The Abyss Merchant

The sea gave Teo ReQs three fish that morning.

Three. After eleven hours on the water, two cracked nets, and a sunburn that made his neck feel like it had been dipped in hot oil.

He held them up anyway as his boat bumped against the dock of Lutaw, the floating village where he had lived all nineteen years of his life. Lutaw was a tangle of stilt houses, rusted barges, and old shipping containers lashed together with cable and stubbornness. Solar sheets flapped on the rooftops. Laundry hung between antennas. Thirty kilometers east, across the gray water, the towers of Meridian City glittered in the morning light like something from another planet.

In a way, they were.

“That’s it?” Mang Pido squinted at the fish from behind his weighing table. He was the only buyer in Lutaw, a round man with a gold tooth and a tablet that he swore was “calibrated by the government.”

“Rockfish,” Teo said. “Fresh. Caught them at dawn.”

Mang Pido tapped the scale. “Two hundred forty pesos.”

“For three?”

“For three. Small ones. Bluefall-tainted, probably.” He sniffed. “Take it or leave it, ReQs.”

Teo took it. He always took it. That was the thing about being poor: you didn’t get to have pride, only timing.

He walked home along the plank bridges, coins heavy in his pocket and not heavy enough. Around him, the village was waking up. Old women gutted fish on their doorsteps. Kids jumped off the barges into water that was the color of weak tea. Somebody’s radio was playing the morning broadcast from Meridian:

“...Bluefall mutation index rising in the southern deep zones. Fishing vessels are advised to avoid unregistered waters. In other news, a Sapphire Mantis Shrimp sold at the Halcyon Auction last night for 2.1 million credits...”

Two point one million. For a shrimp.

Teo laughed under his breath. Twenty years ago, before the Bluefall, the ocean had been just the ocean. Then the meteor shower came, a rain of blue fire that lit up the whole sky for three nights and sank into the sea. Nobody really knew what was inside those rocks. All anyone knew was what came after. Fish grew bigger. Crabs grew stranger. Some creatures started to glow in the dark. Rich people in the sky towers started paying fortunes for the rare ones: for medicine, for collections, for dinners that cost more than a fisherman’s house.

And the fishermen of Lutaw, who had fished these waters for generations, could not tell a priceless creature from a common one. So they sold everything to Mang Pido for pennies, and Mang Pido sold everything to Meridian for gold.

That was the order of the world.

“Kuya!”

His sister, Lira, came running down the bridge in a shirt three sizes too big for her. She was ten, skinny as a fishing pole, with their mother’s eyes and their father’s stubbornness. She grabbed his arm with both hands.

“How many?”

“Three.”

She frowned. “That’s not many.”

“They were very brave fish. They fought hard.” He handed her a fifty-peso coin. “Go buy pandesal. And eggs, if Aling Nena still has some.”

She didn’t move. Her eyes were fixed on something behind him.

Teo turned.

A sleek black speedboat was cutting through the water toward their house, the only house in Lutaw with a blue-painted door, because their father had painted it that color. The speedboat had a shark painted on the side, white teeth bared.

The Tiburón Syndicate.

“Lira,” Teo said quietly. “Go inside.”

“But...”

“Inside.”

She went.

The boat slid against the stilts of their house. Three men climbed up onto the porch. Two of them were big, with augmented arms that hissed when they moved, chrome showing through the skin at the elbows. The third was thin and neat, in a pressed white shirt that had no business being in a village like Lutaw. He had a silver earpiece and the bored expression of someone who had done this a thousand times.

“Teodoro ReQs,” the thin man said. “I’m Dario Salcedo. I handle collections for this district.”

“I know who you are.”

“Good. Then this will be quick.” Dario flicked his wrist, and a holographic document bloomed in the air between them, glowing pale blue. At the bottom was a signature Teo knew as well as his own.

Ramon ReQs.

His father’s name.

“Six months ago,” Dario said, “your father borrowed money from the Syndicate. Boat engine, deep-sea sonar, diving equipment. Expensive equipment. Then he went out to sea and did not come back.” He shrugged. “Tragic. But the debt did not go into the sea with him.”

Teo’s throat tightened. “How much?”

“With interest? Three million pesos.”

The number hit him like a wave to the chest. Three million. He had two hundred forty pesos in his pocket, minus fifty for bread. He would need to sell twelve thousand mornings of fish to pay that. He would be dead before he finished.

“My father never told me he borrowed anything.”

“Fathers rarely do.” Dario closed the hologram. “Here’s the arrangement. You have ninety days. Pay the full amount, and the Syndicate forgets your family’s name.”

“And if I can’t?”

Dario’s eyes moved past Teo, to the blue door. To the small shadow standing behind the window.

“The Syndicate runs processing ships in the southern waters,” he said calmly. “They always need small hands. Fast hands. Hands that can clean fish and work nets for ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day.” He smiled, and it was the worst thing Teo had ever seen. “Your sister looks like a hard worker.”

Teo moved before he could think.

One of the chrome-armed men caught him by the collar and slammed him against the wall of his own house. The wood cracked. Pain burst through his shoulder. The man held him there easily, like holding a wet towel.

“Don’t,” Dario said, in the tone of a teacher correcting a child. “Fighting adds interest.”

The man let go. Teo slid down to his knees, gasping.

Dario stepped back onto the boat. “Ninety days, Teodoro. The clock starts today.” He tapped his earpiece. “Oh, and don’t think about running. The Syndicate owns every dock from here to Meridian. There’s nowhere you can sail that we can’t see.”

The speedboat roared away, leaving a white scar on the water.

For a long time, Teo stayed on his knees.

Then the door creaked open behind him. Lira stepped out, her face pale, the fifty-peso coin still clutched in her fist.

“Kuya,” she whispered. “Are they going to take me?”

He pulled her into his arms and held on too tightly.

“No,” he said. “No one is taking you anywhere. I promise.”

It was a promise he had no way of keeping. He knew it. She probably knew it too.

That evening, after Lira fell asleep, Teo sat on the edge of the porch with his feet hanging over the water and his father’s old radio beside him. The weather broadcast crackled through the static:

“...severe storm system approaching from the southeast. All vessels are ordered to remain in harbor for the next forty-eight hours. Repeat, all vessels...”

Teo looked south, toward the place where the sea went from green to black. The fishermen called it the Drop: an underwater cliff where the seafloor fell away into nothing. Nobody fished there. The currents were wrong. Boats disappeared there.

His father’s boat had disappeared there.

But his father had also once said, late at night, with a strange light in his eyes: Everything worth having in this ocean is at the Drop, anak. Everything.

Teo turned off the radio.

Ninety days. Three million pesos. One old boat.

There was only one place left to go.