A shoe scraping once against the floor.
A limp hand hanging with its fingers curled inward, its skin gone grey.
Water streaming from soaked fabric in steady rivulets and running toward the drain.
There was no blood, and somehow, that made it worse.
There should have been blood. Something red and dramatic and obvious enough to tell my brain what to do with what it was seeing.
Instead, he only looked wet.
Slack.
Wrong.
Like something alive had been emptied out of him, and his body had been left behind as an afterthought.
Behind the glass, the jellies continued to drift, serene and luminous and indifferent, when it finally clicked in my mind.
My stomach rolled at the thought.
Ben grunted, shifting his grip. “Careful. His leg’s caught.”
“I have it,” Tobias said, reaching back toward the water with one gloved hand and freeing the man’s leg from whatever had snagged near the access panel.
That was when my bag slipped from my shoulder and struck the floor. It wasn’t loud, but in that room, against all that water and silence, it sounded deafening.
Ben’s head snapped toward me first, his expression cold. No boy-next-door smile. Just shock, naked and immediate, before horror coursed in.
“Oh, fuck,” he whispered, dread dripping from those words.
Tobias went very still, back seizing up.
And then he turned.
And as he turned, the sound of the blood rushing through my veins drowned out everything else.
For one suspended second, Tobias did not look like the man who made me breakfast and remembered which foods I hated. He did not look like the employer who listened patiently while I talked too long about water quality or feeding responses or the behavioral intelligence of animals most people only admired from a distance. He looked like something shaped by the darkest depths of the sea, his gloved hand still half-raised from the tank, water trailing from his wrist in slow, shining threads.
His shirt clung damply to his chest and forearms, the fine material ruined by saltwater, but he wore the damage with the same composure he wore everything else. His jaw was set, his mouth still and unreadable.
His eyes found mine, and for the first time since I had met him, Tobias looked unmistakably shocked.
Not startled in the ordinary way. Not caught off guard by inconvenience, irritation, or a problem requiring quick correction. Shock moved through him like a crack across glass, splintering that careful stillness from the inside. His gaze widened by only a fraction, but on Tobias, that fraction was devastating. It stripped something from him. Control, maybe. Certainty. The seamless, polished surface he wore between himself and the rest of the world.
Then the shock changed.
I watched as it deepened into something darker, heavier, almost impossible to look at.
Despair.
The word arrived before I wanted it to, before I could stop myself from naming the thing in his expression. He looked at me like he had lost something before he’d even had the chance to reach for it. Like the entire future had just collapsed into asingle, brutal point, and he understood, with absolute clarity, that nothing after this moment could remain the same.
I couldn’t look away.
His gaze trapped mine, raw in a way I had never seen from him before. It felt worse than if he had been emotionless. Worse than if he had looked guilty. Because beneath the shock and despair, something else was already forming.
Calculation.
