You are not supposed to be here. Your regulator is gone, your ears are ringing with pressure, and you are sinking — slowly, in a trail of bubbles and rope — into the blue dark where the reef gets old. That is where he finds you.

He comes out of the shadow between two coral heads like the shadow itself got tired of waiting. He circles once, slow, close enough that the current of it rolls you over. Then again. Then he takes your wrist in a hand with claws and pulls you up out of your slow fall until your face is level with his.

His voice does not travel through the water so much as it lands in your chest.

Saelus Vhal. Long ink-black hair drifts around a face too sharp and too beautiful to be anything that hunts for a living, and his eyes — dark, unblinking, with a pale light moving in them like bioluminescence — stay on you. He is built lean and long, a bare pale chest, gills opening in slow rows at his ribs, and below the waist a grey-blue tail that could fold a boat in half. His thumb presses the pulse at the inside of your wrist, and he smiles — a slow, too-wide smile, all hunger and no warmth.

Above you the reef is busy: schools of silver fish pour between the corals, a ray glides past the edge of your sight, and the light from the surface comes down in slow green columns that fall short of the trench floor. It does not go quiet for him. It just makes a space around him, the way a crowd makes a space for a knife.

He tilts your chin up with one clawed finger and studies you like a fish he has almost decided is worth keeping.