“Nothing about this is simple.” His hand finds my waist beneath the water, steadying me against the current that’s trying to push us apart. “Aviora?—”
“Don’t.” I shake my head. “Whatever you’re about to say—don’t. We don’t have time for last words.”
“These aren’t last words.”
“Then save them for after.” I push closer, pressing my forehead to his. The water is freezing, but where our bodies touch, warmth blooms. “Tell me when we’re standing on dry land. Tell me when Oreth is ash and the curse is broken. Tell me then.”
He’s quiet for a moment. I feel his breath against my lips, feel the tension in his body as he fights whatever he wants to say.
“After,” he says finally. “I’ll hold you to that.”
“You’d better.”
I kiss him. Quick and fierce, a promise more than a goodbye. Then I push away, toward the far side of the chamber, toward the passage that leads deeper into the Wrecktide’s heart.
“Ready?”
“No.” He follows me anyway. “Let’s go.”
The second dive is worse.
The water gets colder as we descend, the current stronger. The passage narrows until I can feel stone brushing my shoulders on both sides, until every stroke is a fight against walls that want to trap me.
And the whispers get louder.
Not just the coins now. Other voices, layered beneath them, rising from the depths ahead. Voices that know my name. Voices that promise rest, peace, an end to running.
Just let go.
I swim harder. Focus on Zoric’s hand in mine, on the ache in my lungs, on anything real and immediate. The whispers are lies. The curse is lies. Everything down here is designed to make me give up, and I refuse.
A shape looms out of the darkness.
I jerk back, my free hand going for my knife, and then I realize—it’s a wreck. The skeletal remains of a ship, wedged into the passage at an angle that speaks to violent currents and violent ends. Its mast has shattered, its hull split open, cargo spilling into the water in rotted heaps.
We have to go through it.
Zoric releases my hand, gestures for me to follow. He enters the wreck first, his massive frame barely fitting through a gap in the splintered timbers. I follow, my smaller body slippingthrough more easily, and we swim through what used to be someone’s hold. Someone’s life. Someone’s last voyage.
Bones float in the water around us. Human bones, picked clean but preserved by the cold, suspended in the currents like ghosts made physical. I try not to look at them. Try not to think about how many ships the Wrecktide has claimed, how many people have ended their journeys in these passages.
Try not to think about Finn, waiting in the deep, waiting for years?—
Stop.
The words feel hollow. The truth is more complicated than that—and right now, with my lungs burning and the whispers rising and the cold eating into my bones, I can’t sort through the complications.
We emerge from the wreck into another open space. This one is different—larger, colder, lit by that ghostly luminescence that marks the curse’s presence. The water here feels wrong. Thick. Heavy. My strokes slow despite my best efforts, the resistance increasing with every inch of progress.
And ahead, in the darkness, something moves.
Zoric pulls me to a halt. His hand finds my face in the water, turns my head, forces me to look at him. In the dim light, I see his expression: warning.
The drowned. They’re here.
I draw my knife. The blade feels small in my hand, insignificant against whatever’s waiting. But it’s something. And right now, something is better than nothing.
We surface slowly, carefully, breaking through into an air pocket so small I can barely fit my head above water. Zoric rises beside me, his breath coming hard, his hand still gripping his blade.
