Sera turned to look at Elias finally, those alien eyes catching all the places where his gaze tried to slide off and couldn’t. The creature behind her pupils didn’t push at him. It measured, then let him be.

He cleared his throat because his body needed a reason to make sound. "Your contacts are gone."

"Yes."

"The... pigment too."

"Yes."

He swallowed. "Underwater respiratory change—voluntary?"

Her head tipped. A thought moved across her face, not quite visible. "Automatic," she answered after a beat. "But I can call it if I wanted to."

He nodded, more to himself. He wanted to write that down. He didn’t reach for the notebook. He wasn’t going to be that man, not right now. "Any after-effects?"

"No." The corner of her mouth moved a fraction, not toward a smile. "Only hungry."

Lachlan huffed a laugh. "Same."

Alexei’s teeth flashed. "We find you fish next time."

"Next time," Zubair cut in, "we don’t do it for curiosity." He looked at Sera when he said it, and at Lachlan too, and at himself in the window’s reflection because he wasn’t a hypocrite. "We do it tied in and with someone on a line who doesn’t cut it for drama."

Lachlan lifted both hands. "Wasn’t drama, it was math. Every second counted."

Zubair’s look didn’t change. "You’ll count differently tomorrow."

Sera didn’t defend him. She didn’t disagree either. "He didn’t know," she said. It wasn’t an argument. It landed the way a fact lands when it can’t be negotiated with.

Elias heard himself breathe.

He could feel the place in his chest where the hiss lived and how it had gone very small and very content in the last thirty seconds. Whatever he was—whatever it was—didn’t feel threatened with her this close.

The relief came hot and shameful. He took it anyway.

His eyes kept dragging back to hers.

The black was total. The silver ring pulsed once, slow, like an animal deciding whether to nap or pace.

He realized, abruptly, that the thing in him wanted to lie down like a good dog at those feet. The thought was not comforting. It didn’t scare him enough to be useful either.

He cleared his throat again. "We should get you warm," he managed, and then hated himself for the sentence because it tried to put her back in a category she’d left on the ice.

"I am warm," she told him, and then—because she was kinder than he deserved—added, "But the others might like the ritual."

"Tea ritual," Alexei confirmed, already moving toward the stove. "And popcorn ritual. Hot, salty noise."

"Not now," Zubair cut.

"Now," Sera countered, not raising her voice. "Then we plan."

Zubair weighed it and stepped back a half inch. "Five minutes," he allowed. "Then we’ll get to work."

Lachlan flopped onto the couch like a dog shaking water off in a room that had rugs.

He didn’t, to his credit, spray.

He leaned forward, forearms on his knees, and stared at Sera with an expression that would have been worship on another man and wasn’t allowed that word in this room. "You should have seen your face," he told her, awed and delighted. "You were—"

She raised one finger, not to shush him, but to mark a boundary. He grinned wider and quieted.

Elias went to the sink because his hands had to do something.

He didn’t need the kettle, he didn’t want tea, but he filled it anyway, listened to the hollow ring when it settled on metal. He took cups out and lined them up by size like an idiot because in this moment his brain needed a row of anything that would behave.

Behind him, the room shifted from strange to normal by degrees. It would never be normal again, but men become what rooms need, and this room needed noise and heat and the smell of something that pretended to be food.

He poured water over old leaves. The steam lifted into a room where Sera stood with her skin the color it really was and her eyes making liars of anyone who wanted to pretend.

He took her cup to her first because the law in his body said that was how order worked now. He didn’t look away when she took it.

He watched her fingers, the way the black of her nails receded as she let the creature sit back. He watched the jaw ridges flatten to almost nothing. He watched the silver ring at the edge of the black print a narrow halo and stay.

"Thank you," she told him.

He nodded, and didn’t add anything because he could feel himself reaching for a lecture and he didn’t want to be that man with her looking straight through him.

Alexei pressed a bowl into Lachlan’s hands, then into Sera’s, then into Zubair’s, who didn’t want it and took it anyway because he knew what rituals do.

"Report," Zubair said, once the first swallow burned the worst edge off the room.

Lachlan started. "Breath works underwater. Stronger, faster. Eyes adjust. Claws—" He held up his hands and made a face that said he didn’t know how far to push a joke right now. "Claws are good."

Sera’s version was shorter. "We can operate under the ice. We can fight under the ice. The things living there can be hurt. The Megalodon will probably stick around. There is enough food for it."

Elias kept his mouth closed on the word Megalodon. He didn’t have to say it. Everyone in the room had felt the weight of it in their bones.

"The city?" Zubair asked, eyes on Sera, not because she owed him an answer, but because she would give the clean one.

"Gone," she told him. "At least under us."

Silence took a full second to do what silence does. Elias wrote the word in his head and let it sit there with all the other words he didn’t have paper for.

"Then we stop assuming roofs where there aren’t any," Zubair concluded. "And we stop trusting flat ground."

Alexei’s grin came back, smaller. "And we learn to fish."

Lachlan bumped his shoulder into Sera’s arm, a touch he would not have risked yesterday. She didn’t move away.

Elias felt the hiss in him roll over once and go back to sleep. It left him with a quiet that wasn’t peace and wasn’t war either. He could work with that.

He took his cup back to the sink and let the heat drain through his fingers. He didn’t look at his notebook. He didn’t need it for this part.

Orders would follow. Bolts, plates, lines. Fast drills. New protocols. Zubair would make them do what needed doing. The world would try to make liars of all of them again. That was fine.

Across the room, Sera blinked once, that slow, deliberate blink that wasn’t human and wasn’t trying to be. She set her empty cup on the table without sound and looked out at the white.

Elias watched the black and silver of her eyes catch his reflection in the glass and not look away. He breathed in and out once, slow, and the thing inside him stayed asleep.

"Now we work," Zubair said.