I take the vial to a corner, away from the others. The seal breaks with a soft hiss, releasing a smell like ozone and deep ocean. Something chemical and wrong. Something that makes my body want to run even as my mind knows there's nowhere to go.
Sam's evacuation notice crinkles in my pocket. His school photo is clipped to it, taken before Miami went under. Before Mom drowned trying to salvage things from our old apartment. Before the world admitted it had already ended and we were just managing the decline.
I drink the tonic in one swallow.
It tastes like drowning from the inside out. Like seawater that's been distilled down to its worst components and mixed with something alien. The effect is immediate. My skin prickles, suddenly aware of every thread in my clothing, every air current in the room. My mouth floods with saliva that tastes wrong, chemical.
But it's between my legs that the change is most aggressive. A clenching heat that makes me grip the table. Wetness, immediate and embarrassing, soaking through my underwear. My body preparing itself for something it shouldn't want.
“Normal reaction,” the tech says without looking over. “It gets worse before it stabilizes.”
Worse. The heat spreads up through my core, making my breasts ache. My nipples harden into painful points against my sports bra. Every heartbeat sends a pulse of need through me that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with biological imperative.
I breathe through it the way I used to breathe through the panic of being tumbled by a wave. Count to four in, hold for four, out for four. But each breath brings more awareness of my body, more sensitivity, more wet heat between my thighs.
“Portal room's at the end of Dock Seven,” the tech says. “You'll want to go soon. Walking gets harder the longer you wait.”
He's right. Standing takes concentration. My legs shake, not from fear but from the constant clench and release of internal muscles I shouldn't be this aware of. The forty yards to the portal room feels like swimming against a riptide.
The portal itself doesn't look like much. A metal arch filled with something that bends light wrong. Through it, I can see a world of black rock and violent water. Storm clouds race across an orange sky. Waves crash against coral formations that pulse with bioluminescence.
“Two minutes,” an automated voice announces.
I pull out Sam's photo one last time. He's smiling, caught mid-laugh at something off-camera. He wants to be an engineer, wants to build the seawalls that might save what's left of the coast. He's got ten times the brains I do, just none of the credits to use them.
“One minute.”
The tonic has progressed to full-body awareness. I can feel my pulse in places I shouldn't. My tongue tastes copper and salt. The wetness between my legs has become a constant,humiliating tide that has nothing to do with arousal and everything to do with biological preparation for something my mind doesn't want to consider.
“Thirty seconds.”
I think about all the times I dove into dangerous water to pull strangers to safety. This is just another rescue. Except this time, I'm saving Sam by letting something pull me under.
“Portal active.”
I step through.
Crossing the portal felt like being disassembled and reassembled in the wrong order. Then I'm standing on black volcanic sand under a bruised orange sky, and the first drops of an approaching storm hit my skin like warnings.
The portal snaps closed behind me. No sound, just absence where return used to be possible.
I'm alone on an island maybe a hundred meters across. Black coral spires rise from the sand like skeletal fingers. The ocean surrounds everything, violent and gray-green, nothing like the Atlantic I knew. These waves move wrong, too much weight behind them, as if the water itself is denser here.
Thunder rolls across the sky. Lightning illuminates the water for a moment, and I see something massive moving beneath the surface. A shadow that displaces too much water to be anything I have a name for.
The rain starts in earnest, and I realize the drops taste different. Salt and something else. Something that makes my modified body respond, skin prickling with renewed sensitivity. The wetness between my legs increases, mixing with rain running down my thighs.
I need shelter. Need to think. Need to figure out how to survive thirty days on a world where the water itself is hostile territory.
But the shadow beneath the waves surfaces just enough for me to see the tentacles, each one as thick as my waist, and I understand that the hunt has already begun.
He's been waiting for me.
NAIA
The shadow disappears beneath the waves, leaving only ripples that the storm quickly erases. I stand frozen on the black sand, rain plastering my clothes to my sensitized skin. Every drop is torture. The sports bra that never bothered me before now feels like sandpaper against my nipples. They're hard as glass, aching with each breath, visible through the soaked fabric.
Between my legs, the wetness has nothing to do with rain. The tonic has turned my body into a producer of constant slick heat that runs down my thighs, mixing with the storm water. I can smell myself—sweet and chemical and wrong. The scent will travel through water. He'll taste it in the ocean from wherever he's hiding.
