Chapter 16

Sixteen

Arges

Arges was rather horrified to realize how fragile she was. He’d thought those strange tails were a problem right from the start, mostly because they didn’t bend in the water the way they should, but he assumed it was some past injury that had made her defective.

Now he’d touched them.

Now he knew her tails wouldn’t ever bend, because there was a thick, straight bone preventing them from ever bending the way his tail did. What had she called them? Legs?

The word was immediately matched with something grotesque in his mind. Achromos who wandered about their homes on stiff tails that couldn’t bend no matter how hard they tried to do so. Legs that defied all logic.

But along the current of that memory was the feeling of her warm skin. No scales, unlike his tail, more like touching his own chest. She’d been so soft. Delicate to touch and pliant underneath his hands. She’d let him lift those legs up, and stare at her feet, as she’d called them. She had trusted him to touch her, even wore that smile on her face, and he was... humbled.

She’d let him touch her. And oh, it made him burn.

Even now, far from the cavern through the ocean currents, he knew this was becoming dangerous. He should return to his pod. He should listen to how her kind had caused more trouble and how many more of his own had died.

Arges desperately needed to get a hold of himself. He needed to remember that their species had been warring for centuries for a reason, and not that he was a weakling who wanted nothing more than to touch more of that soft skin.

The current buffeted him away from returning to her cave, and he knew what it was saying. He had drifted too far from his mission. He was supposed to be learning more about her kind so that he could destroy them. Not so that he could become fascinated with them.

But even with that knowledge, even knowing the sea herself was against this oddity in his mind, he couldn’t stop himself from wondering more about her people. She’d explained how fragile they were, and that worried him. So, she couldn’t stay in that cave. He couldn’t keep leaving her there when the cold and the wet could kill her.

He’d never had a more difficult pet in his life.

Although he couldn’t consider her a pet anymore. Or even a mission. Arges rolled his body through a current, switching to another and joining a family of stingrays that eyed him. Their dangerous barbs at the ends of their tails remained flat, though, so he ignored them to get lost in his own thoughts again.

Mira was a person. She talked, and he understood her, and she told him all manner of ridiculous stories from her kind. Perhaps, in time, he could converse with her. The robot clearly didn’t have a handle on his language yet and didn’t seem to be making much progress.

He could use that to his advantage.

Ignoring that his stomach twisted at the mere thought of using her, he made his way back to her cave. He needed to move her. If she was going to get sick and die before he got what he wanted, then he had to do something about it.

Could she be lying? Yes, of course. But he didn’t think she was.

She was strangely honest. Easily speaking about her people and kind whenever he quirked a brow in question. She acted like there were no secrets she knew or that there was anything he shouldn’t know about her kind.

Like she didn’t realize how he would use this information against her people.

Troubled, he swam through the crevice into the cave. But as he took a deep breath to steady himself, he froze at the bottom. He could smell someone else had been here. One of his own people, with the faintest hint of sulfur and ash.

A depthstrider? Certainly not. Their kind rarely came out of the deep, and they wouldn’t dare overstep their bounds when they could smell his scent here. Arges had made certain it was very clear whose cave this was.

Which only left one other person. There was only one in his tribe who reeked of the depths, of the endless layer of gasses that hid yet another layer of the ocean from prying eyes.

“Daios,” he snarled.

His brother had been here. He had stared up at the achromo through the currents, and she likely didn’t even know he’d been there. Lurking in the depths, like the predator he wasn’t supposed to be, Daios had likely thought about stealing what was Arges’s.

And then his blood turned icy.

What if his brother had killed the achromo? What if he hadn’t been here and his enraged brother had ended this job for Arges?

His gills flared wide in worry and all the lights along his tail flashed bright and hot. He wouldn’t stand for it. No one would take Mira from him, not this soon, not when she had just ignited the spark of interest in his chest.

With a flick of his tail, he launched himself to the surface. Splashing loudly, he whipped his head around in the air. Searching for her. Hoping and praying to every ocean god out there that would listen that she be right where he left her.

A startled shriek echoed through the cave, and he had to dodge a launched rock that would have bludgeoned him. Though the projectile should have angered him, all he could muster was a relieved sigh.

His feisty achromo was still alive, then. No one else would dare throw a rock at his head.

Mira pressed a hand to her chest, her face startlingly pale. “Arges! You scared the shit out of me. What are you doing, splashing around like that? I thought you were some deep sea squid who finally decided I would be a tasty snack.”

Luckily for her, he was not. But he hadn’t even considered that there were plenty of creatures here who would happily take a bite out of her.

Swimming closer to the edge, he held out his hand for her. “Come, achromo. I cannot keep you here when it is so clearly dangerous. I would like to keep you alive.”

She shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

May the sea gods curse this infernal obstacle between them. Grumbling under his breath, he couldn’t quite shake the fear that his brother had been here. All the more reason to move her.

What had Daios wanted with her? His brother wasn’t good for much, other than killing. He was very good at murdering her kind and had many scars along his tail to prove it. He was not a creature who enjoyed speaking with or understanding others.

Surely this was a bad sign. An omen of warning that his decision to move her could have been too late.

Lifting his hands out of the water, he held one of them over his face like her contraption that allowed her to breathe. Lifting an arm over his head, he mimed the strange way she swam.

“You want me to go swimming with you?” Her eyes widened in shock. “Absolutely not. It’s dangerous out there. I don’t have my flippers, so I could lose my damn toes. You realize that, right? The water is too cold for me.”

Of course it was. Everything was too dangerous for her.

Scrubbing a hand down his face, he spoke while he mimed out his words. “This cave is too dangerous for you. You said it yourself. You’ll die if you stay here. I am taking you somewhere else. Somewhere safer.”

How could he mime safe? He tried to think of something that might make him feel safe, so he wrapped his arms around himself. Maybe that would make her realize what he wanted.

“Hug?” she muttered before it dawned on her what he wanted. “You want to move me out of this cave?”

He nodded. “Yes, achromo. This is not your final resting place.”

The robot poked its head out of its box, and he watched as Mira turned to the little creature. “I have to bring Byte.”

He couldn’t... no. They were not going to bring the abomination. It could stay down here and rust like all the other creations of her people. He shook his head, only to find her glaring at him.

“What?” he snarled.

Apparently, she knew what he said, because she pointed to the box again and replied, “We’re bringing it. Or I’m staying right here and you can leave me to rot.”

He would do none of that. “You’re reliant on me for everything. Do you think I cannot make you come with me?”

She took a step deeper into the cave. “If you try to make me, I will kick you back into that pool as many times as is necessary. Unless you can suddenly grow legs, undine, I don’t think you’re going to win this fight.”

He would drag himself across the stones if he had to. There was nowhere she could hide from him.

His thoughts caught on a word that he’d heard her say many times. “Undine?” he repeated. “What is this word?”

She blinked. “Did you just say undine?”

As was their usual sign to continue, he quirked a brow. Clearly telling her that he wanted to hear more about this word, or what it meant.

She pointed at him. “You’re an undine.”

“I am one of the People of Water.” Arges pressed a hand to his chest, then gestured to her. “You are a achromo.”

She mimicked his movements. “I am a human. You are an undine.”

They stared at each other for a few moments longer before he sighed. Giving up. She would have no way of understanding what he was saying, anyway. These achromos and their words that weren’t quite right.

He gestured with his hand, trying to get her to hurry up before his brother decided to return. “Come, kairos. You’ve already had a visitor today that makes me nervous. Get in the water with me and carry your box. I will hold the both of you so we can flee this place.”

She made quick work of readying herself. She rarely took off the silver skin that covered her body, anyway. He’d only seen her remove it a few times after she’d gotten wet. And unfortunately, he feared this would not be a journey she would enjoy.

But there were only so many places he knew of that were safe, and she was a delicate creature.

“I can’t go any deeper in the water than this,” she said, strapping a makeshift rope around her waist and securing her trash to her hip. “My body will explode. Do you hear me? It’s already hard enough to breathe down here.”

“Hard to breathe?”

She pressed a hand to her stomach, inhaling and letting it out. “Too much pressure. My lungs can’t get enough air. I don’t know how deep we are, but I assume it’s only a couple hundred feet.”

He did not know these measurements. But she was correct that they weren’t as deep as she likely thought. He’d noticed how the depths seemed to crush her kind, having dragged their bodies far deeper than this. He’d seen them pop, as she said. He did not want to do that to her.

Grunting his agreement, he twisted to look down into the water. Perhaps it was just his mind, but he swore he could feel eyes on them. There was no one in this cave with them, though. Unless an attacker waited in the darkness outside, just far enough so that the depths protected them from Arges’s sight.

“Hurry, kairos,” he muttered.

She did no such thing. Mira picked up the robot and then turned to look around the cavern one last time. “It was fun living here, even if it wasn’t all that safe. I’ve never had an adventure like this before. Are you bringing me home now?”

He didn’t have the heart to tell her that he would never return her to the home of the achromos. She knew too much.

Mira would either die or stay with him for the rest of her life.

He watched as she strode over to the metal remains of her world and slapped her hand down on it. With a guttural groan, something stopped moving in the water and all the lights over their head flickered out. Suddenly plunged into darkness, she was the faintest outline in the distance, lit only by the warm yellow glow of the water where he waited for her.

As she came closer, he could see those bright yellow lights sparkling in her eyes like the rare glimpse of the sun on the surface of the sea. The determination in her eyes only made her all the more appealing. He didn’t even see those strange legs. All he saw was a woman who would fight the very sea itself, if that’s what it took to keep her alive.

That realization made the waters boil around him.

He reached out his hand for her to take, sucking in a sharp breath at the feeling of those strange fingers slipping around his. She didn’t flinch away from the webs between his, and he didn’t mind that she didn’t have them. This strange, fragile creature was a mixture of strength and aching delicacy that turned his mind into mush.

She let him help her into the water, gracefully sliding her legs into the depths before hissing in a sharp breath. “So cold.”

“I will carry you,” he murmured, wrapping one of his arms around her back and drawing her closer to him. “Let me keep you warm, Mira.”

A soft smile crossed her features before she yanked down the first of her face coverings. Magnified eyes stared up at him, blinking a few times and overly large. “Sexy, right?”

The translator she’d attached to his ear wasn’t helpful for the first word. But he could guess by the rounded sounds and the way she quirked her lips before putting the device over her mouth. And oh, it made all the colors in his body flare bright.

Was she... interested in him? Surely not. They were two very different species and that wouldn’t work. They didn’t fit.

But then she swam a little closer to him, wrapping her arms around his neck and slotting her feet back into the fins at his hips that were always a little warmer. Warm to keep his offspring safe should he wish to mate with someone. A position he was certain she did not know was so tempting that it made his hips buck forward.

“Sorry,” she muttered, the words muffled by the device over her mouth. “Let me just get situated.”

Any more situating and he’d be pressing something other than fins between her legs. Angry at himself, he grabbed onto her a little more forcefully than he’d anticipated. But then they were drifting underneath the water, and her fingers slid through the gills on his neck before he moved her arms away from them.

They both shuddered, and he allowed himself to pretend they shuddered for the same reason. Perhaps she was remembering that fateful first touch, when he’d arched into her fingers and she’d played with his gills. And he was thinking about the same thing.

But realistically, he knew she shuddered only because the water was icy.

So, dragging her scent through his gills and letting it play underneath his scales, he speared them out of the cave and into the waiting depths so quickly that no one else could follow them. Surely.

But he thought he heard her murmur something about red lights in the distance.