Ely Janko's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Ely Janko had a scent trail in the water, and the storm was erasing it. For three days she had tracked the creature that struck her boat from below and drowned her brother and three crewmates. She was the only one who came up. Now she inked another line onto her forearm, over the depth marks and the strike angle, and read the map on her own skin like a hunter reads torn ground. The trail was a chain of kills. Broken shells. Gouged coral. A path the creature had eaten across the reef, heading somewhere she meant to follow. She had circled a drop-off where the gouges pointed down. She would dive there at dawn and put the harpoon in the thing she had once frozen in front of. But the storm came first. Ely woke to a churned cove and a reef buried in wreck. Curved planks and a chipped prow lay tangled in rope across the shallows, a boat torn apart and scattered. Silt hung in the water like smoke. The gouges were gone. The broken shells were gone. Everything she had marked was smoothed flat or hidden under debris. She waded in and started throwing planks aside. Each one she moved uncovered nothing but more sand. The trail was going cold, and cold meant she lost the creature again, maybe for good. Her hands shook. She had built her whole map on that trail. She stopped forcing it and made herself watch the water instead. Near the debris, a small creature clung to a rope with a curled tail. It had a seal's round face and a seahorse's ridged spine. It nosed the sand, then jerked back from a patch beside a fallen rib. Ely went still. The animal was afraid of something under the sand. She dug where it had flinched. Beneath the silt she found a crab, blue and white, its head flared wide like a hammer. It was dead, split clean down the shell. Not crushed by the storm. Bitten. She turned it in her hands and read the wound the way she read strike angles. The bite came from below and behind, the same angle that had opened her hull. The crab was fresh. The creature had fed here after the storm, not before. That meant the trail was not cold. It had moved. She followed the little seal-tailed animal as it fled, and it led her past the drop-off to a deeper channel. Down in the dark water a cluster of jellyfish drifted, glowing soft blue, and their light caught something below them. A wide shadow, sliding along the channel floor, far bigger than any shape the storm could make. Ely knelt at the edge and inked the new channel onto her wrist. The trail was alive again, and it led straight down. She would need to go deeper than forty feet this time, into water where the glow ran out.