Page 65 of Siren Problems
Isign the grant acceptance letter with a hand that feels like it belongs to someone else.
It’s temporary, I tell myself.
Just long enough to collect the last batch of data. Just long enough to take what I need and dismantle the machine from the inside. It’s strategy. Not surrender.
I send the email, close my laptop, and wait for the rush of pride I thought I’d feel.
It doesn’t come.
Instead, there’s just this low thrum in my chest. Like a leyline gone off-key.
Like something breaking quietly where no one can see.
Mira is thrilled.
“Smartest tactical pivot you’ve ever made,” she says, clapping her hands. “Access, funding, mobility—and when you pull the plug? You’ll have every artifact and data point they could ever try to bury.”
Kai’s more subdued.
She leans against the counter at The Gutter Mermaid, stirring her drink with a straw like it personally offended her.
“You’re walking a line, Wilder.”
“I know.”
“You sure you won’t get sucked in?”
“That’s the plan.”
She studies me for a moment, then says, “It’s not just the council you’re lying to, you know.”
I lift my chin. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You haven’t talked to him since that night.”
I look away.
“It’s not avoidance,” I say. “It’s... boundaries.”
She snorts. “Call it what you want. But you’re both walking around this town like ghosts who died holding hands.”
Calder’s silencesettles over Lowtide like fog.
He’s still around—I see him on the cliffs sometimes, or disappearing into the surf at dusk—but he never comes close. Never speaks.
We’re orbiting each other.
Too raw to touch.
Too scared to let go.
It bleeds into everything I do.
Every field report, every relic scan, every half-finished chart has a hollow ache stitched into its corners.
I try to focus. I do.
But every time I look at the data, all I see ishim.
