Page 79 of Echoes of the Tide

“No!”

She was laughing now, the bubbling sound filling him with so much joy that he felt the reasoning for her name again. Everything in him breathed out a sigh of relief. At least she wasn’t angry with him for sending out the depthstrider anymore. He needed all the reassurance he could get now that he was bringing her back to the others.

Ace shook her head at him, trying hard to not fall under his antics. But then she reached up and traced the jaw he’d just flaunted at her. “Beautiful,” she said. “I didn’t know you would be so beautiful.”

It wasn’t a word he’d ever used to describe himself. Beautiful was a word for pretty things, delicate or soft creatures who were created more for their aesthetics than their use. But then the word settled into him. Beautiful meant she looked at him like she’d looked at the sunset last night. With those wide eyes taking in all the splendor that was stretched out in front of her. She’d looked at that sunset like it was her reason for being, and if that’s what it meant to be beautiful...

Well, he didn’t mind that at all.

He tucked her a little more firmly into his grip and zipped through the sea. He curved around Gamma with her, letting her see the neon lights in the distance and all the fish that swarmed around that place. Her breathing caught as they swam by, but he didn’t think that was because she wanted to go there.

Instead, it was just her moment of saying goodbye to the version of herself she left behind in those walls. He swam higher through the towers, passing just overhead until they were off into the distance where she had likely never been. There wereno human cities here. Why would there be? They all clustered deeper in the waters where the storms couldn’t reach them.

But he and his people had found a haven. Just deep enough for the storms to only make the waters a little rougher, but not so shallow that the waves would easily touch them.

With a grin, he spun with her in his arms. A spiral in the water that sent them both careening through a current that they could ride for hours on end.

Neither of them talked much. They just rode the sea current that drew them closer and closer to the home he hoped she liked. Because soon enough, she would live here. With him, he hoped. Although he knew perhaps that was a stretch.

They reached the home where his pod had grown even larger. Arges had been the greatest warrior their people had ever seen. They followed him wherever he would let them, and many of them had come here.

The first thing he noticed was that many of the new pod members had already decorated. From far and wide, they found round stones they then embedded into the sand. Each one had a meaning and a perfect place that created a spiral in the sand. The spirals led to the bed where his people slept, sometimes in a pile with their families, other times floating there, just letting the sea hold them in place.

As they sped overhead, he looked down to see a few families had joined them now. There was a mother and father, the massive female lucky enough to still have the male she’d mated with. She held onto the fin of a tiny female who was struggling hard against her mother’s grip to get to her father’s waiting open arms.

A pang of jealousy struck him. It was the life he’d always wanted, and the one he would forever be denied.

But then he felt a warm hand on his chest, smoothing away the ache that burned there where his hearts pounded. Heremembered that while it hurt to see other people so happy, he was also blissfully happy on his own. Because he’d found his joy, and she was right here in his arms.

Holding Ace a little tighter, he zipped past the nests and all the stone beds, heading to what was quickly becoming an expanding city. Once Mira started building something, it appeared it was rather hard for her to stop.

“What is that?” Ace asked, her voice dropped low in awe.

He knew she could see the small village that Mira had built. She was beyond just an engineer, because the genius it had taken to weave all of these pieces together was remarkable. What had just been a single pod that was created for life support of a single person became so much more. They’d expanded into Mira and Anya’s bedrooms, then a garden building. But now that they had so many pieces and parts from Alpha, it was even larger.

Mira had created a kitchen, a dining room, then a living area for everyone to gather. A research pod that stood off from the side of the others, then a storage unit as well. Countless other buildings were ready to be attached just in case they were needed. Or perhaps, in the hopes that they were.

Anya was particularly happy to be on her own, or only spend her time with Daios. But Mira needed people. She enjoyed the company of others, and he’d seen the toll it had taken on her recently. She wanted to be surrounded by her own people.

And Anya? Well. Anya wasn’t particularly good company. The two of them didn’t quite like each other all that much.

Now he feared if either of them would like his achromo.

“Are you ready?” he asked, nodding at a few of the others who had swum up to their side.

“Not really,” she replied with a small laugh. “But I’d like to be dry.”

“I can promise you that.”

Anything else? He wasn’t sure how much he could promise.

CHAPTER 32

Holding onto Maketes felt like the only grasp she still had on her sanity. She’d gone from the frying pan into the fire. They were surrounded by undines, and she hadn’t realized their kind came in so many colors. No wonder they called humans achromos, a name which meant colorless in Latin.

Humans really were colorless in comparison. They came in tones of beige, but these creatures were in a rainbow of colors. Everywhere she looked, there was another color. Blues and violets, bright greens and yellows, even a few flashes of red that were so distracting, she craned her neck to stare at them as they headed off into the distance.

They were so beyond beautiful. All different kinds of flukes and fins decorated their sides. The gills that framed their faces were all different, too. Maketes’s were smaller than some, and there were a few who had massive fins on each side of their face. Rib gills seemed to have the same treatment. There was no way to know how large they were going to be or how thin the filaments were.

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