Faint, and coming from somewhere deeper in the wing.
My body relaxed immediately, relief flooding through me at the thought that someone was home and I wasn’t just wandering alone through an empty mansion at night.
Then I paused.
Because Ben’s voice was there, but it sounded wrong—tight and stripped of warmth, nothing like his usual friendly and teasing self.
Tobias answered in words I couldn’t make out, but the tone alone made the hair on the back of my neck rise.
I should have called out.
That would have been normal.
“Hey, it’s me. Sorry, I left my phone.”
Instead, I walked toward the voices.
The door to the main wing was partially open, light spilling through the gap and cutting across the floor. I pushed it in the rest of the way and stepped inside.
Tobias and Ben’s absence from the entry corridor confirmed my suspicion that they were farther inside.
As I looked around, it felt as if I had entered a dream.
Not a pleasant one, necessarily, but not a nightmare either.
Something suspended between the two.
The main aquarium wing always felt removed from the rest of the house, but at night that separation became almost absolute. During the day, there was my tablet chiming softly, feeding tools clinking as they were set out on trays, notes murmured under my breath while I moved from system to system. Even when I was alone, the space felt occupied by work.
Now, it belonged entirely to the water.
Dim light drifted across the floor in fractured bands as animals passed behind glass. The tanks glowed from within, each one its own impossible little world suspended in darkness. Coral structures rose like submerged ruins. Fish moved between them in muted flashes of color, less bright than they were during the day, as if even they understood that night required quiet.
My shoes made almost no sound against the floor, but I still placed each step carefully, as though the room had become something sleeping that I did not wish to wake.
The reef tank was nearest, its moon-cycle lighting washing the coral in dim violet and blue. Tiny polyps extended into the current, pale and soft, opening themselves to whatever the water carried. Everything inside that world looked peaceful.
Untouched and normal.
Ben’s voice reached me again from somewhere deeper in the wing, too low for the words to survive the distance. The tone was what mattered—still strained, still missing every easy note I had come to associate with him.
I kept walking.
Past the lionfish habitat, where ornate silhouettes hovered beneath faint amber light, fins spread like delicate weapons. They turned as I passed, slow and synchronized, watching me with a stillness that made them seem carved from warning rather than flesh.
Past the puffer tank, where Puff Daddy did not rush the glass.
That was the first thing that truly frightened me.
He always rushed the glass when he noticed me. Always. But tonight, he remained near the back of the enclosure, half hidden behind a structure, one dark eye visible.
Watching.
Not me, maybe.
Something beyond me.
The change unsettled me deeply, sending a cold, crawling awareness down my spine.
