The girl was sinking, her small body pulled down by the undertow created by the shuttle’s descent. She was maybe thirty feet below her, but her heartbeat was a beacon, drawing Ariella towards her with the same inexorable pull as the tide.
Thump… thump… thump…
The rhythm was slowing.
“Ariella!”
Merrick’s hand caught her ankle.
The touch sent ice through her veins—cold fingers closing around her flesh, desperate and demanding. She looked down at him, at this man who had bought her like livestock, who had forced her into that suffocating suit, who wanted her as a wife while treating her as property.
His flint-colored eyes were wide with terror. All the polish, all the sophistication, all the carefully cultivated menace—stripped away in an instant. What remained was something small and pathetic, a man who had spent his entire life controlling others and now faced the one thing he couldn’t manipulate.
Death.
“Don’t leave me.” His voice cracked. “You can’t. You belong to me.”
His words echoed in her skull as thoughts raced through her mind. All the ways she had been owned. Her father, treating her as a scientific achievement rather than a daughter. The lab’s researchers, measuring and cataloging her modifications like she was a specimen in a jar. Merrick, planning to parade her through Port Cantor as his exotic trophy.
Never a person. Never wanted.
And then she thought of Lilani with her wild curly hair and her boundless curiosity. Lilani, who had hugged her without hesitation, who had traced the glowing patches on her skin and called them “stars.” Lilani, who had never once looked at her like she was strange or frightening or wrong.
“You’re so pretty,” the girl had said on that first morning in the cave. “Like you’re made of light.”
She remembered other touches—Merrick’s manicured fingers tilting her chin up, treating her face like a commodity to be inspected. His cold palm on her shoulder, possessive and clinical. His whispered voice in her ear, making promises that sounded like threats.
And she remembered Lilani’s small hands, sticky with fruit juice, reaching up to pat her cheeks. The warmth of the girl’s arms wrapped around her neck. The way Lilani had fallen asleep against her shoulder one afternoon, trusting and peaceful, as if Ariella were the safest place in all the world.
The Prince of Port Cantor,she thought, looking at Merrick.Or the child of the cave.
It wasn’t even a choice.
“Let go.”
Her voice was calm. Flat. Final.
“What?” Merrick’s grip tightened, his nails digging into her ankle. “No! No, you can’t. I’m offering you everything?—”
“You never had anything I wanted.”
She kicked free.
The motion was clean and precise, her elongated toes and webbed feet giving her leverage his desperate human fingers couldn’t match. She saw his face as she pulled away, saw the terror transform into something uglier, something twisted with rage and disbelief. How dare she refuse him. But his silent fury meant nothing anymore.
She turned her back on him and dove.
Beneath the dying shuttle, the storm’s chaos faded to a distant roar. The water grew colder, denser, pressing against her like a living thing. Her bioluminescent patches blazed against the black—indigo fire trailing behind her as she descended, the only light in a world gone dark.
Thump… thump…
Lilani’s heartbeat was her compass.
The rhythm was dangerously slow now, each beat separated by eternities of silence. She pushed harder, her body becoming a torpedo of desperate purpose.
Faster. I have to be faster.
The shuttle’s debris field spread around her like a graveyard. She dodged twisted metal and shattered furniture, ignored the bodies floating in the murk—Merrick’s mercenaries, the crew, perhaps even her father although she couldn’t bring herself to look closely. There was no time for grief. No time for anything except the fading pulse calling to her from below.
