We moved through the black silt like two halves of a single, damaged creature. The heavy, shackled feet of the Colonel churned the mud below. The world was a crushing, silent void, yet the fusion of our minds gave us an internal, searing clarity.
"Where is she?" I sent the thought, direct and sharp, into the torrent of Rist's self-condemnation.
"I won't say."
"Where did you hide the girl?"
A violent wave of denial slammed back. "Silence! If Ramsey knows, she dies. He won't use her as leverage; he'll use her as proof of my failure and as my punishment."
"Ramsey is hunting you not for riches, but for that failure," I countered, forcing him to confront the choice he made.
"Your mission was to destroy all evidence. You saved the one witness. That debt is the only thing keeping us alive right now. Tell me the location, Colonel. We have to get to her before he finds us."
The image I had seen—the small, silent child covered in impossible white and crimson—flared in my mind, and I drove it into his consciousness like a spear. The guilt, the shame, and the desperate love Rist felt for that one act of redemption finally overwhelmed his paranoia. The dam broke.
The world dissolved into the memory.
Last Command
I am Rist again, but no longer a colonel. I am just a man, scarred and betrayed, running on raw instinct. It was weeks after the massacre. The search for the survivors has long been called off, the official story cemented as a rogue pirate attack. Though she and I had been on the run for all that time, hidden from the public. But in the shadows of media conferences and behind Ramsey's sorrowful performances, there was a mass of fury, and the waves of assassins cemented it.
The only thing saved, besides her life, was an old, secure access card. It's heavy, made of bronze, and bears the almost-forgotten insignia of the Oceanic Survey Command—a relic I could never part with from my days as the general's right-hand man, overseeing deep-sea logistics.
Standing on the pier of a forgotten shipyard, the child—still silent, still empty-eyed—was wrapped tightly in my old regulation coat.
I take a glance over at her periodically as I scan the surroundings for signs of a tail.
I couldn't leave her with strangers. She was too volatile a truth; her existence would condemn me, and her innocence would condemn Ramsey. I'm sure that by now he's aware of her existence, my fellow brothers who are now hunting me must have reported back to him, they must have reported that I now have a greater priority than seeking him out for answers.
I chartered a battered, anonymous cutter, navigated by the old bronze card, and set a course far from any main shipping lanes, heading for the Kestrel Deep Shelf.
There, far out where the currents change and the depths drop, sat Lightship 73.
It wasn't a lighthouse but a large, permanent, automated buoy—a floating research station used decades ago to monitor the tectonic stability of the ocean floor. It was remote, perfectly autonomous, and, most importantly, boring. No one had checked its systems since that event years ago.
I remember hauling her up the rusted ladder, the sea air sharp and clean. Inside, the station was small, smelling faintly of ozone and old, preserved electronics. The main chamber was a control room with a massive, sealed porthole, a perfect view of nothing but endless blue.
I stocked the automated stores with enough rations for a year, desalination filters, and a few blankets. Before I left, I activated the ship's old, silent cloaking system—a remnant of military testing—which made it invisible to all standard satellite and radar scans, relying instead on archaic sonar frequencies that Ramsey's modern network would overlook. There was also a labyrinth of deep-sea tunnels no more than five feet in diameter used for the connection of cables between all the lightships. I decided that was how I'd make my escape.
I knelt before her. She still hadn't spoken, hadn't cried. I pressed the bronze key into her small hand, closing her tiny fingers around it.
"You wait here, little ghost," I whispered, my voice raw. "You wait for the one who comes for the key. You are safe. I will pay the debt."
And then, I sealed the hatch, leaving the most valuable thing in the world to me alone on a silent ocean shelf, condemned to a life of perpetual solitude to ensure her safety. It was the only way I knew to keep her alive.
Directions in the deep
I slammed back into my body, the cold, gritty silt immediately real. My head spun, and the pain in my side felt like a white-hot brand. But the fusion had achieved its purpose.
Lightship 73. Kestrel Deep Shelf.
I now had a name and a destination.
"The Lightship," I thought, relaying the name back to Rist, who was silent now, his resistance broken.
"Ramsey would never check a decommissioned post. It's perfect."
"We'll move to the nearest continental shelf access." Rist's trained mind immediately took over the logistics, though his voice was still internal and haunted.
"The current is too strong for the surface, and the chains make swimming impossible. We need to find a deep-sea maintenance tunnel. They run along the shelf to the city's power grid."
We were in the deepest part of the arena's wreckage, far below the churning surface. The assassin, stunned by the shackles, was somewhere in the dark, no doubt recovering.
Ramsey was still above, dealing with the total collapse of his stage, but he was a general, not a deep-sea diver.
Our immediate priority was to ditch the chains. The metal links were thick, immune to simple kinetic force.
I drove my legs forward, focusing on the coordinates imprinted by Rist's memory. It wasn't just a matter of escape; it was a race against a man who would pay any price to erase the only evidence of his monstrous command.
We began our long, desperate crawl toward the silent tunnels, the immense weight of the chains making it grueling.
Above us, the sounds of the surface—the muffled, seismic shockwaves of Ramsey and Maro's continued, destructive fight—were a constant, low-frequency thrum, a clock counting down our borrowed time.
The fusion of our minds was no longer a surge of adrenaline but a painful, invasive clarity, forcing me to endure Rist's self-loathing while my body screamed from the wound in my side.
No Direction
Suddenly the thrumming sound stopped and there was an immense shift in the water above us, we both glanced around frantically, knowing that it meant only one thing.
"Ramsey is here. He's geared for pressure." Rist's voice—cold, clinical, and completely filled with guilt—slammed into my thoughts.
The internal communication was clean, overriding the sensory chaos.
The force of Ramsey's blow combined with the towers' implosion had scattered the fight. Ramsey must have taken advantage of that to put Maro, someone obviously less experienced with the seas, at a disadvantage.
I saw a final flash—the distinct, silver-blue energy of Maro's Law application—as he fought against the currents to pull himself to the surface, more than likely injured and exhausted. He had bought us time, but he could not follow us into the crushing depths. We were entirely alone.
We hadn't crawled twenty yards before the mud vibrated with a deep, subsonic hum. A single, piercing beam of focused white light cut through the murk, followed by a hulking silhouette.
It was Ramsey, he wore a massive, matte-black exoskeleton, built for deep-sea salvage and sealed against the depth. He wasn't wading; he was striding across the ocean floor.
His chassis stopped twenty feet away, the light beam locking onto the metallic glint of Rist's shackles. Attached to the suit's massive arms, instead of hands, were two enormous, reinforced buoys—the orange color muted and sinister in the black water. These weren't for saving lives; they were likely high-density buoyancy units used for crushing and pressure-testing. Ramsey had infused them with the law of action as well, turning them into underwater wrecking balls.
"A sentimental fool, and a reckless child!"
Ramsey's voice boomed through a directional sonic emitter, making the words feel like physical blows.
"You've wasted your sacrifice, Colonel. Now, the final act of your treason will be televised."
The suit raised the two floats. They moved not to strike, but to crush—designed to instantly envelop and flatten a human body into a singular mass. The threat was terrifyingly absolute.
Rist's mind screamed. "Move! Use the weight! It's the only way to meet his force!"
I drove my legs hard into the mud, throwing my body sideways, dragging Rist and the massive chain that connected us.
"The Colonel's ghost is waiting for us!" I yelled internally, translating my desperate intent into energy as Ramsey fired.
The two giant floats slammed together, the water between them violently compressed and momentarily vaporized by the force of the Law. The sonic boom that followed ripped through the water where we had been, leaving a shimmering, empty cavity in the silt.