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Far-away-Light was unusual. This Small-five knew thanks to her years of study, her research, her knowledge of her people. In thousands of years of slow, steady, methodical progress, of deliberate expansion and growth, of carefully-guided population metrics achieved through the withholding and extension of aid to the starving polar juveniles, cities had been built into the walls of existing reefcolonies. Pre-existing wilds had been tamed with stern minds and careful proboscises, predators warded off and regulated sufficiently to preserve the citizenry from harm.
There had been mistakes, of course, but they were accepted as lessons, not punishments, and when the first cities were constructed from scratch – decades of planning and careful nourishment, the development of ‘force-feeding’ techniques to accelerate structural growth – they were built in shallow seas, warm seas. Familiar. Comfortable.
A restless mind never waits for comfort to turn to complacency, and the beautiful thing about cities that Small-five had seen first-hand was that if you get enough people in one spot, someone is always restless all the time. The warmer, shallower waters of the equator were perfect environments to dwell in, and that was what brought thinkers to look south and north, towards harsher climes. What could be found out there? The knowledge gained simply through attempting to survive would be worth the risk.
And so three cities were built. Two in the north, one alone in the south: Far-away-light, loneliest and most daring, in the midst of the deep, reliant on the most intensively-monitored and concentrated reefcolony food-park ever planned. Life in the oceans surrounding it was a grand blank.
In the midst of that blank swam Small-five, close to the surface, as straight as she could manage in the suddenly terrifying night. She’d never seen such blackness from the moment of her birth; even the times of her infancy, when her light was a mere guttering speck, could not compare to this absolute darkness. So as she swam through a sea that had become a stranger to her, she kept her mind in the past, in the trivial places where nothing could harm her.
The stars were important to her now. Bright enough to see just a little bit more by, and more importantly a source of guidance. Small-five had never taken much note of astronomy, but she knew enough to tell north from south without the aid of devices. North was life, even if only a lucky idiot’s chance at it, lightless and alone as she was. South was a cold death – not likely at the hands of predators. She would starve long before she reached the dangers of the ice floes. At least on her current path she wouldn’t freeze as her stomach ate itself.
Now and again she wondered at how calm she felt, and each time she found it harder to dwell upon. Immediate problems were immediate and therefore must be solved; the reasons behind her expulsion were immaterial as long as her life was in danger. Her inability to shine
To communicate in sister-talk and in the flowing way of adults, to light her way, to stun prey, to produce her own name at all.
was an obstacle, not a tragedy. A problem-set. And one whose only real effect so far was increasing her tendency to jump at shadows. There was no enemy or prey to dazzle and nothing to shine her light upon but blank blueness.
Ultimately, the fact that she would never be called Small-five again didn’t matter at all.

Forgoing rest paid off, as did eschewing thought for action (sometimes forcibly). Small-five found herself outstripping her memories of expedition-pace, even as her energy drained from her day by day. No baggage to carry, no slowpokes to match pace with, no need to stop early for chores and maintenance and the thousand, thousand, thousand other things that needed doing on a large-scale trip. It was strangely liberating, if a bit lonely.
It was the first time that Small-five had truly been alone since she became an adult.
Mostly she filled her time with nothing. After years of thinking and straining and frustration, to do nothing was a relief, a soothing mental balm. And her days pressed on, and finally the nothing came to an end with the detection of an abnormal chill in the otherwise steadily-warming water, one that grew only greater as Small-five continued northwards.

It was dawn when she found it, the iceberg, the lost floe. Poor sad child of the polar seas, it must have once measured a hundred, a thousand times greater in mass and scale and scope than it did now. Its sides would’ve glimmered with an infinity of tiny darkened bodies turned translucent. But now its trip was nearing its end, its lesser cousins all melted down to nothing and less, their loads of life discharged into coldness and the dark. Perhaps some would take root, more likely they would struggle, falter, and fall.
Against this ignominious end the berg had stood long, but not for much longer. Its near-core was exposed, and the few, deep-burrowing, sturdy Fiskupids that remained were close to the surface, fresh for the plucking. Irrelevant for the most part, since no predator had been senseless enough to leave the cold seas behind for a slowly-shrinking feast.
There were not many. But there were enough to fill Small-five’s belly six times over, and that was all that mattered.
With refuge came rest, with rest came thoughts. Plans. Or at least growing and unavoidable realization of the lack of plans.
Small-five had never heard of expulsion as a punishment. Never heard of the destruction of a person’s glowshine. Then again, she’d also never heard of anything like what she’d discovered.
So, a conspiracy against her discovery. Why? She didn’t know. Did it matter? She could neither accomplish nor learn from where she was, and had no sane means to return home, where she doubted she would be received fondly. Perhaps this time they wouldn’t use mercy.

And the journey continued in much the same manner as it had before, albeit with more food and an omnipresent seeping cold that seemed to crawl inside Small-five’s bones.
Eventually, the berg melted its last crystal and became no more than a lingering chill on the currents. The few and most stubborn of the Fiskupids that Small-five had not consumed descended downwards, to begin a centuries-long battle of growth.
Not one day past this, Small-five saw the shelled, coraled buttresses of a reefcolony peering through the gloom.
Home again, for the second time.

Business took over, as it had before. But less abstract, more concrete. As an adult she had returned to her childhood grounds and looked at them critically from an abstract afar, remained aloof. An observer. Now she was right back in the haze of live-and-eat that had made up her childhood, and so much of the vaunted effortless superiority that she had fancied herself with on her expedition with Populism was gone now, drained away as if it had never been.
Her size had withered under her exodus.
Her speed – although still adequate at a cruise – was limited by wracking pain from the shredded, scabbed-over wrecks that her glowshine tubes had become.
And of course she couldn’t shine-shock prey into bewilderment, for obvious reasons.
Luckily, her most-prized adult virtue remained: an ability to have ideas. For instance…
You could find a Gloudulite, crack the shells of its young open cleanly (and carefully), and then use the largest pieces as a shield over your proboscis, letting you easily dispatch a steady stream of Kleeistrojatch cleaners as they gallantly came to the defense.
You could toss pieces of broken shell and bone towards sheltering Mtuilks from a distance, flushing the elusive creatures into open water and closing the distance as their sprint faded in a haze of exhaustion.
You could spook Raskljen loose from their meals with the sort of panicked, headlong flight that might occur from a rogue Verrineeach school, then snap up the leftovers before they realized their error.
Her greatest discovery, though, was her last: you could shadow the young.
It was a fresh year, and the father-males had just departed as she’d arrived. Young fled from her at every corner, peered out with frightened eyes from behind every cranny (had she ever been so small, to fit into such spaces?). Sometimes Small-five wondered if they would find her more or less terrifying were she still capable of glowshine, if they would gather to her light or flee all the more quickly. It felt so long ago that she’d last had a mind that small, that timid.
Well, maybe not so long with the timidness.
Frightened as they were, they were still unwary. Ideal prey for any reefcolony predator, save for Small-five. Conveniently enough, that which ate the young provided her with a meal. A hunter busy stalking a set of oblivious sisters was a hunter that was unable to see Small-five’s proboscis sinking into its spine, and a hunter that was small enough to consider them adequate prey was a hunter that was a good source of nourishment for Small-five. Surly, ever-stupid Stairrow were a bite apiece, and particularly welcome, if a bit tough. As a bonus, whatever prey the infants hunted often evaded their inept clutches, swerving away from their too-eager grasps and speeding off to the safety of elsewhere, which was often Small-five’s gullet. She considered this not theft so much as prevention of waste.
It was a good life. A quiet life, with all comforts and concerns stripped away to be replaced by…nothing. She almost forgot that she’d ever had another, that there had ever been a Small-five, a Far-away-light, a place in all the world that wasn’t home. It was a wilful retreat to childhood with the tools of adult power and mental flexibility, a cheat.
And one day, it came to an end.

Small-five was lurking in a trench in mid-water, idly practicing a new hunting strategy that she felt held promise, spurred on by faded memories of her near-ambush in a similar place at a similar time by a Raskljen. With her acquired permanent lack of glowshine, she felt no risk of giving away her presence with a mistaken spark at the wrong moment, here in the dark space between the walls of the reefs surrounding her.
Shapes flickered overhead, indistinguishable save by silhouette. Each in a hurry, each hesitant to linger, the few loiterers being Small-five’s fellow marauders of the deep places. She felt a vague, useless impatience at the slowness of it all, but it was small and far away inside a part of herself that hadn’t stirred for months.
A thing moved above her, slowly.
That got her attention. Slow, slow, slothful. And what’s this, oh my? Slow with jerky motions. Not merely idle or inattentive then. Wounded. Easy. And what’s that smell?
Small-five had never relied overmuch on her sense of smell. It was a supplement at best, an augmentation to her keen eyes, her sharp attention to light and shade and motion. As was proper and normal in an adult, who’d long since outgrown the need to tell her sisters from strangers by nose alone.
But Small-five had adapted in her time spent lightless, as lazily as she had, and she knew both the scents that trickled into her brain very well indeed.
Blood. Juvenile.
And now a third that brought memories of sleek, efficient death: Verrineeach.
Small-five moved instantly, and before her muscle had twitched, she was already thinking. Making a plan, having an idea. And what that idea was, as she surged directly through the midsection of some forty-seven extremely startled Verrineeach (oh, they were startled, see all those little silver teeth bared in sudden surprise) was to sharply whip her proboscis around the juvenile’s midsection, grasping her with all the ferocious tenacity of a Nohlohk that had netted a fat Ooliku. Ribs skidded against her – so thin, so whip-thin – and then came the glaring, blaring, out-of-control glowshine she’d counted on, a burning flare that forced her to hastily slam all three of her lens-lids over her eyes. Had glowshine always been so bright, or had she scared the juvenile that badly?
Her confusion aside, the sudden burst of light did the trick. The Verrineeach, already uncertain, instinctively recoiled from the dazzle, their exposed eyes searing, their vision a blurry mess. As long as one member of the school remained sighted, they would not be blind, but first that one would have to overcome the trauma of becoming temporarily sightless in one-hundred-and-thirty-eight other eyes at once. This took time, and Small-five never learned how long because she was far, far away whenever it occurred, her cargo still firmly clutched to her.
She slowed over a quiet part of the reefcolony and let the adrenaline drain from her. The juvenile was limp in her grasp; still conscious, but no longer resisting. Unusually sensible for something at its stage of maturity. At its age she would’ve fled the moment her captor’s grip slackened, but…
Small-five realized something, then checked to make sure it wasn’t her imagination.
No, the size was right. Small. Much smaller than Small-five.
The smell was wrong. It wasn’t a juvenile at all. Not right. There was something odd about it that spoke to something in the back of Small-five’s head.
The glowshine was right. Pulsing, erratic. Feeble and incapable of sustained pulse and flow.
The proportions…wrong. The ribs were too thick (a cut on the side: there was the blood-source). The head was too small compared to the body. And were those two little lumps on either side of the jaw meant to be buds that would one day sprout into current-tasting tendrils?
Small-five released the juvenile. It hung there in the water for a moment, as if paralyzed, then shook itself about in a full-body shiver and swirled to face her, eyes twitching, lights pulsing in that stop-start-stop-start way that produced a million kinds of sistertalk, each incomprehensible to all other speakers.
Small-five watched the lights, and understood. Not the words, of course – the name.
She tested that smell again, and knew it.
Pulsing-two-point-fin-shine, repeated the thing that wasn’t a juvenile, that thing that had a scent six years and more old, that had vanished into the blue in a ring of teeth. Pulsing-two-point-fin-shine. Pulsing-two-point-fin-shine.
Small-five-point-burst-of-light knew that her sister was waiting for an answer.
She reached out with her proboscis – slowly, so as not to alarm the not-a-juvenile – and stroked her glowshine tubes, just above her snout.
Pulsing-point flinched, then slowly untensed.
Small-five repeated the gesture twice more, each time soft, gentle, and felt the raggedness fall away from her sister’s glowshine.
Small-five, she thought to herself. I am Small-five.
Sister, I will make this known to you.
But first, I will make you right.

Small-five stared into the steady, unwavering otherglow of her computer, proboscis tapping aimlessly against its side in an endless, idiot drawl. She envied its composure.
Three years. One and a half to waste on idiot child-thoughts, one and a half to regroup and reinvent and rethink all her old ideas. Three years of her life gone, just like that.
Of course, she had about a hundred of those left over, minus around a decade or possibly plus several. But it was the principle of the thing.
She glimmered to herself sourly as she reviewed what of her ideas she’d managed to pin down into light for the umpteenth time. There they all were, pinned down and preserved like a Fiskupid embedded in ice: a complete and thorough exploration and documentation of the life history of every Small-five, every faint-marks, every Outward-spreading, every sister and mother and daughter. There was even a subchapter devoted to the peculiarities of the cycles of the males, including an up-to-date speculation that the birthed fathers returned to the cold poles to shepherd and safeguard the pregnant fathers-to-be as they grew.
All of it was firmly cited, founded in strong base principles, expanded upon many minor details that were often casually overlooked, and possessed a clear sense of direction and progression.
It was, essentially, worthless regurgitation.
Not nearly as bad as her first idea of course – Small-five winced inwardly as she recalled the conversations she’d had with Dim-glow back then.

It won’t work, she’d said, in that clean, careful way that she seemed to consider most things nowadays.
I’ll need more detail than THAT, Small-five responded.
You’ve said it yourself, you’re having problems with even the most basic issues, just the problems with tricking the biology into working. The engineering involved would be ridiculous. An expedition to the very fringes of the pole is hard going and dangerous and a big investment. Settling a permanent outpost of any size is nearly impossible. Settling a large-scale facility that needs to pump unadulterated chemicals from near the polar core an unspecified thousands of miles, in mass volume, without contamination or disruption? We’ve reached beyond impossible, at least at our current technological scope. Dim-glow’s sides roiled with sluggish disagreement. And the level of attention a mass draw in those waters would draw enough superpredators to turn every day into a bloodbath, even with top-notch Safety work. Go on, ask All-fin how much she’d like a year-round posting down there. Go on.
Small-five gave in, feeling a prickling wince crawl along her back as she recalled the return of the expedition that had been her other two sisters’ voyage outside Far-away-light. Nine-point and All-fin had been badly shaken, but had considered themselves lucky – six of the Safety wardens (All-fin included) had come back missing chunks of themselves, and one aspiring Research youth hadn’t come back at all, lost in the ice floes.
There has to be a way to do it, she said, and knew that moment marked her argument caving in and revealing its core of unreasonable stubbornness.
Maybe, said Dim-glow. But it won’t be today, or tomorrow. Maybe daughters of yours will solve this problem someday. For now, just let it go. There’s no way to raise infants artificially.

Small-five was looking at a specific page of her tables now, and wasn’t sure how she’d arrived there. It was a small, nondescript graph that hadn’t been cited anywhere in her analysis yet stubbornly refused removal, no matter how much editing she did.
It was a timeline that followed the activities of a tracking tag over half a year, where it ended suddenly. The tag had been lost in the open oceans near the poles, and had not been recovered.
Her sides were pulsing most unevenly, she realized dimly, and calmed down as much as she was able. It must be all this sitting around. So much reading and writing and citing and prodding; it was a wonder her proboscis hadn’t blunted itself on the buttons of her computer.
And so, in the grand tradition of frustrated academics, Small-five decided to clear her head with some exercise. She swam out of her little research nook in one of the darker branches of Far-away-light’s library with such a violent surge that an observer (absent at the time) would’ve confused it with frightened escape.
By the time the tunnels of Far-away-light lay behind her and she hovered in the grip of the uplifting currents that scoured its sides, her mood had evened some. Every year the memories of the ice closing in faded a bit more, but she was sure she’d see the end of her first decade before she felt entirely comfortable so far from open water. Not that open water didn’t have its share of bad memories.
No, she was headed to where she could relax. The captive reefcolony that sat atop the bulging head of Far-away-light, where the sun shone through the waves and life sat so near at all sides that you could eat by opening your mouth and swimming forwards. It was quiet in that special way that only the noisiest places could be – quiet inside – and there was enough room that she wouldn’t run face to face with anyone and have to ruin her terrible mood by spreading it around.
It wasn’t the end of the world, she reminded herself. No adult her age was expected to write much more than what she had created. No adult her age was supposed to create a work of learning and insight that was all original research, every page a new and novel concept. A solid, stable, perfectly suitable re-shining of a complicated topic with added spines and lights was typical and worthwhile and would make that little graph that wouldn’t die unexceptional and usual.
Entirely usual.
Small-five found that she was sick of exercise, and departed the reefcolony with the same graceless haste that she’d arrived, nearly running over a subadult as she did so. That was an added nuisance right there; that year’s crop of juveniles was fresh in. How many years would it take for her to get used to things that were smaller than her? They looked so fragile, so delicate. And always, always, always, so starved.
They shouldn’t have to do that. But they had to. What a terrible, awful thing it was, to put the food that made you…you where there was almost nothing to eat, and so many hungry mouths to strain at you without end. And the worst of it all was that Dim-glow was right; there WASN’T any way to change it, and she knew it. She was at the tail-tip of half a year of studying the chemical structure of the cocktails of polar nutrients that had combined to swell her brain triple in size, and all of her conclusions told her the same thing: give up. The substances were too ridiculously complex to synthesize, too deceptively frail and ferociously remote to transport; the infants were too skittish and too finicky in their habitats to survive the guiding presence of adults or accept a cultivated home.
Their lives were a cruel joke: a fiendishly complicated process with a product so simple that it stood no hope of bettering itself. And some days, Small-five thought that she was the only one of all her sisters and mothers (no daughters yet) that ever thought this way. It seemed narcissistic, but the alternative – that behind every shimmering glowshine lay the same bone-aching, soul-grinding awareness of the unfairness of it all – was too grim for her to contemplate.
She was contemplating it again, wasn’t she? No, that wasn’t the sort of thing she should allow at all. Back to work. Back to studying. Back to learning and growing and oh sisters, she’d never thought she’d get this sick of being able to think. Thinking was meant to give you ideas, ideas were meant to make you feel smart, being smart was meant to light a glow under your skin that flickered without light. Not leave you with a terrible aching cramp in your mind that throbbed just behind your eyes and made you feel as though you’d stared at the sun.
Fine then. If she couldn’t think, she’d research.
Small-five wriggled her way back into her chamber at the rim of the library’s guts and curled herself around her most recent chemistry worksphere. Inside it gaped the empty space of a vacuum, contaminant-free and crisply inhospitable, and inside THAT lay a small, perfectly sliced piece of flesh from an infant, a sample retrieved from her latest expedition with the other Populists. It had been only a few weeks old when she found it, floating free in the water half-out of a Raskljen’s mouth. The predator had made itself scarce in the face of her glaring glowshine and aggressive posture, but it had been all too late for the little sister, just in time for a specimen.
It was perfectly preserved, as fresh as it had been the moment she sealed it. And now, as Small-five carefully manoeuvered a much smaller worksphere into place, it was about to change.
The workspheres were simple to attach to one another, yet required the entry of a ten-digit code to comingle; a design that suited the sorts of things kept in them. Rare tissue samples (or sentimental ones; Small-five was sure she had a chunk of blubber from All-fin’s side as a post-surgery souvenir her sister had refused to accept), live organisms, organs, bacterial cultures, strange Fiskupids (Nine-point had told her last year that Research was hoping to create a sort of viral cocktail that would supercharge Fiskupid production in reefcolonies for single generations at a time, permitting controlled habitat increase and increased building material). And in this case, the last portion of a small sample of water drawn from the far, far south that her sisters had brought back home to her, several years ago, after a dangerous expedition. The strange chemicals in it had been concentrated, then concentrated again. As a juvenile, her body had intaken less than a third of this sphere’s volume to transform her mind completely.
There wasn’t much left, but she’d been saving it for a day like this, when she’d be too depressed to do anything much beyond mope and handle incredibly rare chemical compounds that she’d slowly squandered over more than a year, learning nothing and gaining nothing and oh get ON with it!
She merged the workspheres, watched half of the liquid splash against the flesh. She selected her tools, carefully probed the sphere’s interior through the airlocked entries. And she watched as the readouts began to appear, and pulsed irritably as they wandered far and wide. Hormones were being triggered in dead flesh, moribund dna was twitching, feebly attempting to synthesis proteins in cells that were bags of tissue. As was proper, and normal, and expected. But the numbers were all wrong. Too large a reaction.
Maybe the flesh was too old – no, she’d used older.
Maybe the worksphere had malfunctioned, but no, the tissue still read as usable by all measurements. She carefully transferred it to another sphere, just to be safe, and watched as the same numbers, the same graphs came tumbling back to her.
Maybe the sample of polar water had gone off…and that was when Small-five knew she was missing something obvious, because that couldn’t physically happen, and the worksphere she’d kept the sample in had been top-grade, certified by a Maintenance chief personally.
She was missing something. She’d spent a full day without rest now, but she’d still missed something. It was right in front of her, sitting behind the big blue wall of hazy infinity, but a half-glimpse farther than her eyes could reach. Maybe if she just shone a bit brighter…
Small-five stared at the workspheres, eyes running over the data they were sliding into her computer, aimlessly racing along othershine displays, no longer reading, simply needing.
And then there it was, teeth rising out of the blue. Small-five looked, and she saw what wasn’t there.
The worksphere that contained the fleshsphere had no serial number filled out, no data entry. Which meant…
Small-five carefully, delicately, tenderly flipped the worksphere over and read the tiny note slapped on in hasty othershine: a gift for All-fin, who nearly was No-side.
She’d just used half of her last extant sample of polar nutrients on a piece of nondescript adult bellyfat with a strip of muscle. And somehow, it was taking every pinch of self control in her body not to break into hysterical rippling laughter that would probably never end.
Fine. Fine. So she’d wasted it! It didn’t matter, she could just fill out a new chart. Sure, a single sample meant nothing, but… well.
Well.

Small-five didn’t rest for the next three days. She was too busy running tests. At one point, she left her tiny library and acquired a small medical clamp, which she used to excise a tiny strip of tissue from her shoulder.
The results came back the same. All of them. And now she had no more nutrients to test with, but she wasn’t worried. If what she’d discovered had any chance of being correct, she felt confident that the head of Research would personally swim to the pole and back to collect samples with her teeth.
Research, no, that could come later. This was a matter of Populism. Populism to the bone. What would faint-marks think of this? What would her sisters? What would…what did she think about it? Did she even know yet.
Well, it was best to keep it quiet until it was completely certain. The first people to know would have to be the most important ones. Just in case she’d missed something, because she was certainly tired enough to do that sort of thing.
faint-marks. Outward-spreading. The chief of Populism, the ancient mother-leader of Far-away-light. They would be the first to know about what she’d learned, the first to read it and judge it and dismiss it for lack of thought or evidence, but perhaps compliment her on her eagerness – if she left out the part about how it was an accident.
No, best to tell them that. Tell them everything. They might need to know it.
Small-five finished writing. Her proboscis hovered above the buttons, wavered, and struck decisively, and with such force that her computer ceased functioning even as it sent the message.
Now, why had she done that? And then all that she’d just seen became real for the first time, and Small-five knew, really knew, what she’d learned, the idea she’d created. It slipped out across her sides with dazzling energy, the last effort on the last hour of the final day of her learning.
Populism-chief, mother-leader… the poles work their magic on more than adolescents! Our flesh is as fluid as their minds! So hard to learn this lesson – so little reason to travel there, and never a sane reason to hunt – but it is known! Small-five has learned this! Small-five-point-burst-of-light has learned this of us, of all of us! Ever mother, every sister, every daughter-to-be! All of us, adults, and yet still aching to change deep inside!
And with that, Small-five fell into a deep and insensate resting-state, the most secure and comforting that she’d ever know, where she faced the deep blue wall and saw the teeth appear and was not afraid, felt them pass through her without harm.

When she finally stirred herself, it was in the grasp of six Safety wardens, unarmed but twice her mass each. She reacted with surprise, then inquiry, then outrage, and finally moved through to fear. And to all she did, their sides remained darker than the depths of the poles.
She was taken, she realized, in the middle of the night. Through the depths of the library, then lower still she was hurried, the Safety wardens forming around her sides in a tight, blotted mass that hid her glowshine away beneath packed muscles and dark silence. The corridors grew close, then jagged – down here the reefcolony that formed Far-away-light had not been groomed, not been tamed for years. More than once one of Small-five’s shadows clipped a fin against the walls and drew blood, but not so much as a flicker of pain gleamed from them.
At last the tunnel terminated, in a tiny, inky-black opening surrounded by jagged-edged shells. Her escort paused, and a shadow near the exit detached itself and began to blink slowly.
It was faint-marks. Small-five tried to speak, but her glowshine was still buried.
never come back, said the chief of Populism, her voice as soft and indistinctly lit as ever. and remember: we could have killed you.
And with that, the Safety wardens surged forwards, proboscises shoving, and Small-five was forced through the opening.
It was much too small.

Instinct saved her, sent her swimming in a frenzy, hurling herself in a blood-blinded panic. She slammed into muck and twisted herself upwards, away from the ocean floor, away from what she could no longer see. Water rippled around her on unseen fangs, and somehow she found the speed to move yet faster, in terror of the unknown even as it fell away, far away below her, with nothing but the taste of her blood to satisfy its hunger. She shone harder, harder, harder, and still the world was a blackened haze.
She swam anyways. What else could she do?

When light returned, it was with the dawn. Every glowshine tube in her body had been ruptured.