The Cure

Fault Lines

There was something off about Anika.

She moved through the lab like a ghost, her usual efficiency dulled by distraction. I’d known her long enough to recognize the shift—no longer the quiet calm of someone focused on their work, but the jittery hush of someone trying to hide.

I told myself it was stress. We were all under pressure—weeks of dives, deteriorating conditions, the weight of a cure dangling just out of reach. But that explanation wore thin, especially when I caught her near the containment unit late one night, her fingers hesitating just inches above the secure housing.

"Everything alright?" I asked, trying to keep my tone casual.

She jumped. "Just checking stabilization temps."

I nodded slowly, but something inside me coiled tighter. That wasn’t her job anymore. And she knew it.

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We initiated the next dive early. Luis piloted the sub while Noah and I handled instrumentation. The coral forest greeted us like a dream—still glowing, still shifting with its strange luminescent rhythm. But there were signs of stress in the reef. Fissures where there had been none. Discolorations in the polyps. Something was changing.

As we collected deeper samples, the earth groaned beneath us.

A deep, grinding vibration rolled through the trench, and Luis snapped his head toward the sonar display.

“Trench quake,” he said. “Magnitude low, but close.”

The coral responded instantly, retracting and dimming like a living city pulling in its lights. Then it pulsed once, bright and defiant. Almost... warning us.

Back on the surface, as we stabilized the sub, Tim was already analyzing telemetry. “The quake disrupted an entire shelf near Sector D. You’re lucky you weren’t under it.”

I stared at the live feed. Fractures webbed outward from the forest's edge, splintering the delicate biome. We were running out of time.

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That night, the betrayal surfaced.

I found Anika in the lab alone. A containment unit was open, the coral sample gone.

“Put it down,” I said, my voice low and level.

She froze. The cooler box in her hands, marked with corporate tracking tags, gleamed beneath the lab lights.

“It’s not what you think,” she whispered.

But it was exactly what I thought.

“You sold us out,” I said. “To Erebos. You’ve been feeding them data since the first dive.”

She stared at me, defiant and trembling. “They were going to fund the research. Real support, not the scraps we’ve been scraping by with. They promised—”

“They promised power. Ownership. You didn’t trust that we could do this without them.”

Tim stepped into the room behind her. His face was like stone. Noah appeared next, fury in his eyes.

Before we could react, Anika bolted. She vanished into the access corridor, slipping out into the storm-lit night.

We never saw her again.

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The next dive was meant to be our last—a full retrieval mission before the biome destabilized entirely.

But the trench had other plans.

Mid-descent, a second quake struck. Violent. Closer. A cascade of rockfall shattered the coral shelf beneath us, and we were thrown sideways in the sub. Alarms blared. Outside, the reef cracked open, glowing fragments curling like wounded limbs.

“We need to abort!” Noah shouted.

Luis didn’t answer. He was rerouting power, stabilizing us, overriding every safety protocol to get us back to the surface.

“Luis, what are you doing?” I cried.

He turned, and in that second I understood.

“I can hold it long enough for you two to get clear,” he said. “Manual override on the ballast. You’ll rise—fast.”

“No—Luis—”

“Go, Tia. You have to save this.”

I felt the jolt as the release triggered. The sub shot upward. I saw Luis’ face one last time through the viewport—calm, brave, resolute.

Then the deep took him.

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We broke the surface at dusk. The ocean was quiet. The coral forest—what remained of it—was no longer glowing.

I collapsed onto the deck, gasping, the sample container still clutched to my chest. Noah said nothing. Tim met us at the hatch, eyes scanning our empty ranks.

Anika was gone. Luis was gone.

We had the cure. But the cost had finally come due.

And I wasn’t sure how to carry it.

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