‘I’m going to be the bait.’
Mav did not say it aloud.
He sat in the middle of his base on the morning of the seventeenth day and let the thought go out to all 10 of them at once, as clearly as he could shape it.
The answer came back at once.
It was not words.
It was a tightening at the back of his neck, and a ripple of unease that ran through every seaweed around the Heartstone.
Two darted toward him and stopped.
They did not like it.
Neither did Mav, and the idea frightened him badly.
‘I know.
Listen to the rest.’
He had promised to show them the plan before he gave a single order.
So he showed it to them, piece by piece.
He pictured each step in his head and held it there until he felt that they had seen it.
The eel woke at dusk, and she was hungry.
She lay in the mud at the bottom of the slope, where the water was black and cold, and she felt the sea around her.
She had no eyes.
She had never needed them.
Every living thing in the water gave off a faint tingle, a small spark of life, and she could feel each spark on her skin from far away.
A shrimp was a prickle.
A fish was a flicker.
Nothing that lived could hide from her.
She was the strongest creature in this sea.
She had always been.
When she let her power out, everything near her went stiff and stopped moving, and then she ate it.
Nothing had ever fought her.
Nothing had ever tried.
Until the new ones came.
They had come into her hunting ground several nights ago.
There were small silver ones, and one with a hard shell.
And there was a big one.
It was soft and slow, and its spark was larger than anything she had ever felt.
It swam badly.
It should have been easy.
She had eaten two of the small ones.
They were hardly worth the effort.
But there was something wrong with them.
Each one had carried a second spark, and that second spark had tasted strange.
The others had fled to the bright place.
She hated the bright place.
In the middle of it sat a stone that hummed.
It hummed so loudly that it drowned out every other spark in the water.
Near that stone, she could feel nothing at all.
Near that stone, she was truly blind.
So she did not go in.
She circled it, night after night, and waited for the big one to come out.
Once, it had.
It had hung in the open water, perfectly still, and she had almost reached it.
Then the hard-shelled one had struck her in the jaw.
Nothing had ever struck her before.
She remembered it.
She was still hungry.
Tonight, she swam up the slope as the last light died, and she felt the bright place ahead of her, humming.
Then she felt something else, and she stopped.
The big one was outside.
It was far from the humming stone, alone in the open water.
Two of the small silver ones were with it.
That did not matter.
They were too small to matter.
She turned toward it.
She did not hurry at first.
She never did.
Prey that felt her coming went mad with fear and wore itself out, and then it was easy.
She swam in long, slow curves and let it feel her.
It did not move.
That was strange.
Prey always fled.
She came closer, and closer still, and the big spark only hung there, beating fast.
Then it turned and ran.
She went after it.
It was slow, as she remembered.
She gained on it with every stroke of her tail.
It was heading for the rocks at the foot of the cliff, the way small prey always headed for rocks.
That did not worry her.
She had pulled many things out of rocks.
Something stung her tail.
Then something else stung her, on the other side.
The two small silver ones had bitten her and fled.
She twisted with rage.
For a moment, she wanted to turn and kill them both.
But the big one was almost at the rocks, and she was so hungry.
She let them go.
The big one reached a hole in the rocks and vanished into it.
She did not slow down.
The hole was narrow, but she was narrow too.
She drove herself into it at full speed.
The walls scraped along her sides, and the spark of the prey blazed right in front of her mouth.
She snapped.
Her teeth closed on water.
The prey was there.
It was right there, an arm’s length from her jaws.
But it had pressed itself into a hollow at the side, around a corner, where she could not reach.
She pushed.
She bent her head as far as it would go.
One tooth caught soft flesh and tore it, and she tasted blood.
It was not enough.
She could not get to it.
She tried to turn around.
She could not turn.
The rock held her on both sides.
It held her from above.
There was stone in front of her and stone all around her, and her whole long body lay behind her in a hole that was exactly as wide as she was.
Something was wrong.
She had hunted in this sea for her entire life.
For the first time, she felt what her prey had always felt.
She began to back out.
It was slow.
It was much too slow.
And the big spark was still there beside her, alive, beating.
She did not understand what it had done to her.
She only knew one way to answer.
She let all of her power out at once.
The water turned to fire.
She felt it pour through the prey, from one end of its soft body to the other.
The big spark went out.