Page 32 of Call of the Fathoms

“What?” he asked, playing dumb. “You’re giving me a look.”

“You have less than two days to make up your mind.”

“About what?”

“Whether you’re going to kill me or not.”

He tapped a long nail on the glass. She could see he was pretending to think. Usually, when he was actually considering her words, the lights on his forearms lit up. It was almost like he didn’t realize they were doing it. And she’d used it to heradvantage thus far. But this time, the lights remained dormant, so he had already thought about this.

His hair twisted in a stray current that toyed with the strands. While he thought he was tormenting her, she looked at the delicate way his gills flared open when he breathed. His body was remarkable this close. She had never seen anything like him before, and now that she had, Alexia wasn’t sure how she would go back to a normal life.

Who else in Tau had experienced this? Sure, there were plenty of scientists who had experimented on an undine. There were a lot of them who had seen undine up close and far more personal. But none of them had talked to one. None of them had spent days on end watching their graceful movements and the way it seemed like the sea accepted them in a way that it never would humans.

Finally, he tapped his nail on the glass harder, getting her attention away from the gills on his ribs and instead on his face. “What do you have to offer me?”

“You were the one who wanted to make a deal for food in the first place!”

“What would you offer me for a battery?”

She froze. What did he mean a battery? He’d ripped them off her ship and then likely thrown them into the depths of the sea. He wasn’t smart enough to... keep them.

He was.

He was smart enough to keep the damn things, and he had done exactly that. He’d just been waiting until the very last second to barter with her.

“You have the batteries?” she hissed.

“I haveabattery to trade with you for information about your city.” He shrugged. “And if you give me more information at a later time, I may have the second battery as well.”

Rat. Bastard.

He was going to keep her on the threshold of death for however long he wanted her to. He was going to continue with this torture until she snapped.

She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to find that numb place the medicine brought her to. The place where her thoughts weren’t running red and she could focus on what was being said in front of her, rather than wanting to get that rivet gun and empty it into the ceiling above her, flooding be damned.

“What information would you consider to be good enough to get the batteries back?” she ground out.

There was a lot she could tell him about Tau that wouldn’t be dangerous for him to know. The layout of Tau was obviously off limits. She wasn’t going to tell him?—

“I need a way into the city that others of my people could use.”

“Absolutely not.” That was the last thing she was going to tell him. “You trapped me here, undine. That doesn’t mean I am willing to sell out my entire city.”

“You’d rather die?”

“I would.”

He leaned closer until his face was nearly pressed against the glass. She could see the anger in his gaze boiling underneath the surface of those black eyes. “Your people stole my son. I thought he was dead. But he was just in Alpha with all their scientists, who were preparing to tear him apart so they could catalogue his insides. Did you know that? Just before Alpha was destroyed by my people, yours almost killed the only child I have.”

She wanted to argue that Alpha wouldn’t have done that without reason, but she had seen it herself. No one in the cities treated the undine like they were people. And that killed her, because she could so easily see that he was a person.

He had a family. A reason to fight.

Damn it, he had a son. She leaned against the wall of the ship and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m sorry to hear that. It shouldn’t have happened. No one deserves to lose a loved one like that, it’s…”

There were no words. Not for something like this.

She could apologize a thousand times over, but it wasn’t her who had done it. She hadn’t made the choice to kidnap his son, nor had she been one of the scientists who had experimented on the boy. But she knew deeply what it was like to be a child in the hands of a scientist.

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