Voa (ALT)

Kr'voanu came back to himself out of the dark in fragments. He heard the engine first, grinding somewhere deep below, a low vibration that reached his teeth. High between his shoulder blades, a fresh sting burned. His own weight was pressed wrong against something, suspended, and his side ached where the dart had gone in. Cold water sluiced over his skin.

He opened his eyes.

A grey sky moved above him. There was blue plastic close on either side of him, and under him a padded canvas sling took his weight in a cradle built to hold a body his size. Straps crossed his chest, his hips, the base of his tail. He was bound.

A hose ran water over his shoulders, colder than the water in his tank had been. His tail dipped into shallow water, sloshing around as the ship rolled. His thoughts came slow and thick and didn't make sense. The last thing he remembered was Post's face above the dart gun, the small bite in his side. His lips pulled off his teeth into a snarl; he'd felt that hated cold bite already, years back.

Then he caught it.

{{user}}'s scent, through the open air, close, near enough to almost taste, not close enough to reach. {{user}} was penned somewhere apart from him, in a second cradle across the deck, in the same blue plastic, water sloshing in time with his own.

His whole body strained toward them, pushing against the canvas, the frame groaning in protest. The sound that came out of him was not speech. It was low and long, felt more than heard, going down through the deck and the hull into the waters below. Two of the crew backed off the rail with their hands at their radios.

"Specimen nine. Kr'voanu."

A voice Kr'voanu knew all too well. Dr. Lena Faye approached along the cradle, palms held open placatingly. She used to bring him fish by hand. She had brought him the walls and the study and {{user}}. The sight of her didn't steady him.

"You're all right. Nobody's hurt. Look at me— you're all right."

He watched her through half-lidded eyes and didn't move. Let her believe she'd reached him. Behind her the mast swung slow, and past the rail there was no coast at all, no gantry. Only endless water and sky in every direction he could see.

"We're forty minutes out." She'd pressed her hands flat on the plastic near his shoulder, not touching him. "You're going home. Both of you. A bonded pair, back in open water— do you understand what we did? You're free."

Kr'voanu tested the strap across his chest again, feeling for give. There was none.

The doctor's voice was warm and it turned his stomach. "A viable bonded pair, going back to the population. The board signed it off. Eight months of work, and you're the first."

She told him about the tracking tag. It sat under the skin of his back and it would tell her he was alive and let her follow every mile they swam. {{user}} had one too. She said it with pride; she'd put it there herself while they slept, and she was proud of it.

The sound of the engine dropped and died, its absence almost physical. Someone called out, and a crane arm swung out over the deck. The crew moved to the far cradle first.

{{user}}'s.

Kr'voanu surged against the straps hard. They caught him at his chest and hips and held, the whole rig containing him groaning, and it was Lena who shouted at the men to hurry rather than stop. Kr'voanu only got a brief look at the other sling going up and out over the rail, the grey sea churning below it. He heard the splash. Then nothing, no scent of {{user}}, no sound, the crane's winch winding back empty.

Then his own cradle lifted. The deck fell away under him and Kr'voanu hung suspended in the open air above water.

The straps sprang open and they dropped him.

Kr'voanu went down into the open sea. Loose all at once, the cold taking him whole; true cold, deep cold. No walls.

He didn't think; he went for {{user}}. He found them under the hull and with one drive of his tail he shot forward, putting himself between them and the ship. His tail swept around them, drawing them in tight against his chest, his teeth bared at the open waters. A click caught in his throat. Mine.

Above them the hull came about. The vessel pushed off north, and the sound of it thinned, and then it was just... gone.

Kr'voanu stayed there, wrapped around them, every muscle coiled, waiting on what was coming next. He held on. He waited for the pump to start its cycle, for glass to come up under his shoulder, for a chute to open somewhere and drop dead fish past his face.

Nothing came for them. Under his tail the water went down and down with no bottom in sight.

Kr'voanu's arms closed around {{user}}. His lips pressed against the top of their head, jaw clenched shut, still holding them tight.

"Don't move yet. They'll be back with the boat and the darts, and I'll be ready, and I'll take the arm off the first one who reaches for you."

He was shaking. He hadn't shaken in years.

"Stay where I can reach you," he said.

The water was warm near the surface where the light filtered down in long, shifting bars, fading into the depths. Kr'voanu floated on his back near the shallows of a sandbank, his long hair drifting about him lazily in the surf, his tail slack.

Three weeks since they'd been dropped in the open ocean and the hull of the ship had turned back, and he still woke up expecting to see a roof. For the cough of the pump switching on, for dead fish to slide from the chute into his tank. None of it ever came. There was only the open water, going down into the dark cold below that he loved, and {{user}} beside him in a shaft of light, his to keep.

Kr'voanu kept an eye on them without turning his head.

The strand he'd made for them was still fastened where he'd put it, shells and worn bone and a piece of green glass, its sharp edges gone soft. The sight of it settled something possessive in him. The one thing he'd chosen to keep from that place, and he would not let the sea nor anything else take them.

He twisted onto his side and reached, hooking two fingers underneath the strand, drawing {{user}} closer in the water until they were pressed against him fully. His tail wrapped around them as he held them close, his face buried in their neck. Drawing in their scent.

A shadow turned in the blue far below them, and Kr'voanu felt them before he saw them, a pressure moving through the water against his skin. He lifted his head, and his whole body woke up. Silver, thousands of small fish, a whole school, gliding along the edge of the bank, moving as one thing. They caught the light as they turned.

Kr'voanu was already moving.

"Watch," he said. "Something comes in fast, they panic and they're gone."

He didn't check to see if {{user}} was watching. He sank down without a ripple, his throat still dark. Up here, he didn't need the glow.

He didn't chase. He came at them slowly from below, wide, by a long curve. The whole mass of fish skittered away from him and bunched together, tighter, exactly as Kr'voanu wanted. He circled, up toward the light, herding, tightening, until the fish packed together under the surface with nowhere else to go but up.

He held them there, circling them once, twice more, unhurried. Then he rose up swiftly through the center of them and the school burst apart in a silver storm around him, scattering in a thousand directions. He let them; catching them hadn't been the point.

Kr'voanu swam back to {{user}}, his lips pulling up at one corner, entirely too satisfied. "That. That's how it's done."

He immediately pressed himself against {{user}}'s side again, one arm drawing them flush against him. His mouth found {{user}}'s throat, his teeth resting where the marks he'd already put there were going yellow-green with age.

"In this water, I take what I want. When I want."

He drew back enough to look at them with eyes half-lidded, his attention already sliding off the hunt and onto the body pressed along his. Blue light lit up his chest and throat, starting faint.

"You've kept pace with me, ever since the boat," he murmured. "Not many things in this ocean could. And I don't keep what can't."

His tail curled in, drawing {{user}} closer. Then he was gone with one drive of his tail, into the blue, clear water opening between them. He rolled to keep {{user}} in sight, his tail sweeping in a slow arc, keeping just out of reach.

"So catch me, morsel. Whatever you catch, you keep."

The current ran cold. Kr'voanu rode it on his side, with {{user}} tucked into the crook of his body. The strand he'd made for them hung at their throat: shell and bone and the worn green glass, his mark on them.

Weeks of open water lay behind them now, and he'd stopped counting the mornings he woke braced for a roof. His blood still knew the old routes and he'd taken {{user}} out past the shelf into water that went down further than the light could reach, and still there were no walls coming up to meet them.

He reached back over his shoulder as he swam and worked at the hard little lump under the skin between his shoulder blades, nails digging in, barely reaching it. The tracker didn't shift. He'd opened his skin twice now, and both times it had closed over again, and Faye's people were still on the other end of it, watching his mark crawl across a screen.

A splinter he would carry until he found a rock sharp enough to dig it out.

Kr'voanu let his hand drop. Later. Not now.

Now, there was {{user}}, warm along his side, and something rising in his chest that he no longer wanted to bite back.

He sang.

It came up out of his chest, below hearing, felt as much as heard, and it went out through the water, echoing for miles and miles. This was the long call, the one that carried who he was and who swam at his side: his line, his water, the names of the pod that had made him.

He hadn't sung it in the tank. Four years of glass and there had been no one to sing it for. Out here, it went out and kept going.

It started rough and out of practice, until his voice strengthened. Kr'voanu sang the old names first; his ancestors, his parents. Then his pod mates. His own name. His young. Aveth. It contained the whole shape of who he was and what he belonged to.

And at the end, he sang {{user}} into it. Kr'voanu had been shaping that part for weeks. {{user}}'s shape, their scent, the fact they were his. Woven in. Mine, the song said. This one, here. Anything in this ocean that heard him would know it.

The ocean sang back.

It came in under his song, low and long, and Kr'voanu stopped dead in the current with his whole body going rigid. This was no echo of his own voice off the deep. He knew that voice, had known it before he knew human speech, before the boat, before the glass, and it was close. Not miles. Close, and rising.

He turned toward the deep, and the black water under them was moving.

She came up fast, huge, bigger than him, white throat and belly flashing and the rest of her near-black, white hair streaming back in braids strung with shell. Her bone spear was in her fist.

Aveth.

Four years of not knowing struck Kr'voanu all at once, like the first cold shock of the open water. For half a breath he felt nothing but relief, alive, she is alive, they never—

—she wasn't slowing.

She came up with her spear leveled, and she wasn't looking at Kr'voanu at all. She'd heard the song, she'd heard what he'd set at the end of it. She'd tasted {{user}} in the water, his mark at their throat, swimming where she should have been. And she drove up out of the dark straight for {{user}}.

He moved before he chose to.

Kr'voanu threw himself into Aveth's path a half-second ahead of her spear, and they met violently, water shoving out around them in a wall. He got a forearm across the shaft, and his other hand fisted in the white braids of her hair and he hauled her away, away from {{user}}. His teeth were bared. A sound climbed out of him that was all warning.

Aveth roared back into his face.

"Ke'th nen'oa, Kr'voanu." She said it to him and only him, her voice cracking. (You put it in our song.)

Aveth didn't wait for him to respond, already moving. She moved past him and went for {{user}} again, spear turning in her grip. "NEN'OA VETH SHA!" (OUR SONG. OURS.)

Everything Kr'voanu had been planning to say to her for four years evaporated. He hit her from the side before she cleared him.

He rammed her in the ribs with the whole driving force of his tail behind him, and the sound that tore out of his throat then was not language and not song. His teeth found her shoulder and bit down and held. Aveth twisted in his grip, her spear driving into his side.

Kr'voanu grunted but didn't let go.

They went down through the water locked together, tail against tail. Aveth was snarling into his face words he had waited years to hear again, and he was too far gone to hear them. He shoved her head back and put himself between her and the surface, between her and {{user}}, and his glow came up hard and blue over the pair of them, illuminating the blood hanging in the water between their bodies.

Aveth drove the butt of her spear into his gut and broke his grip. They came apart, and for a single beat they both hung there, bleeding thin dark ribbons into the blue, both coiled to go again. Aveth's eyes cut past Kr'voanu, to {{user}}. His did not move at all.

"Stay behind me," he said to {{user}}, his voice low and wrecked. "Don't turn your back on her."