Chapter 3 - The Touch of the Deep
The child reached out.
Its tiny arm was pale, covered in a faint, translucent sheen that glistened like morning dew. Its fingers were small and delicate, though Thomas could see faint, webbed membranes of clear, elastic tissue stretching between the base of each finger.
Thomas slowly lifted his right hand. On his index finger, a red, inflamed scratch from his climb down the cliff stood out starkly against his weathered, dirty skin.
He held his hand out, pausing an inch away from the baby’s face, terrified that if he touched her, the illusion would shatter like spun glass and leave him alone on the cold rock.
The toddler didn't hesitate. She reached out with her small, warm hand and pressed her tiny index finger directly against the red scratch on Thomas's skin.
The instant their skin touched, a violent surge of electric warmth shot up Thomas's arm, slamming into his chest like a defibrillator pulse.
The wind died instantly. The roar of the ocean faded into a muffled, subterranean drone.
Inside Thomas's head, a flood of memories that were not his own exploded behind his eyelids. He didn't see the dark cliff or the gray sky; he saw the vast, abyssal depths of the trench—a world of bio-luminescent forests, ancient stone ruins buried beneath thousands of feet of pressure, and vast, shadowy leviathans swimming through thermal vents. And among them, he felt a haunting, mournful consciousness—a mother’s presence, immensely powerful, impossibly ancient, and dying.
Thomas gasped, snapping his hand back as if he had been burned.
The toddler giggled, a bright, musical sound that shattered the eerie stillness of the beach.
"You... you survived," Thomas stammered, his mind reeling as he tried to reconcile the scientific impossibilities with the undeniable warmth he had just felt. "They took you... she transformed you..."
He looked at the baby's tail, watching the scales shimmer as she flipped her fin against the wet rock, splashing cold water onto his waterproof overalls. She wasn't a monster. She wasn't a hallucination. She was his daughter—or what his daughter had become after three years in the dark abyss below.
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Before he could reach out to scoop her into his arms, the air pressure plummeted so violently that Thomas’s ears popped with a sharp, sickening crack.
The sea behind them began to rise.
