The Current Between Us

Nightfall I

## Chapter 3: Nightfall

The king didn't stay.

"Nightfall," he said, voice flat like a blade. Then he left with the Alpha and half the guards trailing behind him, their formation tight and silent, obedient to a word no one had spoken aloud. Armor flashed once in the fading light, then faded into the deeper blue. The water shifted as they moved off, a heavy current dragging in their wake, leaving only two guards behind to watch the post.

"Fail, and the Alpha finishes what he started," the king's voice echoed one last time before he vanished into the distance, swallowed by shadow and current. The words sank into the sand like stones, heavy enough that Beatrice swore she could feel them settle.

The second he was gone, the post erupted. Slaves exhaled all at once, a ragged chorus of breath held too long. Someone coughed, wet and rattling. A child whimpered somewhere near the coral pens, and a mother's voice hushed it, low and frantic. The tension didn't break so much as shift, sliding from fear of the king to fear of what came next.

"Silence!" one guard barked, his trident slamming against rock hard enough to c***k the surface. The sound echoed through the post, bouncing off broken coral. "No moving. No talking. You wait here till nightfall."

But he couldn't watch everyone. The gate post was wide, built from broken coral and old shipwood salvaged from some wreck long since picked clean, full of shadowed corners and half-collapsed pillars that broke sightlines every few feet. And the other guard was already distracted, eyeing Dove's haul of coral with greedy eyes, fingers twitching toward pieces that weren't his to take. Greed made guards careless. It always had. It was the one thing Beatrice's mother had taught her to count on.

Beatrice felt Mom's fingers dig into her arm again, harder this time. The nails weren't digging from fear anymore. They were digging from decision — the kind of grip that came only after a choice had already been made and there was no going back from it.

"We have maybe four hours," Mom whispered, pulling her behind a pillar of coral where the guards couldn't see them, moving with the quiet, practiced ease of someone who had learned long ago how to disappear in plain sight. The coral was bleached and brittle, crumbling slightly where her shoulder brushed it, but it broke the line of sight completely. "Bale won't hold. He'll talk before the deadline. He always talks when they press him. I've known him too long to hope otherwise."

Beatrice's heart pounded against her ribs, so hard she was certain the guards could hear it through the water. "Then what do we do?" Her voice was small, but steady — steadier than she felt.

Mom glanced down at her belt, at the faint outline of the comb pressed against the fabric of Beatrice's tunic. Her face had gone pale, lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line, the expression of someone doing arithmetic with lives instead of numbers.

"We run. Now. Before Bale breaks, and before those guards decide they're bored enough to search us properly. Once they start touching slaves, checking belts and satchels, they won't stop until they've turned every one of us inside out."

"But where?" Beatrice asked, panic rising fast, clawing up her throat. "The king owns this sea. Every post answers to him. Every post will turn us in the moment they see us — for a reward, for mercy, for nothing at all. There's no safe water anywhere in his territory."

"Not the reef," Mom said, eyes darting toward the deepening blue beyond the gate, toward the direction none of the slaves ever willingly swam. "Not the reef, and not the caves near the drop-off, either. Not the old caves further out. No one goes there — not the guards, not the fishermen, not even the smugglers who'll go anywhere for coin. The currents run wrong out there, twisting against themselves, and the stories about what lives in the dark parts are worse than anything the king could do to us. But that's exactly why it's the only place he won't think to look. If we make it that far, we hide until morning and figure out the rest then. One night. That's all we need to buy ourselves."

Beatrice glanced back toward the center of the post, to where Bale still knelt in the sand. He hadn't moved. His head was bowed low, but his eyes weren't closed — they were fixed on her, steady and unblinking, waiting. Green eyes, tired in a way that went bone-deep, but knowing. Always knowing more than he should.

He knew she had the comb. And he knew nightfall was coming, ticking down with every heartbeat, whether any of them were ready for it or not.

"Beatrice!" a guard's voice snapped, sharp as a whip cracking through still water. "Get back in line!"

Mom shoved her forward, gentle but fast, the motion so smooth it looked almost accidental. "Go. Act normal. Head down, hands busy. We move when their backs turn. One breath, one kick, and we're gone before they even register we're missing."

Beatrice stepped back into line, tail shaking beneath her tunic despite every effort to still it. The comb felt heavier with every passing second, as though it had roots now, as though it was trying to pull her straight down into the sand and bury her there with it. Across the post, Bale lifted his head just slightly, careful not to draw the guards' attention. His mouth moved. No sound came out — nothing that could carry on the water and be overheard — but Beatrice read his lips as clearly as if he'd shouted.

*I'm sorry.*

Two words. That was all. But they landed like a stone dropped into still water, rippling out further than they had any right to.

The light beyond the gate sank lower by the minute, turning from gold to orange, then to a deep, bruised red, and finally to a dim gray-blue that swallowed the shapes of things at any distance. Shadows stretched long across the sand and climbed the broken coral like living things, reaching. The water cooled with the fading light, a chill settling over the post that had nothing to do with the current.

Nightfall came, and running felt suddenly, impossibly hard — harder than it had when it was still an idea, still hours away. The guards were closer now, drawn by boredom or instinct or simple proximity, their spears catching what little light remained and throwing it back in thin, deadly glints.

But staying felt like death all the same. Just a slower one, dressed up as patience.

Mom's whisper hit her ear one last time, barely louder than the current sliding past the coral, barely more than breath shaped into words.

"When I drop the coral basket, you run. Don't look back. Don't stop, no matter what you hear behind you."

Beatrice's tail coiled tight beneath her, every muscle drawn taut and ready, waiting for the sound of a basket hitting sand.