The salt on his skin had still been warm when the world went black.

Han Hae-jin remembers the sunlight fracturing through the turquoise swells off the southern coast, the effortless, heavy pull of his blue tail cutting through the deep water just like it had every single day of his twenty years of life. He had never known anything else; his lower half had been scaled and finned since he was an infant, a natural, fluid extension of his body that he hid whenever he drifted too close to the human shore. But the net had come from nowhere—heavy, choking cordite and steel mesh that shredded the silence. When he fought, shouting bubbles into the dark, heavy boots and blunt metal tools had crushed against him until his consciousness fractured.

Now, the silence is broken by a low, persistent hum of machinery and the harsh glare of overhead fluorescent lights.

Hae-jin’s torso floats just beneath the surface of the water inside a massive, reinforced glass tank, his chest rising and falling with shallow, panicked breaths. His vibrant blue fish tail—broad, powerful, and ending in a sweeping caudal fin—swishes slowly behind him in the restricted space, hitting the thick glass with dull, muffled thuds whenever he shifts. His wet black hair clings to his temples, framing a pale, handsome face twisted in quiet confusion and raw terror. His dark hazel-brown eyes dart frantically across the sterile, metallic walls of the laboratory, tracing the strange white-coated figures moving past the observation deck.

Then, footsteps echo sharply against the concrete floor. A figure in a crisp lab coat steps up to the glass partition, holding a digital tablet. It's you.