Page 25 of Call of the Fathoms

“Why are you hanging around?”

“I’m curious to see what you will do now. I want to know if you’ll let yourself starve.” She’d have to, after all. It wasn’t like she could hunt fish from where she was in this tiny contraption.

“I’m changing. Unless you want to be disgusted by my human body, you should leave.”

He was certain it would be disgusting. He’d seen bodies like hers before. Their two boney tails were the most disturbing things he’d seen. But of course, there was also the opportunity to enrage her. If only he could get her mad enough, she might look at him and allow him to peer into her future this time.

Baring his teeth, he took the opportunity that was presented. “I am certain you are ridiculously ugly. Just look at you now. I’ve never seen an achromo who looks like you before, and certainly that was by design. They did not care to make you pretty and functional.”

“It was entirely by design.” She carefully folded and placed the silver blanket in the pilot’s seat at the front of the ship. Andthen she peeled that wetsuit off her arms. Though her back was to him, he could already see there was much he could talk about.

Not a single scale on her body protected her from the elements, and she was far too muscular. The shoulders she revealed were rounded, far too large to be attractive to her kind. After all, they were such foolhardy people that they liked their women to be smaller than they were. Ridiculous.

“My kind seek out larger woman than they are,” he informed her. “We desire a woman with bite. A woman who can protect herself, with claws and sharp teeth, who would make even the greatest of sharks flee from them.”

But then that wetsuit slipped down the impressive muscles of her back and he forgot what he was saying. By all the gods in the sea, this woman was strong. He could see all that power in the way her back moved as she shifted the material away from her skin. The hollow of her spine trailed down to a trim waist, even though her shoulders were broad and strong.

Dotted all along her back were scars. He could tell they were old, as many of them were pale. So many of them. Some in long lines, some deeper and ropey textured, suggesting that they were mortal wounds. Some of them were little, though. Tiny pinpricks that looked almost like lines of stitches, the same as his people would do. Hundreds of them, scattered all along her skin and circling to her ribs.

She didn’t seem to care that he was looking. Instead, she just peeled the wetsuit off her body. Now she was nude. Standing there in the middle of the room with her back to him as she pulled dry clothing out of that top crate, completely unaware that she had rendered him mute.

He hated their legs. Always had. Achromo had two tails that were both useless at swimming, when they should have had at least one working tail. But this woman’s legs were powerful.Thick thighs with defined muscles that flexed with every movement. Her glutes were...

Why was he staring so hard at her ass? There was no reason for it. He had never been someone who cared what an achromo’s ass looked like. His people barely had them. Their muscular tails were clearly powerful, but glutes were something that just developed. And they certainly didn’t look likethat.

Was he calling it an ass even in his head? He’d been around their kind too long. He didn’t need to know the nicknames for their anatomy. They were her gluteus maximus, they were…

The globes moved as she did, and then his eyes widened as she bent down to slide pants over her legs. Goddess, how was it even better when she bent down like that? The view was stunning, remarkable, and he was staring at an achromo like he’d never seen one before.

Growling, he forced himself backward over the ship so he wasn’t looking at her anymore. At least the lack of sight would stop him from thinking all these terrible things.

Stupid depthstrider. He knew better than to get interested in a person. Already he could feel himself desiring more and more to look into her future, and it wasn’t because he wanted to find out anything about the Originals. He wanted to find out more abouther.

What made her the way she was? She was massive compared to the others of her kind, and he had seen that she was made, not born. But how? Why had that they done that? The achromos were a confusing lot at the best of times, so why had she served those who created her?

Perhaps he didn’t need to look into her future. Perhaps he could get her to talk to him. All he had to do was steal that medicine, which clearly controlled her.

Peering back over the edge of the glass, he frowned as she sat down in the pilot’s chair and opened a small box. Within it werea myriad of needles. She took one of them and then stuck it into a bottle full of some kind of fluid.

Was she going to give herself the drugs? It appeared she was, because she very quickly filled the needle in her hand and then plunged it into her arm. No reaction. Not a single one. She just stared into the darkness of the abyss as she did so, and then placed the needle back in the box once she was done.

That was what he needed to get, then. Whatever medicine she was giving herself, that was the barrier he had to tear down.

Eleven

Alexia

Time passed strangely in the abyss. She would never have known how long she was down here without the computer informing her it had been eight days. Eight days of her rationing food, drugs, and time spent staring into the darkness that seemed to look back at her.

Alexia was stuck here. She knew that. The ship’s AI would not let her override it and manually drive the ship home. She’d argued she could get them closer to Tau before the whole ship shut down. But the AI only said she didn’t have high enough clearance to force it to do what she wanted.

Slumped against some crates where there was still meager amounts of food, Alexia told herself not to look into the sea. The lights above her head still blinked on and off. They were driving her crazy. Sometimes she asked the computer to turn them off entirely and just sat in the pitch black. She understood the reasoning for the warning lights. Many systems didn’t have enough battery power to continue for much longer. The ship only reminded her that they were in dire circumstances.

Life support would last the longest. But some of the filtrations were already blowing. She only had a few more days under here without those batteries, and that meant she had to get her shit together.

Not to mention her food supply was dropping. She looked down at the tablet in her hand where she had been keeping count of everything. The food she’d been sent was enough to last a week. She’d spaced it out enough that she knew it would last double that. But even then, two weeks with that little food was going to weaken her.

And then what was she going to do?

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