The sardines, it turned out, had been underselling it.

  “STORM COMING THIRTY HOURS,” they had said, with the confidence of creatures relaying accurate information. What they had not said — what the Storm Read skill had not fully resolved, because thirty hours out a Category Four hurricane looks like a very bad storm and a very bad storm looks like other very bad storms until it doesn’t — was that what was coming was not a storm.

  It was a reorganization of the ocean.

  I spent the night helping.

  Oscar coordinated the central reef with the efficiency of someone who had always been doing this and was simply now doing it with better information. Evacuation routes established. The deep channels, which I had mapped and shared, became highways for moving slower-moving residents to sheltered positions in the reef’s lower structure. Crabby directed traffic from my back with the calm authority of someone who had been through this before and had opinions about optimal sequencing.

  The cleaning station wrasses packed up their station — there was a packing up, I hadn’t realized there was a packing up, involving the careful relocation of the specific arrangements of coral rubble that marked the neutral zone — and moved to the deep reef. Coral shuttered the garden in a process that took four hours and involved more structural engineering than I would have expected from an anemone colony, the clownfish working in coordinated teams to anchor the most vulnerable fronds and guide the garden residents to the protected inner beds.

  Will had written a preparation protocol. It was three pages long and had been updated for current conditions. I know this because he had Otter deliver it to me via Oscar at approximately the four-hour mark of preparation, with a note that said *the western kelp anchoring sequence should begin before the main reef evacuation is complete, not after.* He was correct. It should have. We fixed it.

  Jack was gone before I thought to look for him. Just — not in the crack in the limestone anymore, his signal absent from the garden perimeter. I asked Coral. She said Jack always knew before everyone else and went where he needed to go. She said this with the tone of someone who had stopped asking questions about it.

  Doug helped by being alarmed about absolutely everything and therefore providing very accurate early warning for each new development. “SOMETHING CHANGED. THE CURRENT CHANGED. IS THAT — WAIT THE PRESSURE — WAIT—” Doug, it turned out, was an excellent storm preparation resource.

  Bruce was nowhere near the reef.

  At the fourteen-hour mark I brought the first residents into my cave. Oscar, because Oscar had spent eight months navigating by landmark and I was not losing Oscar to a Category Four. Crabby, because Crabby had eleven years of irreplaceable reef knowledge in a very small body with no structural protection. The damselfish group — the juveniles who had commissioned the group trip in my first weeks — because they were small and the reef structure they usually sheltered in was on the exposed face.

  My cave fit all of them. It was tighter than I’d have liked, but the structural read I did on the limestone told me what Otter had been right about from the beginning: the formation was solid. Old rock. Good depth. The entrance narrow enough to reduce surge.

  At the twenty-hour mark the sardines updated their broadcast.

  “STORM BIGGER. STORM MUCH BIGGER. STORM IS NOT THE STORM WE SAID. NEW STORM. WORSE STORM. ALL SARDINES GO DEEP. ALL FISH GO DEEP. THIS IS NOT A DRILL THIS IS—”

  The sardines went deep.

  Two hours later, the hurricane arrived.

  -----

  A Category Four hurricane, experienced from underwater, is not what you imagine when you imagine a storm.

  Above the surface it is wind and rain and the reorganization of air. Below the surface it is something else — it is the ocean being told by physics that it needs to go somewhere, all of it, simultaneously, and the ocean’s compliance with this instruction transmitted downward through the water column as surge and pressure and current reversals and the fundamental destabilization of every structure that has been standing on the seafloor under the assumption that water moves in predictable ways.

  The coral breaks.

  Not all of it. Not immediately. But the surge catches the exposed formations — the tall ones, the branching ones, the ones that grew up toward the light because light was the resource and nothing had told them to grow low and wide — and does to them what wind does to trees. The old deep ones hold. The new growth goes.

  I could feel it through the electromagnetic sense like a city losing its lights, section by section.

  I stayed in my cave through the first surge. Hovered at the center of the chamber, the residents tucked as deep as they could go, the cave entrance taking on a different quality of sound — a roaring that wasn’t quite sound, more like pressure with an opinion. The limestone held. Old rock.

  At the second surge I felt the signal that made me leave.

  A cluster of signals, small, young, the specific electromagnetic signature of juvenile fish — not the damselfish who were safe in my cave, different ones, the little school of chromis from the north reef section that I had taken on a group trip in my second week. They were wedged into a formation that my structural read told me was not going to survive the third surge.

  I went out.

  Here is what swimming in a Category Four hurricane feels like: it feels like the ocean has decided that the concept of direction is optional. Current, surge, the contradictory pull of water going several places at once — the Graceful Swimming skill hit its Rank A wall in approximately the first thirty seconds, the efficiency reaching the ceiling of what efficiency could do and simply *holding*, maintaining my ability to navigate the chaos at a level that was functional without being comfortable. I used the reef structure as windbreaks, moving from shelter to shelter, reading the surge timing through the electromagnetic-pressure sense in a way the Storm Read skill and Current Reading were doing together without my having to consciously request it.

  The chromis were where I’d felt them. I got there between surges — there’s a rhythm to hurricane surge if you can read the electromagnetic pressure, peaks and troughs, and the troughs are when you move — and herded them out of the collapsing formation and back toward the deep reef. They were too disoriented to navigate. I stayed behind them, pulse-nudging the ones that went the wrong direction, running interference between them and the debris the surge was carrying through the water.

  They made it to the deep structure.

  I went back for the triggerfish couple whose territory was on the north face, the exposed one, because their cave was shallow and the surge was going to clear it. Got them. Went back for the old parrotfish who had been sleeping in a crevice I recognized and found him still there, too slow to have evacuated. Got him.

  SONIC PULSE: multiple defensive deployments against falling debris, against surge-carried rocks, against one very large piece of coral that came off the upper reef structure and was going somewhere I was also going. The pulse couldn’t stop the coral but it could deflect it. At Rank B the geometry was intuitive enough that I didn’t have to think about it — I felt the trajectory and fired, and the coral went sideways instead of into me.

  I was on my fourth rescue run when the squid appeared.

  -----

  I felt him before I saw him — a massive, deep-water signal surging up through the water column with the specific quality of something that had been somewhere very far down and had been brought up against its will by the pressure differentials of the storm. Deep-water animals come up during major storms sometimes, displaced from their depth by the physics of the event, disoriented by the pressure change and the sudden cacophony of the shallower reef environment.

  He was large. Very large. Larger than Bruce. The electromagnetic signature of a deep-water squid is different from anything in the reef — a dense and complex neural activity that read like a library compared to the single volumes of reef fish, ten arms registering as ten separate extensions of a central intelligence, each one alive with its own signal.

  He hit the reef structure with the disorientation of something that had been in very cold, very dark, very quiet water and had abruptly been deposited into a hurricane.

  I went to him.

  “WHAT,” said the squid, “IN THE NAME OF ALL THE DEEP AND LIGHTLESS WATERS—”

  He was spinning. All ten arms extended in different directions, chromatophores cycling through patterns I had no framework for, his deep-water eyes — enormous, built for darkness, dealing very poorly with even the dim hurricane-filtered light — scanning in all directions with unfocused panic.

  I put myself in front of him.

  Hey, I said. Hey. Look at me.

  The enormous eyes found me. Fixed.

  “YOU,” he said, with the authority of something that had been something commanding before it was disoriented and was reasserting that in real time. “What manner of creature are you and what manner of chaos IS this and where in the abyss am I and—”

  Reef, I said. Storm. You got pulled up in the surge. I’ve got you.

  The arms were still moving, but slower. “Pulled up,” he repeated, with the tone of someone identifying an insult. “I was *pulled up*.”

  By the storm. It’s a Category Four. You’re going to be okay.

  “I am ALWAYS okay,” he said, with the specific conviction of something that lived in the deep ocean and had therefore encountered things that made Category Four hurricanes look like weather. “I am BOB. I am—” he stopped. The chromatophores settled into a steadier pattern. “I am aware that I am currently disoriented and that the appropriate response is to gather information before proceeding.”

  That’s a good call, I said.

  “DON’T,” Bob said, with crisp authority, “patronize me.” He extended one arm and felt the reef structure he was pressed against, the touch-sensitivity of squid arms apparently giving him information his eyes were struggling to. “Reef. Limestone. Yes. We are at the reef.” A pause. “Shallower than I prefer.”

  Much shallower, I agreed. But the storm will pass. Twelve hours, maybe less. I can get you to a stable position in the deep structure.

  Bob looked at me with one enormous eye. Then the other. “You have an accent,” he said.

  I’m a Floor Seven case.

  “Of course you are.” He extended another arm, tested the current, made some calculation I couldn’t follow. “Lead on, then.”

  -----

  I got Bob to a deep cave system at the base of the reef — a chamber large enough for something his size, deep enough to buffer the worst of the surge, with structural integrity my electromagnetic sense confirmed as solid. He settled into it with the dignity of something that was choosing to be where it was and not someone who had been deposited there by physics.

  “This will suffice,” he said.

  I’ll check on you after the storm, I said.

  “You will do as you choose,” Bob said. “I will be here. Or I will not be here. The deep ocean calls.” He looked at me with those enormous eyes. “You are a peculiar creature for a reef.”

  I’m new, I said.

  “You swim like you’re not,” he said, which was maybe the nicest thing anyone had said to me since I arrived, and I chose to take it as a compliment before he could clarify otherwise.

  I went back out into the hurricane.

  -----

  The storm passed in the way Category Four hurricanes pass — not gracefully, not quickly, but eventually. The surge reduced to swell, the swell to chop, the chop to the particular unsettled quality of water after major weather, when everything is technically calm but the ocean hasn’t fully committed to the idea yet.

  I came out of the storm into a reef I didn’t quite recognize.

  The structure was there. The old deep formations, the limestone foundations, the framework that the reef had been built on over centuries — that was there. What wasn’t there were the things that had grown on top of it. The branching coral. The tall formations. The smaller structures that had been home to a dozen species each. The storm had revised the reef’s skyline completely, and in the rubble and debris field of the aftermath everything that had been organized was displaced and everything that had been settled was confused.

  My residents emerged from the cave in stages. Oscar first, with the look of someone taking inventory. Crabby second, reading the wreckage with eleven years of pattern recognition running continuously. The damselfish, uncertain, their home formation gone.

  Crabby said: “Work.”

  Yes, I agreed.

  -----

  The rebuilding had a different quality from the storm preparation. Preparation was urgency. Rebuilding was patience — the slower work of assessing what remained and what could be salvaged and what needed to be cleared before anything new could happen.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Bob, who had emerged from his deep cave with the energy of someone who had reconsidered their schedule, turned out to be extremely useful. This surprised me. It should not have surprised me — something that had survived to that size in the deep ocean had obviously done so through capability — but his particular combination of strength, arm-reach, and the specific commanding authority of his voice created a coordination dynamic I hadn’t expected.

  “THAT SECTION,” he would say, indicating a pile of debris with an arm that could reach six meters, “requires clearing before the residents of the eastern formation can return. Begin there.”

  And the fish would begin there.

  “The crevice on the northern face,” he would say, “is structurally sound. The opening is blocked by two rocks. If the ray with the sonic apparatus addresses the upper rock the lower one will shift.”

  I addressed the upper rock. The lower one shifted. The crevice opened.

  “Good,” said Bob.

  I had taken to using the pulse for debris clearing with an efficiency I hadn’t anticipated — targeted bursts loosening compacted rubble, rocks shifted from cave entrances and formation gaps, the pulse geometry precise enough at Rank B to work in tight spaces without damaging the surrounding structure. It felt like the urchin work but for construction instead of eviction, reading the electromagnetic map of each debris pile to find the load-bearing pieces and working from there.

  Crabby directed the social geography. Who needed to be where. Which caves were viable for which species. The long memory of reef history informing each decision — *that formation is where the chromis have denned for six years, it’s worth clearing*, *the triggerfish territory needs to extend to that rock now that the one east of it is gone*.

  We worked.

  Not just us — the whole reef working, in the disorganized but genuine way of a community that has been through something together. Residents who had sheltered in the deep structure emerging to clear their own territories. Species that didn’t usually interact working alongside each other with the emergency cooperation of shared crisis. Doug, who found approximately seventeen urgent new things per hour but addressed each one briefly and with genuine effectiveness.

  Jack appeared at some point during the second day of rebuilding. He didn’t explain where he’d been. He assessed a section of the eastern reef structure that had been giving us problems — a partially collapsed formation that needed to come down fully before it could be rebuilt but that nobody could get purchase on — and solved it with three precise movements that suggested familiarity with structural failure in confined spaces.

  Nobody asked. He didn’t say.

  “Competent,” Bob observed, watching Jack work.

  “Hm,” said Crabby.

  -----

  Bruce arrived on the third day of rebuilding.

  I felt him before I saw him — the flat-grievance signature, back from wherever he’d ridden out the storm, but different. Hotter. Sharper. The storm had done something to Bruce’s already-poor relationship with existence and the result was moving through the reef edge with the electromagnetic quality of something that had decided to stop maintaining its usual containment.

  He hit a school of displaced juvenile parrotfish on the outer reef flat.

  I was there in forty seconds, which was fast enough to matter. The juveniles had scattered — reflex, survival, the right response — and Bruce was following the stragglers with the focused intensity of a hunt and not the usual flat-orbit energy of a shark making his presence known.

  Hey, I said.

  Bruce turned. Found me. The flat-grievance signature was still in there but buried under the hot-sharp thing, and I had been around Bruce enough by now to read the difference between *Bruce being Bruce* and *Bruce in a state where Bruce’s usual self-governance had gone offline.*

  The storm had been a lot for someone who chose this body because he was tired of dealing with things.

  This isn’t you, I said.

  “You don’t know what’s me,” he said.

  I know you ate clams near my reef because you wanted to see where I was. I know you asked to be best friends and then immediately told me not to make a thing of it. I know when Smith put you in a bubble you had a panic attack and he talked you through it like he’d done it before.

  The hot-sharp signature shifted. Not gone, but — registered.

  I know, I said, that right now everything is destroyed and displaced and your territory is disrupted and nothing is where it’s supposed to be and that is genuinely terrible. I know that.

  Bruce was still.

  I also know that those are juvenile parrotfish, I said. Most of them were born in this reef. And you don’t actually want to eat them. You’re just — catastrophically bad at having feelings.

  The longest pause.

  “That’s—” Bruce started.

  Accurate?

  Another pause. “I was going to say *rude.*”

  It’s both, I said. And you know it.

  The hot-sharp signature very slowly, with visible effort, stepped back toward the flat-grievance. Which was not *good*, exactly, but was *Bruce*, and Bruce I knew how to be around.

  “The storm,” he said.

  I know, I said.

  “My territory is completely—”

  I know.

  “I don’t—” He stopped. The fins moved, a minimal adjustment. “I don’t know where anything is.”

  I’ll help you map it, I said. Give me two days to get the immediate rebuilding to a stable point and then I’ll do a full survey of your outer territory with you. We’ll know where everything is.

  He was quiet.

  “You would do that,” he said. Not a question. More like testing the sentence again, the way he had before.

  I would do that.

  “Why.”

  Because you asked to be best friends, I said. I’m taking it seriously even though you told me not to make a thing of it.

  Something in his signal shifted in the way I had only felt once before — that almost-adjacent-to-amusement thing, the emotion he wasn’t used to having and didn’t have vocabulary for.

  “Fine,” he said.

  He left. The juveniles, who had been frozen in place, dispersed with the collective exhale of something that has just been not-eaten.

  GRACEFUL SWIMMING: Rank A achieved.

  I read the notification.

  Well, I thought. Good to know what that takes.

  -----

  When I finally had a moment to breathe — metaphorically, I had technically been breathing the whole time, it was a passive system, but *figuratively* — I pulled up my status.

  I had not looked at it properly in two weeks.

  ╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗

  ║   MIKA — OWL RAY     ║

  ║   Level: 11      ║

  ╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣

  ║ STATS         ║

  ║ Health:  89/89      ║

  ║ Stamina:  103/110     ║

  ║ Mana:   28/40 (growing)   ║

  ║ Intelligence: 14      ║

  ║ Strength:  9      ║

  ╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣

  ║ SKILLS         ║

  ║ ? Graceful Swimming [PASSIVE] — Rank A ║

  ║ ? Hover [ACTIVE]    — Rank B ║

  ║ ? Electromagnetic Detection — Rank A ║

  ║ [PASSIVE] Heightened + Hyper   ║

  ║ ? Sonic Pulse [ACTIVE]   — Rank B ║

  ║ ? Venomous Barbed Tail [ACTIVE]— Rank D ║

  ║ ? Current Reading [PASSIVE] — Rank B ║

  ║ ? Reef Helper [PASSIVE]  — Rank B ║

  ║ ? Storm Read [PASSIVE]   — Rank C ║

  ║ ? Efficient Swimmer [PASSIVE] — Rank C ║

  ╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣

  ║ ELECTROMAGNETIC DETECTION    ║

  ║ ? Range: Extended (full reef + outer  ║

  ║ flat coverage)       ║

  ║ ? Precision: FINE PINPOINT    ║

  ║ Near-visual resolution of EM signals ║

  ║ Individual organism identification  ║

  ║ at range. Signal filtering: FULL  ║

  ╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣

  ║ LUCKY SHELL INVENTORY: 0     ║

  ║ (8 found post-storm, 7x Please Try Again,║

  ║ 1x RARE ABILITY — see below)   ║

  ╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣

  ║ ? NEW ABILITY: FLY [LOCKED]    ║

  ║ Classification: RARE — UNIQUE   ║

  ║ Status: Locked pending development  ║

  ║ Details: [REDACTED PENDING UNLOCK]  ║

  ╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝

  I looked at the FLY notification for a long time.

  Then I looked at it some more.

  The system, which had been quiet through my review, offered: the ability has been logged. Further details will be available when the relevant developmental threshold is reached.

  That’s not helpful, I said.

  It is accurate, the system replied.

  What does it *mean*, fly?

  A pause. What do you think it means?

  I think it means something is eventually going to let me leave the water, I said. And I think you’re not going to tell me anything more about it right now.

  The system’s response came back with the specific quality it got when it was being almost warm: some things are more rewarding to discover.

  I closed the status window.

  Seven Please Try Agains. The universe had a 4.7% joke and it was committed.

  -----

  The Fine Pinpoint electromagnetic upgrade deserves its own note because it had changed something fundamental about how I experienced the reef.

  Before, the electromagnetic sense had been like having a very detailed map — I knew where things were, their size, their general biological signature, their movement. After the storm, after eleven levels of development and the Hyper-Electromagnetic skill stacking with the Heightened Detection and whatever the Level 11 milestone had done to the underlying system, it was something else.

  I could *see* them.

  Not with eyes. Not quite. But the resolution of the electromagnetic sense had crossed some threshold during the storm — the extreme use, the precision required for pulse work in tight spaces, the filtering demanded by the chaos of hurricane conditions — and what had been a map had become something closer to a portrait. I could distinguish Oscar from any other yellow tang in the reef not just by size and position but by the specific signature of his neural activity, the particular pattern that was *Oscar* and not a different fish of the same species. I could feel Crabby’s thought-processes in the dense electrical activity of a very old and very attentive brain.

  I could feel my cave from two hundred meters away, the specific electromagnetic texture of home.

  I tried to explain this to Crabby.

  He thought about it for a moment. “You can see us,” he said. “Not with light. But *see*.”

  Something like that, I said.

  “Hm,” he said. Then: “Can you feel what I’m thinking?”

  No, I said. Just that you’re thinking. And roughly how much.

  “Roughly how much,” he repeated, and went quiet in a way that suggested he was thinking approximately a lot.

  -----

  The cleaning station wrasses found me on the fifth day of rebuilding.

  There were three of them — the senior wrasse whose name I had learned was Edith, and two younger ones who deferred to her completely. They arrived at my cave entrance with the energy of something that had prepared what it was going to say.

  “The eastern cleaning station site is gone,” Edith said. “The formation is rubble.”

  I know, I said. I’m sorry.

  “We need a new neutral site.” She looked at my cave. At the rock formation outside it — solid, prominent, positioned at the reef’s edge in a way that had good traffic flow. “This rock.”

  She said it with the confidence of someone who had done a site assessment and arrived at a conclusion.

  I looked at the rock. It was outside my cave, so it wasn’t the cave itself — it was a chunk of old limestone that had been part of the reef structure for longer than any current resident had been alive. A good rock. Stable.

  It’s yours, I said.

  Edith looked at me. “You understand what this means,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “The cleaning station is neutral ground. Non-aggression. The site becomes a protected zone.”

  I understand.

  “That includes sharks,” she said.

  Including sharks, I agreed.

  “Including your shark,” she said, with the specific care of someone confirming a detail that mattered.

  I’ll tell Bruce, I said.

  Edith looked at the rock for a moment. Then: “You carried Benedikt to us four times.” She paused. “Eight times, including after the storm.”

  He didn’t ask after the storm, I said. I just checked on him.

  Edith was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded — the wrasse full-body nod — and began the process of establishing the station on the new rock, which involved a ritual arrangement of small pieces of coral rubble I did not ask about and chose to respect.

  The neutral zone outside my cave. Which felt right, somehow — that the most neutral spot in the reef would be the one closest to home.

  -----

  Smith arrived ten days after the storm, which was four days earlier than his usual schedule. He landed on the surface with less splash than usual, which I was learning to read as Smith adjusting his presentation to conditions. The reef was still in recovery. He could see that from the surface.

  We assembled. All six of us plus Bob, who had not left, and who arrived at the surface with the authority of something that had decided to attend.

  “Who’s this,” Smith said.

  “BOB,” said Bob.

  “Are you a Bureau case?”

  “I,” said Bob, “am from the deep. I was brought here by the storm. I have decided to remain temporarily.” A pause. “I find the reef community tolerable.”

  Smith looked at him for a moment. Made a notation. “I’ll file the paperwork.”

  “You will do as you wish,” Bob said graciously.

  Smith did the individual assessments with the focused efficiency of someone who had looked at a damaged reef and adjusted his schedule accordingly. He noted my level progression, my skill development, the Lucky Shell count — which he updated on the Hidden Statistics Board without comment, though the seven Please Try Agains seemed to give him a moment.

  “The FLY ability,” he said.

  It’s locked.

  “I know. I’ve flagged it with Bureau Oversight.” A pause. “I’ve never seen that one before.”

  Join the club, I said.

  He made another notation. Then: “The Bruce situation.”

  I went to talk to him during the rebuilding, I said. We mapped his territory together. He’s been maintaining the outer perimeter since.

  “He hasn’t eaten anyone in ten days,” Smith said.

  He’s working on it, I said.

  “The reef ecosystem is more stable with him in a functional role,” Smith said. “He knows that. I’m not sure he knows he knows that.” He looked at the outer water, where Bruce’s signal was doing its usual circuits but closer to the reef than it used to. “Keep doing what you’re doing.”

  Then Smith did something I hadn’t seen him do before. He looked at all of us — the assembled reef cases, Bob who had filed no paperwork, Crabby who was present as a community member and not technically a Bureau case but who attended check-ins because he considered himself a stakeholder in the proceedings — and his posture shifted into something that was not the professional assessment mode but something quieter.

  “I need to ask all of you something,” he said.

  We waited.

  “The Bureau has been monitoring an uptick in system anomalies across multiple reef cohorts,” Smith said. “Glitches in the interface. Unexpected notifications. System messages that don’t match standard Bureau templates. We’re assessing whether a patch is required.” He paused. “Has anyone experienced system irregularities? Anything that seemed off?”

  There was a silence.

  Then Sura said, with the careful tone of someone who had been waiting for this question: “Three. The skill notification interface produced duplicate entries twice and a null error once.”

  “Two here,” Otter said. “A level-up notification that fired twice, and a stat display that showed incorrect values for approximately an hour before correcting.”

  Oscar: “Two. Both were minor — formatting errors in skill descriptions.”

  Gerald, newly returned: “Three. Including one that I reported to the Bureau at the time.” He looked at Smith. “You have the log.”

  Smith nodded. “Bob?”

  “I have been in the deep ocean,” Bob said. “My system interface is — irregular by nature. I cannot usefully contribute to this data.”

  Smith made notations. Then he looked at me.

  I thought about it honestly. I went through every system interaction I could remember — the initialization, the Bureau Oversight complaint process, the skill acquisitions, the Lucky Spin, the FLY ability.

  Nothing, I said. No errors. No duplicates. Nothing off.

  Smith’s pen — the impression of a pen, the bill-as-bureaucratic-instrument — paused.

  He looked at me with the careful attention of someone recalibrating.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Nothing, I confirmed.

  The silence had a different quality than before.

  “That’s—” Smith stopped. Made a notation that seemed longer than the others. “That’s useful information. Thank you.” His tone was the professional tone. The precise, even, Bureau-representative tone.

  But underneath it — the Fine Pinpoint electromagnetic sense resolving the subtle signature of his neural activity at the surface interface — something else. Not alarm, exactly. Something more considered than alarm.

  Something that was asking a question it hadn’t figured out how to answer yet.

  He moved on. New case introduction — the Bureau, apparently, had processed a new arrival. A shimmer in the water nearby, a brief disturbance, and then from a portal I had not seen open: a lobster. Dropped from approximately two meters into the water with the grace of someone who had not been warned about the drop.

  “BLOODY HELL,” said the lobster.

  It was large. Red-tinted, with the electromagnetic signature of something deeply disoriented and deeply aggrieved about it. It surfaced, looked around, took in the reef, the assembled residents, the pelican on the surface, and me, in approximately four seconds.

  “What in blazes,” it said, with the specific diction of something that was going to have opinions about everything immediately, “is going on?”

  “Welcome to Earth 6214,” Smith said. “I’m Agent Smith, Bureau representative for this reef cohort. I’ll be conducting your onboarding assessment—”

  “I had a TANK,” the lobster said. “I had a perfectly good tank in a restaurant in— where am I? Is this a reef? This is a reef.” It looked at the reef. “Why am I in a reef.”

  Floor Seven, Crabby said, from my back. There was a clerical error.

  The lobster turned toward Crabby’s voice. Found him. Found me. The electromagnetic sense resolved the disorientation pattern — the one I recognized because I’d had it, the particular quality of very new.

  “I’m Leonardo,” it said. Then, with the specific suspicion of something that had been somewhere it understood and was now somewhere it didn’t: “Is anyone going to explain this or are we all just standing here?”

  Everyone looked at everyone else.

  Oscar turned to me. It was my reef. Or close enough to it.

  Welcome to the reef, I said. Come find me when you’ve had a minute. I’ll explain what I can.

  Leonardo looked at me for a long moment with the assessment of something forming rapid opinions.

  “Fine,” it said. “But I want the full story. No editorializing.”

  You’ll get Crabby’s version, I said. It’s more accurate.

  “Hm,” said Crabby, with what I had learned to recognize as satisfaction.

  Smith finished his notations. He looked at the assembled reef one more time — the recovered community, the new arrival, the work of two months visible in how the whole thing held together even three weeks after a Category Four.

  His gaze found me for just a moment, the professional mask entirely in place.

  But the Fine Pinpoint sense was very clear.

  Smith was thinking very hard about zero glitches.

  And I was starting to wonder if I should be too.