Nervous, she punched her fists into his ribs, but he didn’t budge. Didn’t even look down at her as he swam her far away from this place and toward who knows what.

Speaking of... She craned her neck to look at where they were going and all she could see was the edge of the cliff where Beta had built their city. A cliff that dove deep.

Real deep.

“No,” she said, her voice warped through the rebreather. “No, you can’t take me down there.”

She didn’t know what was that far underneath the waves, but that didn’t matter. She knew what the pressure would do to her. She needed a better suit, a much better mask, and if they kept going like this...

Mira struggled again, slamming her hands over and over against the muscular prison. “Stop! Listen to me, I can’t. We can’t. I don’t know how deep you want to go, and I have no idea how far down that even goes. I’m an engineer, not a pilot. But listen to me, undine, I can’t!”

He didn’t pay her any mind. She stared up at him, wondering how much it would hurt if she grabbed a handful of his gills. But then she remembered the knife in her hand. Stupid. She was so stupid when she panicked.

Fear controlled her body. Fear of the unknown, the depths of the ocean, of the blackness behind her and how the currents seemed to work in his favor. They were already at the lip of it, already so close to the abyss that opened like the maw of a massive sea creature.

And she had no idea what he wanted from her. Only that his kind killed hers.

She reacted. Mira slashed out at him with the serrated blade and felt his shock ripple across her body. His fins flared, his arms loosened, and those gills around his neck puffed out like some fancy collar she’d seen in the history books.

But then she was falling. No, she was floating away from him and a current had snagged onto her. She didn’t have any way to control herself, nor did she know where it was taking her. Only that the current ripped her out of his arms and down over the edge.

“Fuck,” she grunted, screaming out a growl of anger at the end of the word.

She kicked her feet, flailed her arms, anything to stop the rioting movement of her body tumbling down into darkness.

Her flashlight illuminated dust particles and a rock wall. That was all she could see, and even then, it swirled around her as she wildly spun through the water. Dust turned gold, then red, then white as all the light disappeared other than her own. Color was hard to see or decipher. And then the rock wall fell away too.

She had the unnerving sensation that she no longer existed. There was nothing around her, no sense of ground or where she might be. Just nothingness that even her light could not penetrate. Particles came and went. Little dust motes that floated by her. She swore at one point she stared into an open mouth full of teeth.

There was nothing. Just her and the open darkness of the abyss. She did not know where up or down was. She couldn’t even hazard a guess. But she had the image of herself as a single speck of dust on a blank canvas of darkness and a monstrous being beneath her that she could not see.

And then suddenly her back struck something hard and unyielding.

Mira turned. Her legs tangled together as her long fins caught on each other, but somehow she reached out and grabbed onto the rock she had hit.

It wasn’t much. But it existed. It was sturdy, and that was enough right now. Breathing hard, she could hear the gears at the back of her head churning to make enough air for her to gulp down, but it wouldn’t last forever. She hadn’t built it for someone to breathe so frantically.

Fingers digging into the rock, she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to control her breath. In and out. She couldn’t count to five on the inhale, but she could count to three. So she did that ten times before switching to four, and then slowly focusing on the rest of her body.

Her toes were intact. She could wiggle them in her fins. Her suit was fine, although she could feel the cold water seeping through a hole in the back. Eventually, that would be a problem, but right now, she was okay. It would last. The integrity of the suit hadn’t been overly damaged, so she could relax about dying of hypothermia.

Draped over the rock as she was, she couldn’t see much other than stone. At least the light attached to her head still worked. She peered down at the rock between her fingers. Black, porous. She’d seen these specimens come into Beta before.

They were volcanic. She tried to pull up the other words for them, but couldn’t. She panicked a bit. Had she hit her head? Maybe that was the problem.

“You didn’t hit your head,” she assured herself. “You would remember if you hit your head. This is a panic attack. You’ve had them before. You’re all right.”

But she didn’t feel all right. She lifted her head to look around, adjusting her light so it was the smallest, most intense beam it could be and still... nothing. Just water. Just vague shapes in the distance that she thought might be other rocks. Or deep-sea creatures she didn’t want to meet.

The current moved just over her head. Mira reached her hand up and could feel it shoving against her palm. She must have fallen out of the bottom and now she was lying here, on volcanic rock, and there had to be another drop off somewhere nearby.

“You’re alive,” she repeated to herself, folding again over the stone and trying not to think about pressure changes and what they did to a body. “You’re alive, and you’re not hallucinating. You would see things moving in the distance, you would...”

See dark shapes.

She would see dark shapes moving a little closer with every heartbeat and she would probably think they were alive. Mira’s brows wrinkled as she turned her attention back to the shadows in the distance. She didn’t think they were moving yet, but what if they were?

Nitrogen poisoning. It affected divers, and she knew it made them see things.

But wait, no, she was panicking. Her rebreather didn’t do that. She wasn’t carrying tanks of oxygen, nitrogen, and everything else they breathed. The device she made turned the water into air just like the fish did. She wasn’t going to hallucinate, which meant the dark shape approaching her was not in her head and right in front of her.

Fear spiked through her body and she moved without thought.

Mira turned from the stone and kept her body low as she swam away. Whatever trailed her, speeding after her like a bullet through the water, it was hunting. But she was smaller and swimming through tight spaces would give her a lot better chance at surviving.

She didn’t take the time to fear that she might swim farther away from Beta. It was a risk she would have to take to stay alive. Dodging through the stones, she found what she was hoping for. Tall spirals of volcanic material that had fallen over each other, creating a labyrinth of tiny cracks where pale fish schooled.

Cracks she could fit in. But whatever was following her? It couldn’t.

She didn’t stop to see what manner of creature hunted her. Mira darted across the volcanic ruins, hoping it wasn’t still active. Black dust floated up around her, and she could only see as far as her hand, but she knew the spirals were right here. Right in front of her. She just had to make it before whatever was behind her caught up.

One more thrust of her feet and she was there. She grabbed onto the edge of the stones just as one of her fins was caught in the current. It dragged her upward, cutting her hands on the sharp stone, but she refused to let it stop her. Gritting her teeth, Mira tunneled beneath one of the stones, wedging herself so deep inside she didn’t know if she’d be able to get out.

But she couldn’t stop wheezing. She had never once in her life felt like prey, but now she knew what it felt like to fear teeth digging into her without ever seeing her attacker.