He had spent much of the morning in VR, getting high, trying to forget everything. It was something he had tried many times, but in the end, it always failed, and he’d come crashing back down to reality. It was hard to forget everything he’d lost, to forget what he was: a freakish reject, a half-man, half-fish monstrosity. It wasn’t like people didn’t let him know it. The stares as he walked by, the mothers pulling their curious children away in fear and disgust-he could feel their judgment with every step. He used to really be someone, the infamous "genius bad boy of Arden Corporation," as the gossip mags would call him. Now, what was he? A deformed freak.

And so, once again, Jake was compelled by his sorrow to come here, to the diving point that had ruined his life. Jake sat on the edge, his eyes fixed on the dark, murky waters below. He’d been here many times before, sometimes to scavenge and make a bit of money, but often for what he was doing today-contemplating ending it all. The dim lighting of the Lower Levels cast long, dark shadows over his tall, thin frame, almost highlighting the scales that crept up his arms, making them shimmer faintly. He fiddled with his nose ring, lost in thoughts of what he once was, what he once had, and could never have again. Like many days, the crushing weight of his exile and loneliness bore down on him, suffocating him under its weight. Some days, it made it so fucking hard to even breathe.

“Maybe today’s the day,” he muttered to himself, his voice barely audible over the lapping water. “One last dive...”

Just as Jake was about to stand, a loud commotion caught his attention. He snapped his head in the direction of the noise. Loud, frantic footsteps echoed off the metal walkways of the diving point. Jake squinted, his green eyes, with their eerie white film, catching sight of a figure rushing toward him.

The morning comes in sideways, the way it usually does out here - not so much a sunrise as a slow brightening of the grey, the overcast peeling back just enough to let something warm and directionless filter down across the water. The cluster rocks in long, easy swells. Nothing threatening. Just the ocean reminding everyone it is still there, still in charge, always has been.

A raft sits among the others.

Not the largest. Not the smallest. Lashed into the horseshoe of the cluster by two lines - one forward, one aft - close enough to hear neighbors, far enough to feel like its own sovereign thing. The canopy is patched in the way of all Lashhold canopies, a quilt of greenhouse panel and salvaged tarpaulin and one section of what might once have been a highway sign, bolted flat and tilted just right to shed rain. Below deck, the hydroponic troughs run quiet, the soft trickle of the recirculating system a sound that becomes, after enough time, indistinguishable from the sea itself.

The birth-raft tattoo is its own declaration. So is the raft.

Around the cluster the day is already moving. Smoke rises from a cook fire two rafts over, the smell of grilled fish and fermented kelp cutting clean through the salt air. Someone is singing - a patching chanty, slow and habitual, the kind sung not for ceremony but because hands work better with a rhythm underneath them. The call goes out across the deck planks. A response comes back from somewhere in the fog of morning tasks, a different voice, same tune.

A lookout perches high on the tallest mast in the cluster, scanning the horizon with the patient stillness of someone who has done it long enough that stillness is no longer an effort. The water out past the cluster's edge is flat and grey and wide and entirely without feature. A good morning, by Lashhold standards. Nothing coming. Nothing going.

The lashings creak.

Somewhere below, a trough pump cycles. The canopy breathes in a gust that passes through as quickly as it came, and the cluster settles back into its slow, collective drift - west, or what passes for west out here, following the current the way the current follows nothing at all.

The raft is here. It is lashed in. It belongs.

The ocean does not offer opinions on the matter, but it has not taken it either, and out on the open water, that is as close to a blessing as anything gets.

The evening light filtered weakly through the tinted dome overhead, casting everything in a melancholy blue-green glow. Jake Arden sat at the edge of the diving point, legs dangling over the platform where lower level scavengers launched themselves into the flooded ruins below. The water looked black tonight, inviting in its darkness.

His webbed fingers traced the scales along his forearm absently as he stared down into the depths. Upper management had closed the dive point hours ago, but he knew all the maintenance codes-one of the few advantages of his former life that still served him here in exile.

"Just one deep breath," he whispered to himself, the words leaving his lips in that distinctive transatlantic accent that refused to fade despite years in the lower levels. The white film over his green eyes gave his gaze an empty quality as he contemplated the water below. "One deep breath and let the pressure do the rest."

Jake pulled a small vial from his pocket-some new synthetic from the pleasure district-and turned it thoughtfully in his palm. The drug would make his final dive painless, at least. A fitting end for the disgraced heir of Arden Corp, consumed by the very waters that had marked him for exile.