Here is what nobody tells you about having electromagnetic perception.

  It is *loud*.

  Not loud in the way music is loud, or in the way Mr. Barnes is loud when he discovers you haven’t done your long division homework, or even in the way Kenji is loud when he has opinions about your reading choices. Loud in the way that the entire ocean is apparently crackling with electricity at all times and you have just been handed the world’s most sensitive radio with no volume knob.

  Within approximately forty-five minutes of my first successful mollusk retrieval, I had catalogued the following: the faint pulse of a sea cucumber making its very slow and very unglamorous way across the sand approximately twenty meters to my left, the rhythmic chemical-electric churn of what I was increasingly convinced was an entire colony of something living in the sediment below me, and the absolutely maddening steady-state hum of the water itself, which had an electromagnetic signature I could only describe as *background noise but make it the ocean*.

  I asked the system about this.

  Can I turn it down?

  The system took a moment. I was starting to recognize its different response-speeds. Quick meant the answer was simple. Measured meant it was about to say something I wasn’t going to enjoy.

  You cannot turn it down. You can, however, learn to filter.

  That’s not the same thing.

  Correct. It is better.

  And then, with the energy of someone who had already decided this conversation was over: electromagnetic perception is a skill, not a switch. Filtering ambient signals from relevant ones is something you develop through practice. Currently you are perceiving everything at approximately equal weight. With experience you will learn to parse signal from noise without conscious effort, in the same way humans eventually stop consciously registering the sound of their own heartbeat.

  Can I consciously register my heartbeat?

  There was a pause.

  Yes. But it becomes distracting.

  Great. So I was going to have to learn to filter an entire ocean’s worth of electrical information, I had no volume knob, and apparently I could now also hear my own heartbeat if I thought about it too hard. Which I was now doing. Thump. Thump. Slower and steadier than a human heart. Located somewhere in the center of me rather than off to the left. Deeply strange.

  I tried very hard to stop thinking about my heartbeat.

  The system, mercifully, changed the subject.

  SKILL AVAILABLE:

  Would you like to begin Graceful Swimming? This skill improves your hydrodynamic efficiency, turning radius, and acceleration control. Currently you are operating at approximately 40% of your body’s natural movement capacity.

  I thought about the undignified spin from earlier. The rock I had nearly introduced my face to.

  Yes. Absolutely yes.

  Acknowledged. Graceful Swimming is a practice-based skill. It will not be given to you. It will develop as you swim.

  Of course it will.

  But even as I thought that, I felt something in the system shift slightly, like a lens coming into very gentle focus. Not a power-up. More like — permission. Like whatever proprioceptive sense lived in my flat cartilaginous body had been given clearer access to whatever passed for my conscious mind.

  I moved.

  Not the chaotic thing I’d been doing before. I thought about it the way the system had described — one side, then the other, the rise and fall of my whole body becoming the direction. And this time it felt less like fighting my own form and more like… convincing it. Like learning a word in a language you’d never spoken and feeling your mouth finally find the shape.

  I hit the rock anyway. But softer. And I didn’t spin.

  Progress.

  -----

  I swam in circles for a while.

  This is what the system did not mention about practice-based skill acquisition: it involves a lot of doing something mediocre and slightly embarrassing in the dark, alone, in an ocean, while your electromagnetic perception cheerfully informs you about the digestive processes of nearby invertebrates. I rippled. I turned. I practiced the thing where you shift your whole center of gravity sideways to arc in a new direction instead of just frantically flapping at the water until something happened.

  Gradually — and I want to be honest that *gradually* here means *over what felt like an extremely long time during which I reconsidered several life choices* — something started to click.

  The turn. That specific tilt of one wing-edge while the other stayed level, the slight flex through my midsection that let me bend in a direction that was still new and strange and mine. The way stopping wasn’t a crash or a scramble but a deceleration, a broadening of my body against the water until the resistance caught me and held me in place like a hand pressed flat.

  Like a page.

  Like reading, actually, in the way that at first the words are individual things you decode one by one and then suddenly they’re not, they’re meaning, they’re story, they’re real — except here it was water and current and the pressure differential under my pectoral fins and the—

  SKILL ACQUIRED:

  ╔═════════════════════════════════════╗

  ║  NEW SKILL UNLOCKED   ║

  ╠═════════════════════════════════════╣

  ║ ? GRACEFUL SWIMMING [PASSIVE]  ║

  ║ Rank: F       ║

  ║ Hydrodynamic efficiency: +15%  ║

  ║ Turning radius: -20%    ║

  ║ Acceleration control: +10%   ║

  ║          ║

  ║ Skill grows through continued use. ║

  ╚═════════════════════════════════════╝

  I read that three times.

  Then I did a turn. A real one. Clean and fast and not into anything.

  The system, unprompted, added: not bad.

  Coming from a system that had previously described my first attempts as *operating at forty percent capacity*, this felt enormous. I did another turn just to confirm it wasn’t a fluke.

  Then another.

  Then I was just — swimming. Not thinking about it in pieces anymore, not monitoring each individual wing-beat, just moving through water the way water wanted to be moved through, the electromagnetic world lighting up ahead of me in its steady buzzing map of *alive* and *here* and *below* and *close*.

  It was, I realized with some surprise, kind of incredible.

  Don’t let that get around.

  -----

  I smelled the reef before I understood what I was sensing.

  Not smell, exactly. Not with a nose, because I no longer had one of those. But there was a density to the electromagnetic information ahead of me that was qualitatively different from the open water behind me. Thicker. More complex. Layered, dozens of signals overlapping in a way that registered somewhere between sound and pressure and something I didn’t have a word for yet.

  Life, I thought. A lot of it.

  I moved toward it.

  The reef appeared in my electroreceptors first — a structure of geological stillness surrounded by a chaos of biological electricity. Coral polyps firing their tiny chemical signals. Fish moving in quick bursts between the structures. And underneath it all, through the sand and rubble at the reef’s edge, a steady and deeply satisfying patter of buried things.

  Buried things.

  I slowed. I focused. The system’s beginner guide had apparently loaded knowledge into me the way it had loaded swimming instincts, because I found I could distinguish the signatures now. Not perfectly. Not with the granularity I imagined came from years of experience. But enough.

  That one: a clam. The slow double-valve pulse of it.

  That one, just there: something crustacean. The different electrical signature of arthropod muscle, the little clicking discharge of a creature testing its own legs against the sand.

  And over there, and there, and there: a whole scattered constellation of mollusks and crustaceans and shellfish, spread across the rubble at the reef’s edge like a buffet that had been arranged entirely for me by a universe that felt guilty about the truck.

  Maybe Floor Seven had its uses.

  I descended.

  -----

  What followed was approximately forty minutes that I am going to describe as *focused foraging* and not as *the most chaotic feeding frenzy I have ever personally participated in, including the time Kenji and I discovered the discount snack aisle at the import store during finals week.*

  I ate a clam. (+1 EXP. Health +1.)

  I ate another clam. (+1 EXP.)

  I found a cluster of small crabs tucked under a ledge and ate three of them in fairly rapid succession, which the system informed me was worth +2 EXP for the first crab and +1 for each subsequent crab of the same species until I found something new, which seemed like an incentive structure designed specifically to make me restless.

  I found something new. It was a species of shellfish I had no name for that the system identified helpfully as *local reef mollusk, edible, nutritionally significant.* (+2 EXP.)

  I found another one. (+1 EXP.)

  I found a small lobster hiding between two pieces of coral and had a brief ethical moment about it before the system pointed out, without being asked, that I currently had a warning notification about starvation and seventeen — now twenty-three — health points, and that the local reef ecosystem had been operating without my input for considerably longer than I had been a ray.

  I ate the lobster.

  (+3 EXP, the system noted, because it was larger. I was choosing not to examine how I felt about the EXP system having an opinion about lobster size.)

  The numbers kept climbing. EXP: 12/50. Then 18. Then 27, when I found a scatter of clams buried in the sand at the base of the reef that took me several dives to locate and extract with my flat flexible mouth in a way that — actually, you know what, I’m getting better at this. The undignified noise I made on the third extraction was purely the ocean’s fault.

  EXP: 38/50.

  I was starting to feel it, the way you feel the last stretch before the end of a chapter, the sense that something is about to resolve. I pushed further along the reef’s outskirts, following the electromagnetic map, finding pockets of life in the rubble and the sand. A scallop. Two more crabs. Something that might have been a sea snail but the system classified under a genus name I couldn’t parse and marked as *nutritional, proceed.*

  I proceeded.

  EXP: 47/50.

  Close. So close. I found one more clam, just sitting there in the open sand like it had been waiting for me, and I—

  LEVEL UP!

  ╔═══════════════════════════════════╗

  ║   LEVEL 2 REACHED!   ║

  ╠═══════════════════════════════════╣

  ║ Health: +3      ║

  ║ Stamina: +5      ║

  ║         ║

  ║ ? ABILITY SELECTION AVAILABLE ║

  ║ Choose one:      ║

  ║         ║

  ║ [A] FAST SWIMMER     ║

  ║ Passive boost to top speed.  ║

  ║ Sustained burst speed +25%  ║

  ║         ║

  ║ [B] ENHANCED STAMINA    ║

  ║ Increases stamina pool.   ║

  ║ Max Stamina +30     ║

  ║         ║

  ║ [C] HEIGHTENED ELECTROMAGNETIC ║

  ║  DETECTION     ║

  ║ Increases perception range and ║

  ║ signal clarity.     ║

  ║ Range +40%. Buried target  ║

  ║ detection improved.    ║

  ╚═══════════════════════════════════╝

  I floated there reading this for a long time.

  Fast Swimmer was appealing in a straightforward way. Enhanced Stamina I could see the logic of — I was already noticing that long foraging runs left me with a vague heavy sensation I was interpreting as tiredness, and the bar I hadn’t been paying much attention to (Stamina: 20/75) seemed relevant.

  But Heightened Electromagnetic Detection.

  I looked at the reef. I thought about the buried shellfish I’d missed, the signals I’d had to chase and re-chase because I couldn’t quite resolve them clearly enough. I thought about what the system had said: *filtering ambient signals from relevant ones is something you develop through practice.* More practice required more range to practice with. More clarity meant more information, and more information meant—

  More levels, said a very honest part of my brain.

  I selected C.

  HEIGHTENED ELECTROMAGNETIC DETECTION acquired.

  The change was immediate and a little overwhelming. The reef didn’t get louder, exactly. It got *sharper*. Signals I’d been reading as vague impressions resolved into specific signatures. The cloud of electrical noise ahead of me separated into distinct sources. I could feel — not just the presence of the buried shellfish, but the depth of them. The way the signals changed as they moved, the difference between a clam that was filtering water and one that had closed its shell and gone still.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  Oh, I thought. *Oh.*

  I went back to the reef.

  -----

  EXP: 0/100.

  The grind resumes.

  This, it turned out, was something I was good at. Or at least something I was willing to do for longer than was strictly sensible, which in practice amounted to the same thing. With the enhanced detection I could sweep a broader area, identify targets before I dove for them, plan approaches instead of just following my nose. I moved along the reef’s outskirts in long arcing passes, the Graceful Swimming skill smoothing each turn, each dive, each resurface into something that was starting to feel almost natural.

  Almost.

  I still had moments. Don’t ask about the coral head that appeared out of nowhere on a turn I’d been very confident about. The point is I learned from it and moved on.

  EXP: 43/100.

  EXP: 61/100.

  EXP: 78/100.

  The numbers had a quality to them that I recognized from somewhere. That specific pull of forward momentum, the way the next target was always just visible enough to be interesting. The way each small success reset the clock to whatever came after it instead of feeling like an end.

  I had hyperfixated on a lot of things in fourteen years. Books, primarily. The occasional documentary about deep-sea biology that had been extremely prophetic in retrospect. A brief and intense period of interest in medieval siege weaponry that Mr. Barnes had been deeply unhappy about when it appeared in my history essays. I knew the particular texture of a brain that had found something it could do indefinitely without noticing the time passing.

  This, I thought, eating my eleventh crab of the afternoon, was that.

  EXP: 94/100.

  EXP: 97/100.

  Come on.

  A single large cockle, half-buried, two meters ahead.

  I dove.

  LEVEL UP!

  ╔══════════════════════════════════════╗

  ║   LEVEL 3 REACHED!   ║

  ╠══════════════════════════════════════╣

  ║ ODD LEVEL: STAT INCREASE ONLY  ║

  ║          ║

  ║ Health: +8       ║

  ║ Stamina: +10      ║

  ║ Intelligence: +2     ║

  ║ Strength: +1      ║

  ╠══════════════════════════════════════╣

  ║ CURRENT STATS:      ║

  ║ Health: 45/25 ?     ║

  ║ Stamina: 20/75      ║

  ║ Mana: ??? (LOCKED)     ║

  ║ Intelligence: 9      ║

  ║ Strength: 4       ║

  ╚══════════════════════════════════════╝

  I stared at the health bar.

  45 out of 25.

  …Why does my health say 45 out of 25.

  The system’s response was very measured. You have eaten significantly beyond your body’s standard capacity. This is not advisable. It is, however, technically possible. The excess does not persist. It will drain to your maximum over the next several hours as your system processes the intake.

  So I can just eat my way to invincibility?

  No. The cap is a soft ceiling during a feeding period, not a permanent state. You cannot meaningfully ‘bank’ health through overeating. You have, however, given yourself approximately the biological equivalent of consuming an entire buffet, which explains the Stamina reading.

  I looked at the Stamina bar. 20 out of 75. That was low. Very low.

  Oh. That’s why I felt like that.

  Yes. You have been sprinting on an empty tank, metabolically speaking. You compensated by eating, which addressed the energy deficit but created a different kind of stress. Rest is recommended.

  Noted. Can we talk about the Mana bar?

  A pause that I was learning to interpret as *the system choosing its words.*

  Mana is locked until you reach the relevant developmental threshold. At Level 5 you will access your Growth Track, which determines your evolutionary path. Certain evolutionary paths unlock magic. Some do not. Until you reach Level 5, Mana is listed as locked rather than zero because zero would imply a defined resource. Your potential has not been defined yet.

  I turned that over slowly.

  So I might get magic.

  You might.

  I might not.

  Also possible.

  Is there any way to influence which one?

  The system’s response came back with what I was starting to recognize as something close to satisfaction. That is a better question than most users ask at this stage.

  I waited.

  …The system let the silence sit.

  You’re not going to tell me, are you.

  Some things are more rewarding to discover.

  I made a mental note to be deeply annoyed about this later and moved on. What about the level structure? Even levels get abilities, odd levels get stats?

  Correct. As a general rule. There are exceptions at milestone levels — Level 5, Level 10, and so on. Level 5 is particularly significant. It is where your Growth Track is assigned and your evolutionary possibilities first become visible. What you are now is not necessarily what you will remain.

  I liked that. I liked that a lot, actually, in a way that surprised me a little.

  What about skills? The swimming thing — how do I get more of those?

  Skills are not level-gated. They emerge from repeated, intentional action. You learned Graceful Swimming by swimming with intention. Other skills will follow the same pattern. Pay attention to what you do repeatedly. The system does not always announce what is developing.

  So I could just… accidentally learn things.

  You could deliberately practice things and learn them in a way that feels accidental, which is roughly how skill acquisition works in most contexts.

  That was almost philosophical. I was choosing to be impressed.

  One more thing. The system said I have a venomous tail locked at Level 3. I’m at Level 3.

  There was a distinct pause.

  …You are correct. Checking.

  ABILITY UNLOCKED:

  ? Venomous Barbed Tail [ACTIVE]

  Delivers a medically significant venom on contact.

  Note: this is a defensive ability. The system would like to note that it is a DEFENSIVE ability.

  I was a little insulted that it felt the need to specify.

  The system added: the note stands.

  -----

  I was resting in a comfortable depression in the sand, which was a sentence I was going to have to get used to in my new life, when the system chimed with something I hadn’t been expecting.

  SPECIAL NOTIFICATION:

  ? LUCKY MOLLUSK SYSTEM — ACTIVE

  The ocean contains a small number of exceptionally rare mollusks which carry a resonance signature detectable only with Heightened Electromagnetic Detection. These are known as Fortune Shells.

  If you find and consume a Fortune Shell, you will receive one (1) Lucky Spin: a randomized upgrade which may include an additional Ability or a Stat Push, drawn from the pool of options appropriate to your current level and evolutionary path.

  Fortune Shells cannot be deliberately farmed. They appear at random. Their signatures are distinct but subtle.

  You have Heightened Electromagnetic Detection. Keep your senses open.

  I read this twice.

  So there are magic lottery clams.

  The system did not dignify this with a response.

  That means yes.

  The system continued not responding, which was also a yes.

  Okay, I thought. I was going to be thinking about this every single time I dove for a clam from now on. The system had to know that. It had given me this information specifically to make every clam potentially interesting. This was psychological manipulation and it was *extremely effective.*

  Noted, I told myself, and also filed away the distinct electromagnetic signature the system had briefly shown me — a shimmer in the signal, a kind of resonance that normal shells didn’t have — and tried to focus on the thing I’d been thinking about before the notification.

  Rest.

  Right.

  I was resting.

  -----

  I want to be honest about something.

  I had been a fish for approximately one afternoon. I had learned to swim without hitting very many things. I had achieved Level 3 and unlocked a venomous tail I was trying not to think about too hard. I had eaten somewhere north of twenty mollusks and an unknown number of crabs and one regrettable but nutritionally necessary lobster.

  I had also, in the back of my mind, been aware the entire time of the item sitting in my mental library that I hadn’t touched yet.

  The Vampire Murderer. Complete collection. All 847 chapters.

  I had read through Chapter 37 in the physical world. I was currently somewhere in the latter third of the second act, and Lord Valdris was in the middle of consolidating power in the eastern provinces in a way that was going to have *enormous* implications for the Merchant King’s alliance structure, and I had been approximately ten pages from a chapter break when the truck happened.

  The system had told me the complete collection was available for reading during rest periods.

  I was resting.

  I opened Chapter 38.

  -----

  Chapter 38 picked up exactly where I’d left off.

  Lord Valdris had sent emissaries to three separate factions simultaneously, each one carrying a message that was technically true in isolation and a complete and devastating lie in context. The prose was dense with the specific pleasure of political scheming rendered in full detail, every move and countermove laid out like a chess problem where you already knew who was going to win but you couldn’t stop watching the elegance of how.

  I read Chapter 38.

  I read Chapter 39. Lord Valdris framed the Eastern Merchant Lord for embezzlement using forged documents from his own treasury secretary, which was breathtaking given that the treasury secretary had been introduced in Chapter 2 as a background character and had apparently been a plant the entire time.

  I read Chapter 40. The king called a council. Lord Valdris attended. The scene was structured entirely in subtext and I had to read it twice and was completely delighted.

  I was approximately four paragraphs into Chapter 41 when the electromagnetic sense — which I had, I will admit, turned most of my attention away from — registered something.

  Large.

  Moving.

  And not, I realized with a sudden clarity that bypassed thought entirely and went straight to the parts of my brain that were now, apparently, a ray’s brain, not moving the way fish moved when they were going somewhere.

  Moving the way something moved when it was coming *toward* something.

  I surfaced out of Chapter 41.

  The signal was close. Very close. And now that I was paying attention, I could feel the shape of it — elongated, dense with muscle, the particular bioelectric profile of something that had a great many large and efficient teeth and an extremely focused sense of purpose.

  Shark.

  The system chimed, with what I can only describe as *why did this take you so long* energy:

  ? PREDATOR ALERT

  ? BULL SHARK DETECTED

  ? Distance: 12 meters

  ? Closing rate: HIGH

  ? RECOMMENDED ACTION: MOVE. NOW.

  I moved.

  -----

  I want to note, for the record, that the next forty-five seconds were entirely Chapter 41’s fault.

  I went fast — actually fast, fast in a way that surprised me, the Graceful Swimming skill translating cleanly into speed when speed was what the situation required. The reef rose ahead of me and I took it as cover, weaving between the coral structures with a turn radius that was, objectively, much better than it had been this morning.

  This was, however, a bull shark. And bull sharks, the system informed me in a notification I was reading while also actively swimming for my life (a skill I was apparently acquiring through necessity), were not known for being deterred by reefs. They were, in fact, remarkably agile for their size in reef environments. They had been navigating reef topography since well before I arrived on Earth 6214 with my two levels and my four strength points and my enhanced electromagnetic detection which I had been reading Chapter 41 with.

  The shark went around the coral structure I had banked on as cover.

  I went faster.

  GRACEFUL SWIMMING has improved: Rank F → Rank E.

  This notification felt like mockery.

  I went left. The shark went left. I went right — harder, using the full arc of the new turn radius — and bought myself maybe six meters, which the shark closed in approximately four seconds because it was a bull shark and I was two feet across on a good day.

  The reef narrowed ahead. I could see — feel — the maze of it, the tight channels between coral heads, the gaps where something my size could fit and something considerably larger might have to slow down and navigate.

  I aimed for the narrowest one.

  The electromagnetic sense, at full heightened-detection resolution, registered the channel as passable. I went through it at full speed, turned hard left on the other side, turned hard right, and then dove because going down seemed like it had not been tried yet.

  Below the reef’s main structure, the seafloor was a rubble field. Dark. Varied. And there, in the face of a limestone outcrop: a cave.

  Not a large cave. Not a cave that was going to comfortably fit anything with ambitions. But a cave that would fit me, because I was flat, and being flat was, I was starting to realize, actually extremely useful in certain critical situations.

  I went in.

  -----

  The cave was dark in the way that underwater caves are dark, which is to say not actually fully dark because my electromagnetic sense didn’t care about light, but light-dark. Textured shadow. The sound of water moving differently in an enclosed space.

  And something else.

  Something in the corner of the cave that was not, I now registered with my close-range heightened detection, a rock.

  Something that had eight arms and a considerable amount of bioelectrical activity happening in what I assumed was its brain.

  Something that had apparently been here first.

  I was taking a breath — not a breath, I didn’t have lungs anymore, but whatever the equivalent was — to compose myself, when the something spoke.

  “ABSOLUTELY NOT,” it said.

  I froze.

  “No. No, no, no. I have been in this cave for THREE TIDES. This is MY cave. I found it. I arranged it. I have been camouflaged in this corner for the last TWO HOURS because I am HUNTING that particular crab outside and you have JUST—” a pause, during which I was too shocked to do anything “—you have just BLUNDERED in here with a SHARK on your TAIL and you are — what ARE you? You’re not a ray. You’re — are you a ray? You’re making a face like you’ve never heard anyone talk before.”

  I was, in fact, making exactly that face.

  Because it was talking.

  It was talking and I was understanding it, not the way you understand words in your own language but the way it had just… arrived, meaning-first, clear as anything. And it wasn’t sound exactly, it was — electrical. Chemical. Something layered that hit multiple senses at once and resolved into language somewhere in whatever now passed for my auditory processing.

  I can understand you, I said, and the saying of it worked the same way — not quite sound, something else, something the cave’s new occupant clearly received because it paused.

  “…Oh,” it said, in a tone that shifted several degrees toward complicated. “You’re new.”

  I’m new, I confirmed.

  There was a silence.

  “How new.”

  This afternoon new.

  “…Ah.” Another pause. “Truck?”

  I stared at it for a long moment. Yes, I said.

  “Floor Seven?”

  I — yes. How do you—

  “There are six of us in this reef system,” the octopus said, in the tone of someone explaining something they have explained many times before and have developed a resignation about. “Different species. Different arrival times. Floor Seven has had a backlog for approximately two years. You learn to recognize the look.” A pause. “It’s mostly the existential shock. Regular rays don’t have it.”

  I did not know what to do with any of this information, so I put it carefully aside for later.

  Okay, I said. I’m Mika. I’m very sorry about your hunting setup. There is a bull shark directly outside.

  “I am AWARE,” the octopus said. “I was AWARE before you came in. I was dealing with it QUIETLY.” A pause. “I am Sura. I have been in this reef for eight months. That shark has been a problem for three of them.” Another pause. “It’s going to wait.”

  For how long?

  “Until something more interesting happens. Bull sharks have opinions but they don’t have patience.” Sura’s electromagnetic signature shifted in a way I was starting to interpret as the cephalopod equivalent of a shrug. “Usually ten minutes. Maybe fifteen if it’s had a slow tide.”

  I settled into the cave. Tried to take up as little of it as possible. My Graceful Swimming was going to be significantly less useful in a space this tight.

  Somewhere outside, I could feel the shark’s bioelectric signature circling.

  Outside the cave, something else registered — many somethings, small and fast and moving in a coordinated mass that I recognized as a school of fish before I registered the noise.

  And then I registered the noise.

  It was sardines.

  I knew, somehow, with the certainty of downloaded knowledge, that it was sardines — a school of them, hundreds, sweeping past the reef’s edge in their silver coordinated mass. And they were communicating, because apparently everything communicated and I was learning this about the ocean very quickly, and what they were communicating was:

  “MINE? MINE? MINE? MINE? MINE? MINE? MINE? MINE?”

  I stared into the middle distance.

  “MINE? MINE? MINE? MINE? MINE? MINE?”

  “They do that,” Sura said, with the exhaustion of someone who has lived next to a loud neighbor for eight months and has made their peace with it.

  “MINE? MINE? MINE? MINE? MINE?”

  The entire ocean, I thought, is like this. The entire ocean is crackling with electricity and filled with opinions and apparently everyone down here is having a conversation at all times and I just hadn’t known how to hear it and now I do and they’re saying—

  “MINE? MINE? MINE? MINE?”

  Sura was watching me process this. “New,” it said again, in a tone that had softened approximately two degrees from deeply irritated toward something approaching sympathy.

  “MINE?”

  Yeah, I said. Very.

  We sat in silence for a moment. Outside, the shark circled. The sardines continued to have their collective and very specific opinion about whatever it was they were all pointing at.

  Then Sura said, with absolute calm: “You need to leave.”

  I looked at the cave entrance. The shark’s signal was still there.

  It’s right outside—

  “Yes. And when you leave, I’m going to tell it something.”

  What are you going to tell it?

  Sura’s electromagnetic signature did something complicated and deeply satisfied.

  “That there’s a much easier meal two hundred meters north. Specifically that there is a ray out there, all alone, with no cave, and it’s been sitting still for ages.” A pause. “The shark will believe this because sharks are not, on the whole, gifted critical thinkers. It will go north. You will go south. I will return to hunting my crab.”

  I stared at it.

  That’s— you’re going to insult the shark.

  “I’m going to *redirect* the shark,” Sura corrected, with dignity. “The insult is incidental.” Another pause. “It’s quite stupid for its size, honestly. I’ve told it this before. It doesn’t retain information well.”

  You’ve talked to it before??

  “I’ve *talked at* it before. That’s different. Are you ready?”

  I thought about the reef system stretching south. The electromagnetic map I was starting to know, the rubble fields and the buried shellfish and the Lucky Mollusk System waiting somewhere out there. I thought about Chapters 42 through 847 in the back of my mind, waiting for a rest period that didn’t have a shark in it.

  I’m ready, I said.

  “Good.” Sura moved toward the cave entrance, chromatophores shifting in complex patterns that I realized were language — different channel, same ocean. “And Mika.”

  Yeah?

  “Try to pay attention to your surroundings next time.” A pause. “Whatever you were reading, it will still be there when you’re not being chased.”

  I didn’t ask how it knew I’d been reading.

  Outside, I heard Sura deliver its message to the shark in a language that sounded like water moving over rocks and tasted like electricity and which I understood, roughly, as: *there’s a much bigger, much stupider ray two hundred meters north, it’s barely moving, honestly it’s almost embarrassing how easy it would be.*

  The shark’s signal hesitated.

  Then turned north.

  I went south.

  The sardines watched me go.

  “MINE?” they said.

  No, I told them firmly. Not yours.

  They lost interest immediately, which was probably the most realistic thing that had happened to me all day.

  EXP: 15/150.

  Chapter 42 could wait until I found another cave.

  One that didn’t already have an octopus in it.