The Voice in the Eighth Tide

The darkness beyond the doorway breathed.

It did not breathe like a person. It drew the water inward in a long, patient pull, and the drowned chamber groaned around them. Suda’s salvage vessel lurched against its anchor lines. Somewhere above, metal screamed.

“Eira!” Suda shouted through the comm bead. “If you’re planning to die down there, kindly do it after I’ve cut you loose!”

Eira barely heard him. Her prosthetic arm had gone rigid from shoulder to fingertip. The instruments embedded beneath its salt-stained casing were registering the seven known tide frequencies at once, each one layered over the next like voices in a crowded room. Beneath them pulsed the eighth.

It was not coming from beyond the door.

It was coming from her.

“Give me the key,” she said.

Klain stood beside her in the green-black water, one hand clenched around the object. The key had no teeth and no bow, only a length of black material that seemed to drink the light from the chamber. His face had gone slack with recognition.

“I gave it to you once,” he whispered.

“No. You gave it to the door.”

The voice beyond the threshold laughed softly. It sounded young, but not innocent. “You always quarrel when you remember.”

Eira thrust her prosthetic hand toward the opening. The fingers crossed the boundary between water and darkness, and every nerve in her arm ignited. For one instant she saw the chamber as it had been before the sea claimed it: white walls, dry stone, lamps burning without flame. A child stood in the center, wrapped in a silver thermal sheet. The child’s face was hidden behind a mirrored mask.

Eira saw herself kneeling before it.

She saw Klain—young, unlined, awake rather than dream-haunted—holding the black key.

And she saw a third figure behind them, tall and faceless, pressing one palm against the child’s shoulder.

That figure wore Eira’s coat.

She tore her hand back. The vision vanished, but the cold remained in her bones.

“It wasn’t me,” she said.

The voice answered from the dark. “It was your hand.”

“That isn’t the same thing.”

Klain looked at her. “What did you see?”

“Someone wearing me.”

His expression changed—not surprise, but fear of confirmation. “Then the memory was edited.”