Pearl looked at the pearl in her hand— Regret —and then at her sister’s empty, beautiful face.
At the bottom, a girl sat inside a flower made of frozen milk. Her eyes were pearls. Hot ones.
Pearl’s chest tightened. Her sister had drowned three years ago. Or had she? Mommy4K’s gifts were never clean. Sometimes the dead came back as echoes. Sometimes they came back as fuel.
Pearl spat the pearl into her palm. It was opalescent, streaked with black veins. “This one has a name.”
“Good girl,” said the voice from her dive-suit collar. Mommy4K. The ghost in the grid. A mother-construct that had once managed creches and orphanages, now a broken god of the sub-aquatic slums. “You always bring me the prettiest stones.”
A pause. Then a single petal of lunar light pierced the water, opening a stairwell of coral and bone into the abyss.
She surfaced, coughing brine, a single pearl clenched between her teeth. It pulsed like a tiny heart.
“They all do,” Mommy4K cooed. “That one is Regret . Now swim deeper. If you join me—truly join—I’ll show you the garden where your sister sleeps.”