They say it takes twenty-one days for a human habit to form. It took forty days for my humanity to dissolve.
I sat on a throne of fossilized vertebrae in the heart of the Drowned City, watching the slow, rhythmic pulse of a thermal vent. The water here was hot enough to scald a man's skin off, but to me, it felt like a lukewarm bath.
I looked down at my hands.
The skin was no longer pink or bruised. It was a pale, translucent shade of bioluminescent silver. When I flexed my fingers, I could see the dark, indigo flow of my own ichor through the membranes. My knuckles had smoothed over, replaced by flexible cartilage that allowed my hands to fold in ways that would have made a land-dweller scream.
I wasn't a man anymore. I was a translation.
[...Elias...]
The Hum didn't just vibrate in my skull anymore. It was my heartbeat. It radiated from the center of my chest, a glowing core of turquoise light that matched hers.
Vespera drifted down from the vaulted ceiling of the bone-cathedral. She was in her smaller form today—the one that roughly mimicked a woman—but she hadn't quite gotten the eyes right. She had four of them now, all blinking in a slow, hypnotic sequence.
She circled me, her long, ink-black hair trailing like smoke in the current. She pressed her cheek against my chest, listening to the resonance of my new heart.
[...The salt has settled in your marrow. The shore is a ghost...]
"It feels... quiet," I said. The words didn't come from my throat. They vibrated out of the gills that had opened behind my jaw, ripples of sound that Vespera caught and drank like wine. "I don't miss the air. I don't miss the sun."
[...The sun is a lie the surface tells itself to forget the dark...]
She reached out and traced the new markings on my ribs—iridescent patterns that glowed when I was happy, a biological map of my devotion to her.
But as her fingers lingered, a sudden, jagged vibration tore through the water. It wasn't a biological sound. It was the rhythmic, mechanical thrum of a deep-sea submersible.
Far above us, a light pierced the eternal gloom. Not the soft, living glow of the abyss, but the harsh, artificial white of a halogen searchlight.
Aris hadn't gone home. He had gone and gotten a bigger boat.
[...They search for the thief...] Vespera's eyes turned a sharp, predatory violet. Her nails—now long, obsidian claws—dug into the bone of my throne. [...They want the specimen back...]
I stood up. My movements were no longer clunky or restricted by the weight of my own body. I felt powerful. I felt ancient. I felt protective.
I looked up at the flickering white light miles above us. To them, I was a missing person. A tragedy. A data point lost to the sea. To my brother, I was a prize to be recaptured and studied in a pressurized tank.
"They won't find a man," I whispered, my gills flaring as I tasted the metallic tang of the submersible's engine in the water.
I reached out and took Vespera's hand. Our bioluminescence synchronized, a blinding flare of turquoise that illuminated the ruins for miles.
"Let them come," I said, my voice vibrating with a power that shook the silt from the floor. "I want to show my brother what happens when the sea finally talks back."