Eli returned home with salt in his hair and dried blood on his temple. His mother didn’t notice—she was passed out on the couch, a television flickering blues and oranges across her face. Half-eaten takeout cluttered the counter. Eli stepped around it, silent as a crab skittering through kelp, and slipped into his bedroom, the one with the broken doorknob and the loose floorboard he always avoided.

  He lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. His cheek throbbed where Reggie had hit him. His ribs felt bruised. But mostly he just felt… tired.

  He didn’t cry. Crying was something Eli had trained out of himself years ago.

  In the quiet, he pulled his wet hoodie tighter and whispered to the ceiling, “I was just trying to be kind.”

  Something moved in his chest then—some ache, some small wish. Not for revenge. Not even for justice. Just for someone to notice.

  He fell asleep like that.

  The next morning, Eli returned to the shore.

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  This time he brought nothing but himself and a piece of soggy toast he didn’t finish. Lapis was there, still sunken in the shallows, unmoving, speaking nonsense under his breath like a monk in a trance.

  “I brought you nothing,” Eli said. “Just me.”

  Lapis didn’t react. But that was fine.

  Eli swam out, slower this time. Not like yesterday—no rocks, no yelling. He just floated near Lapis’s head and tried to listen.

  The sea was quiet.

  Then—something glimmered on the seafloor beneath Lapis’s claws. A cluster of coral, pale as bone and shaped like old curls of parchment. It shimmered like memories half-forgotten, and when Eli reached toward it—

  —he saw something.

  A flash: a ship breaking in half under black waves.

  A scream.

  A monster’s claws tearing at ropes.

  Not to kill—but to save.

  He recoiled, choking on salt. “What was that?”

  Lapis stirred. “The coral remembers,” he muttered.

  Eli stared. “Was that you?”

  “I… tried,” Lapis whispered. His voice cracked like old stone. “I tried to save them. I did. But I was clumsy. And they screamed. And I screamed. And then I was alone again.”

  The boy floated closer. “You weren’t evil.”

  “I was enormous,” said Lapis. “I was wrong. My hands too big. My eyes too slow.”

  Eli touched the coral gently. “You tried.”

  And for once, Lapis said nothing at all.