Page 102 of Call of the Fathoms

“You bring her back here. I have everything I need to make sure she doesn’t die.” A troubled expression crossed his face. “I hope she isn’t hurt, though.”

So did he, but he also knew Alexia and knew all the choices she would make. She risked herself every single day to make sure that others were well. He wouldn’t be surprised to find her injured, especially if everyone else was fighting.

With a sharp nod, he headed out into the hallway and closed the door behind him. Hopefully, the doctor would remain in there. He doubted any of his own kind would harm the man, but he would spread the word as soon as he found the other People of Water.

It didn’t take him long.

He headed down one blood smeared white hallway to find his first depthstrider. The female was bloated with rage, her spines all lifted and her body larger than it would be when she wasn’t so angered. She turned toward him with a hiss, and he could see that a blast had caught her across the face, cutting through her lovely pale lavender cheek.

“All is well,” he said as he crawled past her on his forearms. “Where is my human?”

“Fortis?” the depthstrider breathed out. ‘But you’re meant to be dead."

“I did not die.”

“But fate said...”

“The vision was wrong. I did not die. I was meant to be here, and the sea saw to it that my soul did not yet flee. Alexia saved me, regardless of how my future was interpreted.” And he would never forget that she had saved his life even when he told her not to.

“I have not seen her. But there are others roaming the halls. Some of the achromos still fight us, but their numbers have dwindled. Soon, they will all be dead but those we have chosen to spare.”

He found that he didn’t care. There were bad people here, yes. He wanted them dead just as much as anyone else, but he wanted... Her.

Alexia had become so much more important than getting his revenge on these people. He’d spent his entire life wanting to harm this city, to destroy them for what they would do to him, but now he just wanted to be withher. Who cared what his people did to this city now?

Nodding, he went in the direction the depthstrider pointed, quickly finding familiar faces. Mira stood at the end of one hallway, a gun loosely held in her hand while she talked with Arges. He was surprised either of them were standing around when anyone could have attacked them. Was the battle really that close to finished?

She caught sight of him and her eyes widened. “Fortis! I didn’t know you were...”

“She didn’t tell you? The damned woman didn’t kill me.”

A slow grin spread across Mira’s face. “I didn’t think she had it in her to lie to you like that, but look at her, surprising me at every turn. Welcome back to the land of the living, I guess.”

“Where is she?”

Arges moved into his line of vision, the gills on the sides of his neck flat with serious emotion. “We were just talking about that. We’re not sure where she is, Fortis. We expected to find her at the last open hatch, but she must have moved on to the next.”

“And someone was sent to retrieve her?”

The other two looked at each other before Mira winced. “No. We’ve been fighting for our lives here. Tau had more people in it than we thought. Most of them are holed up in the same room at this point, but we can’t get into it. We’re not sure if there’s an escape pod attached to it, but there’s about fifty people in there.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“No one has looked for her, Fortis.”

His gills flared wide with an angry hiss. “Fine, I will go.”

“We could use you here, brother,” Arges said. But there was no real emotion in his voice. Clearly Arges expected him to go.

So he did. Fortis headed down the nearest hallway, following the path she should have taken. There was so much blood on the floor, he slipped as he moved. He ended up crawling through the red streaks on his forearms, only reminding him just how much he hated not being in water.

The first five hatches were all open, and the sound of the water splashing against the edges was the only thing he could hear. But then he came to the sixth, and he smelled her blood. There hadn’t been many people here, or if there had been, they were all inside. So now he could follow her blood on the floor, only hers. She’d been dragging her feet as her life force spilled out.

Here she had slipped. There was a smear of blood down the wall where she’d fallen, a pool of it where she’d rested for a moment before she continued going.

Hearts pounding in his chest, he finally found her on her hands and knees past the seventh hatch. She was nearly at the eighth, crawling her way towards it.

Alexia didn’t even look at him as he approached. All her attention was on her labored breathing and words he could just barely make out. “One more. Just one more.”

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