They told us the ocean would rise. They just never said it would look us in the eye when it did.

  I grew up in a village that had no name anymore. The maps had been redrawn so many times, even the government stopped pretending to label us. We were just coordinates, and after the storms came, even those were washed away.

  It started with the tide. Then the fish stopped swimming near the shore. Then the color of the sky changed. Always gray. Always low. A ceiling pushing down.

  I was fifteen when I first saw the sea eat a road. I was twenty when it took the school. By the time I turned twenty-three, we were building rafts from hollow doors and fishing with old garden rakes. You learn to stop asking when the help is coming. You learn not to look at the horizon.

  But the thing about the end of the world is—it’s never quite the end. Not until it’s your turn to drown.

  The day the village died started like any other: wet.

  The air was thick, not just with rain but with that sort of wet that lives in your lungs. My boots squelched through the mud as I pushed a broken shopping cart through the flooded alley behind the old church, one hand on the rusted handle, the other holding my hood against the wind.

  There was a baby crying in the next house over. There was always a baby crying. There was no power. No proper roofs. Just stacked shelters made of waterlogged sheet metal and plastic tarps.

  I remember thinking—I should go check on them. That was the last time I thought something normal.

  The sirens wailed. Not our sirens—ours had rusted out long ago. These were new. Deep. Mechanical. The kind of sound that vibrates in your teeth. A whale's call, if the whale was built by a machine god.

  People screamed before they saw the water. As if their bodies remembered something before their eyes did.

  I turned toward the harbor—and there it was.

  Not a wave.

  A wall.

  Water, black with silt and oil, rising like a vertical horizon. Higher than the church spire. Higher than anything had a right to be. It wasn’t curling like waves do. It stood. Like a held breath. Like it was looking at us.

  Then it fell.

  I ran. Of course I ran. Everyone ran.

  We always talked about what we’d do when it came—how we’d get to the high ground, how we’d climb the old satellite tower, how we’d tie ourselves to trees if we had to.

  But it came too fast. Too tall. Too deliberate.

  The sound was like nothing I’ve ever heard. It wasn’t just crashing—it was cracking. Snapping. The sound of history being broken.

  I tripped over someone. I don’t know who. Their hands grabbed at my coat. I kicked, I’m ashamed to say. I kicked and didn’t look back.

  Water surged through the alleys like a mouth that had finally opened. I got two blocks from the harbor when I saw the sea split open the church like a rotted fruit. The steeple snapped sideways. Bells fell silent in a single breath.

  I climbed.

  My lungs screamed. My fingers bled. My shoes were long gone.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  I got to the rooftop of the old bakery. Thought I’d made it.

  Then the wave turned. Like it knew where I was.

  And then I was in it.

  Drowning is strange.

  You think you’ll feel pain. You think it’ll burn.

  It does. For a moment. Then everything goes... soft. Your limbs slow. Your chest stretches. Your vision tunnels. And then it’s quiet.

  People say your life flashes before your eyes. Mine didn’t.

  What I saw was a shape.

  A shadow in the water.

  Massive. Slow. Wrong.

  It moved like it was watching. Like it had eyes. And worse—it had intent. I felt it scan me like a scanner. Felt its gaze slide under my skin.

  Then it blinked.

  It blinked at me.

  I woke up coughing out water that didn’t taste like ocean.

  It was colder. Thicker. Like it had been distilled and put through metal pipes. The kind of water you find dripping from an old freezer or leaking through submarine bulkheads.

  The light was green. Dim. Pulsing.

  I was on my side, lying on damp metal flooring. The air smelled sterile—like filtered mold and ozone. I could hear a humming. Deep. Rhythmic. Mechanical.

  And I wasn’t alone.

  Hands rolled me onto my back. Not soft hands. Not human hands, even though they were shaped that way. They were gloved. Black. Seamless. No seams or stitching.

  I blinked up into masks. Black visors with red glowing stripes down the middle. No eyes. No mouths. No names.

  One of them said something. Their voice was garbled—filtered like it came through radio static.

  “All vitals within baseline. Initiate transfer.”

  I tried to speak. Choked. The other one touched my neck. A hiss. A prick of cold.

  Then darkness again.

  I think.

  I was in a room. Metal walls. Low ceiling. Green lighting that flickered like an old aquarium bulb. The floor vibrated slightly, like I was inside a giant engine.

  There was a window.

  I stumbled toward it. My legs barely worked. Felt like jelly. Like they belonged to someone else.

  Outside the window was water.

  Not waves. Not the sea. Just… depth. A constant blur of blue-green darkness, filled with floating debris, fish silhouettes, and enormous glass tanks embedded into the facility’s outer structure.

  I was underwater.

  So deep, the light barely reached. So far down, the pressure should have crushed me.

  I turned and saw the logo stamped on the door:

  “AQUARIUM // Project R – Subsea Preservation Hub”

  A smaller sign blinked below it. Digital. Faint.

  “Welcome, Survivor.”

  There was a sound in the wall behind me. A low groan—like the building itself was alive and dreaming of drowning.

  I wandered the corridor outside, barefoot and wet. Everything felt too quiet. I passed other rooms, other windows, but no people. No one else moving.

  Eventually, a door slid open with a mechanical sigh.

  A woman stood inside. Pale gray uniform. Hair tied too tight. Her eyes were… wrong. Focused, but not on me. Like she was looking just to the left of where I stood.

  “You are Nadia, correct?” she asked in a tone that could’ve been recorded.

  I nodded. My voice didn’t work.

  “You’ve been rescued by the Aquarium Initiative. You are safe. Please follow the blue line to the Orientation Bay.”

  I looked down. A strip of flickering blue light pulsed across the floor, leading away like a vein.

  The woman didn’t move again. She blinked. Once. Slowly. Then didn’t blink at all.

  The Orientation Bay was filled with rows of chairs bolted to the floor and a large screen hanging from the ceiling like an ancient movie theater.

  I wasn’t alone anymore. Others sat scattered around the room. Survivors like me. All with the same half-drowned, half-dead look in their eyes.

  Some stared straight ahead. Some rocked gently. A child hummed a song under his breath that I swear didn’t have a melody—just notes that made your stomach twist.

  The screen flickered to life.

  A voice—cheerful, sterile, female—played over peaceful music that sounded like it had been recorded underwater.

  “Welcome to the Aquarium. You are one of the lucky few to be chosen for refuge beneath the sea. Here, we preserve not only humanity, but knowledge, culture, and the future.”

  Images flashed—fish swimming in tubes, children laughing in classrooms, scientists smiling behind glass walls. None of it looked recent.

  “As we adjust to our new life below the waves, remember: Unity, Calm, and Obedience keep the Aquarium whole.”

  The screen went black.

  The doors opened.

  The caretakers came back in, gliding on silent feet. They handed out injections and ration packets.

  Someone asked what year it was.

  No one answered.

  That night, I lay in a narrow bunk and listened to the walls breathe.

  There were no stars.

  Only darkness outside the glass. Deep and endless.

  I should’ve been grateful. I was alive. I was safe.

  But I couldn’t stop thinking about what I saw when the wave hit.

  That shape. That shadow. The way it looked at me.

  Not like a monster.

  Not like a god.

  Like a mirror.

  And I knew—deep in my bones—that I hadn’t been saved from the sea.

  I had been claimed.