I squeezed my eyes shut, breathing through the sudden spike of rage and panic that rose up together, tangled and ugly.
“You can,” I said, opening my eyes again. “You just won’t.”
18
Cove
That night, I dreamed I was underwater.
Not drowning.
Not struggling.
Just… there.
Suspended in the quiet of one of Tobias’s tanks, floating in water so clear it felt less like being submerged and more like being held inside a different kind of air. The world beyond the glass was blurred and softened, all hard edges turned gentle by refraction, while the water wrapped itself around me with impossible tenderness. It slipped through my hair, lifted the loose strands around my face, pressed comfortingly against my skin, and for one strange, dream-heavy moment, my body did not hurt.
My ankle did not throb.
My wrists did not sting.
My throat did not ache from crying.
I moved one hand and watched the water answer, rippling around my fingers in slow ribbons of light. It felt effortless in a way that being awake hadn’t felt in hours. There was no concrete room, no locked door, no camera tucked into the corner, just the weightless certainty that nothing in there could reach me unless I allowed it.
For a while, I let myself drift.
The tank around me was vast, larger than any habitat Tobias had shown me, with glass walls disappearing into blue shadow and artificial current moving through the space like a slow breath. There were no other animals inside it. No coral, no rockwork, no sand, no shelter. Nothing to hide behind.
Just me.
And while in real life, that would’ve bothered me—the lack of cover—in the dream, it felt infinitely peaceful.
Maybe because the water gave my body back to itself. Maybe because sound arrived muted and harmless there, stripped of urgency before it could hurt me. Maybe because, for once, I was not required to explain anything, or decide anything, or understand how care could look so much like captivity when it came from the wrong hands.
Then I saw him, standing outside my tank in perfect stillness, one hand pressed to the glass.
He was watching me.
Not with that terrifying calculation I had seen take shape in him the moment he realized everything had changed, but something else entirely.
His expression was worshipful.
The word came to me even in the dream, strange and too intimate, but there was no other one that fit. He looked at me as though I were rare beyond naming. As though I had not been trapped there but enshrined. As though every movement I madein the water revealed some impossible truth he had been waiting his whole life to witness.
Like I was something to be marveled at.
Somethingprecious. Dream me vaguely remembered that word coming from Tobias’s mouth, so absurd but sounding so true at the same time.
As I floated closer, Tobias did not move except for his eyes, which followed me with a reverence so complete it made my chest ache. Behind him, the aquarium wing stretched, but he did not look at any of it.
Only me.
I lifted my hand.
The water resisted gently, sliding fluidly between my fingers as I reached for him. His palm waited just on the other side of the glass, separated from mine by a barrier that felt both protective and painfully unbearable.
When my hand met his through the tank wall, the glass was cold beneath my palm. I stayed there with my hand pressed to his, water holding me up while he looked at me like I was the only living thing in the world worth saving.
