Chapter 20

Twenty

Arges

His safe place for her, the one area in the entire ocean where he thought she wouldn’t be found, had proven to be flawed. Any of his people could smell her from a mile away. She had a scent that wasn’t found otherwise in the ocean, and clearly they all knew where she was.

It was time to move her again.

But first, he had to make sure that she was safe. That his insane brother hadn’t injured her. When Daios had struck her, Arges thought he’d lose one of his hearts. She’d looked so limp, flying through the water before striking the stone hard enough to make him wince. She must be bleeding. Or perhaps one of her brittle bones had snapped.

He had no idea how to heal her kind. He didn’t even think they could be healed. The People of Water were a hardy bunch. He’d broken countless bones himself. A significant amount of them were still broken in his tail and they would never be fixed. But they didn’t hurt.

He could still use his body without having to stop and heal himself, but he knew it was very different for her people.

Running his hands down the delicate bones of her spine, he counted each of her ribs before grunting in frustration. He didn’t know how many ribs she was supposed to have, so this wasn’t getting him anywhere. He couldn’t even ask if she was all right, because they couldn’t converse with each other.

Mira grabbed his hand on the next pass down her body, holding the web pinched between her fingers so he had to look at her. “I’m fine,” she said, squeezing his webs a little too hard. “I’m absolutely fine. No one hurt me.”

“Good,” he said quietly, knowing that she couldn’t understand him. “Because I would have turned the waters black with their blood. I don’t care that he’s my brother, or that the others have been in my pod for years. They do not understand the value or the worth of your life, kairos, and I will not stand for their mistreatment of you.” Brushing his fingers gently through her hair, he added, “You are dear to me now, Mira. I fear I have brought you into a world where you can only meet your end.”

She tilted her face into the palm of his hand and he felt the entire ocean shift. A current pressed against his back, drawing him even closer to her. So close he could feel her chest rise and fall against him, and he noticed there was the slightest catch in her throat at his nearness.

He drew their hands down. Together. The back of his hand brushed down her chest, and he was delighted to see a shudder run through her. So she was sensitive there. It was something he would remember. Her fingers flexed in his.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice a little ragged.

He didn’t know. He was only certain that he was pleased to see her alive. And he wished he could speak with her. To tell her how relieved he was, how terrified he’d been when he had realized his brother was coming straight for her. How he needed her to know that he had never intended to risk her life when he brought her here.

Again, a current pushed him closer to her. Not for the first time in his life, he listened to the ocean. He drew her into his arms and rested his hand on top of her head. Red, like a plume of delicate coral, coiled around them. He ran his fingers through her hair, letting it float across his shoulder and tangle around his neck. Just as he wished to feel her.

Tangled up in him. Just as tangled as he was in her.

Wrapping an arm around her waist, he tugged her even closer before letting the current take him onto his back. He allowed her to rest against him, buoying both of them toward the bells where he’d left her. There were other caverns, other caves that existed. And though they would have to move in between all the monstrous hovels her people had made centuries ago, at the very least, he knew she would be safe. He could take care of her. He could do this.

Some voice whispered in his mind that these thoughts went beyond a mission to keep his people safe. Beyond a means to an end.

He’d come to care for this little creature, and that was the most dangerous choice he’d made in his entire life.

Mira pointed at something just over his shoulder, and he tensed for a few moments before she said, “Don’t forget Byte.”

He twisted to the side as they passed by the small box and palmed it. Though it was disgusting for him to touch anything the achromos had made, he could admit this felt more like a rock than a demon of the deep. It didn’t even click or whir like it had the first time he’d picked it up off the bottom of the ocean floor.

Then his mind wandered. He’d found a few caverns like the one he’d brought her in, although none of them had been in such complete states. Most of them were too dangerous with falling rocks and earthquakes that could easily shake more free. But there was one, rather bare bones, with tunnels that disappeared into the earth. He thought perhaps that one would be safe enough.

So he brought her and her box to this new cave system, holding her against his hearts the entire time. He couldn’t quite get himself to release her. Not a single finger wanted to peel out of her hair or from her back, where he could be certain she was inhaling and exhaling. The rhythm calmed him as nothing else ever had.

Finally, they reached the cave. There were no glowing lights in this one. No natural light at all. Just a black hole in a wall where he could see the faintest outlines of gray shapes.

This wasn’t good enough. Even as he crested the surface of the water, poking his head up and flaring his nostrils to see if he could breathe in here, he knew it wasn’t good enough.

“I’m sorry, kairos,” he muttered. “This will have to do until I can find another.”

To her credit, Mira didn’t seem to be nervous at all. Though she didn’t look around, her weak eyes could see nothing in the darkness. She still smiled up at him. “Is this where I’m staying the night?”

“It is safe,” Arges grunted in agreement before lifting her out of the water. She got significantly heavier without the ocean holding her weight, but he still tossed her up onto the rock like she weighed nothing. “I wish it were better. You deserve somewhere comfortable to sleep. But I will find a better place for you tomorrow night. My brother will not be able to find you here, at the very least.”

“I still don’t understand you,” she said with a bright bubble of laughter. Then she reached out for the box that he was still holding.

He released the robot, surprised that he’d forgotten he was holding it. Mira tapped on its top three times, and then the box opened. Only a slight peek allowed light to spill throughout the cave. He threw up an arm to cover his sensitive eyes. The damned creature was trying to kill him! He should throw it back into the ocean and see how long it took for the droid to drown.

“Sorry,” Mira muttered. “I need light to see by, and thankfully Byte’s lights aren’t broken like mine were on the way down here.”

“That seems like a long time ago,” he murmured, lowering his arm as his eyes got used to the light. “You were terrified of me. And now, you welcome my touch like we have been friends for a very long time.”

“Still can’t understand you,” she sang, her voice a long lilting song before she tapped the robot on the head. “Byte, how are we coming with the language chip?”

“Twenty-two percent,” it replied.

“Ah.” Mira’s brow furrowed in a frown before she tapped another side of the metal box. “Can you open this side? I want to see if your trauma pod is still intact.”

Amused, he understood the robot could get frustrated with humans. Its odd shaped head popped out of the box and with a rather indignant sounding voice, it replied, “All of my functions are in perfect working order.”

“Then do you have a trauma pod?”

He swore it looked at him before it opened up the side of the box. Mira reached in and pulled out something that looked eerily similar to her other trash that she still wore strapped to her hip. But this one, when she clicked the button near her forefinger, emitted some kind of strange pale liquid.

“There we go,” she muttered. “Still in working order, then.”

What in the seven seas was she holding?

Arges watched her suspiciously, his brows furrowed as she gestured for him to come closer. “I’m not coming anywhere near that,” he said. “You achromos and your strange devices. There is no need for any of them. The ocean gives you what she wants you to have.”

“It will heal you.” Again, she gestured for him to come closer to her. “If you give me just a few seconds, I can put this on your shoulder and it will feel better.”

He highly doubted that. In fact, he wanted nothing to do with it. Arges moved away from her, but then the air hit the wound on his shoulder. With a sharp hiss, he pressed his fingers to the ragged edges.

Perhaps it was worse than he thought. He didn’t regret getting his brother out of the line of fire. He hadn’t even realized that he’d been caught in the shoulder by the same weapon Daios had been so certain he could destroy. Apparently, the achromos had weapons that were as indestructible as they were painful.

Again, Mira gestured for him to come closer. “Come on, big guy. You want me to think you’re all brave and impossible to kill? Then show me how brave you are. This is nothing more than a salve that will seal over the wound and make sure it doesn’t get infected. Like a bubble. I have nothing else to heal you with out here.”

A bubble? He could deal with a bubble.

Coming a little closer, he grumbled the entire way. “I have no interest in being healed, female. The ocean will heal me just fine.”

“I’m sure you’re saying how big and strong you are and that healing has no purpose when you could just walk it off and rub some dirt in it.” Mira rolled her eyes. But when he got close enough, she cupped his jaw and gently ran her fingers across the gills on his neck. “Everyone needs to be taken care of sometimes, you know?”

He didn’t. But looking up into those strange eyes, even if they were surrounded by white, he wondered if it wouldn’t be too bad to be taken care of by her.

She brushed her thumb along his chin before turning her attention to the wound on his shoulder. “The twenty-two percent that Byte mentioned is how much of your language it has learned. It’s not a lot, but that’s a significant jump from listening to three of you talking at the same time.”

“It’s hard to imagine it’s only gathered that much of our language,” he muttered, turning his head to the side so she had better access to the wound on his shoulder. “I talk significantly more than the others of my kind.”

“You should tell me a story,” she said, ignoring everything that he’d said. And he wondered if she made up what he was telling her in her head. Like she was actually having a conversation with him. “There have to be some words that you haven’t said. At least Byte can translate those.”

He wasn’t so sure that there were stories he could tell her. Mitéra would likely want to murder him if he told her about their gods or any other secrets of their kind. Though he was coming to trust his achromo, he certainly wasn’t sure that the robot wasn’t collecting everything he said for later use.

Perhaps she recognized his hesitation, or maybe she mistook it for him being in so much pain that he couldn’t think. Either way, she slid more into the water, until her bottom was on a ledge in the water. “This might be an easier position. It’s going to take a while for this solution to set, anyway.”

She hadn’t even started doing anything, as far as he was aware. But he allowed her to draw him forward, even though there was nowhere for him to go. Without words, she guided him to lay his head on her lap.

She couldn’t know what this was doing to him. She had no way of knowing that by resting his head against her thighs, that she had pressed his gills between them as well. That her scent was nearly overpowering here, tantalizing his senses and filtering through his very breath. He could taste her on his tongue, sweet and musky and entirely unlike anything he’d ever tasted before.

Mira cleared her throat, her fingers playing over his exposed gills for a second before rasping, “Is this okay?”

It was mouthwatering. Arges wanted to turn his head, to use his other senses to find out where that delicate scent was coming from. He wanted to split her strange tails, to see if she was built the same as his kind or if she was something different. He wanted her to run her fingers through his gills again, the way she had before in that cave where he hadn’t been so afraid that someone would find her.

Every color in his body burst into light, lighting up the surrounding water with a bright glow. And he wasn’t even ashamed about it. He refused to think too much about how all of his gills flared and then fluttered. No voice interrupted his thoughts to tell him that fluttering for a creature like her was a direct insult to the gods of his kind.

None of it mattered. The only thing that mattered at all was the feeling of her fingers brushing through his hair, and the taste of her on his tongue.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

He couldn’t trust himself to speak. He’d say something foolish, like beg her to give him permission to discover more about her body. To see beyond the silver suit that covered her from head to toe. He wanted to know what that little hollow on her belly was, or what was between the split of her twin tails.

There was so much about her that he didn’t know. So much that he wanted to discover.

Instead, he let out a little hum and heard her gasp. Perhaps the sound had vibrated the water between her thighs, and it was something he stored away for later. Because that taste bloomed even more before she cleared her throat.

“I’m going to start healing you. If that’s all right?” she asked again, her voice a little deeper than before.

Nodding, he lifted his arms to frame her hips, dragging her a little closer. She could do whatever she wanted if he could stay right here for a little while longer.