He darted sideways and swung. His axe bit shallow into thick neck, opening a dark flow.
The shark snapped back, then struck. He twisted, but not fast enough.
Pain ripped across his back as jaws clamped on his tank. Metal screamed. The hiss of escaping air roared in his ears. His gauge plunged.
"Well," Gin thought, oddly detached. "That's bad."
Blood flooded from the bite, hot against the cold water.
His ribs ignited.
The Floodborn thing in his bones woke all the way up. Heat rolled out from his sternum like a furnace door kicked open. He dragged in a reflexive breath—deep, huge, far more than his lungs should hold.
Oxygen slammed through him like molten metal in a mold.
The world snapped into bright, merciless focus. Every drifting speck of rust, every twitch of the shark's muscles, every creak of stressed hull was suddenly crystal clear. His limbs felt light, overclocked, as if gravity had loosened its grip.
The falling needle on his gauge suddenly seemed… less relevant.
Oh, he realized through the adrenaline roar. So you can also do things like this. Aren't you full of surprises?
Heat raced along his spine, following the path of his spilling blood. Instead of drifting away, the blood thickened, darkening, answering the call of whatever lived in his ribs.
It moved.
It listened.
Three iron-dark spikes erupted from his back, tearing free through suit and flesh. They were the color of old anchors and dried scabs, hooked slightly like harpoons, each as long as his arm.
The shark lunged again, jaws wide.
The spikes met it.
They punched up through palate and brain, burying themselves deep. Impact slammed the beast into the wreck wall. Its body convulsed once in a violent shudder of muscle and tail—
Then went limp, a dead weight hanging on the barbed forest jutting from Gin's spine.
For a frozen heartbeat, everything was still.
Then the spikes began to drink.
He felt it: a warm, steady pull as the shark's blood ran along the lances toward him, as if the spikes were hollow and thirsty. The red cloud that should have bloomed outward instead streamed inward, veins of dark wine flowing home.
Energy poured into his bones, thick and exhilarating. His chest buzzed with it. Each beat of his heart sent a bright, fizzy rush through his veins, like his blood had turned carbonated with oxygen. His muscles soaked it up greedily; the fatigue he should have felt simply couldn't get a foothold.
Like a mosquito, his mind offered. A very large mosquito.
He almost laughed. Underwater. Over a corpse nailed to a wall with his own spine.
The spikes retracted, melting back into him. Suit fabric tried to close over the wounds and failed; his torn back burned, then cooled as his Floodborn body struggled to knit damage faster than any human's had a right to.
The shark drifted away, lifeless, mouth a ruined cavern.
His tank was gone. His gauge was dead. By all logic, he should be drowning.
Instead his lungs felt full, heavy with that single huge breath he'd taken, and his ribs worked it like bellows in a forge. The microbes rode his blood, stripping every scrap of oxygen, stretching it, shoving it back through heart and muscle over and over.
His chest ached in a distant, warning way, but he wasn't choking. Not yet.
"Okay," he thought to himself, "We are absolutely having a conversation about this later."
He glanced at the eggs. Still intact.
"You're welcome," he told them. "Please don't eat any children when you hatch."
Then he grabbed gold.
He moved fast, loading trinkets into the net atop the engine parts until it strained. The only sign his miracle breath was thinning was a faint gray at the edges of his vision, like the start of a storm.
"Message received," he muttered, and kicked for the surface.
He broke through in a burst of spray. Hands dragged him aboard with his dripping net.
He lay on the deck, gulping air more from habit than need, laughing weakly.
The salvage clerk leaned over him, eyes bugging at the haul. Engine guts. Gold. Shark guts.
"What in all drowned hells is that?" the clerk sputtered.
"Treasure," Gin panted. "And a bad decision."
Divers crowded close, whispering about the shark innards that stained his suit.
The clerk recovered fast. Greed steadied him. "Engine scrap, mostly worthless. Call it… two thousand three hundred Rimark. Gold's corroded, mixed purity, lot of work… I'll be kind and say one thousand."
A grizzled diver snorted. "That's a lie so big it needs its own dock."
The clerk snapped, "You want to do the paperwork, old man?"
Gin followed the clerk's eyes to the rate board stenciled on the bulkhead. "Standard for gold is two thousand," he said calmly. "You just cut it in half."
The clerk's smile twitched. "Guidelines. This haul is contaminated—blood, salt, organics—"
"It's gold, not sugar," Gin said. "It doesn't melt because it got its feet wet."
Divers snickered.
His ribs warmed.
He picked up his ruined tank. Meant only to make a point.
He squeezed.
Metal shrieked. The steel shell folded in his hands like brittle foil, collapsing into a crushed ball.
The deck went silent.
Gin stared at it. "…Oops." He'd felt stronger after that deep breath—but it still shocked him that it was this much stronger.
The clerk went a shade paler. Gin set the crumpled tank down very gently.
"Let's try again," he said lightly. "Two thousand for the gold. Engine parts stay mine."
"Two for the gold." The clerk blurted. "Of course. Must've miscalculated."
"Must've," Gin said.
By the time Hydrarchy and boat cuts finished carving his share, the chip in his palm read thirteen hundred Rimark. Enough to patch his skiff properly. Not enough to replace her. Not that he wanted to anyway.
He looked at the stack of tagged engine parts. His chest warmed in a way that had nothing to do with microbes.
"We'll fix what we've got," he told himself.
His bones agreed.
The mood on deck snapped tight a few minutes later.
The captain stared at the water beyond the wreck field, jaw clenched. "Everyone out," he barked into the speaking-tube. "Full recall. Now."
Alarm bells rang. Tether lines screamed as winches hauled divers up. Helmets broke the surface, one after another, dripping onto the deck.
Gin joined the crush at the rail.
He saw it then: a huge shadow circling the wrecks. Long body. Longer neck. Scarred. Angry.
Another long-necked.
Probably the mate of the one he'd pinned.
Its head broke the surface once—massive jaws snapping, scar near the gills raw and bright. Then it sank again, wake slapping the hull.
"Oh," Gin thought. "That would be my fault."
"Stay off the rails!" the captain shouted. "Nobody back in the water! That male's enraged. Hull guns are primed. Beast-hunter's been signaled."
"Jakkon?" someone asked.
"The Hull's strongest," the captain said. "If he's not face-down in a gutter."
One tether still drooped overboard, line vanishing into green.
"Who's still down?" the captain snapped.
A deckhand checked his slate, face going tight. "Tamsin. She took grid seven. Said there was copper worth 'an extra wriggle.'"
The winch rattled her line in. It came up with a sad, weightless flick. No diver.
Silence hit harder than the alarm.
"Nobody goes overboard," the captain said, voice iron. "We wait for Jakkon. That's an order."
Gin's bones vibrated hard enough to hurt.
He imagined Jakkon, drunk outside the bar. The dead shark in the wreck. The enraged mate circling. Tamsin below, small and stubborn and absolutely the type to wriggle for copper.
He drew a breath—huge and deliberate. His ribs flared hot, bellows lighting.
Tamsin wasn't on deck to tell him this was stupid.
He didn't need her to.
He knew.
He vaulted onto the rail.
"Farcast! Stand down!" the captain roared.
Gin wrapped his fingers around his dive-axe, feeling every nick and notch in its tarred grip.
"Alright," he told the sea. "Round two."
And he dove, cutting into the green after the slack line and the girl who deserved better than to be eaten because of his mistake.