Page 15 of Song of the Abyss

Padding to the entrance to her bathroom, she paused. The people watching the feed into her room needed to believe that she was going to be in the bathroom for a while. If she wanted any sort of information from this creature, then she would need to time this correctly for them to interact.

What would Ace do? Her contact in the other station—she still had no idea where Ace was located—seemed to be far braver than her. They would say something like get all the things she could possibly need and lie through her teeth. Put on a performance that would last a lifetime.

That’s why Ace had always called her the Queen of Hearts. She was supposed to be the most believable liar there was, at least that’s what Ace always said. Anya was the person everyone wanted.

Snorting, she walked back to her table and grabbed an armful of bath products. She knew for a fact no one that watched her feeds would think twice about the amount of items she carried. They would think the spoiled brat was going to take a long bath and pamper herself.

The moment she walked through the bathroom, she dumped her armful of stuff on the floor.

She could already see him. The dark fringes of his fins were sticking out of the pipe that led into her private bath. And if she peered a little harder, squinted her eyes to see better, she could see there was a face looking at her through the water.

It really was him. Not that Anya had a lot of experience with undines, but she assumed she would be able to recognize this one no matter where he was. Those scars decorating his shoulders, the dark glint in his eyes, all of it hinted at a man possessed by a plan and barely leashed rage.

Maybe that was what called to her about him. He was angry, and she was angry, and maybe two monstrous people were supposed to find each other. They’d either end up like a bomb or they would fizzle out beating against each other’s rage.

But right now, she was the one with a plan.

Crouching at the edge of her pool, she patted her hand against the tile. “Come up here.”

Bitsy hit the floor on the other side, racing across the tile with her little spindly legs moving almost too quickly. She leapt up onto Anya’s shoulder. Tiny pinpricks of metallic pain followed the droid’s sudden rush before she wrapped herself around Anya’s head and immediately put the lens over her eye.

Words vibrated around the image of the undine in the pipe.

“Danger. Undine. Do not approach.”

“Oh now you’re afraid of the undine? You were the one arguing to see him just a week ago,” she muttered, before patting her hand on the tile again. “I’m just going to get him to come up here so we can talk.”

“Talk?” Bitsy said, the word vibrating with anger. “How do you expect to talk? He is undine. You are human.”

She wasn’t really sure. But something told her this undine was coming to the city for... her. And she wasn’t sure why that was.

He seemed to think the same thing. Because with one more pat, she’d already convinced him to come out of the pipe. With a sharp inhalation, she got her first good look at him.

The AI had captured images of him swimming, but he was always a darting shadow in the dark waters, barely a hint of what he might look like. In person? The undine was enormous.

She hadn’t realized how large sixteen feet was until she was suddenly right in front of it. His broad, blunt features were creased with a frown that should have sent her running back into her room or perhaps sent pee running down her leg. His long hair tangled around his face, falling to his wide shoulders in a waterfall of darkness that almost distracted her from all the muscles that were laid out in front of her.

“Oh boy,” she muttered. “You’re really big.”

That was the first thing she said? She sounded like an idiot.

His skin was a very strange color. Gray, with dark stripes starting at his collarbone and plummeting down to join the darkness of his tail. And the red streaks! He had glowing red streaks running up and down his tail, disappearing into the water where the rest of him was coiled, some of it still inside the pipe, and it seemed like he was already taking up her entire pool.

But then she noticed his arm. Or rather, the lack of it. One arm was big and strong and had so much meat on those biceps her first thought was, “Bite”. The other? It had been cleaved clean off, right in the center of where his biceps would have been.

Anya schooled herself to not stare. A missing arm wasn’t all that surprising, considering he lived out in the ocean. He could have lost it to a fish, or a squid, or a shark. There were whales out there that were rather large as well, and aggressive if the rumors were true.

But then her eyes wandered to the missing appendage one more time, and she recognized burn scars that moved up nearly to his shoulder.

The limb had been burned off. Or rather, it had been shot off. Her kind were the only ones who were capable of doing that.

Her eyes flicked to his black ones, unmoving and dark, as he met her gaze. “I’m sorry you had to suffer that,” she said quietly. “I know the pain of losing something that was once a part of your body, and I know it’s not easy.”

At her words, he leaned a little closer. A flick of those fins at his hips and suddenly he was right in front of her. His hand braced against the side of the pool, right next to hers, and he was so close she could see her own reflection in those dark eyes.

But then he opened his mouth, and he spoke.

Bitsy sent red warning exclamation marks dancing all over the lens, but Anya didn’t read a single one. She barely even noticed the exclamation points because, as he backed up, those words echoed through her head.

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