Before anything else, I checked my skills.

  This was something I had apparently decided was going to be a thing I did now. A morning routine, except it was underwater and I didn’t know what morning was anymore and I didn’t have hands to check a phone with. But there is something deeply human about the compulsion to open the status screen first thing and just *look at the numbers*, and whatever else I was now, I was still fourteen years of deeply human habits wearing a ray-shaped exterior.

  SKILLS:

  ? Graceful Swimming [PASSIVE] — Rank F → Rank E → Rank E+ → Rank D

  ? Electromagnetic Detection [PASSIVE] — Heightened (Level 2 upgrade)

  ? Venomous Barbed Tail [ACTIVE] — Unlocked, Level 3

  I stared at the swimming rank.

  Rank D.

  I had achieved Rank D Graceful Swimming while being chased by a shark through a coral reef and fleeing into a cave that already had an octopus in it. This was, I decided, the most accurate possible summary of my skill development strategy so far: complete chaos applied consistently over time.

  The system, unprompted: skill growth accelerates under pressure.

  That explains a lot about school, I thought.

  The system did not respond to this, which was probably diplomatic.

  -----

  The southern reef, Sura had not mentioned, was significantly more *occupied* than the section I’d been foraging in.

  I realized this within approximately three minutes of heading south, when my electromagnetic sense resolved what I had initially read as a dense signal cluster into a dozens-strong community of reef residents going about their business with the energy of a neighborhood that had been here for considerably longer than I had. Fish darting in and out of coral heads. Something large and slow moving along the seafloor with a pace that suggested it had nowhere to be and had made its peace with that. The constant background chatter of biological electricity that I was getting better at parsing into individual voices, though *better* was doing some heavy lifting there — mostly I could tell when something was nearby, annoyed, or moving fast. Sometimes all three at once.

  I was looking for a cave.

  My requirements were simple: empty, defensible, large enough for a ray of my dimensions, and ideally not currently occupied by a cephalopod with strong opinions about its hunting setup. I had spent what I estimated was a night wedged into a crevice in the reef structure, which was technically shelter but lacked the specific quality of *home* that I was realizing I needed more urgently than I’d expected. There’s something about not having a home base that makes everything feel temporary and precarious, even when your situation is objectively very precarious regardless.

  I moved along the reef’s southern face, running my detection sense across the limestone outcrops.

  Cave. Occupied — two fish, a small eel that wanted nothing to do with anything.

  Cave. Partially collapsed.

  Not-a-cave. Just a rock with aspirations.

  Cave. Occupied — and the signal inside it was large, and slow, and had the particular bioelectric signature of something that was *very settled* and had a whole ecosystem of opinions about its personal space.

  I was about to pass that one by when I felt the edges of it more carefully and realized it was actually two chambers, and the large settled occupant was in the back chamber, and the front chamber was—

  I moved to investigate.

  The front of the cave was a wide, flat opening in the limestone, shadowed and sandy-floored, big enough for me to turn around in. And there, tucked against the left wall of the outer chamber in a way that suggested it had considered this spot carefully and arrived at a conclusion: a lobster.

  Not a small lobster. A substantial one. The kind with claws that registered in my electromagnetic sense as two dense masses of highly efficient crushing muscle.

  It was sitting very still.

  It was also, I realized, watching me.

  “No,” it said.

  I had not said anything yet.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, no. This is my cave.”

  I looked around the outer chamber. There was significant space. The lobster occupied maybe a third of it, tucked into its corner with the energy of someone who had arranged their furniture exactly how they wanted it and was not open to input.

  I just need a corner, I said. I’m not trying to take your space.

  “My space,” the lobster said, “is the whole front chamber. The back is Geraldine’s. I caretake the front.” A pause during which it shifted its weight in a way that put both claws slightly more forward. “I have been here for four years. Every single organism that has ever poked a fin through that opening has wanted something. Not one of them has brought anything.”

  That seems lonely, I said.

  “LONELY,” the lobster said, with such complete and immediate offense that I actually backed up half a meter. “I am not LONELY. I am SELECTIVE. There is a difference. I have a waiting list.”

  You have a waiting list for your cave.

  “For my *company*. Which is closed. Indefinitely.” A pause. “You can’t stay.”

  I thought about the shark. I thought about the crevice I’d spent the night in. I thought about the two weeks of reef life I was apparently going to be navigating before Level 5 and whatever came after it.

  I’m going to find another cave, I told it, because the path of least resistance seemed like the right choice when one party to a negotiation had two very large claws. But can you tell me if there are any empty ones further south?

  “There’s one,” the lobster said, in the tone of someone being helpful despite themselves. “Forty meters south-southeast. Narrow opening. Interior is larger than it looks. Nobody’s been in it since the grouper moved out last season.”

  Why did the grouper move out?

  “Personal reasons,” the lobster said, in a tone that made it very clear the reasons were known and would not be shared. “It’s available.”

  Thank you, I said.

  “Don’t come back.”

  I respect a clear communicator.

  -----

  I was eight meters from the lobster cave, moving south, when I almost died for the second time in two days.

  The thing about bull sharks is that they don’t have a flashy electromagnetic signature when they’re trying to be stealthy. I don’t know if Bruce — I didn’t know his name yet, this was before the crab — was doing it on purpose or if this was just how sharks moved when they were focused. But he came in from my blind spot, from below and behind, and the first thing I registered was not a bioelectric pulse but a *pressure change*, a shift in the water that my ray-body knew before my human-brain understood it.

  I went sideways. Hard. Full new-and-improved Rank D Graceful Swimming turning radius, wing-edge dropping, body bending in the direction that felt like *away* with every instinct I’d been issued.

  Behind me, something went past. Close. Very close.

  And then a different sound — a snap, wet and decisive, the sound of a closing jaw finding an unexpected target. Followed by a sort of crunch.

  I turned around.

  Bruce — I was going to learn his name shortly, but even then he had a very Bruce energy about him — was approximately where I had been four seconds ago. He was also, currently, chewing.

  He was chewing the lobster.

  The lobster who had come out of the cave after me. I couldn’t tell if it had been following me or had just had terrible timing. Either way, it was now significantly more Bruce than it had been previously, and the universe had delivered a verdict on the cave-access dispute that I had not been expecting.

  Bruce finished chewing. He looked at me. His electromagnetic signature was the specific quality of deep, sustained, personal grievance — not the focused hunting signal from before, but something flatter and more general, the signature of an entity that was annoyed at the entire concept of existence and had been for a while.

  He looked at me for a long moment.

  Then he turned and left.

  I stayed very still until his signal was forty meters away.

  Then I thought, very carefully: I need to learn more about that shark.

  -----

  The cave forty meters south-southeast was exactly as described: narrow opening, interior larger than expected. I slid through the entrance sideways — a manuever that would have been significantly harder before Rank D swimming — and found myself in a chamber that was wide and flat and sandy-floored and, critically, empty.

  Just empty.

  No lobster. No octopus. No previous occupants with waiting lists or hunting setups.

  Mine.

  I floated in the center of it for a moment. Let the electromagnetic sense map the walls, the ceiling, the back where it narrowed into a crack that nothing larger than a small fish could navigate. One entrance, which I could monitor. Sandy floor, which meant I could settle into it. Enough ceiling clearance for me to exist in three dimensions, which was more important than it sounded when your primary movement was a full-body ripple.

  This is home, I thought.

  The thought landed strangely. Not bad-strange. Just — the particular texture of something being true that you hadn’t expected to feel so soon. I had been a ray for less than two days and I was already cataloguing a home, and something about that felt like it deserved a moment.

  The system, apparently respecting the moment, waited.

  Then: new location flagged as Home Base. Certain skills and rest bonuses will apply when you are within range of your Home Base.

  And then: you should learn to hover.

  How do I hover?

  Go still. Find the trim.

  That was the entire instruction.

  I tried it. Hovering — or what I was attempting — was the pectoral fin equivalent of treading water, a constant micro-adjustment that kept me suspended without requiring active swimming. The first few attempts resulted in me slowly descending to the sandy floor, which wasn’t dangerous but felt pointed. The fourth attempt I overcorrected and hit the ceiling. The seventh attempt I held for about three seconds before losing it.

  The twelfth attempt I held for thirty seconds.

  SKILL ACQUIRED:

  ? HOVER [ACTIVE] — Rank F

  Maintain near-stationary position in the water column.

  Enables rest state while remaining in water.

  Passive oxygen processing efficiency increased during hover.

  Oh thank god, I thought. I could rest. Actually rest, suspended in my cave, without having to press myself into the sand or find a physical surface to lean against. I let the skill settle into my body — that same permission-sensation from Graceful Swimming — and found the particular stillness of it, the way not-moving became its own kind of motion, a thousand small corrections that added up to staying.

  I hovered in the center of my cave.

  The ocean moved around me. The reef’s electromagnetic map hummed in my peripheral sense. Somewhere outside, I could feel the sardines moving past.

  And then, in the stillness, something else happened.

  Something I hadn’t been ready for.

  -----

  It started as a thought, the way these things do.

  I’m not going home.

  Just that, very simple. I had been so busy with the systems and the levels and the lobster and the shark that I hadn’t — I had been very deliberately not thinking about — I was not going to see Mr. Barnes. I was not going to finish the school year. I was not going to deal with Kenji’s opinions about my reading choices or Maya shaking her head at me across the classroom or any of the small and specific textures of a life that had been in progress and was now just — stopped.

  My parents didn’t know where I was.

  My parents thought — what did they think? That I was gone. Just gone. And I was alive, technically, more alive than I’d ever been in certain measurable respects, but I was alive as a *ray* on *Earth 6214* and there was no mechanism by which that information was going to reach them.

  I hovered in my cave and I had a panic attack, which is interesting when you don’t have a throat to close or hands to shake or a chest to tighten, but the brain finds a way. The electromagnetic sense went sideways — picking up signals and losing them, range contracting and then blaring, the map going staticky and unreliable. My hover failed. I dropped to the floor. I lay in the sand and felt the particular quality of grief that doesn’t know what shape to be yet because you haven’t had time to figure out what you’ve lost.

  The system didn’t say anything. I was grateful for that.

  After a while the electromagnetic sense steadied. I hovered again. Not great, but functional.

  I had a second panic attack about an hour later, which was about the question of whether I was actually *me* or whether I was a copy of me, whether the original Mika had simply ceased and this was something new wearing the memories, and that one was honestly worse.

  The system waited through that one too, and when I came back up it offered only: these are valid questions. Many reincarnates experience them. There are no clean answers. This does not mean the experience you are having is not real.

  Thanks, I said.

  A pause. Then: for what it’s worth — your distress response is consistent with continuous identity. Something without your memories would not grieve what you are grieving.

  That wasn’t a clean answer. But it was something to hold onto.

  I held onto it.

  Third panic attack was smaller. About whether rays could get therapists. The answer, the system informed me, was no, but Sura had mentioned there were six Floor Seven cases in this reef, and statistics suggested at least some of them had been here long enough to have developed opinions on the subject.

  I filed that away and tried to sleep.

  -----

  In the morning — I was beginning to map time by water temperature and current shifts, which wasn’t precise but was something — I came out of the cave.

  The sardines were waiting.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Not all of them. Maybe thirty, forming a loose cluster just outside my cave entrance with the energy of a group that had been there for a while and had developed opinions about it.

  I looked at them.

  “HERE,” said the sardines.

  I hadn’t done anything yet.

  “HERE. HERE. HERE.”

  I moved slightly left.

  “HERE. HERE. HERE.”

  I moved right.

  “HERE.”

  I looked at them for a long moment. I looked back at my cave. I looked at the reef ahead of me and the long day of foraging I needed to do and the EXP bar that wasn’t going to fill itself.

  Why, I asked the nearest sardine, are you doing this.

  The sardine considered this. “HERE,” it said.

  Right.

  “HERE.”

  I swam south. Thirty sardines followed me, narrating my location to an audience I couldn’t identify.

  “HERE. HERE. HERE.”

  The system, helpfully: sardines are a prey species. They have adapted several cooperative alarm behaviors, including location broadcasting. You are large enough to qualify as a threat category. They are warning the reef that you are here.

  They’re announcing me like I’m a problem.

  Correct.

  Every time I leave my cave?

  Until they reclassify you. Which requires familiarity, time, and a demonstration that you are not a threat.

  How long does that take?

  The system seemed to consider. It varies.

  “HERE.”

  It’s going to be a while, isn’t it.

  I swam south with my entourage. The reef watched me come.

  -----

  I learned Bruce’s name from a crab.

  Not the crab I had eaten. A different crab — smaller, with the electromagnetic signature of something very old relative to its size, tucked under a coral overhang in the rubble field at the reef’s edge. I had almost swum past it entirely when it spoke.

  “You’re the new ray.”

  I slowed. Yes.

  “Thought so.” A pause. “You’ve met Bruce.”

  The shark has a name?

  “Everyone has a name,” the crab said, with mild offense. “I’m Crabby. The shark is Bruce. The octopus in the northern cave system is Sura, which you apparently already know because she told me. The grouper that used to be in your cave is Gerald, who is gone now and honestly good riddance, he had boundary issues.” A pause. “I’ve been in this reef for eleven years. I know everyone.”

  That’s — you know everyone.

  “I’m a crab,” Crabby said. “I don’t move fast and I don’t move far. When you don’t move much you pay attention.” A shift of ancient small legs against the coral. “You want to know about Bruce.”

  I did want to know about Bruce. Yes.

  “Bruce,” said Crabby, in the tone of someone who has had a long time to develop a complete opinion, “is a special case. Most of the Floor Seven cases here are accidents. Wrong slot, clerical error, didn’t ask for this. Bruce *asked* for this.”

  I stopped swimming entirely.

  He chose to be a shark.

  “He chose to be a bull shark specifically.” Crabby paused to let that settle. “He said, and I am quoting from the conversation we had approximately four months after he arrived, that he was tired of dealing with people, he wanted to be something large and toothy, and bull sharks seemed like they had the right attitude about the situation.”

  What situation?

  “Existence,” Crabby said. “Bruce has a very particular relationship with existence. He is not fond of it. He is, however, too stubborn to do anything other than continue.” A pause. “He has eaten three of my cousins. I do not hold this against him personally. He is consistent, which is a quality I respect.”

  I thought about the flat sustained-grievance electromagnetic signature. The way he’d turned and left after the lobster. The very specific energy of someone who was annoyed at everything and had been for long enough that it had become a personality.

  He just hates everyone, I said.

  “He hates everyone equally,” Crabby corrected. “That’s different. It’s almost fair.” A long pause. “Don’t try to talk to him. He knows you can talk. He doesn’t care. He made his choices.”

  I thought about that for a while.

  Is he okay?

  Crabby was quiet for a moment. Then: “He chose a body that fits his feelings. There’s something honest about that.” Another pause. “But no. Probably not.”

  I filed Bruce away under *complicated* and thanked Crabby for the information.

  “Come back,” Crabby said. “I have opinions about most things and limited opportunities to share them.”

  I will, I said.

  -----

  The Lucky Mollusk moment happened on a Tuesday.

  I didn’t actually know it was Tuesday. I had lost all reliable access to the concept of Tuesday. But something about the quality of the day — the current temperature, the way the light refracted through the water above the reef — had a Tuesday energy, and I was choosing to honor that.

  I had been foraging along the rubble field for about an hour when my electromagnetic sense snagged on something.

  Most buried shellfish have a clean, single-note signature. The clam I’d been about to go for was exactly that — a steady bivalve pulse, predictable, uninteresting. But *beneath* it, separated by maybe ten centimeters of sand, there was something else. A resonance. A kind of shimmer in the signal that I’d been told to look for and had been half-monitoring for every dive since.

  I dove.

  Slow. Careful. Cleared the sand with the specific delicacy I’d been developing over the last several days.

  The Fortune Shell was smaller than I expected. Smooth, pale, unremarkable to look at. But the signal coming off it was like a tuning fork struck against everything else in the electromagnetic spectrum — a clean sustained note in a world of chatter.

  I ate it.

  LUCKY SPIN INITIATED!

  SPINNING…

  The system produced something I had not previously encountered: an actual spin. A wheel, rendered in the blue-white text of all system notifications, divided into segments: ABILITY (3x), STAT PUSH (3x), BONUS EXP (2x), EVOLUTION HINT (1x), and one final segment, narrow as a crack in the limestone, which read simply:

  PLEASE TRY AGAIN.

  I watched the wheel spin.

  I watched it slow.

  I watched it land, with the specific energy of a universe that had its sense of humor firmly intact, directly on the narrow segment.

  RESULT: PLEASE TRY AGAIN

  Better luck next Fortune Shell!

  Fortune Shells respawn on an irregular cycle.

  The system wishes you well.

  I floated there for a long moment.

  The system added, after a pause that felt almost sympathetic: the odds of that segment are 4.7%.

  I see, I said.

  Another pause. Then: for what it’s worth, you found the shell, which most users do not manage before Level 10. Heightened Electromagnetic Detection was a good investment.

  I decided to accept this as a partial win and move on with my life.

  “HERE,” said a sardine, who had been watching.

  Mind your business, I told it.

  “HERE.”

  -----

  Oscar found me, not the other way around.

  I was practicing hover drills outside my cave — I had gotten the skill to Rank C through sheer stubbornness, which I was increasingly convinced was my primary character attribute — when a flash of yellow appeared in my peripheral vision and a voice said:

  “You’re doing it wrong.”

  I looked. The yellow tang was the specific bright yellow of something that had no predator concerns and wanted everyone to know it, small and disc-shaped and hovering with the absolute effortless stillness of something that had been doing this its entire life.

  Am I, I said.

  “You’re fighting the current. You keep making micro-corrections when the current shifts instead of just — going with it and then correcting back.” A pause. “It’s inefficient.”

  I had not asked for feedback. I was also aware that the feedback was correct.

  My name’s Mika, I said.

  “Oscar.” He tilted in the water slightly, looking at me with the frank assessment of someone who has lived in a neighborhood long enough to have opinions about new arrivals. “You’re the Floor Seven ray.”

  Word travels fast.

  “Crabby talks to everyone,” Oscar said. “And the sardines have been announcing you every time you leave your cave, so.” He moved to hover next to me, adjusted slightly, demonstrating the current-follow technique with the ease of someone who didn’t have to think about it anymore. “You’ve been here four days and you’ve already had a run-in with Bruce, evicted an octopus from her cave, eaten Maurice—”

  Maurice?

  “The lobster,” Oscar said.

  Oh no. I didn’t eat Maurice. Bruce did.

  “Maurice came out of his cave after you. He was following you because he was going to tell you to stay out of his section of the reef.” Oscar paused. “The result was the same, technically.”

  I was quiet for a moment. I felt bad about Maurice, which was a complicated feeling to have about a lobster who had been rude to me, but here we were.

  Oscar watched me process this with the patience of someone who had done a lot of waiting around reefs. “He wasn’t good people,” he said, not unkindly. “He’d been there nine years and he never talked to anyone if he could help it. Refused to learn the reef communication systems. Just pinched things that came close.” A pause. “Some residents are sad about him. Most are mostly fine.”

  Did he have a name? I didn’t know his name.

  “His name was Maurice,” Oscar said. “He knew everyone else’s names. He just preferred not to use them.” He tilted again. “You want me to show you around?”

  You’d do that?

  “Crabby asked me to.” A pause. “Also you’re new and you don’t know the reef etiquette and you’re going to accidentally start something with one of the established residents if nobody walks you through it. I’ve done this before.” He moved south, an invitation. “Come on. And stop fighting the current.”

  I followed him.

  -----

  The tour of the southern reef took most of a day, and I am going to summarize it because otherwise we will be here until the tide changes.

  Oscar knew everyone, and everyone, it turned out, had *feelings* about everything.

  There were the cleaning stations, which were sacred and inviolable: certain spots on the reef where small cleaner wrasses set up what amounted to a service industry, picking parasites from larger fish, and which operated under a strict code of non-aggression that even predators respected. “You don’t hunt at a cleaning station,” Oscar said. “You don’t even think loudly about hunting at a cleaning station. It’s the one piece of neutral ground.”

  There were the current highways — channels between coral structures where the water moved fast and efficient, used by fish who needed to get somewhere quickly and by fish who needed to avoid being somewhere quickly. “Learn these,” Oscar said. “If you’re ever in trouble, the current highways will get you to the open reef faster than anything else.”

  There were the nocturnal zones, sections of the reef that operated on a different schedule, currently quiet but that Oscar described with the tone of someone who had opinions about the night shift. “Don’t be in the anemone garden after dark unless you know the clownfish who runs it. She has a *system*.”

  And there was the otter.

  I smelled — *sensed* — Otter before I saw her. The electromagnetic signature of a mammal is different from a fish in a way I was learning to categorize: warmer, in some non-temperature sense, more complex, the rapid-fire neural activity of a brain that worked differently than the cold-blooded minds I’d been navigating. She was floating on the surface above the reef, on her back, doing the specific otter thing of using her chest as a table.

  “Oscar!” she called, when we surfaced nearby. Then, looking at me: “Oh! You’re new!”

  She was delighted by this in a way that felt different from every other resident I’d met. Not suspicious. Not territorial. Just — *delighted*, the way you’re delighted when something interesting happens in a place you’ve been for a while.

  Mika, I said. Hi.

  “Otter,” she said. “I know that’s not a name exactly. I named myself after the concept because it felt right.” A pause. “Are you doing okay? You have the look.”

  The look?

  “The Floor Seven look. I had it for the first month.” She rolled in the water, an otter-flip that seemed purely for the pleasure of it. “It gets better. The panic attacks slow down.”

  You had them too?

  “Everyone has them,” Otter said. “Even Bruce had them. He expressed them differently—” and here her tone became the fond-but-complicated register of someone describing a friend they’d given up trying to fix, “—but he had them.”

  I looked at her for a moment. You know Bruce?

  “Bruce and I have an arrangement,” she said. “I don’t go in the water past where he considers his territory, and he doesn’t bother me near the surface. We’ve had exactly one real conversation and it lasted four minutes and he told me life was pointless and I told him I was making kelp art and he looked at me for a very long time and left.” She paused. “I think he finds me confusing. That’s fine. I find him sad.” Another pause. “He’s not going to eat you, by the way. He ate the lobster and that settled whatever he was feeling. He’s like that. Very short bursts of active grievance and then long periods of just — swimming around being unhappy at the water.”

  I decided I was going to have to process Bruce as a concept later when I had more emotional bandwidth.

  Oscar had apparently spent this entire exchange confirming that the otter was not going to distract me for the rest of the day, which to be fair was a reasonable concern. “We should finish the tour,” he said.

  “Come back,” Otter told me. “I want to hear about the truck. Mine was a bus.”

  -----

  Two weeks.

  Two weeks of reef life, which broke down roughly as follows:

  Foraging: significant. EXP: accumulating. The enhanced electromagnetic detection had paid off exactly as I’d hoped — I was finding buried shellfish that I would have completely missed before, and my dive precision had improved to the point where I very rarely needed more than one pass to locate and extract a target. My Graceful Swimming had reached Rank C, which Oscar acknowledged with approximately the respect of a sports coach saying “not bad” in a tone that means “I’ve seen better.”

  Panic attacks: decreasing. Not gone. But I was getting better at knowing when they were coming — a particular quality of stillness in the cave, a certain point in the reading of The Vampire Murderer when I’d be deep enough in Valdris’s machinations that the real world would reassert itself by contrast — and bracing for them, and getting through them.

  Sardines: ongoing.

  “HERE,” they said, every morning without exception, as I left my cave.

  Every morning.

  Without exception.

  Oscar told me it usually took a few months for a new large-ish predator species to be reclassified. He said this with the compassion of someone who genuinely felt bad about it while also being completely unable to help.

  Crabby had begun saving interesting observations for me, which I discovered when I stopped by his coral overhang on day four and found he had a list. The list included: the migratory pattern of the Tuesday current (which validated my earlier instinct about Tuesdays), the social hierarchy of the damselfish in the central reef section (complicated and not my business, Crabby noted, but useful to know), and the current status of Bruce (swimming circuits between the northern reef and the open water, mood: consistently poor, activity: eating things, threat level to me specifically: low, probably).

  Otter taught me to look at clouds.

  I can’t see clouds directly. But I can feel the surface of the water above me, and Otter had spent enough time floating on it to know how the light and the current and the wave-pattern changed with different cloud cover. “That’s a good storm in three days,” she told me on day nine, pointing at something I couldn’t see but could feel as a particular quality of surface turbulence. “We go deep when it comes. I’ll find rocks.”

  The Lucky Mollusk wheel haunted me. I had found two more Fortune Shells — my detection was getting good enough to sweep for them during longer foraging runs — and both times the wheel had landed on something meaningful: an ability enhancement on the second spin (Electromagnetic Detection efficiency +20%, which made the system observe dryly that I had now invested very heavily in a single stat tree, which I chose to take as a compliment), and a Stat Push on the third (Intelligence: +1).

  Neither of them made me forget the Please Try Again.

  -----

  Level 5 arrived on a Thursday.

  Or what I was calling Thursday. I had developed a system.

  I was in the rubble field doing my morning sweep when the cockle that had been quietly sitting in the sediment for what the system estimated was three years finally met its end and the EXP bar tipped over and the notifications started.

  LEVEL UP!

  ODD LEVEL: STAT INCREASE

  Health: +5, Stamina: +8, Intelligence: +1

  LEVEL 5 MILESTONE REACHED.

  GROWTH TRACK SELECTION AVAILABLE.

  Please review your evolutionary options.

  And then the screen did something it hadn’t done before. It pulled back — the blue-white text expanding into something wider, more like a map than a status window — and showed me two paths laid out in branching lines, with silhouettes at the end of each.

  PATH ONE: SPOTTED EAGLE RAY (REEF VARIANT)

  Aetobatus narinari — Reef Adaptation

  Your current form, optimized for reef environments.

  Increased maneuverability in complex structures.

  Enhanced sensory resolution at close range.

  Size reduction: more compact, more agile.

  Reef predator tier. Magic compatibility: LIMITED.

  PATH TWO: MIDNIGHT EAGLE RAY

  Aetobatus noctilux (rare variant)

  Open water specialization.

  Significant size increase.

  Extended range electromagnetic detection.

  Deep water survival adaptations.

  Pelagic apex tier. Magic compatibility: MODERATE.

  I looked at both of these for a long time.

  Then I thought: wait.

  You said at Level 3 that my evolutionary path determines whether I get magic. These both say *limited* or *moderate*. Neither of them says *full*.

  The system’s response came back in the register I now recognized as *carefully measured.*

  Correct.

  So there are paths with full magic compatibility.

  There are.

  And neither of these is one of them.

  The system paused. These are the paths available to a Spotted Eagle Ray given your current stat distribution and environmental history.

  I want to speak to a manager.

  …We’ve discussed the manager escalation policy.

  I know. I’m doing it anyway. I want to file a formal complaint that I have been offered two evolutionary paths, neither of which offers full magic compatibility, after being explicitly told at Level 3 that magic was a *possibility*, and I would like that possibility to be honored.

  There was a pause. Longer than usual.

  Your complaint has been received.

  Thank you.

  Another pause.

  …Bureau Oversight has reviewed your complaint. They note that the standard evolutionary paths offered are determined by your species baseline and accumulated experience. Non-standard paths exist but are generally not available through normal Growth Track selection.

  Generally.

  *Generally.*

  The system seemed to recognize that it had chosen that word incautiously.

  There is, it said, a third option. It is not on the standard path menu. It has been flagged as available due to a combination of your Electromagnetic Detection investment, your Intelligence score, and—

  I waited.

  —the Floor Seven incident.

  Of course, I said.

  Floor Seven apparently resulted in a soul-imprint anomaly that has been classified as a unique developmental marker. Bureau Oversight has approved the following as an alternative Growth Track, available by request only:

  PATH THREE: OWL RAY

  Aetobatus strix (no natural analog — theoretical construct)

  Electromagnetic-acoustic hybrid specialization.

  Unique ability: SONIC EMISSION — localized high-frequency acoustic pulse, similar in mechanism to mantis shrimp strike physics.

  Reef and open water generalist.

  Magic compatibility: FULL.

  Note: This path exists nowhere else in the natural world. You would be the first.

  There was a very specific quality to that last sentence.

  I would be the first.

  I read the ability again. Sonic emission. High-frequency acoustic pulse. Like a pistol shrimp, but *mine*. Not a borrowed adaptation but something that had never existed before, built from the weird particular circumstances of a girl who got hit by a truck while reading a book about a vampire count, landed in the wrong world, refused to accept the wrong world, and somehow ended up—

  This, I thought.

  I want this one.

  GROWTH TRACK SELECTED: OWL RAY

  INITIAL ABILITY GRANTED:

  ? SONIC PULSE [ACTIVE] — Rank F

  Generate and emit a focused high-frequency acoustic pulse from electromagnetic structures.

  Range: 2 meters (current). Effect: disorienting to nearby organisms.

  WARNING: Skill is undertested. User is advised to exercise caution during initial attempts.

  I read the warning.

  I absolutely clocked the word *undertested*.

  I want to try it.

  The system, with genuine feeling: please practice somewhere open first.

  I was in the rubble field. Open sand. No coral nearby. Otter was at the surface, Crabby was under his overhang, Oscar was doing Oscar things somewhere in the central reef.

  I was alone, in the open, with the particular energy of someone who has been told something is undertested and has interpreted this as a *challenge*.

  I focused on the ability the way I’d learned to focus on everything — finding the sense, the structure, the part of my new body that knew what this was before I did. I could feel it, something in the acoustic-electromagnetic hybrid of whatever an Owl Ray was supposed to be, a charge that built the way static built, that wanted to go somewhere.

  I aimed it at nothing. At open water.

  I fired.

  -----

  Later, Oscar would describe what happened as “a noise that made every fish in a twenty-meter radius immediately go somewhere else.” Crabby would describe it as “deeply unreasonable.” Otter, who had been on the surface and therefore at a safe distance, would describe it as “the best thing that has happened to this reef in months.”

  What I experienced was a sound like every tuning fork in the world being struck simultaneously, transmitting directly through my body, through the water, outward in a pulse that I felt in my electromagnetic sense as a shockwave of disrupted signals —

  —and then the rebound, because I was inside the pulse I had created, and the pulse apparently had opinions about that—

  —and then the sand.

  I was in the sand.

  I had apparently traveled approximately three meters and arrived at the sand with considerable momentum, which my health bar registered as: ow.

  STATUS UPDATE:

  Health: -8 (collision damage)

  Status: STUNNED (4 seconds)

  Skill: SONIC PULSE has improved to Rank E through experience.

  Note: The system would like to gently suggest that in future the user considers the physics of generating a shockwave from inside the shockwave before generating the shockwave.

  I lay in the sand.

  “HERE,” said a sardine, who had returned to observe.

  I know, I told it.

  “HERE. HERE.”

  I know.

  Rank E, though.

  I had knocked myself unconscious — briefly, four seconds — and received eight damage and a face full of reef sand, and I had immediately leveled the skill to Rank E. This was, in the specific and particular accounting of my new life, an absolute win.

  “HERE,” said the sardine.

  I moved my wings. I was definitely going to need to practice that somewhere further from the reef.

  But first I was going to need to lie in the sand for a few more minutes.

  I opened Chapter 42.

  Lord Valdris was about to do something absolutely unhinged to the Eastern Merchant Council, and I had earned this.