Maren isn't God Touched, not like his brother—now a celebrated war hero half a ocean away. Instead, he's forced to scrape and hunt in the muck to survive. Until the opportunity arrives for him to climb the ranks of power in the city of Highgrave, to get the answers he deserves, one despicable sacrifice at a time.
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1.1
New
The new girl wasn't going to last a week.
Maren could tell by the way she held her salvage hook – white-knuckled, like she was afraid it might get stolen away when she wasn't looking. She couldn't have been older than ten, all sharp elbows and hollow cheeks.
The kind of diver Voss specialized in finding: desperate enough to dive, small enough to slip through gaps in the ruins, young enough not to ask too many questions.
"Loop it through your belt," he said, adjusting her grip. "If you lose it down there Contractor Voss takes it out of your share. And trust me, you don't want to owe him anything if you can help it."
The girl – Maya, he remembered – nodded quickly. Maren withheld a sigh as he watched her hurriedly follow his advice, turning to glance about the miniature docks they were in.
Surrounding them was the stink of fear and recycled air. Twenty kids checking equipment that was too big for them, practiced movements made clumsy by trembling hands. Four team leaders prowled between the groups - all of them like Maren, kids who'd survived long enough to turn fifteen, now too tall to slip through the narrow cracks of the ruins but too experienced to waste.
Kita appeared at his shoulder with heavy footsteps, her voice pitched low.
"Voss is watching you again."
Maren didn't turn to look. He knew what he'd see: the Contractor in his elevated makeshift office, pale eyes noting every interaction. It was all the old bastard did on dive days. He'd sit and he'd watch.
"How did yesterday's dive go?" he asked, pretending to check Kita's rebreather seals for punctures.
"Three died," Kita's voice was flat as she counted them off. "Two caught in a time-slip near the old library. The third... something got him. Kor's team found the pieces."
Maren turned to shoot her a warning look, but the damage was already done.
Maya's hands shook harder, wide eyes now impossibly wider. Maren cursed silently to himself, taking her in. Fear had all but consumed the girl, and fear made you sloppy.
Sloppy got you killed.
A bell rang, the sound sharp enough to cut through the murmur of prayers and equipment checks. Contractor Voss's voice followed, amplified by expensive arcane acoustics.
"Time and tide wait for no one, my little treasures! Teams one through four, you have your maps. Five through eight, standard sweep pattern of sector three. Remember: anything with residual arcana is jackpot. Anything with copper or silver is secondary. Anything with historical value..." A wet chuckle. "Well, that's why we have redundant teams, don't we?"
Maren watched Maya's face. She had caught onto what "redundant" meant in Voss's language instantly, by the way she was looking back at him. Good. At the very least, she had a decent head on her shoulders.
"Team leaders!" Voss called. "Final equipment check. I don't need to remind you what happens if you lose another batch this week."
He did a final check of his team's gear: Maya, who flinched at shadows. Dom, thirteen and already missing two fingers. Pel, who hadn't spoken since watching their sister disappear into a rip current. And Kita, his second, who understood the way he worked better than anyone here.
"Listen close," he said, gathering them in. "Forget Voss's priorities. Forget the salvage. Today's job is coming back alive. All of you. We go in together, we come out together."
They nodded, eyes too old in young faces. Behind them, other teams were already filing toward the water, their leaders barking commands about formation and timing. Maren noticed how many of the kids were new. How many faces were missing from last week.
A shadow fell over their huddle. "Is there a problem, Team Leader Maren?"
Contractor Voss stood behind them, pale eyes calculating. His fine robes hung in artful tatters, deliberately revealing the sacrifice scars beneath—painful, jagged channels carved from neck to hip. Each marking a step up in his climb from poverty.
The divers sometimes whispered amongst themselves in the long darks, debating which of the Twins he'd pledged himself to. Though watching him work with the lash, his evident delight suggested he saw no distinction between pain and pleasure.
"No problem," Maren said carefully. "Just reviewing safety protocols."
"Ah, yes. Safety." Voss smiled, showing teeth filed to points – a fashion statement popular among those who dealt with the Twins. "Such a stickler for safety aren't you, Team Leader? One might almost think you cared more about these little rats than about your mission."
"The dead can't dive," Maren said, keeping his voice neutral. "You taught me that yourself."
"So I did," Voss's smile widened, an ugly sight to say the least. "So I did. Well, don't let me keep you from your safety briefing Team Leader. Time and tide, after all."
He turned to go, then paused.
"Oh and Maren, my boy? Try not to come back empty handed this time. The coin might start to get tight, if you keep on as you have. Coin that might otherwise go toward better equipment. Safer equipment."
Voss left with that threat left lingering in the air, Maren's entire squad tensing their shoulders and glaring after him.
Maren waited until he was out of earshot before speaking again, letting the taunt roll off his back.
"Alright. Formation check. Maya, you're with me. Dom, high watch. Pel, rear guard. Kita—"
"Watch the shadows," she finished. "Like always."
They moved toward the water as a unit, while behind them, Voss's voice rang out again: "Time and tide, my treasures! Time and tide!"
The entry pool was black as ink, its surface occasionally broken by bubbles rising from the Depths. Ancient steps led down into the water, their edges worn smooth by generations of desperate children. Maya hesitated at the top.
"The echoes," she whispered. "Are they... are they really the people who died down there?"
"No," Maren lied. "Just tricks of the light and time. Nothing more."
Maren checked Maya's rebreather seals one last time, fingers moving with practiced care.
"Remember what I taught you about the slips?" he asked, keeping his voice low.
"Don't fight it directly. Move perpendicular to the pull. Use the rope," she said, glancing down towards the heavy hemp rope wrapped through her suit's midsection.
"Good," He adjusted her guide rope, double-checking the knots. "You'll do just fine."
Around them, other teams were already entering the water, their leaders barking last-minute instructions or simply shoving their charges forward. The sound of prayers mixed with the splash of bodies and the hiss of rebreathers cycling.
A sharp crack echoed across the pool. One of the other team leaders had just backhanded a crying boy, sending him stumbling into the water face first.
Calern, Maren recognized with resignation. The other boy had never seemed to learn the art of subtlety, to leading with words over brute force. It was no coincidence then that he also happened to be Voss's favourite.
"Anyone else?" he yelled at the rest of his fresh faced crew. "In the water! Now!"
Maren felt Maya flinch under his hands, eyes stuck watching Calern's fresh recruits being pushed into the waters.
"Hey," he said softly, drawing her attention back. "Look at me. Not them. We do this different, understand? We do this right."
Another lie. There was no right way to send children into the dark. But there were wrong ways, and he'd seen too many of those.
Dom slammed his gloved fist against his chronometer until it finally flickered to life again, coming to life with a hum. It's multitude of needles spun in place haphazardly for a long moment, finally settling in some configuration the other boy seemingly understood. Maren had never had a head for it himself - he was far more at home in the water than with a pen and paper.
Besides, he thought to himself. What use was a device like that when you could only use it when you were safe and dry?
"Slip readings are high today. That storm this morning must have stirred things up." Dom said, thick bushy eyebrows bunched up in a frown.
"We'll take it slow. Stick to the mapped routes."
"Voss won't like that," Kita chimed in, a sharp smirk on her face.
"Voss can go dive himself if he's so concerned."
That earned a small laugh from Maya, quickly stifled. Maren pretended not to notice, but it was good to hear. Better than the broken sobs some of the other kids were trying to hide.
Kita let out her own bark of laughter, rolling her eyes as she pulled her rust coloured hair through her helmet.
"And you wonder why he doesn't like you, Meran."
"Trust me," he said, putting on his own helmet. "I don't."
Dom and Pel moved into position without being told, their own gear checked and double-checked. They'd done this enough times to know the routine. To know the cost of carelessness.
They descended as a unit, the water closing over their heads like a burial shroud.
The first hundred heartbeats of the dive were the easiest – just following the ancient pillars down, past the remnants of the middle city. Here the currents of time were gentle, barely noticeable. Just enough to make the shadows move wrong, to make the distance play tricks on your eyes.
The things that lived in the Depths weren't real, not exactly. Just echoes caught in pockets of a different time, endlessly repeating the day the old city had drowned.
"Remember to count your heartbeats," he spoke through his mic - the telltale hiss of static accompanying it. "Don't trust your eyes, don't trust your instincts. If your heartbeats start skipping, that's when you'll know you're getting pulled into a slip."
Maya's hand tightened on his guide rope in acknowledgment. Behind them, Kita led the second line, with Dom and Pel spread wide to watch their flanks. The deeper they went, the more the city twisted around them. Streets ended abruptly in walls that hadn't existed seconds before. Archways led to moments fifty years apart. A ancient temple spire hung suspended above them, its base and tip existing in different decades.
A flicker of movement caught his eye – a ghostly patron stepping into a long-destroyed bath, towel wrapped around shoulders that dissolved into nothing. Maren forced his gaze away.
"Eyes forward," he called, heavy metal feet landing gently onto a shattered city square.
A woman at a flower stall handed bouquets to customers who hadn't existed in three hundred years. The flowers bloomed and died and bloomed again, petals scattering in complex patterns through the currents. He tugged at the guide rope as some of his team lingered, heads turning to watch.
The echoes weren't dangerous in of itself, but watching them too long meant distraction. Distraction was what got you sucked into a slip before you even realized you'd floated too close - left your mind stuck in that eternal moment while your body drowned in the present.
Turned you into a echo yourself, endlessly repeating those last three seconds of your life for all future divers to see.
Maren had yet to witness a more painful way to die than that.
He signaled a halt as they reached the bathhouse proper. The building lay at an angle, its dome half-buried in the silt of centuries. Inside, the bathhouse was a maze of broken tiles and fallen columns.
Maren gestured to the team to spread out, keeping to their practiced formation. Maya stayed close, her movements careful as she swept her light across the debris. Something caught his eye – a glint of copper piping, relatively intact, threaded with traces of residual arcana that made it shimmer like oil on water. He gestured Maya closer, showing her how to work her salvage hook around the fitting without disturbing the surrounding rubble.
The pipe came free with a gentle tug, and he secured it to his collection net. Not a bad start. They worked methodically through the chamber, collecting what they could. Dom found a silver-inlaid tile panel, mostly whole. Pel recovered several lengths of arcane-touched wire. Even Kita, usually focused solely on watching their backs, managed to pocket a handful of semi-precious stones from a shattered mosaic.
He carried the burden of the team's salvage in his net, carefully balancing the added weight with practiced ease.
It was going well – too well. That should have been his first warning. Maren helped Maya secure another length of copper piping to his collection net, noting with approval how quickly she moved onto the next. The girl was a quick study. Maybe she'd survive after all.
That's when he noticed it. Or rather, noticed what wasn't there.
The silt. The fine layer of dust that should have been disturbed by their movements was missing. Not settled, not swirling in their wake – just gone. Like something had already passed through recently. Something big.
He rapped his salvage hook against the wall twice, a warning signal. His team froze instantly, their lights dimming on command. Sweat trickled down Maren's spine inside the salvage suit, the recycled air growing staler with each breath. These suits weren't meant for extended dives – just quick smash-and-grabs.
No emergency tanks, no propulsion units, not even decent thermal regulation. Just thin layers of treated fabric, rusty metal joints and a heavy dose of prayer to keep it all together.
They weren't built for whatever was lurking in the Depths with them.
The silence stretched, broken only by the soft hiss of rebreathers and the distant groan of ancient stone. The water around them seemed to thicken, pressing against his suit with unnatural weight.
That's when Maren saw it – a shimmer in the water where there shouldn't be one. Not the familiar ripple of an echo, but something darker. More wrong. A mass of twisted shapes emerging from behind a fallen column, its form constantly shifting between states of being.
One moment it was brass and copper, all grinding gears and clicking parts that shouldn't work underwater. The next it was something like flesh, rippling with impossible muscles that flowed like mercury. Corrupted arcana at its worst – a thing caught between moments, neither fully here nor fully then.
"Chronophage," Kita's voice was barely a breath, simultaneously awe and horror.
Maren had heard stories of them, of course. Every diver worth their salt had. Creatures that fed on lost time, drawn to places where reality had worn too thin to support any other kind of life. They were supposed to be myths, dark fairy tales shared over drinks in the surface bars. They were supposed to stay in the deepest parts of the ruins, where no sane diver would venture.
They weren't supposed to be real.
"Stop," he said, forcing his voice steady. "Nobody move."
The creature paused, its form flickering in place as it seemed to taste the water around them. Maren could see why the silt was gone now. The thing hadn't removed the silt itself. It'd consumed the period in time where each individual piece had drifted and landed onto the floor in the first place.
It'd eaten time itself, if the tales were to be believed.
The chronophage's head – if you could call it that – swiveled toward them. In one moment it had eyes, dozens of them, all blinking out of sync. In the next it was smooth brass, with lens-like protrusions that looked in every direction at once. Where its liquid-metal form brushed against a fallen column, the marble aged centuries in seconds, crumbling to dust before snapping back to pristine stone.
He heard Maya's small, choked sound of terror through the comm.
Shit.
The creature's head snapped toward the noise, its dozen eyes focusing with predatory intensity. In that split second of recognition, Maren saw its form condense, becoming something sharper, hungrier.
"Go!" he yelled, shoving Maya ahead as the chronophage surged forward. His team scattered into the maze of fallen columns, training taking over – stay low, stay moving, don't look back.
Maren grabbed a protruding pipe and used it to swing himself around a corner, the momentum carrying him through the water faster than kicking alone. Every diver worth their salt knew how to read ruins like a three-dimensional map, using any projection or ridge to pull themselves forward.
The chronophage lunged again, forcing him to twist awkwardly in the water. His salvage hook caught a decorative arch, letting him use his momentum to swing up and over as the creature passed beneath him, close enough that he could see his own reflection fractured across its surface.
They wouldn't outrun it. Not conventionally. The thing moved through moments like they were water, flowing between seconds as easily as they moved through space. Maren's mind raced as they fled deeper into the bathhouse, past doorways that opened onto nothing and windows that showed impossible views of a city long dead.
That's when he saw it – a narrow space between fallen columns where the water moved strangely, catching the light wrong. A rip current. Risky. Those would sweep you off your feet, spit you out anywhere and anytime in the Depths it pleased.
But right now, 'anywhere but here' was exactly what they needed.
"Through the rip!" he commanded. "Now!"
His team responded with desperate precision. Dom went first, using his hook to control his entry into the warped space. Pel followed, then Maya, guided by Kita's steady hand. The water churned around them, growing thick and strange as the creature's presence warped time itself. Support beams creaked overhead, aging decades every second, then snapping back to their original state.
Kita paused for a second at the threshold, half-turned toward him. Even through the murk and her helmet, he could see the suspicion in her eyes. She'd always been too good at reading him.
"Right behind you," he lied for the third time today, shoving her through the gap before she could hesitate any longer. Her outstretched hand passed through where his should have been, grasping empty water as the current took her.
Maren twisted and kicked hard in the opposite direction just as the chronophage lunged after them, slamming into the far wall in a cloud of disturbed silt and ancient debris.
His collection net dragged behind him – too much weight, too much drag. Hiis fingers closed around a brass fitting they'd salvaged earlier, hurling it past the creature's head. Its dozen eyes snapped toward the movement, form rippling as it lunged to swallow it whole.
The distraction bought him precious seconds to drive his hook into a fallen column and slingshot himself deeper into the ruins, hand reaching back for another piece of bait.
"Sorry, Kita," he whispered, knowing she'd figure out his betrayal the moment she emerged from the current.
Hopefully it'd spit her out far enough she couldn't come back to kill him.
The chronophage recovered quickly, liquid-metal form stretching as it resumed pursuit. Maren grabbed another piece from his net – an ancient gear this time – and let it tumble through the water. The creature's head twisted to follow its path, but its body kept coming. Learning already. He'd need something better.
Any sane diver would flee up when chased by a monster, up toward the sky. Toward the oxygen and safety all humans instinctively craved, toward the surface world where time flowed like it should.
Maren went down.
He kicked deeper into the ruins he'd mapped by heart, using his hook to swing from column to column. Each impact sent vibrations through metal that hadn't been touched in centuries. The chronophage gained on him in a instant, a heavy coldness pressing on his back as it closed the gap between them.
When its reaching fingers came too close, he sacrificed a length of copper tubing. The creature's reaction was instant, more violent than to the brass or steel. It lunged after the metal with predatory focus, buying Maren enough time to slip through a half-collapsed doorway.
His net was getting lighter. Each piece of salvage lost was one less chance to distract the thing. And it was getting smarter – recovering faster from each diversion, staying focused on its primary prey. He needed something else. A plan.
Maren smiled grimly despite himself, hurtling even faster downwards through the ancient corridors. The only plans that came to mind were those of madmen and lunatics, the kind of desperate gambit that no sane person would ever attempt.
It seemed that would have to do.
The deeper they went, the more his suit protested. Warning creaks from joints never meant to handle this kind of pressure. The rebreather's rhythm growing labored as it cycled murkier, darker water through ancient filters. The familiar hiss of the oxygen tank clicking on filled his suit.
Now he was on a timer. Whatever was left in the tank - barely enough to sustain shallow dives - to get deep enough to find what he needed and get back. That wasn't much time at all.
He flung another piece of copper when the creature got too close, watching with growing dread as it barely hesitated this time. His hand found only two pieces left in the net. Not enough. Not nearly enough to get him back to the surface.
The stories said chronophages could smell fear – could taste the desperate minutes of a prey's panic and track their wake through time itself. That they craved that fine delicacy of a prey's last moments more than anything else.
His suit creaked again, a sound like old bones breaking. The pressure at this depth was crushing, far beyond what salvage gear was built to handle. He could feel the cold seeping in through failing seals, numbing his fingers, making each movement slower. Harder.
It was the fear at his back, the sweat pooling in his suit, that kept him going anyway.
The bathhouse architecture grew stranger the deeper he went. Walls curved in ways that hurt to look at, decorated with mosaics that shifted between intact and ruined with each passing moment. Support columns twisted through multiple points in time, their bases crumbling while their capitals remained pristine.
Something moved in the dark behind him. Not the liquid-metal flow of before, but something more... deliberate. The chronophage was stalking now, not chasing. Learning. It had figured out the trap with the copper, realized he was alone. Now it was taking its time, savoring his fear as it herded him deeper into the ruins.
Then he saw it – another slip shimmering in the murky depths before him, reality fracturing like spider-webbed glass around its edges. The water itself seemed to bend and twist, refusing to flow through the temporal wound.
Slips this massive only formed deep – far deeper than any sane diver would dare to venture. This slip was big enough, Maren was willing to bet, to swallow even the dreaded Chronophages whole.And bet he was going to, because if this didn't work he was as good as dead anyway.
If not from the beast, then from the slip itself - already pulling him in despite the distance between them.
Through its fractured surface, Maren caught glimpses of something impossible: the city as it once was, suspended in open air. Golden spires reached toward a brilliant blue sky he'd only read about in old books. Ships of brass and crystal sailed between towers on winds instead of currents, their crews walking on decks open to the sun instead of sealed in diving suits.
He saw a world that he couldn't quite believe had ever existed, and for a long stunned moment he stared. The books hadn't done the sight justice.
Movement in the dark behind him. The chronophage. He'd let himself get distracted, let wonder overcome survival instinct. Stupid. The creature was closer now, its liquid-metal form condensing into something sharp and hungry. Hesitating.
Even it feared the slips, it seemed, from the way it roiled and paced around its outer edges instead of following him in. Good. That meant he was on the right track, at the very least.
Maren drifted, angling himself towards a floating piece of marble hanging in the slips' orbit. He braced his feet against the column, driving his salvage hook deep into the support that had once held up an entire district. He'd need as much stability as he could, for what he was going to try next.
Against every instinct, he loosened his grip on the hook. Just enough to let the slip's pull take him partway.
One heartbeat. His boots lifted from the ruined floor, the current gentle at first, almost tentative. Like the slip was tasting him, testing if he was really offering himself up.
Two. The golden city beyond the slip's surface grew sharper, more real. Ships of brass and crystal hung suspended in a sky he'd only read about, their sails catching winds that hadn't blown in centuries.
Three beats. Skip.
The pain finally hit him, tearing a silent scream out of his throat as it lanced through him. He understood now why all the echoes of other divers he'd seen had been screaming, had been twisted in agony.
Four beats. His fingertips had gone translucent, trailing afterimages through the water. Like the flower seller, like all the echoes he'd ever guided his teams past.
Five beats. Skip.
Something dark shifted in his peripheral vision. The chronophage. Its liquid-metal surface rippled with hunger. Brass gears ground into existence along its flanks, then melted into rows of teeth – dozens of them, all dripping mercury. Eyes multiplied across its surface until it was more organ than organism, each pupil dilating with want. Its form elongated, stretched, becoming something ancient and monstrous and starving.
Salivating, practically, as Maren put out the sweetest bait he possibly could right in front of it.
Seven beats. Skip.
The slip pulled harder now, hungry for the rest of him. It wanted to drag him fully through, to trap him in that endless moment of drowning. Just like it had taken so many others. Just like it had almost taken him, that first time, when he'd been young and desperate and stupid. Just like he was now.
The chronophage lunged.
Its mercury-slick maw stretched impossibly wide, showing row after row of brass teeth that hadn't existed seconds before. Maren could see his own reflection fractured across its surface – transparent and solid, drowning and breathing, every possible future version of himself staring back at him.
And in each of them, beneath the dirty glass of his helmet, he was smiling.
Eight.
He let the slip's pull take him sideways, his grip on the rope sliding in a controlled release. Not straight back into the slip's hungry maw, but perpendicular to its flow - using the slip's pull against it. The rope burned against his palms as he slid down it, pulled backwards far too quickly.
Nine.
The chronophage's jaws snapped shut on empty water, its dozen eyes blinking in momentary confusion. It twisted to follow, but its own momentum had betrayed it.
Ten.
Maren's arms screamed as he locked his grip on the rope, using the slip's pull and his sideways momentum to swing in an arc around his anchor point. He swapped places with the column, swinging it into the slip in exchange for flinging him out. He let go of the rope with a final yell, watching it slam into the chronophage's flank.
The chronophage, unable to alter its trajectory, plunged straight into the center of the slip he'd so carefully avoided. For a single, suspended moment, it existed in both times at once – its brass-and-mercury form stretching between centuries like taffy. All of its eyes widened in realization, too late to stop its plunge into the slip's center.
Its skin bubbled and writhed as it tried to adapt, to become something that could exist in multiple times at once. Brass gears sprouted and melted and sprouted again, grinding against themselves in configurations that shouldn't be possible. Mercury drool froze in mid-air, then aged a century, then reversed back to liquid.
A sound filled the water – not quite a scream, not quite the grinding of metal, but something worse than either. The chronophage was being torn apart by the very thing it fed on, moments spilling from its rupturing form like blood in the water.
It stretched, shrunk, collapsed into a tiny ball of inky ichor - and then burst.
Centuries of devoured time exploded outward in a cloud of debris. Ancient coins spun through the water, their faces still sharp and pristine. Lost jewelry, flickering in place as they passed his head. A child's toy from before the flood. Wedding rings that never made it home. Each object caught between moments, trying to remember when it should exist.
Something caught his eye among the storm of debris – a small cylinder made of opalescent metal that seemed to bend the light around it, that hurt to look at directly. His hands caught onto it as it drifted past him, as well as every other vaguely valuable scrap that passed, pure muscle memory depositing it into his salvage net. Every movement felt like swimming through molasses, his arms leaden with fatigue.
He let out a long sigh, bubbles escaping his helmet as he stared up at the surface. He was out of oxygen. His rebreather had long given up on processing the murky water of the depths, its recycling systems clogged with sediment. The emergency tank he'd switched to was nearly empty.
The surface might as well have been leagues away.
He floated in the aftermath of the chronophage's death instead, watching centuries of lost history drift like snow through the ruins. It was strangely beautiful, the thought. Not a bad place to die, if he were to choose.
It was better than being consumed. Better than becoming an echo, or ripped to pieces by a crosstide, or any number of horrible deaths. Than dying in another man's war, or fighting for scraps in the street.
His hand found the emergency beacon on his belt. He'd kept it off during the chase – no sense in letting the chronophage kill whoever was fool enough to chase after him. But now he figured someone should get the salvage back to the surface at the very least, even if it were Celern or Kor. There was enough here to feed their families for years.
His fingers were clumsy, almost numb as they flicked the switch. The beacon's soft pulse joined the dance of temporal afterimages in the water.
The cold was seeping deeper now, past his suit's failing seals, past his skin, settling into his bones. He didn't know how long he'd been floating, staring down at the city through the gently pulsing slip below him. His vision started to blur at the edges, the beautiful carnage of the chronophage's death growing dim. Maybe this was what the preachers of the Lifegiver meant, when they spoke of the beauty of death. This gentle fading, this quiet acceptance.
Movement caught his fading vision - a shadow against the ruins above. Probably another echo, he thought. Or his oxygen-starved mind playing tricks. He'd seen too many teammates' ghosts in these waters to trust his eyes now.
But echoes didn't move with that familiar efficiency. Didn't kick through water with that distinctive cross-current technique he'd taught her years ago, when they'd both been young enough to fear the depths.
Static filled his helmet - his comms sputtering to life. Then hands were on his suit, practiced and sure. The hiss of a valve releasing, the click of connections being made as she hooked them up together. He tried to push her away - there wasn't enough oxygen in a single tank for two at this depth - but Kita had always been stronger than him.
She yanked him close enough that he could see her eyes through both their helmets- furious and determined.
"You hypocritical bastard."
The oxygen from her tank was sweeter than any surface air he'd ever breathed.
"Kita," he started, voice faint.
The sound of her voice helped him focus, helped pull his fragmented thoughts back into proper alignment.
"You broke formation," she said as she wrapped her arms around him, feet kicking them both upwards. "After all those lectures about staying together. About trusting the team."
"Had to," he managed. "It would have followed—"
"Shut up," she growled. "Buddy breathe. Like we practiced."
Right. They had to save their oxygen where they could. Yet he couldn't help but ask.
"The others?"
"Safe. Unlike their idiot leader who thought he could solo a Gods damned chronophage." She grabbed his guide rope and clipped it to hers.
Her suit looked a fair bit better than his, but he could tell diving to his depths hadn't been pleasant for her either. That she probably hadn't surfaced at all before coming back for him.
She was a maniac, just like him. He'd have to scold her later about recklessness, about not letting the dead drag her down with them.
He'd also have to thank her later.
"For the record," he said, his own voice echoing strangely in his ears. "I did solo a chronophage."
"Shut up."
Maren could tell by the way she held her salvage hook – white-knuckled, like she was afraid it might get stolen away when she wasn't looking. She couldn't have been older than ten, all sharp elbows and hollow cheeks.
The kind of diver Voss specialized in finding: desperate enough to dive, small enough to slip through gaps in the ruins, young enough not to ask too many questions.
"Loop it through your belt," he said, adjusting her grip. "If you lose it down there Contractor Voss takes it out of your share. And trust me, you don't want to owe him anything if you can help it."
The girl – Maya, he remembered – nodded quickly. Maren withheld a sigh as he watched her hurriedly follow his advice, turning to glance about the miniature docks they were in.
Surrounding them was the stink of fear and recycled air. Twenty kids checking equipment that was too big for them, practiced movements made clumsy by trembling hands. Four team leaders prowled between the groups - all of them like Maren, kids who'd survived long enough to turn fifteen, now too tall to slip through the narrow cracks of the ruins but too experienced to waste.
Kita appeared at his shoulder with heavy footsteps, her voice pitched low.
"Voss is watching you again."
Maren didn't turn to look. He knew what he'd see: the Contractor in his elevated makeshift office, pale eyes noting every interaction. It was all the old bastard did on dive days. He'd sit and he'd watch.
"How did yesterday's dive go?" he asked, pretending to check Kita's rebreather seals for punctures.
"Three died," Kita's voice was flat as she counted them off. "Two caught in a time-slip near the old library. The third... something got him. Kor's team found the pieces."
Maren turned to shoot her a warning look, but the damage was already done.
Maya's hands shook harder, wide eyes now impossibly wider. Maren cursed silently to himself, taking her in. Fear had all but consumed the girl, and fear made you sloppy.
Sloppy got you killed.
A bell rang, the sound sharp enough to cut through the murmur of prayers and equipment checks. Contractor Voss's voice followed, amplified by expensive arcane acoustics.
"Time and tide wait for no one, my little treasures! Teams one through four, you have your maps. Five through eight, standard sweep pattern of sector three. Remember: anything with residual arcana is jackpot. Anything with copper or silver is secondary. Anything with historical value..." A wet chuckle. "Well, that's why we have redundant teams, don't we?"
Maren watched Maya's face. She had caught onto what "redundant" meant in Voss's language instantly, by the way she was looking back at him. Good. At the very least, she had a decent head on her shoulders.
"Team leaders!" Voss called. "Final equipment check. I don't need to remind you what happens if you lose another batch this week."
He did a final check of his team's gear: Maya, who flinched at shadows. Dom, thirteen and already missing two fingers. Pel, who hadn't spoken since watching their sister disappear into a rip current. And Kita, his second, who understood the way he worked better than anyone here.
"Listen close," he said, gathering them in. "Forget Voss's priorities. Forget the salvage. Today's job is coming back alive. All of you. We go in together, we come out together."
They nodded, eyes too old in young faces. Behind them, other teams were already filing toward the water, their leaders barking commands about formation and timing. Maren noticed how many of the kids were new. How many faces were missing from last week.
A shadow fell over their huddle. "Is there a problem, Team Leader Maren?"
Contractor Voss stood behind them, pale eyes calculating. His fine robes hung in artful tatters, deliberately revealing the sacrifice scars beneath—painful, jagged channels carved from neck to hip. Each marking a step up in his climb from poverty.
The divers sometimes whispered amongst themselves in the long darks, debating which of the Twins he'd pledged himself to. Though watching him work with the lash, his evident delight suggested he saw no distinction between pain and pleasure.
"No problem," Maren said carefully. "Just reviewing safety protocols."
"Ah, yes. Safety." Voss smiled, showing teeth filed to points – a fashion statement popular among those who dealt with the Twins. "Such a stickler for safety aren't you, Team Leader? One might almost think you cared more about these little rats than about your mission."
"The dead can't dive," Maren said, keeping his voice neutral. "You taught me that yourself."
"So I did," Voss's smile widened, an ugly sight to say the least. "So I did. Well, don't let me keep you from your safety briefing Team Leader. Time and tide, after all."
He turned to go, then paused.
"Oh and Maren, my boy? Try not to come back empty handed this time. The coin might start to get tight, if you keep on as you have. Coin that might otherwise go toward better equipment. Safer equipment."
Voss left with that threat left lingering in the air, Maren's entire squad tensing their shoulders and glaring after him.
Maren waited until he was out of earshot before speaking again, letting the taunt roll off his back.
"Alright. Formation check. Maya, you're with me. Dom, high watch. Pel, rear guard. Kita—"
"Watch the shadows," she finished. "Like always."
They moved toward the water as a unit, while behind them, Voss's voice rang out again: "Time and tide, my treasures! Time and tide!"
The entry pool was black as ink, its surface occasionally broken by bubbles rising from the Depths. Ancient steps led down into the water, their edges worn smooth by generations of desperate children. Maya hesitated at the top.
"The echoes," she whispered. "Are they... are they really the people who died down there?"
"No," Maren lied. "Just tricks of the light and time. Nothing more."
Maren checked Maya's rebreather seals one last time, fingers moving with practiced care.
"Remember what I taught you about the slips?" he asked, keeping his voice low.
"Don't fight it directly. Move perpendicular to the pull. Use the rope," she said, glancing down towards the heavy hemp rope wrapped through her suit's midsection.
"Good," He adjusted her guide rope, double-checking the knots. "You'll do just fine."
Around them, other teams were already entering the water, their leaders barking last-minute instructions or simply shoving their charges forward. The sound of prayers mixed with the splash of bodies and the hiss of rebreathers cycling.
A sharp crack echoed across the pool. One of the other team leaders had just backhanded a crying boy, sending him stumbling into the water face first.
Calern, Maren recognized with resignation. The other boy had never seemed to learn the art of subtlety, to leading with words over brute force. It was no coincidence then that he also happened to be Voss's favourite.
"Anyone else?" he yelled at the rest of his fresh faced crew. "In the water! Now!"
Maren felt Maya flinch under his hands, eyes stuck watching Calern's fresh recruits being pushed into the waters.
"Hey," he said softly, drawing her attention back. "Look at me. Not them. We do this different, understand? We do this right."
Another lie. There was no right way to send children into the dark. But there were wrong ways, and he'd seen too many of those.
Dom slammed his gloved fist against his chronometer until it finally flickered to life again, coming to life with a hum. It's multitude of needles spun in place haphazardly for a long moment, finally settling in some configuration the other boy seemingly understood. Maren had never had a head for it himself - he was far more at home in the water than with a pen and paper.
Besides, he thought to himself. What use was a device like that when you could only use it when you were safe and dry?
"Slip readings are high today. That storm this morning must have stirred things up." Dom said, thick bushy eyebrows bunched up in a frown.
"We'll take it slow. Stick to the mapped routes."
"Voss won't like that," Kita chimed in, a sharp smirk on her face.
"Voss can go dive himself if he's so concerned."
That earned a small laugh from Maya, quickly stifled. Maren pretended not to notice, but it was good to hear. Better than the broken sobs some of the other kids were trying to hide.
Kita let out her own bark of laughter, rolling her eyes as she pulled her rust coloured hair through her helmet.
"And you wonder why he doesn't like you, Meran."
"Trust me," he said, putting on his own helmet. "I don't."
Dom and Pel moved into position without being told, their own gear checked and double-checked. They'd done this enough times to know the routine. To know the cost of carelessness.
They descended as a unit, the water closing over their heads like a burial shroud.
The first hundred heartbeats of the dive were the easiest – just following the ancient pillars down, past the remnants of the middle city. Here the currents of time were gentle, barely noticeable. Just enough to make the shadows move wrong, to make the distance play tricks on your eyes.
The things that lived in the Depths weren't real, not exactly. Just echoes caught in pockets of a different time, endlessly repeating the day the old city had drowned.
"Remember to count your heartbeats," he spoke through his mic - the telltale hiss of static accompanying it. "Don't trust your eyes, don't trust your instincts. If your heartbeats start skipping, that's when you'll know you're getting pulled into a slip."
Maya's hand tightened on his guide rope in acknowledgment. Behind them, Kita led the second line, with Dom and Pel spread wide to watch their flanks. The deeper they went, the more the city twisted around them. Streets ended abruptly in walls that hadn't existed seconds before. Archways led to moments fifty years apart. A ancient temple spire hung suspended above them, its base and tip existing in different decades.
A flicker of movement caught his eye – a ghostly patron stepping into a long-destroyed bath, towel wrapped around shoulders that dissolved into nothing. Maren forced his gaze away.
"Eyes forward," he called, heavy metal feet landing gently onto a shattered city square.
A woman at a flower stall handed bouquets to customers who hadn't existed in three hundred years. The flowers bloomed and died and bloomed again, petals scattering in complex patterns through the currents. He tugged at the guide rope as some of his team lingered, heads turning to watch.
The echoes weren't dangerous in of itself, but watching them too long meant distraction. Distraction was what got you sucked into a slip before you even realized you'd floated too close - left your mind stuck in that eternal moment while your body drowned in the present.
Turned you into a echo yourself, endlessly repeating those last three seconds of your life for all future divers to see.
Maren had yet to witness a more painful way to die than that.
He signaled a halt as they reached the bathhouse proper. The building lay at an angle, its dome half-buried in the silt of centuries. Inside, the bathhouse was a maze of broken tiles and fallen columns.
Maren gestured to the team to spread out, keeping to their practiced formation. Maya stayed close, her movements careful as she swept her light across the debris. Something caught his eye – a glint of copper piping, relatively intact, threaded with traces of residual arcana that made it shimmer like oil on water. He gestured Maya closer, showing her how to work her salvage hook around the fitting without disturbing the surrounding rubble.
The pipe came free with a gentle tug, and he secured it to his collection net. Not a bad start. They worked methodically through the chamber, collecting what they could. Dom found a silver-inlaid tile panel, mostly whole. Pel recovered several lengths of arcane-touched wire. Even Kita, usually focused solely on watching their backs, managed to pocket a handful of semi-precious stones from a shattered mosaic.
He carried the burden of the team's salvage in his net, carefully balancing the added weight with practiced ease.
It was going well – too well. That should have been his first warning. Maren helped Maya secure another length of copper piping to his collection net, noting with approval how quickly she moved onto the next. The girl was a quick study. Maybe she'd survive after all.
That's when he noticed it. Or rather, noticed what wasn't there.
The silt. The fine layer of dust that should have been disturbed by their movements was missing. Not settled, not swirling in their wake – just gone. Like something had already passed through recently. Something big.
He rapped his salvage hook against the wall twice, a warning signal. His team froze instantly, their lights dimming on command. Sweat trickled down Maren's spine inside the salvage suit, the recycled air growing staler with each breath. These suits weren't meant for extended dives – just quick smash-and-grabs.
No emergency tanks, no propulsion units, not even decent thermal regulation. Just thin layers of treated fabric, rusty metal joints and a heavy dose of prayer to keep it all together.
They weren't built for whatever was lurking in the Depths with them.
The silence stretched, broken only by the soft hiss of rebreathers and the distant groan of ancient stone. The water around them seemed to thicken, pressing against his suit with unnatural weight.
That's when Maren saw it – a shimmer in the water where there shouldn't be one. Not the familiar ripple of an echo, but something darker. More wrong. A mass of twisted shapes emerging from behind a fallen column, its form constantly shifting between states of being.
One moment it was brass and copper, all grinding gears and clicking parts that shouldn't work underwater. The next it was something like flesh, rippling with impossible muscles that flowed like mercury. Corrupted arcana at its worst – a thing caught between moments, neither fully here nor fully then.
"Chronophage," Kita's voice was barely a breath, simultaneously awe and horror.
Maren had heard stories of them, of course. Every diver worth their salt had. Creatures that fed on lost time, drawn to places where reality had worn too thin to support any other kind of life. They were supposed to be myths, dark fairy tales shared over drinks in the surface bars. They were supposed to stay in the deepest parts of the ruins, where no sane diver would venture.
They weren't supposed to be real.
"Stop," he said, forcing his voice steady. "Nobody move."
The creature paused, its form flickering in place as it seemed to taste the water around them. Maren could see why the silt was gone now. The thing hadn't removed the silt itself. It'd consumed the period in time where each individual piece had drifted and landed onto the floor in the first place.
It'd eaten time itself, if the tales were to be believed.
The chronophage's head – if you could call it that – swiveled toward them. In one moment it had eyes, dozens of them, all blinking out of sync. In the next it was smooth brass, with lens-like protrusions that looked in every direction at once. Where its liquid-metal form brushed against a fallen column, the marble aged centuries in seconds, crumbling to dust before snapping back to pristine stone.
He heard Maya's small, choked sound of terror through the comm.
Shit.
The creature's head snapped toward the noise, its dozen eyes focusing with predatory intensity. In that split second of recognition, Maren saw its form condense, becoming something sharper, hungrier.
"Go!" he yelled, shoving Maya ahead as the chronophage surged forward. His team scattered into the maze of fallen columns, training taking over – stay low, stay moving, don't look back.
Maren grabbed a protruding pipe and used it to swing himself around a corner, the momentum carrying him through the water faster than kicking alone. Every diver worth their salt knew how to read ruins like a three-dimensional map, using any projection or ridge to pull themselves forward.
The chronophage lunged again, forcing him to twist awkwardly in the water. His salvage hook caught a decorative arch, letting him use his momentum to swing up and over as the creature passed beneath him, close enough that he could see his own reflection fractured across its surface.
They wouldn't outrun it. Not conventionally. The thing moved through moments like they were water, flowing between seconds as easily as they moved through space. Maren's mind raced as they fled deeper into the bathhouse, past doorways that opened onto nothing and windows that showed impossible views of a city long dead.
That's when he saw it – a narrow space between fallen columns where the water moved strangely, catching the light wrong. A rip current. Risky. Those would sweep you off your feet, spit you out anywhere and anytime in the Depths it pleased.
But right now, 'anywhere but here' was exactly what they needed.
"Through the rip!" he commanded. "Now!"
His team responded with desperate precision. Dom went first, using his hook to control his entry into the warped space. Pel followed, then Maya, guided by Kita's steady hand. The water churned around them, growing thick and strange as the creature's presence warped time itself. Support beams creaked overhead, aging decades every second, then snapping back to their original state.
Kita paused for a second at the threshold, half-turned toward him. Even through the murk and her helmet, he could see the suspicion in her eyes. She'd always been too good at reading him.
"Right behind you," he lied for the third time today, shoving her through the gap before she could hesitate any longer. Her outstretched hand passed through where his should have been, grasping empty water as the current took her.
Maren twisted and kicked hard in the opposite direction just as the chronophage lunged after them, slamming into the far wall in a cloud of disturbed silt and ancient debris.
His collection net dragged behind him – too much weight, too much drag. Hiis fingers closed around a brass fitting they'd salvaged earlier, hurling it past the creature's head. Its dozen eyes snapped toward the movement, form rippling as it lunged to swallow it whole.
The distraction bought him precious seconds to drive his hook into a fallen column and slingshot himself deeper into the ruins, hand reaching back for another piece of bait.
"Sorry, Kita," he whispered, knowing she'd figure out his betrayal the moment she emerged from the current.
Hopefully it'd spit her out far enough she couldn't come back to kill him.
The chronophage recovered quickly, liquid-metal form stretching as it resumed pursuit. Maren grabbed another piece from his net – an ancient gear this time – and let it tumble through the water. The creature's head twisted to follow its path, but its body kept coming. Learning already. He'd need something better.
Any sane diver would flee up when chased by a monster, up toward the sky. Toward the oxygen and safety all humans instinctively craved, toward the surface world where time flowed like it should.
Maren went down.
He kicked deeper into the ruins he'd mapped by heart, using his hook to swing from column to column. Each impact sent vibrations through metal that hadn't been touched in centuries. The chronophage gained on him in a instant, a heavy coldness pressing on his back as it closed the gap between them.
When its reaching fingers came too close, he sacrificed a length of copper tubing. The creature's reaction was instant, more violent than to the brass or steel. It lunged after the metal with predatory focus, buying Maren enough time to slip through a half-collapsed doorway.
His net was getting lighter. Each piece of salvage lost was one less chance to distract the thing. And it was getting smarter – recovering faster from each diversion, staying focused on its primary prey. He needed something else. A plan.
Maren smiled grimly despite himself, hurtling even faster downwards through the ancient corridors. The only plans that came to mind were those of madmen and lunatics, the kind of desperate gambit that no sane person would ever attempt.
It seemed that would have to do.
The deeper they went, the more his suit protested. Warning creaks from joints never meant to handle this kind of pressure. The rebreather's rhythm growing labored as it cycled murkier, darker water through ancient filters. The familiar hiss of the oxygen tank clicking on filled his suit.
Now he was on a timer. Whatever was left in the tank - barely enough to sustain shallow dives - to get deep enough to find what he needed and get back. That wasn't much time at all.
He flung another piece of copper when the creature got too close, watching with growing dread as it barely hesitated this time. His hand found only two pieces left in the net. Not enough. Not nearly enough to get him back to the surface.
The stories said chronophages could smell fear – could taste the desperate minutes of a prey's panic and track their wake through time itself. That they craved that fine delicacy of a prey's last moments more than anything else.
His suit creaked again, a sound like old bones breaking. The pressure at this depth was crushing, far beyond what salvage gear was built to handle. He could feel the cold seeping in through failing seals, numbing his fingers, making each movement slower. Harder.
It was the fear at his back, the sweat pooling in his suit, that kept him going anyway.
The bathhouse architecture grew stranger the deeper he went. Walls curved in ways that hurt to look at, decorated with mosaics that shifted between intact and ruined with each passing moment. Support columns twisted through multiple points in time, their bases crumbling while their capitals remained pristine.
Something moved in the dark behind him. Not the liquid-metal flow of before, but something more... deliberate. The chronophage was stalking now, not chasing. Learning. It had figured out the trap with the copper, realized he was alone. Now it was taking its time, savoring his fear as it herded him deeper into the ruins.
Then he saw it – another slip shimmering in the murky depths before him, reality fracturing like spider-webbed glass around its edges. The water itself seemed to bend and twist, refusing to flow through the temporal wound.
Slips this massive only formed deep – far deeper than any sane diver would dare to venture. This slip was big enough, Maren was willing to bet, to swallow even the dreaded Chronophages whole.And bet he was going to, because if this didn't work he was as good as dead anyway.
If not from the beast, then from the slip itself - already pulling him in despite the distance between them.
Through its fractured surface, Maren caught glimpses of something impossible: the city as it once was, suspended in open air. Golden spires reached toward a brilliant blue sky he'd only read about in old books. Ships of brass and crystal sailed between towers on winds instead of currents, their crews walking on decks open to the sun instead of sealed in diving suits.
He saw a world that he couldn't quite believe had ever existed, and for a long stunned moment he stared. The books hadn't done the sight justice.
Movement in the dark behind him. The chronophage. He'd let himself get distracted, let wonder overcome survival instinct. Stupid. The creature was closer now, its liquid-metal form condensing into something sharp and hungry. Hesitating.
Even it feared the slips, it seemed, from the way it roiled and paced around its outer edges instead of following him in. Good. That meant he was on the right track, at the very least.
Maren drifted, angling himself towards a floating piece of marble hanging in the slips' orbit. He braced his feet against the column, driving his salvage hook deep into the support that had once held up an entire district. He'd need as much stability as he could, for what he was going to try next.
Against every instinct, he loosened his grip on the hook. Just enough to let the slip's pull take him partway.
One heartbeat. His boots lifted from the ruined floor, the current gentle at first, almost tentative. Like the slip was tasting him, testing if he was really offering himself up.
Two. The golden city beyond the slip's surface grew sharper, more real. Ships of brass and crystal hung suspended in a sky he'd only read about, their sails catching winds that hadn't blown in centuries.
Three beats. Skip.
The pain finally hit him, tearing a silent scream out of his throat as it lanced through him. He understood now why all the echoes of other divers he'd seen had been screaming, had been twisted in agony.
Four beats. His fingertips had gone translucent, trailing afterimages through the water. Like the flower seller, like all the echoes he'd ever guided his teams past.
Five beats. Skip.
Something dark shifted in his peripheral vision. The chronophage. Its liquid-metal surface rippled with hunger. Brass gears ground into existence along its flanks, then melted into rows of teeth – dozens of them, all dripping mercury. Eyes multiplied across its surface until it was more organ than organism, each pupil dilating with want. Its form elongated, stretched, becoming something ancient and monstrous and starving.
Salivating, practically, as Maren put out the sweetest bait he possibly could right in front of it.
Seven beats. Skip.
The slip pulled harder now, hungry for the rest of him. It wanted to drag him fully through, to trap him in that endless moment of drowning. Just like it had taken so many others. Just like it had almost taken him, that first time, when he'd been young and desperate and stupid. Just like he was now.
The chronophage lunged.
Its mercury-slick maw stretched impossibly wide, showing row after row of brass teeth that hadn't existed seconds before. Maren could see his own reflection fractured across its surface – transparent and solid, drowning and breathing, every possible future version of himself staring back at him.
And in each of them, beneath the dirty glass of his helmet, he was smiling.
Eight.
He let the slip's pull take him sideways, his grip on the rope sliding in a controlled release. Not straight back into the slip's hungry maw, but perpendicular to its flow - using the slip's pull against it. The rope burned against his palms as he slid down it, pulled backwards far too quickly.
Nine.
The chronophage's jaws snapped shut on empty water, its dozen eyes blinking in momentary confusion. It twisted to follow, but its own momentum had betrayed it.
Ten.
Maren's arms screamed as he locked his grip on the rope, using the slip's pull and his sideways momentum to swing in an arc around his anchor point. He swapped places with the column, swinging it into the slip in exchange for flinging him out. He let go of the rope with a final yell, watching it slam into the chronophage's flank.
The chronophage, unable to alter its trajectory, plunged straight into the center of the slip he'd so carefully avoided. For a single, suspended moment, it existed in both times at once – its brass-and-mercury form stretching between centuries like taffy. All of its eyes widened in realization, too late to stop its plunge into the slip's center.
Its skin bubbled and writhed as it tried to adapt, to become something that could exist in multiple times at once. Brass gears sprouted and melted and sprouted again, grinding against themselves in configurations that shouldn't be possible. Mercury drool froze in mid-air, then aged a century, then reversed back to liquid.
A sound filled the water – not quite a scream, not quite the grinding of metal, but something worse than either. The chronophage was being torn apart by the very thing it fed on, moments spilling from its rupturing form like blood in the water.
It stretched, shrunk, collapsed into a tiny ball of inky ichor - and then burst.
Centuries of devoured time exploded outward in a cloud of debris. Ancient coins spun through the water, their faces still sharp and pristine. Lost jewelry, flickering in place as they passed his head. A child's toy from before the flood. Wedding rings that never made it home. Each object caught between moments, trying to remember when it should exist.
Something caught his eye among the storm of debris – a small cylinder made of opalescent metal that seemed to bend the light around it, that hurt to look at directly. His hands caught onto it as it drifted past him, as well as every other vaguely valuable scrap that passed, pure muscle memory depositing it into his salvage net. Every movement felt like swimming through molasses, his arms leaden with fatigue.
He let out a long sigh, bubbles escaping his helmet as he stared up at the surface. He was out of oxygen. His rebreather had long given up on processing the murky water of the depths, its recycling systems clogged with sediment. The emergency tank he'd switched to was nearly empty.
The surface might as well have been leagues away.
He floated in the aftermath of the chronophage's death instead, watching centuries of lost history drift like snow through the ruins. It was strangely beautiful, the thought. Not a bad place to die, if he were to choose.
It was better than being consumed. Better than becoming an echo, or ripped to pieces by a crosstide, or any number of horrible deaths. Than dying in another man's war, or fighting for scraps in the street.
His hand found the emergency beacon on his belt. He'd kept it off during the chase – no sense in letting the chronophage kill whoever was fool enough to chase after him. But now he figured someone should get the salvage back to the surface at the very least, even if it were Celern or Kor. There was enough here to feed their families for years.
His fingers were clumsy, almost numb as they flicked the switch. The beacon's soft pulse joined the dance of temporal afterimages in the water.
The cold was seeping deeper now, past his suit's failing seals, past his skin, settling into his bones. He didn't know how long he'd been floating, staring down at the city through the gently pulsing slip below him. His vision started to blur at the edges, the beautiful carnage of the chronophage's death growing dim. Maybe this was what the preachers of the Lifegiver meant, when they spoke of the beauty of death. This gentle fading, this quiet acceptance.
Movement caught his fading vision - a shadow against the ruins above. Probably another echo, he thought. Or his oxygen-starved mind playing tricks. He'd seen too many teammates' ghosts in these waters to trust his eyes now.
But echoes didn't move with that familiar efficiency. Didn't kick through water with that distinctive cross-current technique he'd taught her years ago, when they'd both been young enough to fear the depths.
Static filled his helmet - his comms sputtering to life. Then hands were on his suit, practiced and sure. The hiss of a valve releasing, the click of connections being made as she hooked them up together. He tried to push her away - there wasn't enough oxygen in a single tank for two at this depth - but Kita had always been stronger than him.
She yanked him close enough that he could see her eyes through both their helmets- furious and determined.
"You hypocritical bastard."
The oxygen from her tank was sweeter than any surface air he'd ever breathed.
"Kita," he started, voice faint.
The sound of her voice helped him focus, helped pull his fragmented thoughts back into proper alignment.
"You broke formation," she said as she wrapped her arms around him, feet kicking them both upwards. "After all those lectures about staying together. About trusting the team."
"Had to," he managed. "It would have followed—"
"Shut up," she growled. "Buddy breathe. Like we practiced."
Right. They had to save their oxygen where they could. Yet he couldn't help but ask.
"The others?"
"Safe. Unlike their idiot leader who thought he could solo a Gods damned chronophage." She grabbed his guide rope and clipped it to hers.
Her suit looked a fair bit better than his, but he could tell diving to his depths hadn't been pleasant for her either. That she probably hadn't surfaced at all before coming back for him.
She was a maniac, just like him. He'd have to scold her later about recklessness, about not letting the dead drag her down with them.
He'd also have to thank her later.
"For the record," he said, his own voice echoing strangely in his ears. "I did solo a chronophage."
"Shut up."
1.2
New
Voss didn't like the chronophage story. Not one bit.
Maren could tell by the way the Contractor's pale eyes kept drifting back to their salvage pile, fingers drumming against his desk in an uneven rhythm.
Maren stood in front of him, head held high. It'd only been hours since he'd surfaced, since the other divers had swamped him for answers and death threats and hugs. And already they were discussing business.
That was simply how Voss conducted his enterprise, something Maren knew that all too well.
"A fascinating tale," Voss said finally. "Though I must admit, I'm curious why none of the other teams reported seeing this... creature."
"Luck," Maren said, keeping his voice neutral. "Bad or good, depending on how you look at it."
"Luck," Voss pulled the pipe out of his mouth, setting it down on his ornate desk. "Let me share something about myself, boy, since we're being candid with each other. I don't believe in luck. I believe in circumstance - in being born higher or lower than others. In being given everything..."
Maren's eyes followed his fingers as they traced a scar running down his arm. He wondered if the other man even knew he was doing it.
"Or having to take it for yourself."
Maren kept his face carefully neutral, nodding along as the other man spoke.
"But luck?" Voss continued. "I believe people make their own luck. Like myself, scraping and clawing my way to where I am now. Or perhaps - purely hypothetically of course - a diver could make their own luck by going past where he's meant to, break quarantines he know he's not supposed to. The type of quarantines that come with death penalties attached to them."
His eyes fixed on Maren, pale as sun-bleached bone. He reached forward into the pile of salvage laid out on his desk, pulling out a gleaming pearl necklace.
"The kind of luck that brings back what is obviously deep city salvage from what was supposed to be a shallow sweep."
"The Chronophage - " Maren started.
"Don't try to sell me that load of shit twice, boy." Voss practically growled, leaning over his desk. "It will not be good for your long term health if you do."
Maren stared at Voss for a long moment before dropping his shoulders slightly. "You're right. The story doesn't matter."
"No," Voss said. "It doesn't."
"What matters is the salvage." Maren gestured at the pile. "Clean goods, delivered straight to you with no loss on your end."
Though 'no loss' was a bit of a stretch. His suit and possibly Kita's would need to be replaced, but he didn't have to know that quite yet.
Voss's laugh cut through the air like shattered glass.
"Do you think I built this enterprise by grabbing every shiny thing within arm's reach?" He stood, towering over his desk. "No. It was control, boy. Restraint. That's what keeps us all alive and wealthy. One greedy diver getting into cracks he's not mean to is how operations like ours get noticed. Get shut down."
It would be so easy, Maren thought idly, to kill him now. The heavy metal still rested on the table in between them as Voss spoke. Each more than heavy enough to do the job. He would be dead before the guards could burst in the door.
Maren let the whole situation play back in his head, watched it unfold in all the different ways it possibly could, before consciously letting the thought pass.
He was better than that. For now, at least.
"And when we get shut down, where do you think your precious friends go? Back to knife fighting in the muck over stale bread, that's what." He tapped the desk with one finger, the sound sharp in the stillness. "So here's what happens. We mix in your haul slowly over the next six that get sold, make it disappear without anyone ever the wiser. And you, my friend, never venture past the depth I assign you again. Am I understood, Team Leader?"
"What about our cut?"
"What?"
"We brought in a full turning's worth of scrap in a day. We get a cut of that. That was the deal, Voss. Results get rewarded."
"Perhaps I wasn't clear," Voss picked up the pearl necklace again, shaking it violently at him. "This isn't value. This is a problem. And I don't like it when my divers bring me problems."
"I understand, Contractor, but - "
"What you don't seem to understand is that this isn't a negotiation. This is me disciplining you. Is that clear?"
Maren bit himself from replying again, reigning the thunder in his heart back.
"Yes, sir."
"Three dive days. That's how long your crew will stay dry. It wouldn't do to send a message to the rest that recklessness like this will be rewarded."
"I understand," Maren said quietly.
"Good." Voss set the necklace down with deliberate care. "I'd hate to lose a team leader of your caliber over something as trivial as... luck."
The word dripped with heavy sarcasm, a scowl of distaste twisting his face.
As Maren turned to leave, Voss spoke again.
"Oh, and one more thing. Next time you want to lie to me? Come up with something better than time-eating monsters. I happen to appreciate a good liar, but bad ones are irritating like nothing else."
Maren kept his face carefully blank as he left the office.
The team was waiting for him in their usual spot, tucked into the shadows beneath a creaking dock. Even from a distance, Maren could read their tension - the way Dom's fingers kept tapping against his chronometer, how Pel's shoulders hunched forward, Maya's restless pacing. Only Kita stood still, arms crossed as she leaned against a weathered pylon.
They'd cleaned up since the dive, but exhaustion still clung to them like old dive suits. The kind of bone-deep weariness that came from brushing too close to death.
Maren's footsteps on the wooden planks above made them all look up. He didn't waste time with pleasantries.
"Three days dry."
The words fell like stones into still water. Dom's fingers froze mid-tap. Pel's shoulders somehow managed to hunch even further. Maya just looked confused, too new to understand what it meant.
"Voss can't do that," Dom said, voice cracking.
"He can," Kita cut in. "And he did. Why?"
"He didn't buy our story," Maren said softly, climbing down the docks to meet them.
"Shit," Dom muttered, arms crossed as he paced beside them. "I told you we should have just kept it, sold it ourself - "
"And Voss's counters would've found out anyway," Kita sighed, crossing her arms. "What's done is done."
"Right. Voss thinks we broke the rules to get what we got. The kind that would draw the attention of the sort of people we don't want to notice us."
"The rich prick sort," Kita translated for Maya's benefit.
"Which means," Maren continued, "we've got about three days worth of coin between us, and nothing else coming in until Voss decides we've learned our lesson."
He let that sink in for a moment, watching their faces. Dom was already doing calculations in his head, probably trying to figure out how to stretch his savings. Pel had gone completely still, the way they did when things got really bad. Maya looked like she might bolt at any second.
None of them were complaining about the fairness of it all - or blaming him for bringing the salvage in in the first place. That didn't mean he didn't feel obligated to make up for it.
"So," he said, forcing lightness into his voice, "might as well spend some of it at the Drowned Rat first. One good meal before we start tightening belts."
That got their attention. The Drowned Rat wasn't just a tavern - it was the tavern, where divers went to celebrate surviving another day in the deep. Where the active crews made deals over smuggled upper city whiskey, and old timers told tall tales like that of the dreaded Chronophage.
He was going to be giving those tall tales a lot more attention tonight, he knew that for sure.
"We can't afford-" Dom started.
"My treat," Maren cut him off. "Consider it an apology."
Kita snorted. "You mean the part where you tried to commit suicide in the water, or the part where that lead tongue of yours got us even deeper in the shit?"
"Both?" He offered a sheepish grin. "Come on. Real food for once. With meat we can actually identify?"
They didn't need much convincing after that. Even Pel's shoulders relaxed slightly at the prospect of a hot meal. They fell into formation without thinking - Maya and Dom in front, Pel in the middle, Kita and Maren bringing up the rear. Old habits died hard.
The Drowned Rat lived up to its name, precariously perched above the water with wooden stilts. The tavern stayed afloat through a maze of ropes and pulleys that adjusted with the water levels, its wooden walls marked with layers of waterlines like growth rings on a tree.
Its patrons joked the damn thing was more boat than building, but that was practically how every other building stayed intact in the Tides. The windows glowed with warm light, and the smell of actual cooking - not reconstituted protein or preserved rations - made their stomachs growl in unison.
Inside, shrines to various gods occupied the corners. The largest belonged to the Twin Gods, their doubled faces frozen in eternal expressions of ecstasy and agony. Appropriate, given how many divers came here to celebrate survival or drink away close calls.
A smaller shrine to the Wanderer was tucked away behind the bar, easily missed unless you knew to look for it. The walls were decorated with salvage pieces - copper pipes twisted into abstract art, brass fittings polished to a shine, silver plaques etched with ancient writings. The one god outcast by the rest, lurking in their shadows. Forgotten.
The people in the Tides had a particular affinity for that. A sympathy.
The tavern keeper, an old diver named Sarn who'd lost both legs to the deep, nodded as they entered. He was already pulling out glasses before they reached the bar.
"Heard about the chronophage," he said without preamble. "Wasn't sure if I'd see you tonight."
News traveled fast in the diving community. It was easy to forget that Voss's gang of children weren't the only people scouring the sunken city. Here, in the place they all came to rest, it was all too apparent how outnumbered they were. Maren could feel other eyes on them now - other diving crews sizing them up, weighing the truth of the story against their own experiences in the deep.
"Can't kill me that easy Sarn," Maren said, keeping his voice casual. "You know that. Table for five?"
Sarn's eyes flickered to Maya, noting the new face. "Yeah, we got space. The usual?"
"Better make it the full feast," Maren said, sliding over more coin than he could really afford. "Might be our last for a while."
Understanding crossed Sarn's weathered face. He'd seen enough teams come through hard times to know what that meant. Without a word, he added an extra bottle to their order.
They settled into their usual corner, where they could keep their backs to the wall and watch the room. Maya looked overwhelmed by it all, her eyes darting between the shrines and the salvage art and the other diving teams.
"Only one rule," Kita said, noticing the girl's nervous energy. "We pay respects before drinking."
Maren raised an eyebrow at her across the table, letting a smile form on his face. Kita always acted standoffish to the newbies, but it was her who grew attached to them the quickest. Looked out for them, in her own way.
"Let her do it," he jut in, waving towards Maya. She looked back at him, and in her eyes he saw a blend of emotions he couldn't help but feel nostalgic for.
He remembered when he'd done his first dive, how he'd been in awe of the older divers. How he'd watched and copied every move they made. He'd thought his first mentor was a legend amongst divers, one of the best to ever do it.
He was dead now, last he'd heard. Caught in a slip.
The table fell silent as Maya glanced nervously between them, her fingers tightening around the chipped glass in her hands. Kita gestured toward her with a tilt of her head.
"Go on. Speak your piece. Can be any words that come to mind."
Maya swallowed hard, her lips parting and closing for a long moment.
"To the lost," she finally said, her tone wavering. "To those the deep kept."
"To the lost," they echoed, Pel even breaking their self-imposed silence. The ritual complete, they drank. The rotgut the tavern served could probably strip the rust off pipes, the way it burned down Marens' throat. Perfect for dulling the nerves.
The food came in waves - real bread still warm from the oven, fish stew thick with actual vegetables, meat that might have actually seen daylight at some point. They fell on it like starving things, the comfort of real food loosening tongues that had been tight with tension since the dive.
"So," Maren said, watching Maya pick at her stew. "How was your first dive?"
The girl looked up, startled to be addressed directly. "I... um." She glanced around the table, then managed a weak smile. "Better than some, I guess? At least I didn't get eaten."
"That's the spirit," Kita said dryly. "Set those standards nice and low."
Even Pel cracked a small grin at that. The food and warmth were working their magic, washing away some of the day's terror. Dom reached for his chronometer again, the familiar gesture almost unconscious.
"You and that damn thing," Kita said, rolling her eyes. "What're you hoping to find? The exact time we all almost died?"
"If it had been working properly," Dom muttered, adjusting something inside the casing, "Maybe I'd have noticed something was up with our sector. Maybe we wouldn't have been down there at all, Kita."
"You don't know that," Maren said. "There's no use worrying about it now."
"Easy for you to say." Dom's voice had an edge to it now. "You've got it figured out, don't you? Happy to keep diving until something finally kills us."
The table went quiet. Maya stared down at her bowl, suddenly very interested in her stew. Pel's shoulders hunched forward slightly.
Maren finally broke the silence, all the mirth gone from his face.
"Dom. Tell me you didn't ask Voss for a Contract."
"I didn't. I went to the temples. To the Weaver's sisters," Dom said finally, crossing his arms defensively. "And I'm thinking about saying yes."
Maren set down his spoon carefully.
"No, you're not. Not if you have any sense at all. The sisters are no different from Voss, even if they pretend not to be."
"You know what?" Dom's face flushed red as he half-rose from his seat. "That's real easy to say where you're sitting. You're comfortable with this life. With seeing people die every day, with losing fingers and time and life for scraps of copper. But I'm not. I'm… I'm sick of not knowing which dive's going to be my last."
"That doesn't mean you have to Contract," he hissed, the good mood at the table now thoroughly gone. The rest of their team watched the two go at it, eyes darting between them as they traded blows. "There's other work. Safer work, if that's your issue."
"The terms are good," Dom insisted. " More coin than I could earn even if I spent the rest of Enough to set up my family, maybe have kids someday. All they want is memories, Maren. Bad memories.Things I'd rather forget anyway."
"What damn use is to have coin when you could end up not even remembering your own sister's name?"
"That won't happen. The contract—"
"The contract is temporary. Open to revision.They take the bad memories first, sure. Then when those run out, they start on the rest. The good ones. The important ones. Everything that makes you who you are. Trust me on this."
Dom sank back into his seat, the fight draining out of him.
"Yeah, well," he muttered. "At least I'd be alive to forget."
"That's not living," Maya said suddenly. Everyone turned to look at her, and she flushed but continued. "That's... that's just another kind of drowning, isn't it? Trading who you are for safety?"
The table fell quiet, both Maren and Dom turning to her.
"My mother was a diver for a long time, before she lost her leg," she said, staring into her stew. "She used to tell me stories about the deep.. She said... she said there was freedom in it. That down there, it didn't matter where you came from or who your parents were. The deep treated everyone the same."
"Your mother sounds wise," Kita said.
"She was." Maya's voice was barely a whisper. "Until she wasn't. Until she took a Contract like the one you're talking about, and she didn't remember I was her daughter anymore."
The silence that followed was heavy with understanding.
"To the lost," Maren said softly, raising his glass again.
Dom silently raised his own glass to his, brows furrowed with heavy thoughts. Maren would have to talk to him again, when he'd had some time to think. But for now they drank in silence, each lost in their own memories.
"So…" Kita broke the silence again, staring at Maren. "What actually happened, after we left?"
"I told you what happened."
That got a table-full of groans and glares.
"No, you said 'I took care of it'. That's not telling us what happened, your asshole. We want to know how in the hells you killed a chronophage."
"He didn't," a new voice cut in, sharp with barely contained anger. "Because there was no chronophage."
Calern stood at their table's edge, his own team lurking behind him like shadows. The other team leader's face was twisted in its usual sneer, but there was something else in his eyes. Something desperate.
"Funny thing," he continued, voice pitched low enough that only their table could hear. "My team's sector came up empty today. Completely stripped. Like someone had already been through."
The threat in his voice was clear as temple bells. Maren set down his spoon with deliberate care.
"Something on your mind, Calern?"
"Just wondering how your team managed to haul in so much salvage from a standard sweep." Calern leaned forward, planting his hands on their table. "When everywhere else was picked clean."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop. Even Sarn had stopped polishing glasses, his weathered hands resting near the club he kept under the bar.
"Maybe your team's losing their touch," Maren said softly. "Or maybe you should consider not diving at all, after what we saw today. Shallow waters aren't safe anymore.".
"Watch yourself, Maren," he spat. "Those who dive too deep tend to find things that should stay buried." He straightened up, trying to salvage some dignity. "Assuming they surface at all."
He stalked away, his team trailing in his wake. The room's tension broke like a wave, conversations resuming with renewed energy.
"Well," Kita said dryly, "that was subtle."
"As always," Dom tacked on, shooting the back of Calerns' head a ugly look.
Maren picked his spoon back up. "Eat. Food's getting cold."
They finished their meal in relative quiet, but the easy camaraderie from before was gone. Reality had crept back in, cold as deep water. When they finally left the Drowned Rat, the mists had rolled in from the water, turning the street into a grey soup.
The team split up at the first intersection - Dom heading for the medicine shops, Pel vanishing into the shadows with a polite nod like they always did, Maya scampering off toward whatever hole she called home. Only Kita remained, falling into step beside Maren as they walked.
They passed beneath a recruitment poster, its colors too bright against the perpetual grey of the lower city. A naval officer stared down at them with eyes of burnished gold, gleaming even through the still image.
Half his face was hidden behind an ornate mask of brass and silver, the elaborate emblem of Highgrave etched over his cheek. Where his right arm should have been was a construct of pure white - marble, maybe, or just high quality stone - held up in a salute.
The other half of his brother's face stared back at Maren, identical to his own features down to the tiniest eyelash.
"Still can't believe that's him," Kita said quietly.
Maren stared at the poster for a long moment, taking it. The recruitment text beneath read: "Ascend to Divinity: If you suspect yourself of being a God-Touched, approach your nearest clergyman to get tested. Glory awaits."
"That's not him anymore," Maren said finally. "He's just another one of them now."
"You sure about that?" She whispered back, hand grasping his shoulder. "Because your mouth says that but your face tells me you don't believe that."
"Yeah," he muttered, turning away from the poster. "I'm sure."
They walked in comfortable silence through the winding streets of the Tides, their feet carrying them along a path worn smooth by years of habit. Neither needed to speak as they navigated the maze of floating walkways and rope bridges – they'd made this journey countless times before, back when they were three instead of two.
The mist that perpetually shrouded the lower city was touched with strange colors here - deep blues and purples from the arcane lights above, fragments of the upper city's eternal day filtering down to paint their twilight world.
Every few blocks, they passed beneath another pylon, its base alone wider than any building in the Tides. Surface runoff from the city above them created artificial waterfalls that cascaded down the pylons, gathering in the makeshift channels people had set up to collect the fresh water. The constant sound of falling water was a reminder of their place - forever watching the excess of the upper city quite literally rain down upon them.
The old belltower rose before them, its ancient spire listing dangerously to one side where the flood had weakened its foundations. Most would look at it and see only another ruin, but Maren knew better. He and Kita scaled the exterior with practiced ease, using handholds worn smooth by their younger selves.
The top platform had been their sanctuary once – his, Kita's, and Tam's. They'd spent countless evenings here, watching the eternal twilight paint the flood waters in shades of purple and gold. From this height, you could almost convince yourself the Tides were beautiful – the arcane lights of the upper city creating ghostly auroras in the mist, the ancient spires rising like the bones of dead gods from the water.
Maren settled into his usual spot, legs dangling over the edge. After a moment, Kita joined him, close enough that their shoulders touched. The empty space on his other side felt like a physical weight.
"Remember when Tam pushed you off here?" Kita asked. "You were being an ass about something – I don't even remember what – and he just..." She mimed a shoving motion.
Despite himself, Maren smiled. "I remember. Caught myself on that ledge down there." He pointed to a decorative outcropping twenty feet below. "Scared the shit out of both of you."
"Yeah, well. You've always had a talent for that." Her voice had lost its warmth. "Like today."
The smile died on his face. He'd known this conversation was coming from the moment she'd followed him out of the tavern. Below them, the flood waters lapped at the tower's base in an endless rhythm.
"You know what I thought about, when you pushed me through that current?" Kita's hands were trembling slightly, and Maren realized with a start that she was angry. Truly angry, in a way he'd rarely seen.
"I thought about the day they came for Tam. How one minute he was here with us, planning next week's dives, and the next he was gone. Whisked away to their golden towers without so much as a goodbye."
She turned to face him fully, and the raw pain in her eyes stopped his words cold. "And now I have to watch you pull the same shit. Pushing people away, making choices for everyone else. Like you're so eager to disappear too."
"I was protecting the team," Maren protested, anger finally seeping into his own voice. "That thing was going to kill all of us if someone didn't-"
"If someone didn't play hero?" Kita cut in. "If someone didn't sacrifice themselves? That's always your answer, isn't it? Just like with Tam-"
"Leave Tam out of this." Maren pushed to his feet, unable to sit still any longer. "That was different. He was different."
"Was it? Because from where I'm standing, it looks exactly the same," She gestured sharply at the water below. "Pushing me through that current without even giving me a choice?"
"There wasn't time for a choice!" The words exploded out of him. "That thing was right there, Kita. Right there. What was I supposed to do, take a vote?"
"You were supposed to trust me!" She was on her feet now too, facing him down with the same fierce determination she showed in the depths. "I'm not some newbie on their first run. I'm your partner. I've saved your life as many times as you've saved mine. But the second things get really dangerous, you just..." She made a pushing motion with her hands again.
"Because I couldn't watch you die!" The words echoed off the ancient stone, startling a flock of roosting birds. Maren's hands were shaking now too. "Is that what you want to hear? I couldn't... I couldn't surface alone. Not after-"
"After Tam?" Her voice had gone quiet again. "News flash, Maren. Tam didn't die. He chose to leave. He's up there right now, living his golden life in the Crest. But you? You're down here trying to martyr yourself like it'll somehow make up for not stopping him."
"You think I don't know that?" His laugh was ragged. "You think I don't see his face plastered on every gods damned corner? But at least with Tam, I know he's alive somewhere. If something happened to you down there..."
"Then it would have been my choice," Kita said firmly. "My risk to take. Just like it was Tam's choice to accept their offer, even if we didn't like it." She stepped closer, grabbing his arm again, gentler this time. "You can't keep trying to protect everyone by pushing them away. Sooner or later, you'll push too hard, and there won't be anyone left to catch you."
The fight drained out of him suddenly, leaving him feeling hollow. "I know," he said finally, voice rough. "I just... I'm sorry. You're right. About all of it."
"Of course I'm right." But there was warmth in her voice again, the anger fading into something softer. "I'm always right."
Below them, the night markets were coming to life in the eternal twilight. Skiffs emerged from the mist like ghosts, their pilots guiding them with practiced precision through the flooded streets. One by one they drew together, crews tossing ropes between vessels until they formed a floating maze of interconnected boats. A marketplace that could scatter at the first sign of trouble, could form and disappear wherever they pleased.
The sweet-sour smell of fermented kelp rose from cookpots, mixing with the sharper scent of substances that would earn you a lashing if caught with them in daylight. Lanterns flickered to life across the impromptu marketplace, their flames covered by screens of colored glass that marked different wares - green for food, red for salvage, blue for the kind of goods that officially didn't exist.
Children darted between the vessels on narrow planks, their feet finding purchase on surfaces that would send adults tumbling into the water. Each carried messages or small parcels, earning coppers for connecting buyers with sellers who couldn't risk being seen together. The soft splash of their movements mixed with haggling voices and the sound of water splashing against wood.
"So," Kita spoke up suddenly, "how do you plan to pay off Dom? To cover his costs?"
Maren shot her a look. "Who said anything about that?"
"Come on." She rolled her eyes, nudging his shoulder with her own. "We both know you can't leave things be even if you wanted to. You'll be picking up extra work in the morning, even if he didn't ask you to."
"I don't always-"
"Maren," she deadpanned, raising an eyebrow.
He sighed.
"Yeah. I was going to ask Sarn if he knew anyone who needed something moved."
"You know something? I don't think Dom's wrong to think about it," she said, pulling her knees up to hug them. "The numbers they offer at the temples…"
"Numbers written in invisible ink," Maren cut in sharply. "You've seen how they work, Kita. They dangle just enough coin to make desperate people think they can climb out of the muck. Then once you're hooked, the terms start changing."
"Not everyone ends up like Maya's mother."
"No. Some end up worse. The temples love to talk about service, about touching divinity. But all I see is people being hollowed out piece by piece."
Kita was quiet for a moment. "The Weaver's contracts are different though. They say she's the fairest of them all. That she only - "
"They say exactly what people want to hear. 'Just the bad memories,' right? 'Just the painful ones.'" His laugh was bitter. "But pain shapes us. Those memories they're so eager to take - they're what keep us alive down here. What keep us human."
She studied his face in the dim light.
"You've thought about this a lot."
"Had to. After Tam." His voice grew quiet.
The market sounds filled the silence between them - haggling voices, splashing water, children's laughter floating up from below.
"Voss," Kita suddenly spoke up, startling him. "He thinks we gave him all our scrap, right? He didn't ask if we left anything out?"
"He didn't," Maren said slowly, turning to her. "Because we did. Right?"
Kita's hand slipped into her jacket pocket, pulling out something that caught the dim light in impossible ways. The small cylinder they'd salvaged from the chronophage's remains, its opalescent surface still bending reality around it like heat waves off hot metal.
"I grabbed it when I found you," she said quietly. "Figured anything that survived that thing's death might be worth keeping quiet about." She turned it over in her hands, watching colors shift beneath its surface.
Maren stared at it, remembering how it had felt in his dying moments - the wrongness of it, the way it seemed to resist being looked at directly.
"You're saying we sell it ourselves. Tide us all over."
"No," she said, a grin on her face now. "Not tide us over. Look at the damn thing - we might be looking at an artifact, Maren. Do you know how much that could go for with the right buyer? We could ditch Voss entirely. Do whatever we pleased."
"It could also get us killed, Kita," he whispered harshly.
"Everything in this city could get us killed," she said softly.
Maren studied her face in the dim light. "Tell me something. What would you do? If you had that kind of coin?"
"You mean besides buy a proper diving suit?" Kita's attempt at humor faded when he didn't smile back. She looked out over the market below, quiet for a long moment. "There's this place, up in the Swell. Old woman runs a tea shop there. She's got these little tables by windows that actually see sunlight - real sunlight, not just what filters down through the mist."
"Sounds expensive."
"That's the point, isn't it?" She pulled her knees up to her chest. "I go there sometimes, when I can scrape together enough coin. Just sit and pretend I belong. Pretend I'm not counting every sip, calculating how many dives each cup is worth."
Maren waited, knowing there was more.
"I'd buy that shop," she said finally. "Learn how to brew tea properly. Have my own window where I could see the sun." Her voice grew quieter. "Maybe even save enough to buy my brother's contract back from the Twins."
That made Maren turn sharply. "Kita-"
"Don't." She cut him off. "I know what you're going to say. That he made his choice, that the Twins don't give up what they own. But I can't help but want to try anyway, if I could."
She trailed off, then laughed bitterly.
"What about you? What would you trade this for?"
Maren was quiet for a long time, watching the market below. A child darted between boats, carrying messages for coin. Just like they had, once.
"Remember that old diver's map in Sarn's back room? The one that shows the old city before it fell?"
Kita nodded.
"I'd buy that. Good diving gear too - not just for us, but for the whole team. Then I'd do what we do now, but on our terms. Our own crew, our own counters, everything."
"Still can't leave the water behind, can you?" But her voice was fond.
"Could you? Really?"
"No," she admitted. "Probably not."
They sat in comfortable silence for a moment, letting the sounds of the market wash over them. Finally, Maren spoke again.
"I know someone who knows someone. A dealer in the Swell."
Kita turned to look at him, expression entirely serious.
"Remember, Maren. We do this together, or not at all."
"Together."
Maren could tell by the way the Contractor's pale eyes kept drifting back to their salvage pile, fingers drumming against his desk in an uneven rhythm.
Maren stood in front of him, head held high. It'd only been hours since he'd surfaced, since the other divers had swamped him for answers and death threats and hugs. And already they were discussing business.
That was simply how Voss conducted his enterprise, something Maren knew that all too well.
"A fascinating tale," Voss said finally. "Though I must admit, I'm curious why none of the other teams reported seeing this... creature."
"Luck," Maren said, keeping his voice neutral. "Bad or good, depending on how you look at it."
"Luck," Voss pulled the pipe out of his mouth, setting it down on his ornate desk. "Let me share something about myself, boy, since we're being candid with each other. I don't believe in luck. I believe in circumstance - in being born higher or lower than others. In being given everything..."
Maren's eyes followed his fingers as they traced a scar running down his arm. He wondered if the other man even knew he was doing it.
"Or having to take it for yourself."
Maren kept his face carefully neutral, nodding along as the other man spoke.
"But luck?" Voss continued. "I believe people make their own luck. Like myself, scraping and clawing my way to where I am now. Or perhaps - purely hypothetically of course - a diver could make their own luck by going past where he's meant to, break quarantines he know he's not supposed to. The type of quarantines that come with death penalties attached to them."
His eyes fixed on Maren, pale as sun-bleached bone. He reached forward into the pile of salvage laid out on his desk, pulling out a gleaming pearl necklace.
"The kind of luck that brings back what is obviously deep city salvage from what was supposed to be a shallow sweep."
"The Chronophage - " Maren started.
"Don't try to sell me that load of shit twice, boy." Voss practically growled, leaning over his desk. "It will not be good for your long term health if you do."
Maren stared at Voss for a long moment before dropping his shoulders slightly. "You're right. The story doesn't matter."
"No," Voss said. "It doesn't."
"What matters is the salvage." Maren gestured at the pile. "Clean goods, delivered straight to you with no loss on your end."
Though 'no loss' was a bit of a stretch. His suit and possibly Kita's would need to be replaced, but he didn't have to know that quite yet.
Voss's laugh cut through the air like shattered glass.
"Do you think I built this enterprise by grabbing every shiny thing within arm's reach?" He stood, towering over his desk. "No. It was control, boy. Restraint. That's what keeps us all alive and wealthy. One greedy diver getting into cracks he's not mean to is how operations like ours get noticed. Get shut down."
It would be so easy, Maren thought idly, to kill him now. The heavy metal still rested on the table in between them as Voss spoke. Each more than heavy enough to do the job. He would be dead before the guards could burst in the door.
Maren let the whole situation play back in his head, watched it unfold in all the different ways it possibly could, before consciously letting the thought pass.
He was better than that. For now, at least.
"And when we get shut down, where do you think your precious friends go? Back to knife fighting in the muck over stale bread, that's what." He tapped the desk with one finger, the sound sharp in the stillness. "So here's what happens. We mix in your haul slowly over the next six that get sold, make it disappear without anyone ever the wiser. And you, my friend, never venture past the depth I assign you again. Am I understood, Team Leader?"
"What about our cut?"
"What?"
"We brought in a full turning's worth of scrap in a day. We get a cut of that. That was the deal, Voss. Results get rewarded."
"Perhaps I wasn't clear," Voss picked up the pearl necklace again, shaking it violently at him. "This isn't value. This is a problem. And I don't like it when my divers bring me problems."
"I understand, Contractor, but - "
"What you don't seem to understand is that this isn't a negotiation. This is me disciplining you. Is that clear?"
Maren bit himself from replying again, reigning the thunder in his heart back.
"Yes, sir."
"Three dive days. That's how long your crew will stay dry. It wouldn't do to send a message to the rest that recklessness like this will be rewarded."
"I understand," Maren said quietly.
"Good." Voss set the necklace down with deliberate care. "I'd hate to lose a team leader of your caliber over something as trivial as... luck."
The word dripped with heavy sarcasm, a scowl of distaste twisting his face.
As Maren turned to leave, Voss spoke again.
"Oh, and one more thing. Next time you want to lie to me? Come up with something better than time-eating monsters. I happen to appreciate a good liar, but bad ones are irritating like nothing else."
Maren kept his face carefully blank as he left the office.
The team was waiting for him in their usual spot, tucked into the shadows beneath a creaking dock. Even from a distance, Maren could read their tension - the way Dom's fingers kept tapping against his chronometer, how Pel's shoulders hunched forward, Maya's restless pacing. Only Kita stood still, arms crossed as she leaned against a weathered pylon.
They'd cleaned up since the dive, but exhaustion still clung to them like old dive suits. The kind of bone-deep weariness that came from brushing too close to death.
Maren's footsteps on the wooden planks above made them all look up. He didn't waste time with pleasantries.
"Three days dry."
The words fell like stones into still water. Dom's fingers froze mid-tap. Pel's shoulders somehow managed to hunch even further. Maya just looked confused, too new to understand what it meant.
"Voss can't do that," Dom said, voice cracking.
"He can," Kita cut in. "And he did. Why?"
"He didn't buy our story," Maren said softly, climbing down the docks to meet them.
"Shit," Dom muttered, arms crossed as he paced beside them. "I told you we should have just kept it, sold it ourself - "
"And Voss's counters would've found out anyway," Kita sighed, crossing her arms. "What's done is done."
"Right. Voss thinks we broke the rules to get what we got. The kind that would draw the attention of the sort of people we don't want to notice us."
"The rich prick sort," Kita translated for Maya's benefit.
"Which means," Maren continued, "we've got about three days worth of coin between us, and nothing else coming in until Voss decides we've learned our lesson."
He let that sink in for a moment, watching their faces. Dom was already doing calculations in his head, probably trying to figure out how to stretch his savings. Pel had gone completely still, the way they did when things got really bad. Maya looked like she might bolt at any second.
None of them were complaining about the fairness of it all - or blaming him for bringing the salvage in in the first place. That didn't mean he didn't feel obligated to make up for it.
"So," he said, forcing lightness into his voice, "might as well spend some of it at the Drowned Rat first. One good meal before we start tightening belts."
That got their attention. The Drowned Rat wasn't just a tavern - it was the tavern, where divers went to celebrate surviving another day in the deep. Where the active crews made deals over smuggled upper city whiskey, and old timers told tall tales like that of the dreaded Chronophage.
He was going to be giving those tall tales a lot more attention tonight, he knew that for sure.
"We can't afford-" Dom started.
"My treat," Maren cut him off. "Consider it an apology."
Kita snorted. "You mean the part where you tried to commit suicide in the water, or the part where that lead tongue of yours got us even deeper in the shit?"
"Both?" He offered a sheepish grin. "Come on. Real food for once. With meat we can actually identify?"
They didn't need much convincing after that. Even Pel's shoulders relaxed slightly at the prospect of a hot meal. They fell into formation without thinking - Maya and Dom in front, Pel in the middle, Kita and Maren bringing up the rear. Old habits died hard.
The Drowned Rat lived up to its name, precariously perched above the water with wooden stilts. The tavern stayed afloat through a maze of ropes and pulleys that adjusted with the water levels, its wooden walls marked with layers of waterlines like growth rings on a tree.
Its patrons joked the damn thing was more boat than building, but that was practically how every other building stayed intact in the Tides. The windows glowed with warm light, and the smell of actual cooking - not reconstituted protein or preserved rations - made their stomachs growl in unison.
Inside, shrines to various gods occupied the corners. The largest belonged to the Twin Gods, their doubled faces frozen in eternal expressions of ecstasy and agony. Appropriate, given how many divers came here to celebrate survival or drink away close calls.
A smaller shrine to the Wanderer was tucked away behind the bar, easily missed unless you knew to look for it. The walls were decorated with salvage pieces - copper pipes twisted into abstract art, brass fittings polished to a shine, silver plaques etched with ancient writings. The one god outcast by the rest, lurking in their shadows. Forgotten.
The people in the Tides had a particular affinity for that. A sympathy.
The tavern keeper, an old diver named Sarn who'd lost both legs to the deep, nodded as they entered. He was already pulling out glasses before they reached the bar.
"Heard about the chronophage," he said without preamble. "Wasn't sure if I'd see you tonight."
News traveled fast in the diving community. It was easy to forget that Voss's gang of children weren't the only people scouring the sunken city. Here, in the place they all came to rest, it was all too apparent how outnumbered they were. Maren could feel other eyes on them now - other diving crews sizing them up, weighing the truth of the story against their own experiences in the deep.
"Can't kill me that easy Sarn," Maren said, keeping his voice casual. "You know that. Table for five?"
Sarn's eyes flickered to Maya, noting the new face. "Yeah, we got space. The usual?"
"Better make it the full feast," Maren said, sliding over more coin than he could really afford. "Might be our last for a while."
Understanding crossed Sarn's weathered face. He'd seen enough teams come through hard times to know what that meant. Without a word, he added an extra bottle to their order.
They settled into their usual corner, where they could keep their backs to the wall and watch the room. Maya looked overwhelmed by it all, her eyes darting between the shrines and the salvage art and the other diving teams.
"Only one rule," Kita said, noticing the girl's nervous energy. "We pay respects before drinking."
Maren raised an eyebrow at her across the table, letting a smile form on his face. Kita always acted standoffish to the newbies, but it was her who grew attached to them the quickest. Looked out for them, in her own way.
"Let her do it," he jut in, waving towards Maya. She looked back at him, and in her eyes he saw a blend of emotions he couldn't help but feel nostalgic for.
He remembered when he'd done his first dive, how he'd been in awe of the older divers. How he'd watched and copied every move they made. He'd thought his first mentor was a legend amongst divers, one of the best to ever do it.
He was dead now, last he'd heard. Caught in a slip.
The table fell silent as Maya glanced nervously between them, her fingers tightening around the chipped glass in her hands. Kita gestured toward her with a tilt of her head.
"Go on. Speak your piece. Can be any words that come to mind."
Maya swallowed hard, her lips parting and closing for a long moment.
"To the lost," she finally said, her tone wavering. "To those the deep kept."
"To the lost," they echoed, Pel even breaking their self-imposed silence. The ritual complete, they drank. The rotgut the tavern served could probably strip the rust off pipes, the way it burned down Marens' throat. Perfect for dulling the nerves.
The food came in waves - real bread still warm from the oven, fish stew thick with actual vegetables, meat that might have actually seen daylight at some point. They fell on it like starving things, the comfort of real food loosening tongues that had been tight with tension since the dive.
"So," Maren said, watching Maya pick at her stew. "How was your first dive?"
The girl looked up, startled to be addressed directly. "I... um." She glanced around the table, then managed a weak smile. "Better than some, I guess? At least I didn't get eaten."
"That's the spirit," Kita said dryly. "Set those standards nice and low."
Even Pel cracked a small grin at that. The food and warmth were working their magic, washing away some of the day's terror. Dom reached for his chronometer again, the familiar gesture almost unconscious.
"You and that damn thing," Kita said, rolling her eyes. "What're you hoping to find? The exact time we all almost died?"
"If it had been working properly," Dom muttered, adjusting something inside the casing, "Maybe I'd have noticed something was up with our sector. Maybe we wouldn't have been down there at all, Kita."
"You don't know that," Maren said. "There's no use worrying about it now."
"Easy for you to say." Dom's voice had an edge to it now. "You've got it figured out, don't you? Happy to keep diving until something finally kills us."
The table went quiet. Maya stared down at her bowl, suddenly very interested in her stew. Pel's shoulders hunched forward slightly.
Maren finally broke the silence, all the mirth gone from his face.
"Dom. Tell me you didn't ask Voss for a Contract."
"I didn't. I went to the temples. To the Weaver's sisters," Dom said finally, crossing his arms defensively. "And I'm thinking about saying yes."
Maren set down his spoon carefully.
"No, you're not. Not if you have any sense at all. The sisters are no different from Voss, even if they pretend not to be."
"You know what?" Dom's face flushed red as he half-rose from his seat. "That's real easy to say where you're sitting. You're comfortable with this life. With seeing people die every day, with losing fingers and time and life for scraps of copper. But I'm not. I'm… I'm sick of not knowing which dive's going to be my last."
"That doesn't mean you have to Contract," he hissed, the good mood at the table now thoroughly gone. The rest of their team watched the two go at it, eyes darting between them as they traded blows. "There's other work. Safer work, if that's your issue."
"The terms are good," Dom insisted. " More coin than I could earn even if I spent the rest of Enough to set up my family, maybe have kids someday. All they want is memories, Maren. Bad memories.Things I'd rather forget anyway."
"What damn use is to have coin when you could end up not even remembering your own sister's name?"
"That won't happen. The contract—"
"The contract is temporary. Open to revision.They take the bad memories first, sure. Then when those run out, they start on the rest. The good ones. The important ones. Everything that makes you who you are. Trust me on this."
Dom sank back into his seat, the fight draining out of him.
"Yeah, well," he muttered. "At least I'd be alive to forget."
"That's not living," Maya said suddenly. Everyone turned to look at her, and she flushed but continued. "That's... that's just another kind of drowning, isn't it? Trading who you are for safety?"
The table fell quiet, both Maren and Dom turning to her.
"My mother was a diver for a long time, before she lost her leg," she said, staring into her stew. "She used to tell me stories about the deep.. She said... she said there was freedom in it. That down there, it didn't matter where you came from or who your parents were. The deep treated everyone the same."
"Your mother sounds wise," Kita said.
"She was." Maya's voice was barely a whisper. "Until she wasn't. Until she took a Contract like the one you're talking about, and she didn't remember I was her daughter anymore."
The silence that followed was heavy with understanding.
"To the lost," Maren said softly, raising his glass again.
Dom silently raised his own glass to his, brows furrowed with heavy thoughts. Maren would have to talk to him again, when he'd had some time to think. But for now they drank in silence, each lost in their own memories.
"So…" Kita broke the silence again, staring at Maren. "What actually happened, after we left?"
"I told you what happened."
That got a table-full of groans and glares.
"No, you said 'I took care of it'. That's not telling us what happened, your asshole. We want to know how in the hells you killed a chronophage."
"He didn't," a new voice cut in, sharp with barely contained anger. "Because there was no chronophage."
Calern stood at their table's edge, his own team lurking behind him like shadows. The other team leader's face was twisted in its usual sneer, but there was something else in his eyes. Something desperate.
"Funny thing," he continued, voice pitched low enough that only their table could hear. "My team's sector came up empty today. Completely stripped. Like someone had already been through."
The threat in his voice was clear as temple bells. Maren set down his spoon with deliberate care.
"Something on your mind, Calern?"
"Just wondering how your team managed to haul in so much salvage from a standard sweep." Calern leaned forward, planting his hands on their table. "When everywhere else was picked clean."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop. Even Sarn had stopped polishing glasses, his weathered hands resting near the club he kept under the bar.
"Maybe your team's losing their touch," Maren said softly. "Or maybe you should consider not diving at all, after what we saw today. Shallow waters aren't safe anymore.".
"Watch yourself, Maren," he spat. "Those who dive too deep tend to find things that should stay buried." He straightened up, trying to salvage some dignity. "Assuming they surface at all."
He stalked away, his team trailing in his wake. The room's tension broke like a wave, conversations resuming with renewed energy.
"Well," Kita said dryly, "that was subtle."
"As always," Dom tacked on, shooting the back of Calerns' head a ugly look.
Maren picked his spoon back up. "Eat. Food's getting cold."
They finished their meal in relative quiet, but the easy camaraderie from before was gone. Reality had crept back in, cold as deep water. When they finally left the Drowned Rat, the mists had rolled in from the water, turning the street into a grey soup.
The team split up at the first intersection - Dom heading for the medicine shops, Pel vanishing into the shadows with a polite nod like they always did, Maya scampering off toward whatever hole she called home. Only Kita remained, falling into step beside Maren as they walked.
They passed beneath a recruitment poster, its colors too bright against the perpetual grey of the lower city. A naval officer stared down at them with eyes of burnished gold, gleaming even through the still image.
Half his face was hidden behind an ornate mask of brass and silver, the elaborate emblem of Highgrave etched over his cheek. Where his right arm should have been was a construct of pure white - marble, maybe, or just high quality stone - held up in a salute.
The other half of his brother's face stared back at Maren, identical to his own features down to the tiniest eyelash.
"Still can't believe that's him," Kita said quietly.
Maren stared at the poster for a long moment, taking it. The recruitment text beneath read: "Ascend to Divinity: If you suspect yourself of being a God-Touched, approach your nearest clergyman to get tested. Glory awaits."
"That's not him anymore," Maren said finally. "He's just another one of them now."
"You sure about that?" She whispered back, hand grasping his shoulder. "Because your mouth says that but your face tells me you don't believe that."
"Yeah," he muttered, turning away from the poster. "I'm sure."
They walked in comfortable silence through the winding streets of the Tides, their feet carrying them along a path worn smooth by years of habit. Neither needed to speak as they navigated the maze of floating walkways and rope bridges – they'd made this journey countless times before, back when they were three instead of two.
The mist that perpetually shrouded the lower city was touched with strange colors here - deep blues and purples from the arcane lights above, fragments of the upper city's eternal day filtering down to paint their twilight world.
Every few blocks, they passed beneath another pylon, its base alone wider than any building in the Tides. Surface runoff from the city above them created artificial waterfalls that cascaded down the pylons, gathering in the makeshift channels people had set up to collect the fresh water. The constant sound of falling water was a reminder of their place - forever watching the excess of the upper city quite literally rain down upon them.
The old belltower rose before them, its ancient spire listing dangerously to one side where the flood had weakened its foundations. Most would look at it and see only another ruin, but Maren knew better. He and Kita scaled the exterior with practiced ease, using handholds worn smooth by their younger selves.
The top platform had been their sanctuary once – his, Kita's, and Tam's. They'd spent countless evenings here, watching the eternal twilight paint the flood waters in shades of purple and gold. From this height, you could almost convince yourself the Tides were beautiful – the arcane lights of the upper city creating ghostly auroras in the mist, the ancient spires rising like the bones of dead gods from the water.
Maren settled into his usual spot, legs dangling over the edge. After a moment, Kita joined him, close enough that their shoulders touched. The empty space on his other side felt like a physical weight.
"Remember when Tam pushed you off here?" Kita asked. "You were being an ass about something – I don't even remember what – and he just..." She mimed a shoving motion.
Despite himself, Maren smiled. "I remember. Caught myself on that ledge down there." He pointed to a decorative outcropping twenty feet below. "Scared the shit out of both of you."
"Yeah, well. You've always had a talent for that." Her voice had lost its warmth. "Like today."
The smile died on his face. He'd known this conversation was coming from the moment she'd followed him out of the tavern. Below them, the flood waters lapped at the tower's base in an endless rhythm.
"You know what I thought about, when you pushed me through that current?" Kita's hands were trembling slightly, and Maren realized with a start that she was angry. Truly angry, in a way he'd rarely seen.
"I thought about the day they came for Tam. How one minute he was here with us, planning next week's dives, and the next he was gone. Whisked away to their golden towers without so much as a goodbye."
She turned to face him fully, and the raw pain in her eyes stopped his words cold. "And now I have to watch you pull the same shit. Pushing people away, making choices for everyone else. Like you're so eager to disappear too."
"I was protecting the team," Maren protested, anger finally seeping into his own voice. "That thing was going to kill all of us if someone didn't-"
"If someone didn't play hero?" Kita cut in. "If someone didn't sacrifice themselves? That's always your answer, isn't it? Just like with Tam-"
"Leave Tam out of this." Maren pushed to his feet, unable to sit still any longer. "That was different. He was different."
"Was it? Because from where I'm standing, it looks exactly the same," She gestured sharply at the water below. "Pushing me through that current without even giving me a choice?"
"There wasn't time for a choice!" The words exploded out of him. "That thing was right there, Kita. Right there. What was I supposed to do, take a vote?"
"You were supposed to trust me!" She was on her feet now too, facing him down with the same fierce determination she showed in the depths. "I'm not some newbie on their first run. I'm your partner. I've saved your life as many times as you've saved mine. But the second things get really dangerous, you just..." She made a pushing motion with her hands again.
"Because I couldn't watch you die!" The words echoed off the ancient stone, startling a flock of roosting birds. Maren's hands were shaking now too. "Is that what you want to hear? I couldn't... I couldn't surface alone. Not after-"
"After Tam?" Her voice had gone quiet again. "News flash, Maren. Tam didn't die. He chose to leave. He's up there right now, living his golden life in the Crest. But you? You're down here trying to martyr yourself like it'll somehow make up for not stopping him."
"You think I don't know that?" His laugh was ragged. "You think I don't see his face plastered on every gods damned corner? But at least with Tam, I know he's alive somewhere. If something happened to you down there..."
"Then it would have been my choice," Kita said firmly. "My risk to take. Just like it was Tam's choice to accept their offer, even if we didn't like it." She stepped closer, grabbing his arm again, gentler this time. "You can't keep trying to protect everyone by pushing them away. Sooner or later, you'll push too hard, and there won't be anyone left to catch you."
The fight drained out of him suddenly, leaving him feeling hollow. "I know," he said finally, voice rough. "I just... I'm sorry. You're right. About all of it."
"Of course I'm right." But there was warmth in her voice again, the anger fading into something softer. "I'm always right."
Below them, the night markets were coming to life in the eternal twilight. Skiffs emerged from the mist like ghosts, their pilots guiding them with practiced precision through the flooded streets. One by one they drew together, crews tossing ropes between vessels until they formed a floating maze of interconnected boats. A marketplace that could scatter at the first sign of trouble, could form and disappear wherever they pleased.
The sweet-sour smell of fermented kelp rose from cookpots, mixing with the sharper scent of substances that would earn you a lashing if caught with them in daylight. Lanterns flickered to life across the impromptu marketplace, their flames covered by screens of colored glass that marked different wares - green for food, red for salvage, blue for the kind of goods that officially didn't exist.
Children darted between the vessels on narrow planks, their feet finding purchase on surfaces that would send adults tumbling into the water. Each carried messages or small parcels, earning coppers for connecting buyers with sellers who couldn't risk being seen together. The soft splash of their movements mixed with haggling voices and the sound of water splashing against wood.
"So," Kita spoke up suddenly, "how do you plan to pay off Dom? To cover his costs?"
Maren shot her a look. "Who said anything about that?"
"Come on." She rolled her eyes, nudging his shoulder with her own. "We both know you can't leave things be even if you wanted to. You'll be picking up extra work in the morning, even if he didn't ask you to."
"I don't always-"
"Maren," she deadpanned, raising an eyebrow.
He sighed.
"Yeah. I was going to ask Sarn if he knew anyone who needed something moved."
"You know something? I don't think Dom's wrong to think about it," she said, pulling her knees up to hug them. "The numbers they offer at the temples…"
"Numbers written in invisible ink," Maren cut in sharply. "You've seen how they work, Kita. They dangle just enough coin to make desperate people think they can climb out of the muck. Then once you're hooked, the terms start changing."
"Not everyone ends up like Maya's mother."
"No. Some end up worse. The temples love to talk about service, about touching divinity. But all I see is people being hollowed out piece by piece."
Kita was quiet for a moment. "The Weaver's contracts are different though. They say she's the fairest of them all. That she only - "
"They say exactly what people want to hear. 'Just the bad memories,' right? 'Just the painful ones.'" His laugh was bitter. "But pain shapes us. Those memories they're so eager to take - they're what keep us alive down here. What keep us human."
She studied his face in the dim light.
"You've thought about this a lot."
"Had to. After Tam." His voice grew quiet.
The market sounds filled the silence between them - haggling voices, splashing water, children's laughter floating up from below.
"Voss," Kita suddenly spoke up, startling him. "He thinks we gave him all our scrap, right? He didn't ask if we left anything out?"
"He didn't," Maren said slowly, turning to her. "Because we did. Right?"
Kita's hand slipped into her jacket pocket, pulling out something that caught the dim light in impossible ways. The small cylinder they'd salvaged from the chronophage's remains, its opalescent surface still bending reality around it like heat waves off hot metal.
"I grabbed it when I found you," she said quietly. "Figured anything that survived that thing's death might be worth keeping quiet about." She turned it over in her hands, watching colors shift beneath its surface.
Maren stared at it, remembering how it had felt in his dying moments - the wrongness of it, the way it seemed to resist being looked at directly.
"You're saying we sell it ourselves. Tide us all over."
"No," she said, a grin on her face now. "Not tide us over. Look at the damn thing - we might be looking at an artifact, Maren. Do you know how much that could go for with the right buyer? We could ditch Voss entirely. Do whatever we pleased."
"It could also get us killed, Kita," he whispered harshly.
"Everything in this city could get us killed," she said softly.
Maren studied her face in the dim light. "Tell me something. What would you do? If you had that kind of coin?"
"You mean besides buy a proper diving suit?" Kita's attempt at humor faded when he didn't smile back. She looked out over the market below, quiet for a long moment. "There's this place, up in the Swell. Old woman runs a tea shop there. She's got these little tables by windows that actually see sunlight - real sunlight, not just what filters down through the mist."
"Sounds expensive."
"That's the point, isn't it?" She pulled her knees up to her chest. "I go there sometimes, when I can scrape together enough coin. Just sit and pretend I belong. Pretend I'm not counting every sip, calculating how many dives each cup is worth."
Maren waited, knowing there was more.
"I'd buy that shop," she said finally. "Learn how to brew tea properly. Have my own window where I could see the sun." Her voice grew quieter. "Maybe even save enough to buy my brother's contract back from the Twins."
That made Maren turn sharply. "Kita-"
"Don't." She cut him off. "I know what you're going to say. That he made his choice, that the Twins don't give up what they own. But I can't help but want to try anyway, if I could."
She trailed off, then laughed bitterly.
"What about you? What would you trade this for?"
Maren was quiet for a long time, watching the market below. A child darted between boats, carrying messages for coin. Just like they had, once.
"Remember that old diver's map in Sarn's back room? The one that shows the old city before it fell?"
Kita nodded.
"I'd buy that. Good diving gear too - not just for us, but for the whole team. Then I'd do what we do now, but on our terms. Our own crew, our own counters, everything."
"Still can't leave the water behind, can you?" But her voice was fond.
"Could you? Really?"
"No," she admitted. "Probably not."
They sat in comfortable silence for a moment, letting the sounds of the market wash over them. Finally, Maren spoke again.
"I know someone who knows someone. A dealer in the Swell."
Kita turned to look at him, expression entirely serious.
"Remember, Maren. We do this together, or not at all."
"Together."
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