Page 82 of The Demons in the Deep: Extended Edition
Kestra shrieked as the dissolution of Mai’s lower half began, and everyone turned around to watch again, including Flay. Mai couldn’t help a wicked grin at them all as her bright-green tail took shape. She tucked the breathing device between her teeth, fastened it at the back of her head, and flipped over the railing as Rake had done, flicking her tail in midair to boost the arc of her descent and clear the spikes.
A moment of sunlit suspension—and then she crashed through the surface into the depths.
Rake was waiting for her, his indigo hair floating in a glorious cloud around his face. Above the surface, his features were almost too sharp sometimes—keen enough to cut flesh. Below, the undulation of the water softened his face a little. He gave her a shark’s smile, and with a lash of his tail, he sped away.
He kept pausing so she could catch up to him, and he spoke to her, though she couldn’t answer.
“I knew you wouldn’t want to wait,” he said. “And I thought you and I deserved to see this together first, after everything.”
Mai couldn’t answer, but she touched the center of her chest. Rake smiled again and swam on. She followed, wriggling her tail.
They hadn’t gone far when the city loomed out of the depths.
Broken it was, splintered and toppled in places, but both of them stopped and hovered, gazing in awe.
The mermaids had built their city from the bottom of the sea to its surface, but they had erected it on a shelf of the sea-floor, so even its lowest tiers were not too deep. Another sign that they had been connected to humans—they had ensured the pressure of the ocean would not be too much for human guests in their domain.
Parts of the buildings still stood—tenements with round entrances or arched openings through which the citizens could swim at ease. Seaweed ribboned like doleful banners in the blue gloom, festooning pillared colonnades. Crystal domes that might once have held breathable air lay like cracked cups, and more sparkling shards of the crystalline substance studded the ocean floor.
The sheer scope of the city turned Mai dizzy. The vast number of doorways and chambers seemed innumerable, like the cells of a hive.
Slender tubes ran throughout the city, from building to building, sometimes emptying near great wheels. Mai suspected that the tubes were used to harness and increase the power of natural currents, forcing the wheels to spin and perhaps powering the mechanics of the place. But everything was so damaged she could not tell for sure. Perhaps with time she could decipher the system.
Rake took her hand and curled it against his chest. The lines of his body were taut with emotion, but his tail undulated steadily. Mai could only imagine how he must feel, seeing the city of his ancestors for the first time. If he could cry, she suspected he would have.
“We must not go too deep,” Rake said at last, “or we may never find our way out again. I would like to look in there.” He pointed to a large building in the center of an open space. A chunk of it had been sheared away, like a third of a round loaf sliced off.
Mai swam after him toward the dark interior, but she hesitated when he plunged into the shadows. His large eyes could see through the gloom, to a certain extent, but she could barely make out anything. She ventured a little deeper, but darkness closed around her and she panicked, thrashing, pushing herself out and up.
Rake came slithering out of the dark at once and twined his tail comfortingly with hers. “Forgive me. I forgot that you are not really a mermaid.”
She wanted to beg him not to leave her alone in the dead, watery city, but with the breathing device in place, all she could do was shake her head.
“Get on my back,” he said. “Wrap your arms around me so we can stay together.”
She slid to his back, securing herself with a solid grip around his torso.
The next several long minutes were spent in utter blackness. Mai clung to Rake, focusing on sipping air through the breathing device, until he swam into a chamber that glimmered with turquoise light.
Tall stone partitions stood in rows, extending far, far above Mai and Rake. And along their surfaces were lines of etched symbols that glowed in the dark.
The mermaid’s written language. It had to be. But though the mermaids spoke Common as humans did, Mai could not decipher any of the writing. The ancient mermaids must have had a different way of representing letters, sounds, and words.
Mai let go of Rake, and they swam together through the rows of walls covered in writing. A few partitions near the end of the chamber were broken, and Rake collected a thin shard with some of the markings on it.
“I’m guessing you’ll want this,” he said, handing it to Mai, and she wriggled her tail to express her excitement. She could study the shard later and possibly figure out how to interpret the writing. Either that, or she would need the help of a linguist.
They swam along a side channel between two walls. But Mai’s tail, not entirely under her control, whipped aside farther than she intended and slapped against a cracked piece of wall. With a grating rumble, a section of broken stone slid sideways. She moved away, but when the chunk tumbled to the floor, its edge caught and crushed part of her tailfin, pinning it in a vise of stone on stone.
She couldn’t cry out for Rake, but in a few moments he noticed her absence and swirled around, speeding to her aid. He jammed both hands against the chunk of rock pinning her tail, churned the water into a frenzy of bubbles trying to work up enough speed and power to shove it aside. But it was too ponderously heavy.
Mai touched her belt questioningly. If she changed back into human form, would her foot still be pinned, or would she be free?
“Wait,” Rake said. “I need leverage. Let me see if I can find something to pry it up.”
He swam away, and she floated in the turquoise glow of the strange symbols until he returned with a long bar that looked like it had once been part of a spear. It had a tapered end, which Rake wedged beneath the fallen chunk of rock. He braced himself against a nearby wall, his arms bulging as he strained to shift the weight off Mai’s fin.
A watery growl of stone on stone, and the chunk moved, just a little. Mai pulled while Rake strained again, with his back set against the neighboring wall.
