Chapter 10 — Dead Air

  Rowan collapsed onto the metal grating, his hands slapping into the receding silt. His first intake of air was a fucking disaster. It felt like inhaling fire and needles. His lungs, which had been supported by magic for gods knew how many hours, buckled under the sudden return of atmospheric pressure.

  He vomited saltwater onto the grate, his chest heaving so hard it felt like his ribs might actually snap. He couldn't stop the sound that came out of him. A raw, animalistic wheeze as he fought to remember how to be a human again. The air was stale, smelling of rusted iron and old rot, but it was dry.

  He was breathing. He was actually fucking breathing.

  The sheer impossibility of it made his head spin faster than the oxygen deprivation had. They were at the bottom of the trench. They were beneath miles of crushing, murderous ocean, and yet here he was, shivering in a puddle of his own sick, inhaling air that tasted like a junkyard.

  He let out a jagged, hysterical sound that might have been a laugh if his throat wasn't raw from the salt. He felt light, dangerously light as if without the weight of the sea, he might just float away and shatter against the ceiling.

  “Rowan.”

  He couldn't look up. He stayed on all fours, his forehead pressed against the cold metal, watching his own blood and the trench silt drain through the floor. His skin felt heavy and his limbs felt like they were made of lead. The buoyancy was gone, and gravity felt like a cruel joke.

  “I’m... I’m...” he tried to speak, but a fresh fit of coughing cut him off. He tasted copper. He stayed there for what felt like an eternity, shivering in the damp, freezing air, until his lungs finally accepted the oxygen without trying to reject it.

  “You’re okay,” Celeste panted. Hearing her voice not as just a telepathic echo in his head, was another kind of feeling. It sounded raw, slightly raspy, and carried a weight that the mental link never had. It made her real. It made this nightmare real.

  Did they finally make it? Were they actually safe, or had they just traded a vast graveyard for a smaller one?

  “Your voice,” Rowan managed to choke out and winced at the sound of himself. “I can... I can actually hear you.”

  She was huddled in the corner of the airlock, her powerful tail coiled tightly beneath her, the fluke tucked against her chest like a shield. Her lavender scales were shimmering with a feverish, angry heat. Without the water to buffer it, the temperature coming off her was terrifying. She looked at him with those spotlight eyes, her chest heaving in sync with his.

  “The magic,” Rowan whispered, his voice sounding thin and metallic in the small room. He looked at his hands. The gold veins were gone. His skin was pale, bruised, and human. “It’s completely gone.”

  “It had to go,” she said, her voice raspy. She gestured vaguely to the walls around them—peeling grey paint, salt-crusted wires, and a flickering green emergency light. “The system... it can’t sustain the link in here. The air changes the frequency.”

  Rowan wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, trying to steady his breathing. He looked around the airlock, his mind struggling to process the industrial reality of it. “Where are we, Celeste? We’re at the bottom of the freaking ocean. How can a place like this exist at all?”

  “I don’t know. The system guides me here.” She said, tugging ribbons of white hair behind her webbed ear. “And at least there’s air and you're not dying.”

  “Are you sure this air won’t kill us?”

  “Is it killing you?”

  “Not yet.”

  He looked around. What exactly was this place? Were there people here? By the look of it, it looked extremely old and thoroughly abandoned. But to think people were here, this deep, felt unreal and unsettling. The walls were weeping with rust, the rivets bulging as if the ocean outside was constantly testing the strength of the iron.

  He tried to stand up, digging his fingers into the metal grating of the floor. He expected to glide upward like he had for the last hours, but the moment he shifted his weight, his muscles screamed. It felt like someone had tied weights to his ankles and chest. Gravity was pinning him to the muck-covered floor.

  "Shit," he gasped, his arms shaking violently. He fell to his knees, his breath coming in ragged, dry hitches.

  His legs left like two pillars of cooling concrete when he grabbed a salt-crusted handrail on the wall to haul himself up. The metal groaned under his grip. He stayed there, slumped against the wall, his head spinning as his blood pressure tried to calibrate to a world that made zero sense.

  He stared at the inner door. It was a thick, circular vault hatch with a manual locking bar. There were no lights on the panel. No signs of life. Just the smell of ancient, recycled breath and the faint, rhythmic drip... drip... of water leaking from his body onto the floor.

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  "If there were people here," Rowan said, his voice trembling as he looked at the peeling grey paint, "where did they go? You don't just... walk home from here."

  "Maybe they didn't go anywhere," Celeste replied. She was looking at the dark, oily silt that had settled in the corner of the airlock.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Rowan tried to take a step forward, and it was like he was walking for the first time. He was a child all over again. His knees shook with a violent, rhythmic tremor, and his toes curled against the cold metal grating, searching for a grip that his brain couldn't quite coordinate. But it felt good—at least he was standing on his feet instead of floating around, at least he was breathing, even though the air was shit.

  He took messy, staggering steps forward, his eyes raking every corner even though there wasn’t much light to see anything clearly. The air felt thin, like it was being filtered through a dirty rag, but the simple friction of his bare feet against the floor gave him a desperate sense of reality.

  “I don’t know. How would they leave this thing if they ever returned to the land?” He panted, leaning his shoulder against a conduit that felt uncomfortably icy.

  “Maybe there was a way,” Celeste whispered. She was still motionless on the floor, looking like a piece of art that had been torn out of a museum and dropped into a scrapyard. He couldn’t believe he was actually looking at a fucking siren. A creature that was supposed to be a myth. “A sub. A shuttle. Something the System doesn't show me.”

  “So you mean if we look hard enough, we'll find their corpses?”

  Celeste gulped, the movement of her throat sharp and pronounced. “I hope not.”

  His chest gave a hard thud at the thought of finding bones or the remains of humans here. He didn’t want them to end up in a fucking haunted grave after everything they’d just went through. The silence of the base started to feel less like "abandonment" and more like "waiting." If no one had walked out of those airlock doors in decades, then whatever was left of them was still behind that inner hatch.

  He looked at his hand, pale and trembling as it hovered near the manual wheel of the inner door. His reflection in the small, salt-smudged porthole looked like a ghost's. He wasn't just afraid of what was in the dark anymore; he was afraid that this place was a mirror. A glimpse of their own future.

  "If we find them," Rowan whispered, his voice hitching as he stared into the blackness of the corridor beyond the glass, "we aren't staying. I don't care what the System says. I'm not rotting down here."

  He reached for the wheel. The cold of the iron bit into his palms, a sharp contrast to the blistering heat still radiating off Celeste’s body. He expected it to be stuck, rusted shut by a century of salt, but when he put his weight into it, the wheel gave a low, oiled groan.

  It was maintained.

  Rowan froze, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. "It's moving too easy."

  “Close it,” Celeste snapped, her voice cutting through the heavy silence like a blade. “Fuck, I can’t even move.” She lifted herself a little, her claws scraping against the metal as she leaned her upper body against the wall, her tail coiling into a tighter, protective knot. “Whatever comes out of that fucking dark, I won’t be able to save you again.”

  The speed with which Rowan slammed the door back shut was impressive. The heavy iron wheel spun in reverse, and the locking bar seated itself with a violent, metallic thud that shook the entire airlock. The vibration traveled up Rowan’s arms and seemed to echo deep into the hull of the base.

  “Fuck, Rowan, keep it down! I can’t with you!” Celeste whisper-shouted, her glowing eyes wide and frantic. She looked like she wanted to bolt, but the dry floor kept her pinned.

  Rowan cringed, his shoulders hiking up to his ears as he held his hands up in a silent apology. “I’m sorry! But you’re the one who scared me shitless!”

  He backed away from the hatch, his bare feet slapping rhythmically on the grating. Every noise felt like an alarm bell. He looked at the door as if it were a living thing, waiting for something on the other side to knock back.

  “You’re the one who said they might still be here,” he hissed, his voice trembling. “If that door moves that easily, it means someone has been using it. Rusted metal doesn’t just fucking glide, Celeste.”

  He was staring at the small, salt-smeared porthole again. “The system,” he whispered, his eyes darting back to her. “Does it say anything else? Is there a map? A security status? Anything other than just 'go here'?”

  Celeste slumped slightly against the wall as she closed her eyes, her brow furrowing in concentration. “It’s silent. Ever since the water left the room, the notifications stopped. It’s like... it’s like the system can’t see me in the air.”

  “Fuck.”

  Rowan slammed back down to the ground, his knees hitting the metal grate with a jarring clang. He held his head in his palms, his fingers digging into his scalp. They were trapped no matter where they went. Outside was miles of crushing pressure, and inside was a dead, silent labyrinth that their "god" couldn't even see into.

  “Rowan.”

  “What?”

  "Look at the door," Celeste rasped, her eyes fixed on the heavy iron seal. She was breathing in short, shallow bursts, her chest heaving as the dry air grew thick with her radiating heat.

  Rowan followed her gaze to the inner door. At first, he saw nothing but the dull, lightless circle of the reinforced porthole. It looked like a black eye staring back at them, dead and empty.

  "I don't see anything," he whispered, his heart skipping a beat. "It’s pitch black, Celeste."

  "Wait," she gulped, her lavender pupils constricting into needle-thin slits. "Wait for the cycle."

  He leaned in closer, his forehead nearly touching the cold glass of the porthole. He squinted, his breath fogging the salt-smudged surface. Then, he saw it.

  Deep within the throat of the dark hallway, a tiny, sickly green dot appeared. It was so faint it almost felt like a trick of his mind, a phantom light born of exhaustion. But then it faded out.

  He held his breath. Three seconds of absolute, crushing darkness. Then it returned. Pulsing like a heart that refused to stop.