1. Iliana
The diesel hits first. Then rust, sharp enough to taste, like sucking on a coin.
My thumb drags along the edge of my clipboard. It’s the only clean thing on this deck, and I’m holding it like it’s load bearing.
Aegaeon made my name radioactive from Athens to the Ionian. This crew doesn’t check blacklists. They check whether I still have my safety papers, and how badly I need the work. Both boxes, ticked.
The ship hums under my boots, keeping time with the sea slapping its hull.
“He’s been down inside for nineteen days,” the shift engineer says. He won’t look at me. His hands won’t stop moving over the valve in front of him, like if they stop, something worse starts.
He’s one of them. They all are.
I know what’s supposed to happen when one of them slips. I know exactly what’s left over after.
I keep three feet of clear deck between his coveralls and my coat. Old habit. Expensive one.
“Your backup air’s failing,” I say. Flat. All business. “Three percent every ten minutes. That’s not a note, that’s a shutdown.”
“Captain runs the dive,” he says, and spits into the water. “Not paperwork.”
He jerks his chin at it, the cage. A fat iron cylinder bolted to the deck, sweating, wrapped in hose thick as my arm. Rust comes off on my fingers when I pass too close.
Something is alive in there.
I climb toward the viewing room, salt crusting under my palm on the rail. Inside, the light drops to a sick green.
Vasilis, the fleet’s medic, and clearly the only man on this boat who hasn’t slept, is locked to the monitors. He doesn’t look up. His knuckles have gone white.
I look through the glass, and I see him.
Captain Alexandros.
No suit. Bare from the waist up, skin slick with the wet heat of the tank, back to the window, every muscle across his shoulders pulled tight enough to hum. He’s shaking, not nerves, something deeper, a fine, fast tremor that doesn’t belong in a body that size.
He turns.
His jaw is carved out of shadow, stubble dark against it, mouth set in a line. His chest works like he’s had to remind it how.
Then, nothing. The shaking stops. All at once, like someone cut the power to it.
His eyes find mine through the glass, and my ears pop, a pressure change I feel before I understand it.
I’ve never met this man. I don’t know his name past the one stitched on a duty roster. But something in the way he locks onto me turns the air in my lungs to ash.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t posture. He stands there, palms flat on the inside of the glass, holding himself so still it looks like it costs him something, like he already knows exactly what I’d do if he didn’t.
I don’t look away first. I look down at the gauges instead, because that’s safer, and because my hands have started that old, familiar shake of their own.
Then the deck screams.
Metal tearing under pressure, a sound with a taste, iron and ozone, and a jet of white gas blasts sideways into the machinery below with the force of a shotgun.
“Breach!” a voice, from somewhere below, already running. “Seal’s going!”
The alarm tries to sound and dies halfway through. All that’s left is the air, screaming out of the ship.
Red light floods the tank. It paints Alexandros in it, his skin, his jaw, the whole width of him.
And behind the glass, his eyes stop being dark.
They bleed from green into amber, wild, lit from somewhere under the surface.
