Page 80 of Call of the Fathoms

“Fortis!” Mitera’s voice called out. The sound erupted from the water like whale song, or perhaps the voice of a goddess herself. “You have returned to your people and violated our greatest law.”

“It was necessary to do so.”

“There is nothing that could give you the right to bring one oftheirkind here.” Mitera’s hair turned a vibrant shade of red, only barely visible this deep even with all the surrounding light. “She has no right to be here. Not in our home. Not even in our sea.”

“She is from Tau.”

Angry hisses rose around him, all the people surrounding them enraged by what he said. Because if she was from Tau, that meant she was part of those who had hurt them, maimed them, killed them. She was part of the evil they had never been able to exact revenge upon.

Exhaling bubbles from his gills, he hugged her a little tighter before turning her around to face Mitera. Alexia had been looking over her shoulder, of course, but she would want to face her opponent directly. He knew his virago well. She would battle until her last breath.

“She has agreed to help us,” he called out, trying to get his people to see reason. “She has left her city, knowing that shewould betray all those she had once lived with. Their city is worse than we ever imagined, and that means she deserves to enact her revenge. She has just as much reason as we do.”

“Reason?” Mitera hissed. “She has no reason to be here. If she is going to fight with us, then let her fight with Arges and all the others who can stand to be surrounded by their stench. Leave that life to those who are foolhardy and see no issues with how her people live. This is not the way of the depthstrider.”

“There is more we can learn from the humans than you give them credit for, Mitera. I would see that she is taken care of, and that we use the knowledge only she can share.” He took a deep breath, knowing his next words would not go over well. “I am here to ask the depthstriders to fight with us. Attack Tau with me, take the information that we have been given by this woman, and we will destroy the city once and for all. Then we can rebuild this sea with the humans. Together, we will learn how to live with each other after we cut the head off the achromo cities.”

Mitera stared at him like he’d lost his mind, and every other depthstrider stopped moving. Not even a flicker of a hip fin stirred the water surrounding them as they all realized he wasn’t joking. He hadn’t brought Alexia here to be punished.

He wanted them to work with humans to destroy humans. And he already knew they were going to deny him even that.

But he would not give up. Wrapping his hands around Alexia’s waist, he gave her a little squeeze. “Talk, virago. Give them a reason to believe us.”

She took a deep breath, and for a moment, he thought she would deny him. After all, she was not the perfect person for this. She had been a warrior her entire life, and while they would respect that, they would not praise her for it.

“I hate them as much as you hate them,” she finally said. At their hisses, she lifted a hand for silence. “I know that is hardto believe. Perhaps there is a part of you that thinks that if I lived there for so long, that surely I agreed with what they did. But they manipulated me, they genetically enhanced me, they created me for everything they wanted me to do. I had no choice in anything that happened.”

Mitera’s hair flared wider, making her look like one of the massive jellyfish that absorbed all its prey. “I care little for your story.”

“And yet, it is a story you will have to listen to. The people in that city don’t care who you are, what you are, or why you want to go against them. Greed is the only language they speak. They have lived for hundreds of years. Countless of them, the original people who destroyed our world above and then decided to take over yours. There is no fixing what they have done. There is nothing humans can do. But you cannot truly believe that all of my kind deserves death.”

A sudden, long silence was her answer. He felt her ribs expand in a shocked breath that she let out very, very slowly.

“Oh,” she whispered. “You do believe we should all die.”

“I don’t care what you do with yourselves,” Mitera said. “But you will not stay here in our ocean, ruining everything for the rest of those who live within these waters.”

“We have nowhere to go.”

“It’s not my task to keep humans safe. There are others who I am certain can do that just fine.”

Alexia’s shoulders straightened, and he could smell her rage on the water. The others would soon smell it too, and they would rise to the challenge she had no idea she was issuing. “The people who are supposed to look after us are corrupt. They are the ones who have harmed you as well. They are the people none of us can trust, yet you expect me to go back to them?”

Mitera’s hair alternated between putrid yellow annoyance and bright red rage. “It is not my responsibility to convince your people that empathy is worthwhile.”

“That’s rich coming from a creature who won’t even offer help to those who need it.”

Oh.

That wasn’t the right thing to say to Mitera, but he could hear the rumblings from a few other depthstriders. They were all thinking the same thing. Why shouldn’t they help the humans? Clearly, help was needed, and they were uniquely qualified to offer it.

But Mitera had never been a forgiving woman.

“We will not help the achromos. We’ve tried to fight Tau before, but your people are as slippery as eels and as deadly as the greatest of foes. We have lost more lives to your city than you could imagine. Your people deserve what they have been fighting to get for centuries now. If that requires the loss of all your lives, then it is just the will of the sea.” Mitera gave her one more look up and down before tsking. “You waste all our time.”

He knew before Alexia even spoke that she was going to do something stupid. He could feel it bubbling up inside of her. Fortis tried to smack his hand over her lips, but it was too late.

She called out, “Then look into my future! You are the best of them, are you not? What the others could not see, you should be able to find easily. Look into my future and see what it is that I will do.”

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