“Shut up, Arges.”
“The one brother who can see the future better than all the others.”
Maketes lit up for a second before he forced his lights to disappear. “Shut up, Arges. You know there is little else I can do. All I can even attempt is to keep you in on the loop. Your brother will kill me otherwise.”
“Daios has one arm.”
“And he can do enough with the other. I swear, he’s gotten more aggressive to make up for the loss. He’s planning another attack against the achromos.”
Arges squeezed his eyes shut. “Another death swim, you mean? If he has his way, the achromos will shoot us with their weapons until there is nothing left of our kind.”
“Mitéra isn’t listening to him yet. She wants to see when the poison will leave your body before they do anything else.” Maketes dragged himself a little closer, pitching his voice even lower. “If you want to get out of these bindings, you’re going to have to convince her that you will lead the pod in another attack.”
“I have no wish to attack their kind any longer.”
“I understand that. And I know you are honor bound to not lie, because that is who you are. But a little lie to get out of these bonds, to go and find her... Wouldn’t it be worth the mark on your honor?”
He hesitated.
Could Arges lie convincingly? Could he pretend he wanted to kill Mira’s kind and that the fog had lifted from his mind?
Maketes lingered for a few more moments before he added, “I don’t think the achromos were happy to see her back. I returned to Beta only once, and it took a long time to find her. They were questioning her in a room that had no windows, but I saw them bring her in. She was tied up, and there were bruises on her face. I don’t think they are happy that she survived any more than Mitéra is happy she survived.”
They were hurting her? Her own people?
A low snarl erupted from his mouth, pressing against the back of his throat. “I will do it.”
“I figured you would.”
Maketes darted up into the water above him, making sure he was visible to all who looked. “Arges has returned to us! Our warrior is back!”
A few shouts echoed from the water, and it didn’t take long for Mitéra to appear. Her glowing bell hair undulated around her body as she stared down at him, suspicion in every line of her body. “Has he?”
He bared his teeth in a feral snarl. “The fog has lifted from my mind, Mitéra. the achromo has released her hold on me, and I am ready to attack their home again.”
“I don’t believe you, son of my soul.”
He slammed his tail hard into the sand, allowing a plume of it to rise around him before he did it again. “Give me leave to destroy them, Mitéra. I was able to converse with the achromo. She told me many of their secrets. I will bring the fight to them. Dismantle their city piece by piece until we can sneak into their underwater cities. We will ruin them from the inside out.”
“How?”
He didn’t have to think that hard. Arges had stored all the information away from when they had met. From the first moment he had laid eyes on her. “There are a few moon pools throughout the base, the same kind that were in the dome where I was keeping her. Those pools are going to be the best way to get into their city. She showed me the tools to seek out. There are many of them on the ocean floor where the achromos have discarded their garbage. We will melt our way into their city and come in through the bottom. They won’t even know we are there.”
Daios appeared out of the darkness and was the first to reply. His dark, demonic voice echoed through the crowd. “He wishes us to fight on land? You want us to go into the very city where the achromos live and fight them in the air?”
“Expel the water from your lungs, brother. Perhaps you will remember what it is like to breathe air rather than water. We will fight their people. Destroy them from the inside out. The city is a clam, sealed shut from the rest of the world and impossible to break open. We must become the rot that forces it to open.”
These were the words he never wanted to say. The words that meant he had truly betrayed the one person who meant so much to him.
But Mira would understand. She would fight him at first, maybe even strike him with those tiny fists. But she would know that he had done it to save her, and that was all he could do in this situation.
Her own people had hunted her. They were beating her, harming her, destroying her even now. And he would not wait until she was dead. He couldn’t.
So he would bring the fight to her. Even if that meant tearing down her entire city to get her back.
Mitéra narrowed her eyes at him, then turned her attention to Maketes. “Is this the truth?”
His yellow finned brother was staring at him with a mixture of horror and respect. “It is, Mitéra. I have seen what he says. I was there with him when he first scouted it out with this human, but none of us knew there were many of them. If he knows the locations of all of them, then this would allow us to attack them from many angles. We would destroy the humans easily.”
“We are larger,” Arges interjected. “We are stronger. The humans would not know how to stop us.”
Mitéra’s bell swelled, growing immensely large as her eyes flashed a hundred colors. “Then we will destroy the achromos tonight. Release him.”
And as the bindings fell away from his wrists and tail, Arges permitted himself one moment to wonder...
What had he done?
Thirty-Seven
Mira
“Bastards,” Mira snarled, spitting a wad of snot and blood toward the man in front of her. She didn’t even know this one’s name, only that he had been sent this morning to make her life a living hell.
But then again, every morning since she’d gotten back was a living hell.
At first, they’d bundled her up and brought her to the fixed engineering wing. She’d gotten to sleep in her old bed, eat familiar food, gorge herself on stale air again and being able to walk more than just a few steps from one side of the dome to the other. Sure, she’d gotten her exercise swimming, but that wasn’t the same as walking.
She’d missed walking. Just taking steps from one place to the other, knowing that she could just step a few feet in one direction and there was another hallway for her to keep going. And then she had realized how much she’d missed the safety of these walls too.
This was the same bed she’d slept in as a child. The same spot where her father had leaned over to kiss her forehead goodnight and tell her stories about monsters of the deep. She still had her pictures of her mother and father here, and a few other trinkets that made her think of home. All of it was good. Even if it was lacking a certain undine who had been the hero of a lot of stories as well.
Then they had come for her. Men in uniforms that she’d never seen in Beta before. Perfectly pressed, starched uniforms that could only mean they came from one place and one place alone. Alpha. Someone had squealed on her.
She’d been getting punched in the face ever since.
The man shook his hand, the one that he’d just used to strike a shoulder since they didn’t actually want to kill her. “You could be spared from all of this. You don’t have to endure all the pain and torture, you realize that? All you have to do is tell us the truth.”
The truth. That’s all she had been telling them.
“I told you already. I was sucked out to sea by a current and I happened to find one of our old research facilities. It was still fairly operational, but it took me a very long time to fix my rebreather. Which works, by the way. Tell my boss to shove that up his ass cause the old bastard said I couldn’t invent anything that worked.” Was her back tooth wiggling? It was absolutely wiggling.