The Prince didn't wait for her to recover. He dismissed the messengers with a sharp, flicking gesture of his hand.
They bowed a fluid, sweeping motion where their long, iridescent tails arched in perfect unison and vanished into the dark, leaving behind only the fading pulse of their bioluminescence.
The Prince turned to her.
He didn't ask if she was ready.
He simply surged forward, his powerful, muscular tail displacing the water with a low, resonant thrum.
He locked an arm around her waist, hauling her into the slipstream of his own speed.
Mamta didn't fight the contact. With her ankle throbbing in sync with the cold, pressurized rhythm of the deep, she knew she would be left behind in seconds if she tried to swim. She went limp, allowing him to navigate while she focused entirely on controlling her breathing keeping her face blank, her mind locked behind a wall of manufactured indifference.
They moved with terrifying velocity.
At this speed, the water felt like a solid wall, but the Prince held her in a pocket of reduced drag, his tail undulating with the rhythmic, hypnotic power of an apex predator.
They reached a structure carved directly into the side of a basaltic canyon.
It was a vault, ancient and covered in calcified growth. The entrance was a narrow slit, protected by a curtain of heavy, viscous water that felt like walking through cold oil.
The Prince released her the moment they breached the threshold. Mamta stumbled, her body suddenly heavy as she braced herself against the cold, sediment-covered floor. She had to shift her weight carefully to avoid putting pressure on her injured ankle.
Inside, the light was dim a soft, pulsing amber.
The Prince poised himself by a stone dais, his powerful tail coiled neatly beneath him, the bioluminescent patterns on his throat glowing a steady, inquisitive blue. The student hovered in the shadows, his own tail flickering with iridescent scales, his silver eyes tracking Mamta's every move.
"You are not a soldier," the Prince said.
"Your movements are not trained. Your combat is purely reactive."
Mamta stood straight, ignoring the fire in her ankle.
"I'm a civilian."
"Civilians in the North usually have markers," the student added, stepping into the light.
"Registries. Clan sigils. You possess none."
Mamta's heart hammered against her ribs—a dangerous, erratic beat. 'They're checking for IDs. They're running a scan.'
A cold spike of dread pierced through her. The Kesh envoys were already moving; they would beat her to the truth. She felt the walls of the vault closing in. 'If they don't find my name in any northern record, if there's some advanced system here, some magical or technological equivalent to an Aadhar then what?'
She tried to stay calm, but her mind spun through the worst-case scenarios. If there were some kind of soul-scan or registry she hadn't accounted for, her total lack of a history wouldn't just make her look like a nobody. It would prove she was a void. A "non-entity." That was infinitely worse than being a spy. Spies could be interrogated; anomalies were usually neutralized.
"If you're looking for a name in a book," Mamta said, her voice steady despite the chaos in her head,
"you won't find one. My country doesn't coordinate with the sea."
"It is not about coordination," the Prince countered. He drifted closer, his tail shifting across the stone floor with a dry, rasping sound.
"It is about existence. Everything that exists in this world leaves a trace. A vibration. A history."
He stopped just outside her personal space. He didn't touch her a deliberate departure from his earlier behavior.
"You were terrified," he said, his voice dropping to a low, resonant hum.
"Not of the Kesh envoys. Not of the politics. You were terrified because you realize that if they look, they won't find what they expect to find."
Mamta felt the oxygen the Veylroot provided, but for a second, it felt like she was suffocating again. She was looking at a man who could see the "glitch" in her existence.
"If I told you," Mamta whispered,
"you'd call me a liar. Or a lunatic. And then you'd report me to the Kesh anyway."
"Perhaps," the Prince admitted, his silver eyes fixed on hers.
"But the Kesh want to know if you are a spy. I only want to know if you are a threat."
"I'm a dead end," Mamta said, forcing a logic that died in her throat.
"That's what I am. If you want to survive the Kesh, tell them I was a scavenger, a nobody, someone who crawled out of a hole and will crawl back into one as soon as I can find a ship."
The Prince reached out, but he stopped his hand in mid-air, inches from her shoulder. He pulled it back, a flicker of something-frustration? crossing his sharp features.
"You think like someone who has spent their whole life hiding from a system that wants to erase them," he said.
Mamta went cold.
"I don't need you to read my life story," she snapped, the crack in her composure finally closing.
"I need you to get me to land."
"Then tell me what to tell them," he retorted, his voice hardening.
"Because if I descend into that meeting and say nothing, they will dissect your history until they find the silence where your name should be. And that is when they will kill you."
He leaned in, his bioluminescence casting long, flickering shadows against the ancient stone.
"Give me a lie that works, Mamta. Or you will not see the surface again."