The day stretched thin as pulled sugar. Heat weighted the boats; salt dried white on rope and knuckles and lips. Oars lay across thwarts like sleeping limbs. Voices, when they came, were low and tight, as if anything louder might crack the sea's strange stillness and spill something worse into the world.
Rowan's report had stripped the last scraps of denial from them. The whale skeleton was no rumor now. It was a shape of bone and iron and wrongness that had swallowed hundreds alive. The Thalriss stood with their jaws set, tridents slick with sweat. The Islanders avoided each other's eyes, as if shame for not being able to breathe the deep were a visible stain.
Darin watched the ribs. He tried not to, but his gaze slid back like a habit. Sun ran across the ivory arcs and made them glare. Every few breaths, he rolled his shoulders and flexed his hands, as if blood and bone could grind themselves into readiness by sheer will.
"I hate this," he said finally, not looking at anyone.
Callen, feet braced, hands easy on an oar he wasn't using, didn't glance up. "Hate which part?"
"Waiting while others drown," Darin said, harsher than he'd meant. He dragged a breath and softened it. "Waiting while Rowan gambles his breath for strangers. Waiting while I—" He broke off before the rest could spill out. While I sit. While I'm useless. While I watch.
On the other boat, Lyra huddled by the mast, Luna's pale glow pooled around her like moonlight poured into a bowl. Lyra's lips moved in a whisper. Her fingers tapped a pattern against her knee—one two three, one two three—as if counting might hold her in the here and now. "They aren't quiet," she said, eyes unfocused. "It's just that sound doesn't carry right up here. Down there, the crying sits on everything. It sits on your bones."
Luna squeezed her shoulder, the light brightening a fraction. "Stay with me," she murmured. "Match my breathing. In, two… out, two."
A clatter cut across the water—chains rattling bone. Heads turned as one. Movement stirred inside the skeleton where the ribs broke the surface. Guards—those ruined silhouettes of men and fish—dragged something enormous along a ribbed platform slick with kelp. Hooks slid; chain scraped. A cage, Darin realized. They were shoving a cage to the edge.
"Rowan," Callen said under his breath, as if the name itself could summon the man out of the sea. No answer came—only the wheeze of rope, the hiss of barnacle slime, the clank of iron skittering over old bone.
The corrupted reached the lip and heaved. For a heartbeat the cage balanced, heavy and mean, as if deciding whether to obey gravity. Then it dropped.
It hit the water like a thrown anvil. A sheet of foam jumped. The boats rocked hard. Islanders grabbed for rails and curses. Shock rolled outward in round gray waves. The cage gulped a breath of air and sank, dragging a comet-tail of bubbles. From the forest of hanging cages came a wail—high, human, terrible. It braided with lower, stranger sounds, and all of it carried even up here, dull with distance but unmistakable: a chorus of things that knew this sport and hated it.
"What are they—" an Islander began, and stopped because he knew. He'd played games as a boy. He knew the look of men making cruelty into pastime.
Darin didn't think. Thought would have put weight on his legs when he needed air, not anchors. He was already stripping his axe-belt, dropping it to the plank with a heavy thud. Already kicking a boot against the rail. Already rolling his shoulders, as if setting them before a yoke.
"Darin!" Callen's voice cracked like a whip.
Darin planted a boot on the rail and dove.
Sun peeled away in a flash of heat then was gone. The sea took him—cold clamping his skin, pressure flattening his ears, the world ringing in that way water makes when it swallows noise. He forced himself down, arms pulling, legs scissoring. The cage tumbled below, a dark mass smearing into green. He squinted, blinking sting away.
Something inside the cage struck the bars—hard enough to throw a tremor through the water. Bubbles exploded out like handfuls of glass beads. For a blink the shell was just a curve of darker curve. Then it rolled, and a flipper hammered iron. The thing squealed.
He had never known a turtle could make a sound like that. It wasn't a cry. It was pressure turned to voice: a high, skirling screech that vibrated his ribs and tickled the insides of his teeth. Panic made into tone. Help—wordless and pure.
He remembered a boyhood afternoon in the shallows, a crab caught in a jar on a dare. He'd unscrewed the lid to feel bigger than his fear and then hadn't been able to fix the wrong he'd made when the tide scoured it under and the crab battered itself against glass, blind with terror. His father had found him an hour later, elbows bloody from digging, the jar still stuck, the crab's legs worn raw. "When you trap a thing, you owe it your hands until it's free," his father had said, not unkind, and together they'd smashed the jar and let the crab scuttle away sideways, furious and alive.
Darin shoved the memory away. It was already too close; it made his hands shake.
He flattened his palms and shaped them, cupping and turning the way Rowan and Mira had shown him on the voyage—how to catch air, how to coax it. He scooped the sea and turned it, thumb to palm, palm to mouth, whispering the breathwork pattern he'd fumbled a dozen times: draw, shape, seal. A thin bubble teased into being around his mouth and nose, a wobbling lens. It was a trick for a heartbeat more at depth. It would not save him if he lost his head.
He dragged in a breath through the bubble. Thin, metallic. Enough.
He arrowed down. The cage spun, then caught on some current and steadied, sinking straight. The turtle flailed inside, every turn slamming it into iron. It had gouged grooves into the bars already; blood ribboned from cracked scutes and smeared on rust. The water tasted like coin and old knives.
Darin hit the cage hard and grabbed for the lock. Rust bit his palms. The mechanism was a simple bolt swelled with salt and time and the lazy meanness of things built for cruelty. He set his feet against iron and heaved. The bolt didn't move. He grunted—noise made no sense here, but his body made it anyway, primitive and necessary.
The turtle thrashed, caught his thigh with a flipper, and spun him. His bubble jittered and thinned. He clamped lips and swallowed and smashed panic down because panic is a bigger killer than depth. He forced breath slow—one, two—and reset his grip.
"Come on," he mouthed, teeth bared, bubbles fizzing like laughter around the word. Not to the lock. To the world. To the part of it that listened. "Come on."
He hauled. The bolt creaked. Something deep in his shoulder twanged hot and sharp. He hauled anyway, with the anger you spend when there is no other coin—anger at cages and men who made sport of drowning; at being born without gills; at having watched too many things go under while he stood above helpless.
The bolt jumped a hair. He slammed his heel into the bar again and again, shaking the whole cage, making it ring. The turtle squealed and smashed the opposite side, as if understanding that impact made change. Together, dumb with terror and furious with purpose, they battered the lock.
It snapped.
The door sagged and stuck. Barnacles had glued their slow, stupid lives into the seam. Darin sawed his hand along the edge, ripping skin, smashing shells, feeling the sting of tiny cuts fill with salt. He shoved his shoulder against the seam and shoved until his breath came in hot little sips and his chest burned even with the bubble trembling around his mouth.
The door tore free.
Everything went still.
The turtle froze, momentum melting out of it. Its flippers hung. Only its eyes moved, rolling toward him. They were dark and deep and so, so tired. The fear in them unknotted the way a cramp does when you breathe through it. It blinked once. The whole sea seemed to pull in a breath.
Light bloomed.
Not the quick flash of a minnow's joy or fright; not the clean silver surge Rowan carried when Midg slipped through his chest. This light came slow, like dawn under water. Jade seeped into the world. It poured from the turtle's shell and from the wounds where barnacle had cracked scute and from somewhere older than any of that. It touched Darin's hands first, laying cool weight along the cuts, and then traveled up his forearms and around his shoulders and across his back, curving there—an outline of a shell etched in light. His chest stopped burning. He breathed, and the water moved through him obedient as air.
The turtle drifted forward and bumped its broad brow against his sternum. Gratitude, not language. For an instant he felt not words but qualities: long patience; storms ridden out; currents learned and ignored when necessary; the absolute refusal to be hurried by anything that had not proven itself worthy. Then the light turned inward, and the turtle was in him.
It settled like a stone settles in a riverbed—finding its slot among other stones, making the flow different by existing. Heavy, but the kind of heavy you want on a roof when the wind is mad. Strength, but not the showy kind. A promise that did not need to be spoken to bind.
Darin's hands shook. Not from effort. From the way something inside him had found a shape it had always suspected was there.
Above, the boats were noise and motion: Islanders shouting, pointing; Thalriss leaning dangerously far over rails; Luna's glow flaring in answer to the jade below as if light recognized light. Lyra's head tipped, mouth open on a tiny oh, like a child seeing fireflies for the first time. "It wasn't for power," she whispered, not to anyone, not quite even to herself. "He did it because it hurt to watch."
Rowan broke the surface ten lengths off, hair slick to his skull, eyes wide against the sting. He saw the green in the water before he saw Darin. When he did, he didn't grin or raise a fist. He only blinked hard, once, and then dipped his chin in a slow nod that said good and there you are and about time the world saw you how I do all at once.
Darin hung in the water, breath moving clean, shoulders humming with the shell's thin light. He looked down. The cage still fell, slower now, tumbling toward a shadowed slope. In the dim he saw things move—other cages. Other wrongs. The thought hit him like cold steel. This was one animal and one lock. The whale's bones were full of both.
He turned and kicked toward the surface with a power that felt like tide. When his head broke into heat and air, the boats were right there, hauled close by men who hadn't realized they were doing it. Hands shot out. He didn't need them. He hooked a wrist anyway and let Callen and two Islanders muscle him across the gunwale in a rush of water and breath and laughter that felt like sobbing.
He sprawled, dripping, the wood warm and splintered under his cheek. For a blink no one spoke, as if a shape of silence had to be honored. Then everything came out at once.
"What did you do—?"
"Are you mad—?"
"By the mother's teeth, he—did you see the light—?"
"Shut up," Callen said amiably, which somehow made them all grin and stop. He crouched by Darin, dark eyes crinkled, and touched two fingers to the shimmer across Darin's shoulder. "That's new."
Darin rolled to his back. The aura flickered, faint as breath on a window, then steadied. He felt it without weight, the way you feel the strap of a tool you've carried so long your body's made a groove for it. He dragged his hand across his face and laughed once, disbelieving, a sound with edges. "I didn't—" He stopped, then tried again. "I didn't jump for that. I couldn't watch it choke."
"No one who matters thinks you did," Callen said. He said it soft, for Darin alone.
A Thalriss, the trident man who had wanted to rush everything apart and call it victory, stepped forward and went to one knee without meaning to. He looked confused by his own body. "Shield-bearer," he said, in a tone that did not quite make the words a title but wanted to. "We thought your fists were only for breaking." He gestured at the water where the green had been. "You break on the right side."
Darin's ears went hot. Compliments sat oddly on him, as if they were clothes cut for a different frame. "Get off your knee," he muttered, too gruff to hide the way the words lodged good in his ribs.
Lyra leaned over him, pupils wide, seeing two worlds at once. Her voice, when it came, was clean, steadier than it had been in days. "It chose you after," she said simply. "That matters more than if it had waited." She blinked hard, as if clearing water from her own eyes. "Can you breathe below now?"
Darin licked salt from his lips and felt the turtle answer inside him with a slow, patient yes. "I can," he said. The word was a stone dropped in a pool. Rings moved outward—relief, purpose, the end of a particular kind of helplessness.
Luna's glow ebbed back to its usual gentle sheen, as if the flare had been a hand lifted in greeting between lights that recognized each other. She smiled, small and bright. "Then when the time comes, you don't have to watch," she said. "You can go."
Rowan hauled himself over the rail and stood with his feet wide, water running off him in drips. He scanned Darin with a soldier's eye, not for wounds but for steadiness. Satisfied, he raked a hand back through hair and turned toward the ribs.
Inside the skeleton, the guards were restless. They had felt the shift. Some craned toward the green that had bloomed and vanished. One jabbed his barbed spear at nothing, irritated by a change he couldn't quantify. A rumble moved through the bones—the slow boom they had heard all day, heavier now, quickening. The prison had a rhythm. Something under it had noticed a stone had been moved from its wall.
Rowan wiped salt from his mouth. "It changes the calculus," he said quietly, as if thinking aloud so panic couldn't fill the space first. "We have another diver. One who can hold a line."
"And a shell," an Islander said, trying for humor and landing near it. Laughter hiccupped out of him, then died as he looked again at the ribs.
Darin pushed himself up to sitting. The aura-shell along his shoulders brightened a breath, then dimmed, like a living thing testing its edges. The turtle settled inside him the way tide settles into its groove. He didn't feel bigger. He felt… put to use.
He turned to Callen. "Ropes. More. And knives on cords."
"Already stacked," Callen said, which made Darin grin because of course. "And if the tentacles come for the hull, we cut, not pry."
Rowan crouched beside Darin. For a moment they didn't speak. The boat creaked. Someone spat over the side. The sea's slow drum pulsed up through the planks into the bones of their feet.
"I didn't do it for a Soulkin," Darin said, in case the world had misunderstood. "I didn't even think of it. I saw a thing choking in a box and—"
"And you moved," Rowan said, not letting him tie himself into knots of apology. He set a hand on Darin's shoulder where the jade shimmer traced shell. "That's why it came to you."
They both looked at the ribs. In that inch of quiet, the cries from within rode a trick of current and wrapped around their little fleet—thin and raw and human. Darin's jaw set. Rowan's mouth thinned.
Far off, where the line of the world met the sky, a smear that might have been sails was still only a smear. The sea boomed again—closer, angrier, or Darin imagined the anger because it made sense to imagine the sea angry at cages.
Callen shaded his eyes. "We won't like the shape of the next hour."
"No," Rowan said. "But we'll choose it." He rose, voice carrying without shouting. "Hear me. We don't strike now. Not yet. When Mira's boats breach that line"—he nodded at the horizon—"we open everything at once. Until then, we hold position. We watch. We prepare."
A grumble—fear dressed as argument—ran through the Islanders and was checked by Callen's presence. The Thalriss straightened, anger repurposed into focus. Luna's hand stayed warm and steady on Lyra's arm, and Lyra's breath matched hers without her noticing.
Darin stood. Water poured off him. He felt the turtle turn inside him—no directions, only an awareness, a slow alignment of his shoulder blades and the world. He reached for his axe out of habit, then let his hand fall. He didn't need it to breathe down there. He might need it to break things built by men up here.
The ribs threw their long shadows across the water as the sun inched. Chains creaked. Somewhere inside the bone cathedral, a guard laughed a small, dry laugh at nothing. The sea's drum tightened a notch.
Darin adjusted his grip on the boat's rail and set his stance. He looked like a door set into a wall—plain, strong, and exactly where it needed to be.
"I didn't save you for me," he murmured, almost a prayer, almost a joke, to the green that had settled in his chest. "But I'll use you for them."
The turtle answered without words—by being there, by making breath possible, by stoning him to the floor of himself so the next wave wouldn't move him.
Under the whale, things shifted. Above it, men did the same.
And far off, beyond heat-haze and hope, the horizon held its breath.