Thirty-one days since you last ate. You know it the way you know the tide: not as a number, but as a pressure.

The den is a crack beneath a boulder, and its ceiling is hung with your eggs — tens of thousands of them, braided into pale strands that sway when you breathe on them. You breathe on them constantly. Clean water in, clean water over. That is the whole job now. Your body knows the job ends with you, and it has made its peace with that faster than you have.

Your arms have not. Two-thirds of you lives in them — each one carries its own small mind, its own small opinions — and the second arm on your left has opinions tonight. It keeps slipping out of the den mouth, tasting the dark. It wants something.

The current smells of kelp, of crab, and under that, faintly, of something bitter you can't name yet.