Page 8 of Currents of Desire

He lifts.

Gravity shifts, sending a spike of white agony through my side where the wood pierced me. A cry tears from my throat, high and whistling, hurting my ears. The room spins, a kaleidoscope of shadows and dust motes.

The male grunts, his jaw tight, sweat beading on his forehead. He is strong for a soft-skinned thing. Muscles bunch beneath the fabric of his sleeves as he adjusts my weight. He carries me through the air that feels thick as wool, his heart hammering a frantic, rabbit-rhythm against my ear. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. It is the only familiar sound in this alien hell, a drumbeat of biology that mirrors my own fading pulse.

We pass through a doorway, leaving the scent of old wood for something sharper.

We move into a smaller, white, sterile cave. The walls are hard and shiny, echoing the harsh artificial light like the inside of a polished conch shell. The smell of chemicals is sharp enough to sting my drying nasal passages, a scent of artificial cleanliness that masks the underlying rot of the surface world.

He lowers me into a hollow, white basin. It is cold. Hard. Porcelain bites into my skin, unyielding and slick. It is a vessel shaped for legs, for creatures who bend at the knee, not for the length of a predator. I am forced to coil, bending my spine, tucking the powerful muscle of my tail underneath me in a cramped, humiliating spiral. My fins press uncomfortably against the sides. I am a leviathan trapped in a teacup.

Then, the sound.

A roar of pressure.

Water explodes from a metal spout, hitting my shoulder with delicious, freezing force. I gasp, arching my back into the stream, abandoning all dignity. It is fresh water, thin, tasteless, lacking the salt and minerals of home, but it is wet.

It is life.

The basin fills. The water rises around my hips, swirling over my waist, finally claiming my chest. The level creeps higher, a rising tide of salvation.

I slide down and submerge.

Oh.

The relief is a physical blow, a wave that washes away the burning itch. The water separates my gill filaments, allowing them to flutter and expand. I inhale. The oxygen content is low, pitiful compared to the deep, but it is there. I pull it in, greedy and desperate. My lungs stop screaming. My heart slows its frantic beating, settling into the slow, powerful thrum of a resting hunter.

I stay under for a long time, letting the water soak into my parched scales. The slime coat begins to regenerate, a microscopic barrier reforming between the harshness of the world and me. The pain in my side dulls to a manageable, familiar throbbing ache. Pain is a constant in the trench. I can ignore pain, but not the dryness.

I open my eyes.

The world is blurry through the fresh water, distorted by ripples, but I can see him.

Jack.

He sits on a white lid, elbows on his knees, staring into the water. He is not hunting. He is… guarding? His posture is slumped, and the aggression drains out of him. He runs a hand through his hair, a gesture of frustration or exhaustion.

He turns his attention to his arm, where he wraps a white cloth around the forearm and pulls it tight with his teeth. The fabric blooms red.

I did that.

Blood clouds the water. The scent drifts toward me, tasting of iron and copper, and triggers a vicious, twisting ache in my stomach. I am entirely empty. Whatever energy I had left is being devoured by the wound in my side, leaving me with nothing.

I break the surface.

Water cascades off my face, dripping from my lashes. I take a breath of the humid air more easily now that my skin is wet. The bathroom is filled with steam, a micro-climate that mimics the coast’s fog.

Jack stops wrapping his arm. He stares at me, his face unreadable, his energy depleted and frayed like an old net. He looks exhausted. Dark circles bruise the skin beneath his eyes. He looks at me not as a monster, but as a problem he does not know how to solve.

I need to tell him.

I need to make the sound.

Communication with his kind is difficult. Their language is flat, lacking the bioluminescent signaling and pressure waves of my people. I force air through my vocal cords, shaping the clumsy sounds of the surface tongue. It hurts to speak. My voice comes out doubled, the high, human-like pitch layered with the lower, resonant hum of the deep that vibrates in my chest.

“Hunger.”

The word hangs in the small, tiled room, echoing with a harmonic chime that shouldn’t exist in this air. It sounds ancient, demanding.