Page 89 of Song of the Abyss

Maybe he knew, in some deep, horrible way, that she’d been trying to get rid of him. Perhaps he had hoped that eventually they would need to fight it out like they were going to in the end. It fit everything she knew about the man.

“And you think Daios is going to let you do that?” Mira asked, her voice echoing through the room.

A shadow passed over the glass. She looked up to see that Daios was the first to return. He carried with him a reasonably sized tuna, and one that she absolutely would not eat. She couldn’t stomach anything right now.

Sighing, she shook her head. “No, I don’t think he’s going to like this one bit.”

Both women waited until he poked his head through the moon pool, much slower than when he’d arrived with Anya. Slapping the fish down onto the metal floor, he looked them both over before growling, “Why do you both look guilty?”

Flicking her gaze to Mira, she tried to convey that she needed the other woman to step in. She couldn’t do this on her own. She couldn’t tell him right now when she was so vulnerable and everything felt so raw.

Mira nodded, her hand hitting the table in what was likely a very loud clap before standing. Bitsy ran words over her eyes that startled even Anya.

“I have something for you, Daios. I’ve been working on it for a while, but it wasn’t working the way I want it to. It’s good enough for what we’re about to do, though.”

She disappeared into a side room, one that had always smelled like metal and oil.

Daios arched a brow. “What’s this about?”

“I don’t know.” But it didn’t matter. She had to tell him. She couldn’t stand here and look at him like she wasn’t lying, just by not telling him what the plan had to be. “Daios...”

Getting up, she sat down beside him on the metal. He reached for her without thinking. That massive arm of his scooped underneath her legs and dragged her closer.

He smelled like the sea. A briny scent mixed with salt that burned her nose, or maybe that was the tears that she refused to let fall. Because he was holding onto her without hesitation. Like she was right where she belonged.

Her forehead came down on his shoulder, and she let him prop her up as though he could take away the weight that was so heavy on her shoulders. Without Mira in the room, he was so quick to run his hand over the back of her head. He smoothed her hair back from her face, hooking the strands behind her ears.

“My kalon,” he whispered, and she could feel his lips press to the top of her head. “Did you miss me?”

“Yes,” she said with a breathy laugh. “Isn’t that crazy?”

“Not so crazy.”

“You were only gone for a couple hours, if that. And already I feel like...” She didn’t know how to say the words. Only that she didn’t like it when they weren’t together.

And maybe that was partly because she was afraid all of this was going to shatter around them. What she knew she had to do was only going to make everything else difficult. Or she’d lose her life in this insane battle that wasn’t necessarily hers to fight and yet, here she was. Fighting.

He hummed long and low, his chest vibrating with the sound that she could still hear. If she failed in doing this, she’d never hear someone speak so clearly again. Her father wouldn’t ever let her leave their home and she would be stuck back in her cage. How could she lose the sound of him when she knew how dear it was now?

Swallowing hard, she forced herself to draw back. “Daios, I think the only way to?—”

Bitsy flashed red all throughout the lens, startling her so much with the bright light that she stopped talking mid sentence, only to realize the droid had thrown up an arrow. And Daios was looking over her shoulder with a frown on his face that almost terrified her.

“What?” Anya asked, turning around to see Mira was standing in the doorway of that room with an... arm.

Or at least, a metal arm.

It was massive, and her arms shook as she held it up for them both to see. Strangely, it sort of looked like a undine arm. The wrist flopped, and the fingers were clearly jointed with fine webbing between them.

“I wasn’t going to show you for a bit, because it’s still very much a prototype.” Mira frowned down at the arm. “There’s a lot it can’t do. Please don’t use this arm on anything that can be bruised, broken, or killed. The tension on it is really touchy.”

“What is that?” Daios hissed.

“It’s an arm,” Mira grumbled, walking toward them while tilting her head down. Bitsy put a little warning that said “murmuring” before she read, “Pretty fucking obvious, I thought.”

Neither Anya nor Daios said anything as Mira stepped up next to him. They watched as she lifted the hole in the fake arm up to his half arm, and something felt... wrong inside of her.

Anya didn’t know how to feel about him getting “fixed” when she’d never thought of him as broken. He lacked an arm, yes, but that didn’t make him less of a person. He had figured out how to live without one and now it felt a little cruel to hand him something like this. Even if he had wanted it, she wasn’t sure how to feel.

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