Up. Now.
We surface gasping. The morning light feels impossibly bright after the murk below.
“How much?” Zoric treads water beside me, the ingots clutched against his chest.
“Six, maybe seven hundred gold. Just in what we grabbed.” I’m already calculating. The chest held at least a dozen ingots. There might be more chests. “We need to go back down.”
“Rest first.” His grip closes on my arm underwater, squeezes. “You’re shaking.”
He’s right. The cold has gotten into me deeper than I realized, my muscles trembling with the effort of maintaining body heat. I want to argue—every minute we spend on the surface is a minute not spent filling our quota—but I know better than to push past physical limits. Finn taught me that. The sea doesn’t forgive exhaustion.
We swim for the patrol boat anchored at the dive site. Brek and Margit are already there, hauling themselves over the gunwale, their own salvage clutched in numb fingers.
“Anything?” I call out.
Brek’s grin is answer enough. “Jewelry of some kind. Margit thinks it’s worth a few hundred.”
Margit herself looks less enthused. She’s staring at the water with an expression I recognize—the wariness of someone who’s felt wrongness and can’t explain what.
“The current’s off,” she says as I climb aboard. “Pulled south when it should be running north. And the temperature...” She shakes her head. “I’ve been diving these waters for thirty years. Never felt cold that deep in the shallows.”
Zoric exchanges a glance with me. We both felt it. Both chose not to mention it.
“The curse is gone,” I say. “Oreth is destroyed.”
“The curse, maybe.” Margit wraps herself in a salvaged blanket, her weathered face troubled. “But curses come from somewhere. And whatever made that one...”
She doesn’t finish. Doesn’t need to.
TWENTY-TWO
AVIORA
Isit in Zoric’s quarters that night, spreading the salvage across his table. Ingots and jewelry. A few loose gemstones. A silver candelabra that somehow survived years underwater without tarnishing. The sum total of eight dives, four divers, and an entire day of work in waters that fought us every stroke.
“Over twenty-four thousand short.” My voice sounds hollow even to my own ears. “Even if we triple our recovery rate, we won’t make it.”
Zoric stands behind my chair, his hands resting on my shoulders. The pressure of his grip grounds me—an anchor in a world that keeps shifting beneath my feet.
“We knew it was a long shot.”
“A long shot is one in ten. This is...” I don’t have a word for what this is. Impossible. Futile. The kind of odds that kill people who are too stubborn to recognize them.
“We keep diving.” His thumbs work at the knots in my shoulders, finding tension I didn’t know I was carrying. “Every wreck we haven’t hit yet. Every cargo we haven’t searched.”
“And if it’s not enough?”
“Then we figure out an alternative.” He leans down, presses his lips to my hair. “We’ve been improvising since you washed up on my shore. No reason to stop now.”
I reach up, catch his hand. Pull it to my lips and kiss his scarred knuckles. “When did you become an optimist?”
“When a thief with cursed gold convinced me that running wasn’t the only option.” His other hand slides down my arm, wraps around my waist. “Come to bed. We can’t salvage anything if we’re too exhausted to swim.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. But lying in the dark with him, feeling his warmth against my back and his arm heavy across my stomach, sleep doesn’t come easy.
The water felt wrong today. Not just cold—watching. Every dive, I caught myself looking over my shoulder, searching the murk for movement that wasn’t there. The whispers I’d heard in Oreth’s realm seemed to echo in the silence, just below the threshold of hearing.
There’s something down there. Something that noticed us.
