The next morning, there was a piece of sea glass in my boot. Green as the shallows on a sunny day, worn smooth by years of tumbling in the waves. I'd nearly cried when I found it.
After that, the gifts came almost daily. A string of tiny pearls draped over the rigging near my workstation, so small and delicate they looked like frozen tears. A fragment of coral, deep red and intricately branched. A stone worn into a perfect oval by the sea, dark with veins of silver running through it. A piece of driftwood carved into the shape of a fish and that one made me pause, because it meant they didn't just collect things. They made things. They created.
I kept every gift. Strung the pearls on a thread and wore them around my neck, hidden under my shirt. Kept the shells and stones in a pouch against my skin. Slept with the carved fish under my pillow like a child with a treasured toy.
The crew noticed I was different. Lighter, somehow. Less hunched and fearful. Decker made some snide comment about me finally going properly mad, and Brennan gave me one of his long, assessing looks, but I didn't care. Let them think what they wanted. They couldn't touch this. They couldn't take this away from me.
The days on the ship became more bearable because the evenings belonged to them. Decker still tormented me, but hiscruelties felt smaller now. The alphas still circled, Cort watching me with those calculating eyes, getting bolder by the day but I could endure it because sunset was coming. Because they would be there. Because I wasn't alone anymore.
I started thinking of them as friends. It was ridiculous, I knew. They were creatures from legend, who had no business being friendly with a human girl. When the warm one waved at me, when the beautiful one smiled his sharp smile, the one in the back watched with sharp eyes and when the dark one watched me with those fathomless eyes, it felt like friendship. It felt like being seen.It felt like being wanted for who I was instead of what I could provide.
On the fourth evening, something changed. I was at my usual spot, hair loose and tumbling in the wind, when I realized I wanted to give them something. The urge was sudden and overwhelming, a compulsion I couldn't explain, couldn't ignore, couldn't rationalize away. They'd been coming to see me every night. They'd listened to me sing. They'd left me gifts, treasures from the sea, things they must have valued or they wouldn't have given them.
I wanted to return the gesture. Needed to. The desire burned in my chest like a physical thing. What did you give to creatures who lived in the sea? What could I possibly have that would mean anything to beings who probably had access to all the treasures of the deep? I went through my belongings in my mind as I sat there, watching the water turn gold with the setting sun. A few coins, useless underwater, and barely enough to matter even on land. Practical clothes, hardly a gift. My dwindling supply of scent blockers—definitely not.
I owned almost nothing. Eight months of running had stripped away everything I'd once had, everything I'd once been. I traveled light because I had to, because carrying things meantleaving things behind, because attachments were dangerous when you were always one step ahead of disaster.
There was one thing. One small, frivolous, precious thing that I'd carried with me since the night I ran.
My ribbons.
The thought surfaced like a bubble rising through dark water. My ribbons. Four of them, different colors, deep blue like the ocean at twilight, soft green like seafoam in morning light, pale pink like sunrise over the waves, and cream like sand at the water's edge.
They were the only beautiful things I owned. The only things that served no practical purpose, that existed purely because they were pretty. I'd kept them hidden in the bottom of my bag, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, protected from the salt and the damp and the hard realities of life on the run.
My mother had given them to me.
The memory came quickly—her hands in my hair, gentle and sure, weaving a ribbon through my braid. I'd been young, maybe eight or nine, and she'd been teaching me how to make myself pretty. "A girl should have pretty things," she'd said, tying off the bow with a flourish. "They remind us that life isn't all work and worry."
That was before I presented. Before I became valuable. Before the light went out of her eyes and she started looking at me like a problem to be solved instead of a daughter to be loved. She'd stopped giving me pretty things after that. Stopped braiding my hair, stopped teaching me songs, stopped looking at me with that soft maternal warmth. I became an investment to be protected, a commodity to be preserved, a prize to be sold to the highest bidder. I'd kept the ribbons through everything—the years of captivity, the night I ran, the months of hiding, I'd kept them. They were the last proof that I'd once been loved. The lastremnant of the mother she'd been before my biology turned me into something other than her child.
They were precious to me.
Which meant they were exactly right.
I scrambled down from my perch, heart pounding, and dug through my bag until I found them. The cloth wrapping was salt-stained but intact, and when I unfolded it, the ribbons were still bright. Still beautiful. Blue, green, pink, cream, four colors for four creatures.
My hands trembled as I lifted them out. Was I really going to do this? Give away the last thing my mother had given me? Give away the only connection I had to who I'd been before?
Yes. Yes, I was.
They'd given me something more valuable than ribbons. They'd given me hope. They'd given me something to look forward to, a reason to endure the endless awful days on this ship. They'd given me the feeling of being seen, being wanted, being worthy of attention.
Ribbons were a small price to pay for that.
I needed something to weigh them down, something to make them sink instead of float away on the current. I looked around my hidden nook and spotted a shell, one of their gifts, actually. A perfect spiral that had appeared on my pillow two nights ago, still slightly damp when I'd found it. It felt appropriate somehow, using their gift to deliver mine. Like completing a circle. Like answering a call. I tied the ribbons to the shell, my fingers clumsy with nerves. Blue first, then green, then pink, then cream. Four bright streamers of color trailing from the pale spiral of the shell. It looked festive when I held it up. Silly, maybe, like something a child would make for a festival game.
It was mine to give, and I wanted them to have it.
The sun was on the horizon by the time I reached the railing. The sky was painted in shades of orange and gold and deepeningpurple, the water reflecting it back. I searched the waves, heart pounding against my ribs, and for one terrible moment I thought they hadn't come.
The water was empty. Still. Just waves and light and the vast indifferent sea.
Then I saw them.
Four shapes rising from the deep, darker shadows against the darkening water. They broke the surface in their usual formation, the dark one in front, the scarred one at his shoulder, the beautiful one drifting slightly to the side, the warm one hanging back with his gentle eyes. Relief flooded through me, so intense it made my knees weak. They were here. They'd come back. They always came back.
I held up my gift so they could see it, the shell with its trailing ribbons, the colors catching the dying light like small flames. I saw their attention sharpen instantly, all four sets of eyes focusing on the object in my hand with that predatory intensity I was starting to recognize. When something interested them, they became absolutely still, absolutely focused.
