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Chapter 79 - The Perimeter

For a few heartbeats after Rowan vanished beneath the ribs, the world above steadied. Not quiet—never quiet here—but the kind of balance a boat finds between swells when all hands lean the same way.

"Form the ring!" Callen's voice carried over water and panic. He stood on a rib slick with kelp, braced like a figurehead, spear in one hand, knife in the other. "Rowers and freed inside—fighters on the line! Points down the throat or through the eye—don't waste steel on hide!"

A ragged chorus of ayes rippled. Islanders slid into place shoulder to shoulder with mainland fishermen and sailors who'd dragged themselves coughing over the gunwales. The newly freed shook, sobbed, spat seawater—but when Callen knifed his hand and pointed, they moved where he told them. Nets were hauled up and slashed open, cages pried half out of the sea and wedged against bone so locks could be hacked. Every heartbeat another wet, shaking body came up and sprawled gasping on planks.

Luna moved among them like a lamp carried through a storm. Her glow didn't blind; it softened—eased the edges off panic, steadied hands that would have capsized a boat with trembling. A boy clung to her hip, too exhausted to cry. She pressed his head to her shoulder and kept walking, voice low and even as she passed knives into the right palms and pushed splints under the right ankles.

Lyra had one foot planted on a thwart and one on a rib, knuckles white on the mast. Her eyes had that far-away glassiness again, as if seeing two worlds at once. When she spoke, it came as a bark: "Left—under the boat—now!" A spear jabbed down in the same breath and an eel arched up, impaled through the mouth. "High!" she cried, and a man who would have taken the tentacle in the face ducked in time to have it smack the keel instead. Every warning she gave felt stolen from a place a second and a half ahead of here.

At the ring's strongest point stood Darin.

Tharos shone around him in a slow, jade halo, the light curved across his shoulders and back like the idea of a shell more than a shell itself. He planted his boots on the rib and leaned into every blow like a man leaning into wind. Tentacles slapped him and slid, teeth scraped and skittered off the shimmer. When the ring bent, he stepped into the bend and shouldered it back into shape.

"Hold," he said, not yelling, as if the word itself had weight. "Hold." When tentacles wrapped a gunwale, he hacked down with his axe and green bled along the blade's edge and the flesh parted cleaner than it should have. "Back," he snarled at the limb, and it recoiled as if the voice belonged to tides.

The first wave hit like a thrown net—wide, messy, all at once. Sharks with milk-glass eyes knifed in. Squids flung themselves over gunwales with a slap and a reek like old pennies. Eels whipped from under the bone shelves, all teeth and hunger. The ring flexed; it did not break. Islanders jabbed when Callen yelled "now," stabbed where Lyra screamed "there," and fell back two steps when Luna grabbed their elbows and said "breathe" through her teeth.

A freed manta ray, net scars white on its black wing, slid under a boat and heaved, throwing an eel into the air like a tossed rope. A dolphin—ragged, one eye clouded—darted in and butted a shark away from a man who'd slipped. A big green turtle battering-rammed a squid and then swam slow circles around a shattered hull as if to say: climb on if you can't float.

Callen moved like a hinge—saw the soft parts of the incoming tide and swung steel toward them. "Eye!" he snapped, and someone took the shot and was rewarded with a shriek and a thrash. "Gills—up under!" and a spear rucked green flesh open and black blood pumped. "Don't wrestle—cut and let go!" and three men stopped tugging on a tentacle like it was a rope and instead severed it clean. His knife and spear flickered; he was everywhere the line frayed.

Lyra's voice went hoarse, but she did not stop. "You—duck!" She pointed, and the man ducked, and a tendril of limb missed his nose by a hair. "That net—cut the top corner!" A knife flashed; the whole weighted mess slid off a boat instead of collapsing onto it. "Behind you—no, your other left!" A woman who'd been a sailor her whole life grinned wolfishly even as she reversed grip and set steel behind her without looking. "Thanks," she called, breathless. Lyra didn't hear; she was already looking somewhere the rest of them hadn't reached yet.

Darin took a hit that would have broken a plank. It slammed him back to one knee and the ring groaned toward collapse; he drove his foot down and the Tharos-light thickened, a double curve blooming cross-boat to boat. The blow spent itself on green. "Up," he told the men who'd flinched and fallen. They rose. He did not look away from the sea.

The water roiled, then thinned as the first wave spent itself on the ring and left meat and foam floating. For six long breaths, nothing struck. In that space, the line did the things lines must if they are to last: men swapped places without asking, knives got passed down and back, shoulders were leaned into, three different voices answered the same cry with "Here."

Then the sea changed its mind.

Bigger shapes moved in the green-black. Things too long to be eels, too thick to be squid, too quiet to be sharks. Something brushed the rib under Darin's boots and the bone hummed. The air itself got heavier, as if it had learned what the water intended and decided to help.

"Steady," Callen said, softer now. Not a bark. A parcel of calm passed hand to hand. "We've held worse weather."

Lyra's head snapped toward the horizon. "No we haven't," she whispered, and then louder, to the man about to laugh at bravado, "Duck!" He did. A beak big as his head slammed into the space his skull had been and rattled the rib under all their feet. He vomited seawater and said, dazed, "Thanks," and she nodded without seeing him.

They met the second wave like men who had learned the first well. The monsters were larger, stranger—eel-bodies with paddle limbs; squids with barnacle crust growing like armor—but the ring was tighter. Spears went where they should. Knives followed to finish. When a thing too big to name humped up and shoved at a boat's belly, Darin stepped, set his shoulders, and let Tharos bear the shove. The boat rocked, did not overturn. The cheer that went up wasn't loud; it was low and fierce, the sound of men who have believed in themselves for a breath longer than fear allowed.

Luna went pale but did not flag. There were too many hands on her now—frightened, grateful, pleading. She pressed calm into them like poultice. "In," she said. "Two. Out. Two. Good." One man's teeth chattered. She took his jaw in her palm and he met her eyes and the chattering stopped without his consent. "Good," she said again, and moved on.

The manta swept back in and flung two eels into each other. An orca shouldered a corrupted shark hard enough to split it and the water shuddered with the impact. A freed turtle hoisted a girl and her father on its back and paddled the slow, patient path to the inside of the ring where hands lifted them down. Someone laughed, rusty as disused bells, and the laugh made three others.

For a little while, they were winning. They felt it—a subtle lean of the world in their favor. Darin shouted, not orders but encouragement that tasted like orders because they made you want to obey. Callen cut something that had teeth where a stomach ought to be and wiped his blade off on the rib and pointed in the same motion to a soft spot on the next incoming horror. Lyra's warnings slid from shriek to bark; she was still aflame inside her skull, but she'd found the rhythm of what tried to kill them and turned it against itself. The ring tightened. The freed inside it wept, then found that their weeping had become shouting, then found that their shouting had shaped itself into a chant with no words anyone had taught them.

Then the deep sent its answer.

It didn't begin with sight. It began with pressure. A long, low push that flattened the hair on forearms and made ears pop. The water around the ribs, already crowded with foam and blood, darkened a shade as if a cloud had passed over the sun below them. The freed sea-creatures, brave as they had been, went skittish—dolphins darted to the far side of the ring and swam tight nervous circles; the manta sank one body-length and held there, wings stiff; the orca angled down and away and vanished with the efficiency of a hunter who respects a bigger predator.

Tharos vibrated against Darin's back, not with fear—turtles do not panic that way—but with a steady warning, a rumble like distant surf. Brace, the feeling said. Darin breathed once and widened his stance.

Lyra's head whipped toward the center of the whale. She saw nothing; she saw everything. The word came out of her before she knew she'd decided to bring it into the world: "Down."

They all looked anyway.

The first tentacle came up slow, like a mountain learning to stand. It broke the surface twenty paces off the ring, round as a mast where it rose, thicker under the skin of the sea. Suckers the size of shields flexed and dripped. Black ichor ran in veins along the flesh and steamed where it hit water. It paused at full height, casting a long, wet shadow. In the same breath, another rose opposite it. And another. And another. A crown of limbs around the ring, each tall as the whale's tallest rib.

"No," someone said softly, not to the tentacles, not to the sea—to the shape of what this meant.

"Hold!" Callen shouted, and his voice climbed the ribs and came back iron. "Stand with me!"

The first tentacle dropped.

Darin met it. He stepped into the space it meant to occupy and raised the green. The limb hit Tharos's shimmer and slid sideways, the slick flesh squealing as it tried to find purchase on light. Darin's knees dipped. The ring leaned. He grunted—not a cry; a sound you make when a weight you expected turns out to be heavier—and shoved it off. Axe up, chop, chop—green on green-white flesh—two deep cuts, not enough to sever. "Again!" he barked, and three spears jabbed in the wounds he'd made. The tentacle recoiled, slapped the water, and dove.

Another limb smashed a rib to splinters a dozen paces away. Wood jumped. Men fell, scrambled, reset. Luna's glow tightened to a hard, bright core; she was done trying to keep everyone from fear and now focused on keeping them from freeze. "Move," she told a man staring at the stump where the rib had been. He moved.

A third tentacle came straight for the boats, aiming not to crush but to scoop. Callen saw the angle and went for the point, not the blade—he rammed his spear up into one sucker as it reached for a gunwale and the limb recoiled, not in pain but in surprise that something had told it no. "In!" he shouted, and the three men nearest him leaned in, and the boat that would have gone out and over rocked in and held water instead of air.

For a breath it looked as if they might meet even this. The ring had bent under waves and swells already; it did what trained things do now when a breaking force hit it: it flowed around the blow and found itself whole on the other side.

The fourth tentacle did not strike. It coiled.

It snaked across the rib toward Callen without lifting, low and fast and quiet. The suckers took hold and the rib sang with the pull. He stepped to meet it and sank his spear again, but the limb had learned his reach; it slid under the point and wrapped his waist like a belt pulled mean. In the same heartbeat, another—twin to the first, coming from the opposite quarter—found Lyra.

Lyra's eyes had gone all pupil. She didn't see the limb until it touched her ankle. She did not scream until it tightened—then the sound tore out of her like cloth ripping. She threw her weight backward and grabbed for the mast. Oiled flesh slid under her fingers. She got purchase on rope. The tentacle pulled. So did Luna, grabbing Lyra's wrists and leaning her whole self into it, heels skidding on wet plank.

"Cut it!" Callen roared, and swung his knife up under his own arm to saw at the living belt around him. The suckers held. They made a sound like boots pulled out of deep mud—wet and stubborn and obscene. He stabbed, stabbed again, calm and precise even now, even here. The second limb looped his thighs. He planted the butt of his spear against bone and shoved. For a heartbeat, it arrested the drag. "Hold the line!" he shouted over his shoulder, because habit sits in marrow and he had enough left to try to leave that in them.

"Darin!" Luna gasped, fingers slipping on Lyra's slick wrists. The girl was not light but fear makes you small. Lyra's nails slashed Luna's forearms bloody; Lyra didn't notice. "Darin!"

Darin was already moving. He took three running steps along the rib and leapt, Tharos brightening to a hard green arc around him. He came down with the axe two-handed where Lyra's limb was thinnest. Green met gray-flesh and the edge bit. The tentacle flinched, tightened—Lyra screamed as it squeezed—then slackened as meat parted. "Again!" Darin snarled, and swung—

—and the pair of limbs at Callen jerked, as if whatever commanded them had decided two meals were better than one if taken at once. Callen's spear butt slipped. The suckers reset. He slashed, found purchase, lost it—

"Callen—!" someone cried, not using a title, using a name in a way that makes it a prayer.

He didn't look back. He looked at them all. He looked at Darin and at Luna and at the men nearest him whose knuckles were white on lines and edges. "Hold," he said again, softer now, a word set down like a keepsake. He jammed his knife hand up between flesh and fish-skin and hissed as suckers took him to the wrist. "Hold," he said again, to the ring and to himself and maybe to the sea.

Darin put every pound of himself into the next cut. The axe split deep, so deep the green sputtered and flared. The limb around Lyra convulsed and let go, not because it had decided to, because it had been told it must by physics and pain. Lyra flew backward into Luna; they went down in a tangle, skidding, breath gone in the same ripped gasp. Darin pivoted, already running, already dragging the axe back to take the angle on Callen's belt—

The limb holding Callen yanked.

There was no arc, no theatrics. It simply went down, and Callen with it. He got one last stroke in—a true one, into the suckers chewing his hip—and then the ocean took him. The water folded over him in a clean, slick line. The ring shouted; the sound didn't change the shape of the sea.

Lyra managed one breath—one clean breath that Luna shoved into her chest with both hands—and then the matching limb that had missed her the first time snapped up from the other side and had her around the calves before Darin could turn. She clawed at Luna, fingers finding fabric, skin, anything. Luna's hands clamped on Lyra's wrists again and held until the tentacle's pull hauled both of them to the very edge of the plank and Luna's ribs hit wood with a thud that would bruise. "No," Luna said through her teeth, not to the limb, to something larger. "No."

"Darin!" Lyra's voice cracked. It had been warning and work all afternoon; now it was only a girl's voice, scared and furious at the unfairness of it. "Darin!"

He was there. He was too late. The limb jerked and Lyra slid out of Luna's hands. Her nails scored four burning lines down Luna's forearms; Luna held anyway and then lost anyway and the water took Lyra, too, clean and hard and final.

Darin dove without thinking—and Tharos caught him. Not physically. Not with a yank. With a feeling like a hand on the back of his heart: not yet, not that way, not if you want to bring them back.

He didn't break the surface. He didn't breathe for two beats that felt like years. He looked at the hole the sea had made where two people had been and the ring that still stood and the men who looked at him because that is what men do when they do not know where else to look. The water bubbled. The limb tips vanished. The deep rolled over.

"Line holds!" he roared, and his voice was raw and huge and not to be argued with. "Hold!"

They did. Because he said it in the tone of a tide that will come back again and again until stone remembers the shape of it and yields.

Luna pushed herself up on shaking arms, hair plastered to her skull, blood and salt streaked together down her skin. She didn't sob; there wasn't room for it. She turned her face toward the place where Lyra had gone and set her jaw so hard it creaked. Her glow didn't flare. It narrowed to a needle of steady light that made the world near her sharp enough to use.

Somewhere under them, far under them, something laughed very quietly.

Above, men spat, reset grips, planted feet.

Rowan's fight raged on in the ribs below—unseen, felt only as tremor and the occasional rush of heat. The prince's cage hung. The line around the whale held. For now.

And in the space where two were missing, the ring closed ranks, not because they thought it would bring them back, but because that was the next true thing to do.

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