calming breath, he tightened his own echolocation. “Stay close to me,” he murmured to Marisol. “I’m picking up some residual murderousness around here…”
Following the most murderous thread, he guided them through the seething quiet to what he knew had once been the pride of the citadel—a garden half submerged and half above according to records from antiquity, the garden had once held the finest specimens all Tritonans regions, both land and sea. The war years had been the end of the garden, as of so many things. All that was left now was the hardscaping of recessed troughs and decorative planters where living things had been. A few hardier specimens of moss and lichen, algae and water weed, had taken over their stubby, stubborn mats and rosettes somehow only emphasizing the hopelessness that had left them to run amok.
Damiara was standing crouched beside a generator, prodding it despondently with an electric spammer. “I think this is the end of it,” she muttered without glancing around. “It won’t stay lit, no matter what I do. Not that anyone wants these molds anyway.” She threw down the spanner with a muttered oath rose to face them. “Here to gloat?”
He sputtered for a moment, confused, but Marisol tilted her head. “Gloat about what?”
Damiara shrugged one shoulder. “Your clever escape. Your journey to stars I’ll never see.” She glared at them. “Each other
Coriolis shook his head. “We have a problem. “
“Besides bringing a fire-witch to our world?” she asked snidely.
He growled. “Your lights won’t stay on because the grid has been compromised.”
Her expression turning fierce, she strode toward them. “Cretarni?” All her lethargy burned away in intense focus.
“We believe so,” he told her. “No confirmation, but—”
She walked right past him back toward the main halls. “No,” she shouted, her hands clenched into fists above her shoulders. “No more. No grakking more!”
She disappeared down the hall, still yelling.
Marisol winced. “She’s very loud. On so many wavelengths.”
“I think she knows the time has come for change.” He pursed his lips. “Not to be quiet though.”
“Yeah. Time to get loud.”
Though they hurried after the Tritonesse-ra, by the time they caught up with her, the assembly chamber was filling with other Tritonesse and a few of the Tritonyri who’d come on the Ammil. They all milled across the cascading steps with none of the tidy tiered ranking from before. Regret speared him. He’d done this to them by bringing confusion and disorder to their house. But their old ways hadn’t gotten them where they wanted to go.
The only thing that changed is what they were fighting for.
And maybe how they and who exactly did the fighting.
“The grak-cret soilers think they’ll come back one last time before the council rep,” Dami was shouting. “I say no!”
Ariab huddled near her Tritonesse-ra. “There’s nothing else we can do,” she wailed. “Estar is likely dead already at the nul’ah-wys’ teeth. We need to stay—”
“No! We stayed down here while the Tritonyri fought. And died. Now we fight together!”
At her impassioned cries, the Tritonesse began to order themselves again—mostly against Dami.
She glared once around the half-circle then put her back to them, standing tall, ignoring those that barely left a ripple as they faded away behind the dark columns. “Commander, will you lead a few more warriors for Tritona?”
He hadn’t ever wanted to lose another fighter, and to lose a Tritonesse would be a Tr
itonyri’s worst dishonor. “We rise to serve,” he whispered.
Her fierce smile needed no generator. “Just to be clear as the First Waters, I follow no one. I am still Tritonesse-ra.”
Marisol laughed quietly behind him as he nodded. “Will you take suggestions if not commands?”
She inclined her head regally. “For Tritona.”
With all the Tritonyri gathering behind Coriolis, a half-dozen Tritonesse—not including Ariab—clustered around her, sweeping a small ring of water into the circle of their mantle hems, perhaps suspecting as he did that someday she would be Tritonesse-rey. If she lived after this.
He shuddered, swallowing against the waning la’ah-wy.
If any of them lived.
“They’ll try for the spaceport,” he told them. “With all the repairs we’ve made and resources expended there, if they take the port, we lose for the last time.”
Dami nodded. “With our grid out, how do we contact your Tritonyri above?”
He reminded himself that even though she’d been trapped below, separate from the fighting, she was still a Tritonesse, with all that entailed. “The Bathyal was able to reach us from orbit, avoiding whatever interference we’re getting internally from the storm and Cretarni.”
“Ah well, if only we were in space too,” Dami snapped. “But since we aren’t—”
Marisol interrupted, “Why aren’t we?”
“We?” Dami narrowed her eyes.
But Marisol ignored the barely veiled threat. “Doesn’t seem fair they always get the high ground.”
“Yes,” the Tritonesse drawled. “If only we had more and bigger spaceships. Too bad ships are expensive and we are poor.”
Coriolis caught Marisol’s thoughtful gaze. “I know you had bottomless resources on Earth, but even if you could transfer all that to galactic credits, we don’t have time to buy and outfit ships.”
“I wasn’t thinking of ships.”
Dami’s lip curled in mockery. “You want to fly into space like a seagull?”
He stiffened to hear the word translate as Marisol had once disdained. But this time she nodded with such enthusiasm that the loosened strands of her pale hair fluffed around her head like spindrift. “Exactly.”