Call Me Moby, Episode 4
The Hunted Years
Trigger warning: violence, death, isolation
The ocean is smaller than it was.
The feeding grounds still lie the same number of body lengths from the breeding waters. The thermal layers still shift at the same depths where they have always shifted, and the currents still carry us along routes that predate memory. But the space between the wooden things has compressed. The intervals of safety have shortened. Surfacing to breathe has become a calculation of risk rather than the simple necessity it was before the adolescent was taken, before the pod split, before the two who stayed learned that staying means accepting the same pursuit, the same targeting, the same persistent adjustment of course whenever the one with the white markings breaks the surface.
We are three.
We have been three for long enough that we no longer count the thermal cycles since the main pod swam where the light begins, and we swam where it sets down. Long enough that the two embedded pieces of metal have become part of the sound the marked one makes through water, the way breath pattern is part of it. The way the push of his body through pressure is part of it. Metal singing against depth. Two different frequencies that announce his location to anything that can hear them. That marks him as precisely as the white forehead and hump mark him to the creatures above who track through methods we do not understand, but whose effectiveness we cannot deny.
The two who stayed swim close.
They surface when he surfaces, dive when he dives. Their own feeding rhythms abandoned to match his. Metal falls toward all of us when we surface together. Sometimes it strikes close to one. Sometimes close to another. Speed and depth, and the small margin between where we are and where the metal falls, determine which of us it finds.
The wooden thing appears on a day when the water is calm, and we are resting near the surface, our bodies rising and falling with swells so gentle they barely register as movement.
The thumping reaches us before we see the disturbance above.
Rhythmic, mechanical. The sound of wood striking water in patterns that have become as familiar as the songs of other pods. As recognizable as prey. As unavoidable as the fact that eventually every one of us must rise to breathe. Visibility means vulnerability. The wooden things have learned to wait.
We dive immediately. Descending through the warm surface layer into the cold zone, where pressure increases, and light fails. The thumping becomes muffled but never quite disappears. It follows as we swim northwest at a depth where the small shapes cannot survive. Where the wooden thing should not be able to track movements through water that separates us from the air by sixty body lengths of salt, current, and darkness. Vision is useless here. All navigation happens through sound and pressure, and the knowledge of where the seafloor lies beneath us. How far the surface waits above us. Whether the space we move through contains others of our kind, predators, or prey, or simply the vast emptiness that fills most of the ocean, most of the time.
But the thumping adjusts.
Shifts direction.
Follows.
We surfaced an hour later. We have put five thousand body lengths between ourselves and where we dove. The wooden thing is not directly above us, but close enough. Half a day’s swim to the east. When we blow and refill our lungs and prepare to dive again, we can feel through the pressure that it has detected us that it is turning. That the pursuit is resuming.
The oldest among us emits a low-frequency pattern. A query. Scarred from encounters before the marked one was born. Survivor of hunts that killed others in the pod he came from before joining ours. The pattern carries question-tones. We recognize them. Scatter? Distance? Split the wooden thing’s attention the way splitting the main pod worked?
Before the pattern completes, the metal falls.
Not toward the marked one.
Toward the oldest.
