I woke before the light.

  I always do on dive days — something pulls me up from sleep the way the current pulls at a loose stone. Liora was still breathing slow beside me. I didn't wake her. I never do. I stood by the bed for a moment, listening to the rhythm of her breath, trying to match mine to it, but I couldn't. Her breath was steady. Mine was already bracing for the cold.

  The air outside was sharp, the kind that makes your teeth ache when you breathe through your mouth. I walked to the river in the dark. The water was already loud — I could hear it before I could see it, that low, constant roar that never stops, never rests. The river doesn't sleep. I wonder sometimes if that's why I can't either.

  I stood at the edge and checked my hands. Still raw from the last dive. The cuts hadn't closed all the way — they never do anymore. I flexed my fingers until the sting felt familiar, then I stepped in.

  The cold hit like a wall. First the legs, then the chest, then the skull — a pressure that wraps around you and squeezes until your thoughts go thin. I let myself sink.

  Below, the world changes. The roar of the surface fades and is replaced by something else — not silence, but a hum. A vibration you feel in your bones more than your ears. The current down here moves differently. It doesn't flow — it swirls. Great, slow spirals of water that seem to have a will of their own.

  I found what I was looking for — a school holding steady behind a rock shelf, silver flanks catching what little light made it this deep. I worked fast. Hands numb, lungs burning, the cold pressing in from every side like a fist closing. My knuckles split open against the rocks again — it happens every time, the river takes its cut — and I felt the warmth of blood in the cold water. A strange comfort. Proof that I was still here, still solid enough to bleed.

  When I finally dragged the catch onto the bank, my breathing was ragged. That should have been the end of it. The work was done. But it never is.

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  I went home. I cleaned the fish, set them out, washed the blood from my hands. The headache was already there — it always is after a deep dive, a pressure behind the eyes that the surface air doesn't ease. The cold does something to the blood. The lack of air does something worse. I've lost days I can't account for. Whole conversations I apparently had but don't remember having. The woman who sets bones in the settlement has a word for it — she calls it the fog. Says the river does it to anyone who stays under too long. She told me to stop diving so deep. I told her the fish moved.

  So I started writing things down. A record. What I caught, how deep, how long. A way to hold onto the days the fog was eating. Simple entries. Practical. But the entries stopped being entries. I'd sit down to write the weight of the catch and fill a page about the pressure at the bottom instead — the way the light fails below the ledges, the hum you can feel in your teeth when the current shifts. Things I'd never say aloud. The desk became a habit, then a need, and by now the stack of pages beside it was thicker than any dive log had a right to be.

  I sat down. I picked up the pen.

  The words came the way they always do now — not from thinking, but from the act of writing itself. I'd start a sentence meaning to describe what I saw at the bottom and end up somewhere else entirely, somewhere I couldn't have planned, filling pages about things I didn't know I knew until the ink was drying. This is what I saw down there. This is what the river looks like from the inside. This matters.

  Page after page. The candle burned down and I didn't notice. My hands ached — the cuts from the dive reopened against the pen — and I didn't stop. It felt urgent, necessary, true. The pen moved ahead of my thoughts — I wasn't composing, I was keeping up, hand over hand, the way you pull rope from dark water without knowing what's at the other end. The words settled on the page like they'd been waiting somewhere below my reach, and the pen was just the thing that dredged them loose.

  When the focus finally broke — when the room came back and the silence hit — I was sitting in the dark with ink on my fingers and blood on the pages. I reached for the older stack, the pages from last week.

  My handwriting. My ink.

  I read the first line and it meant nothing. I read the second and it could have been written by a stranger — careful, deliberate sentences about things I had no memory of thinking. I recognized the hand but not the mind behind it.

  I set the pages down and waited for my name to come back to me. It took a long time.