The Current Between Us

Undercurrent.

## Chapter 6: Undercurrent

Beatrice didn't breathe until the guard moved past her storage trunk, his trident already jabbing toward the next family's belongings without a backward glance.

Her hands shook. Not from the search itself, not from the cold water settling deeper into the execution ground as night pressed in. From Bale's eyes.

When they met hers, it felt like he'd reached straight into her skull and pulled out the one thing she'd never said aloud to anyone — not to a friend, not to the tide, not even in the privacy of her own thoughts where she usually allowed herself to be honest. The one thing she'd buried deep enough that she'd half convinced herself it didn't exist anymore. Not even Mom knew the whole shape of it.

She knew what Bale was. Mom had told her at twelve, voice low like a warning passed down through generations of careful women. *"Bale hears thoughts. That's why we don't speak certain things at home, even when we're alone. Some thoughts are doors, and if you're not careful, he walks right through them without even trying."*

Beatrice had learned to keep her mind quiet since then, the way other children learned to swim before they learned to walk. No names spoken even in her head. No images allowed to linger. Though if she was honest with herself, she'd never been very good at it — not really, not the way Mom seemed to manage effortlessly. Sometimes only the surface thoughts held, dull and boring on purpose, a shield built from tedium: *Check the net. Watch the tide. Breathe. Don't think. Don't think. Don't think.*

Bale wasn't listening to the surface, though. He never had been. He was looking at the cracks underneath, the way water always finds the weakest point in any wall no matter how carefully it's built.

Mom's voice came low and fast at her ear, barely more than breath shaped into words, meant only for her.

"Don't look at him. Don't answer, no matter what they ask you. If they ask, you were at the outer reef all week. You never found anything out there. You don't know what any of them are talking about. Do you understand me?"

Beatrice let out a slow breath, forcing her shoulders down from where they'd crept up near her ears. The water around her felt unnaturally still, the way it sometimes did right before a storm rolled in from deeper water, pressure building long before the first current shift gave it away.

She'd lied about some things, and the lie sat sour in her stomach now, curdled with hindsight. She'd wanted a few hours — just a few — to keep the comb to herself before handing it over to anyone, even Mom. A few hours to pretend, foolishly, that she wasn't the reason everyone around her was suddenly standing at the edge of a blade.

Now the guards tore through their things without ceremony, tridents stabbing into mats and packs, overturning what little the family owned in the world. And it was still hidden right there, wrapped in kelp and tucked beneath her tunic, pressed so close to her skin she could feel every fiber of the wrapping through the thin fabric. If they found it, it wouldn't be just her who paid the price. It would be Mom, dragged down alongside her. Maybe the whole post, if the king decided an example needed making.

Guilt sat heavy in her chest, a stone she couldn't cough up no matter how hard she tried. She was eighteen — old enough to know exactly what happened when secrets got loose in a kingdom like this one. Old enough to know that "I wanted to keep it a little longer" was not a reason any king, least of all this one, would accept as mitigation.

Beatrice kept her face carefully blank, her thoughts locked down behind walls she'd been building since she was a child too young to understand why they mattered. But her chest felt wrong, tight and thin, like something inside her was slipping loose no matter how hard she clamped down on it. Like panic itself had edges sharp enough to cut through stone, given enough time and pressure.

Because Bale knew. She could see it in the way his eyes hadn't blinked once since they'd locked onto hers, hadn't wavered even as guards shoved him roughly toward the execution post. And if the king made him talk — when the king made him talk, because there had never really been any question of *if* — if Alpha pressed that humming trident to his throat one more time, Mom and Beatrice were both out of time. Whatever hours they thought they had left were an illusion, a number Bale's silence had bought them and could just as easily take back.

A guard kicked her seaweed bag hard enough to send it skidding across the sand. Shells scattered across the stone with sharp, brittle clicks that seemed impossibly loud in the tense hush of the execution ground. One rolled right past her foot and came to rest against a c***k in the rock, and Beatrice found herself staring at it as though it might offer some kind of answer.

Beatrice stared and thought one thing on repeat, like a prayer whispered too many times to still mean anything: *Don't think it. Don't think it. Don't think it.*

But thinking about not thinking was still thinking, a trap as old as the mind itself, and the harder she pushed the image away, the brighter it burned behind her eyes — silver teeth catching torchlight, a carved handle worn smooth by generations of hands, the way it had hummed faintly under her fingers that very morning, warm with something that felt almost alive.

And in the silence, she felt it — the water shifting around her, pressure changing in a way that had nothing to do with current or tide. The particular stillness that comes right before something irreversible happens. The moment before everything broke apart for good.

Bale's gaze flicked away from hers first, dropping to the sand beneath him as though the weight of what he was about to do had finally become too much to carry while looking her in the eye.

But it was already too late. He'd already seen everything he needed to see, and Beatrice understood, with a cold certainty settling into her bones, that there was no version of the next few minutes where the comb stayed hidden.