Salt and Steel

The pressure gauge on my left wrist read two hundred and forty meters when the sonar pinged.

I killed the thrusters. The submersible drifted, a dead thing in black water, and I watched the screen. A shape. Faint. Metallic. Wrong for the seabed.

"Come on," I whispered. My voice sounded thin inside the hull. "Come on, you bastard."

The shape resolved. Not a rock formation. Not a whale fall. A ship. Broken in half, half-swallowed by sediment, but a ship. My heart did something stupid in my chest, a hard kick against my ribs that I hadn't felt in three years.

I marked the coordinates. Took three photos. Then I sat there in the dark, two hundred and forty meters down, and let myself feel it. The thing I don't talk about. The thing that keeps me going back into water that wants to kill me.

The locket against my sternum was warm from my skin. I didn't touch it. I never do when I'm working.

I surfaced forty minutes later. The sun was doing its late-afternoon thing, slanted and orange, turning the harbor at Cairnport into something almost pretty. Almost. The town itself was the same as always: rusted cranes, fish-smelling docks, a row of bars that opened at noon and never really closed. My boat, the *Marrow*, sat tied to the end of Pier 7 like a drunk who'd given up on going home.

Teo was waiting on the dock. He had a cigarette in his mouth and a clipboard in his hand, which meant he was pretending to be organized.

"Well?" he called, before I'd even climbed the ladder.

I pulled off my hood. Saltwater ran down my neck. "Ship. Maybe 1800s. Could be the *Serpentine*."

Teo's cigarette fell out of his mouth. He didn't pick it up. "You're sure?"

"I'm not sure of anything. But it's big, it's old, and it's in the trench where the *Serpentine* went down." I stepped onto the dock, my boots heavy with water. "We need to go back down with lights. Proper survey. And we need a buyer before we do anything else."

That was the part I hated. The part where the thing I loved, the finding, turned into the thing I tolerated, the selling.

Teo was already scrolling through his phone. "I know a guy. Artifact broker. Based in the city."

"The city." I said it like a curse because that's what it was. Cairnport was three hours north of anything that mattered. The city was glass towers and men in suits who'd never gotten their hands dirty. Men who thought the ocean was a view.

"He pays fast," Teo said. "And he doesn't ask questions."

"Everyone asks questions."

"Not this guy. Word is he's got a private collection. Buys directly from salvagers. No auction houses, no customs, no paperwork."

I should've said no. I should've said we'd find someone local, someone I could look in the eye. But the *Marrow* needed a new compressor, and my savings had gone into the last dry-dock, and Teo had a kid now, a baby with a full head of hair and a mother who worked doubles at the cannery. I couldn't ask him to wait.

"Set it up," I said.

He grinned. That grin used to mean trouble when we were kids. Now it just meant he was relieved.

The meeting was two days later, at a restaurant I couldn't afford. White tablecloths. A sommelier. I wore my cleanest jeans and the jacket without the fish blood on it. The host looked at me like I'd walked in off a fishing trawler, which, technically, I had.

"Ms. Bruna?" He pronounced it wrong. Brew-na. I didn't correct him.

"That's me."

"Mr. Almeida is expecting you. This way."

The name hit me in the back of the skull. Almeida. I knew that name. Everyone in the salvage world knew that name. The Almeida family had been in shipping for a hundred years, maybe more. Old money. The kind of money that buys islands and doesn't notice.

I followed the host through the dining room. Rich people eating tiny food. A woman in diamonds laughed at something a man in a bespoke suit said. I felt their eyes on me, the way I always do. The way that makes me want to spit on the floor just to remind them I exist.

The host stopped at a table by the window. The man sitting there was younger than I expected. Thirties, maybe. Dark hair, dark eyes, a face that looked like it had never been sunburned in its life. He wore a gray suit that probably cost more than my boat. No tie. A glass of something amber in front of him.

"Ms. Bruna," he said, standing. His voice was low, smooth. "I'm Rafael Almeida. Thank you for coming."

He held out his hand. I looked at it. Clean. Soft. A hand that had never pulled a rope or pried open a rusted hatch.

I shook it. His grip was firm, but not too firm. The kind of handshake a man learns in a boardroom.

"Your guy said you don't ask questions," I said, sitting down without being invited.

Rafael smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. "I don't. But I do like to know who I'm working with."

"Then you already know who I am."

"I know your reputation. Deep salvage. Difficult sites. You've found three wrecks in the last five years that other operators said were unfindable." He picked up his glass, swirled it. "I also know you lost a crew member on an expedition four years ago. Off the coast of Chile. The *Santa Rosa*."

The restaurant went quiet. Or maybe it was just my ears. The locket against my chest felt suddenly heavy, a small cold weight.

"That's not public record," I said.

"No. It's not." He took a sip of his drink. "I make it my business to know things that aren't public record."

I should've walked out. Any smart person would've walked out. But I was already in it, and the *Marrow* needed that compressor, and there was something in his eyes that looked like hunger. Not for me. For what I could give him.

"The ship is in the Cairnport Trench," I said. "Two hundred and forty meters. Broken in half. I think it's the *Serpentine*. British merchant vessel, went down in 1834. Carrying textiles, spices, and according to some accounts, a shipment of silver ingots that was never recovered."

Rafael leaned forward. "According to some accounts?"

"The *Serpentine* was owned by a company that went bankrupt six months after it sank. Most of the records were lost. The silver is a rumor. But rumors are usually based on something."

"And you can get to it."

"I can get to it."

He studied me. I let him. I've been stared at by men who thought I was less than them my whole life. Rafael Almeida was different. He looked at me like I was a puzzle he wanted to solve. Like I was a thing he wanted to own.

"I'll fund the expedition," he said. "Full costs. Equipment, crew, permits, whatever you need. In exchange, I get first pick of the artifacts. And I come along."

"Absolutely not."

The words were out before I could stop them. Rafael raised an eyebrow.

"I don't take tourists," I said. "And I don't take men who've never been below fifty meters. You'd be a liability."

"I've been diving. The Maldives. The Great Barrier Reef."

"Recreational diving. That's not the same thing. The trench is cold, dark, and full of currents that will kill you if you make one wrong move. I'm not dragging your body back to your family."

Something flickered in his face. Anger, maybe. Or something older. "My family wouldn't care."

"Not my problem."

We sat there, the two of us, the silence between us like a third person at the table. Then Rafael did something I didn't expect. He laughed. A real laugh, not the polite boardroom kind.

"You're exactly like they said," he told me. "Stubborn. Rude. Impossible."

"Flattery will get you nowhere."

"I'm not flattering you." He leaned back, the smile still there but different now. Warmer. "I'm negotiating. You need money. I have money. You don't want me on your boat. Fine. I'll stay on shore. But I want daily reports. Photos. And I want to see the wreck myself once you've secured the site."

I thought about the compressor. The baby. Teo's tired eyes.

"Fifty percent of the artifacts go to you," I said. "The other fifty go to me and my crew. We split the profits. You don't get to change the terms after we've shaken on it."

"Forty percent. And I get the silver. All of it."

"The silver might not exist."

"Then I lose nothing." He held out his hand again. "Do we have a deal?"

I looked at his hand. Then at his face. He was watching me with those dark eyes, and I had the sudden, unsettling feeling that he could see right through me. Through the jacket and the scars and the locket. Straight down to the part of me that was still scared of the water.

I shook his hand.

"Deal," I said. "But if you try to screw me, I'll leave you at the bottom of the trench."

Rafael smiled. "I'd expect nothing less."

I walked out of the restaurant without looking back. The sun was setting over the city, all those glass towers catching fire. I got in my truck and sat there for a minute, my hands on the wheel.

The locket was cold again. I didn't open it. I never do.

But I thought about the *Serpentine*, down there in the dark, waiting for me. And I thought about Rafael Almeida, with his clean hands and his hungry eyes. And I knew, the way you know a storm is coming, that I'd just made a mistake I couldn't take back.