Kin floated, suspended and unmoving, in the water. The Jorogumo-class drone had left, having done its bloody work.

Kin floated in the water.

There was no sound, no movement, only the omnipresent invisible eddies of the deep, molecules under thousands of atmospheres of pressure jostling and shoving each other at the smallest level, atom-sized holes being formed and filled, the currents gently lapping at Kin’s body, pushing it this way and that.

Kin floated in the water. His legs waved in that gentle manner of submerged seaweed.

The silence of the area seemed to have permeated and swallowed the boy, seeping into his body, and making him one with the noiseless cavern.

Dark. Cold. Silent.

Alone.

Crrrrckl

Not so alone.

“Kin? Kin?”

No response. Legs waving like seaweed. Like dead grass in the wind.

“Kin?”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Faint, but it was there. Mion could feel a heartbeat.

Major stress to the 10th and 11th thoracic vertebrae. Not broken, but he would have a hard time walking later. If he could wake up and do that.

Kin groaned and his legs jerked as he tried to move them unconsciously. Dead seaweed.

Mion wanted to do something, anything, but as long as she was trapped in a matrix, with no ability to move an unmotorised drysuit, she could only wait.

Kin’s chest rose and fell between shudders, like he was trying to breathe properly. Three bruised ribs. One hairline crack.

Those would heal in time.

Time was not something they had in abundance.

But Mion was useless without a human to be her hands and feet, and so she waited, time trickling away like water.

And Kin lay, and dreamed.

He dreamed he was standing on dry metal. The walls were impossible arches, somehow bending outside his vision. It made the sides of his eyes hurt.

Covered with rust.

Kin looked down and realised he was rusting, too, his skin falling off in red flakes.

He screamed. Pain, blinding and pulsating.

He tried to scrape the rust off, and his flesh came along with it. Tender flesh and organs were exposed to air, and they rusted too, turning rough and hard and crimson.

Just before Kin’s eyes went, he saw a huge eye in the ceiling, marred by patches of oxidation, staring at him.

He woke up.

“Ouch, ouch, that really hurts--”

“You’re awake.”

It was a question.

“Sorry about that.”

Kin suddenly felt nauseous.

“Bleeegh…”

He was just able to remove his rebreather in time, avoiding a potentially messy accident. Water flooded into his mouth as he threw up the half-digested remains of his last meal. Some of it got into his nose, and the rest of it went everywhere else.

Vomiting underwater was not fun.

Kin wiped his mouth and replaced his rebreather, draining it to allow himself to breathe again. The burning ache in his chest was getting worse, and his spine felt like somebody had jammed a wood brick into it.

One encounter with that metal thing had done this to him. Reduced him to a half-operational, hurting wreck.

Kin, removed from his dream, felt the weight of the abyss settle back down on his shoulders like silt, muddy and ever-present, and turned his thoughts to cold and wet and dark things again, banishing the rust from his mind.