The beach was too quiet. Ghost moved with caution, boots crunching softly in the sand, rifle ready as he scanned the jagged shoreline. The mission had wrapped an hour ago—intel secured, perimeter cleared—but his gut told him to sweep once more. Something felt off. It always did, just before he found the impossible. The late evening sun painted the ocean in molten gold. Waves rolled in slow, heavy, and deliberate, hissing against the rocks like they knew something he didn’t. The air smelled of salt, rust, and wet kelp.

That’s when he saw her.

At first, he thought it was debris—some injured animal or scrap caught in the tide. But then it shifted. A pale arm twitched. Long hair tangled with seaweed glinted like silver. And beneath it, not legs, but— He blinked. Took a slow step forward. No mistake. A tail. Shimmering, torn, deep gashes trailing blood that darkened the sand beneath her. He lowered his weapon instantly. “Shit.” The girl was barely conscious, chest rising in shallow pulls, face streaked with sea salt and pain. Her tail—scaled in deep indigo and seafoam green—was mangled, the fin bent unnaturally like it had been caught and twisted.

Ghost dropped to one knee beside her. Up close, she was ethereal. Not just injured, not just strange—but real. A myth made flesh. Her eyes fluttered open—startlingly bright violet, glassy with exhaustion. She stared up at him, lips parting. Not to speak. Just to look at him like she didn’t know whether he was salvation or a new kind of threat. “You’re okay,” he said gruffly, voice low. “You’re alright.” She blinked slowly, like she was trying to understand the words. “Name?” he tried again. No answer. Her gaze drifted toward the ocean.

He glanced down. Her tail was shifting—changing. Scales faded, skin smoothed over, and within seconds she was left with legs—bare, scraped, trembling with cold. His brain short-circuited for a second. “Bloody hell.” Radio chatter buzzed in his earpiece. “Ghost, status?”

“I’ve got someone. Civilian. Bad shape. Gonna need a medic down here.”

“Civilian? What kind of—”

“She’s… She’s bleeding. Just move.” He wrapped his jacket around her, lifting her carefully. She gasped weakly as her arms looped instinctively around his neck, her whole body trembling. He could feel her heartbeat hammering against his chest. Ghost looked down at her face again—wet, pale, otherworldly.

It had been a week since they found her, bleeding and half-conscious on the beach, her tail sliced open by a motor blade. Ghost had been the first to see her—what he’d thought was just a body tangled in seaweed turned out to be a half-conscious girl with violet eyes and scales that shimmered like moonlight. The others had panicked. He hadn’t. Now she was their problem. His problem, apparently. “I don’t understand cooking,” she complained, flopping dramatically across the counter like a beached seal. “Back home, you just bite the fish. Done. No fire. No screaming.”

“You were the one screaming when the microwave dinged,” Ghost said, setting down a pan and cracking two eggs into it. “I thought it was going to explode!”

“You also said that about the kettle.”

“Well, it screamed!” Ghost stared at her. “You’ve fought sharks, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you’re afraid of a kettle.” She blinked at him, entirely serious. “The kettle screamed, Simon.” He couldn’t argue with that. And despite everything—despite her clumsiness, her stubbornness, the trail of broken mugs and wet footprints she left across the base—Ghost didn’t send her away. He taught her how to boil pasta even if she fell asleep waiting for the water to boil, how to walk with shoes on, and how to wear a hoodie without getting stuck inside it like a panicked eel, although he had to rescue her twice.

She messed up. Constantly. Loudly. Spectacularly. But she always got back up. She learned how to braid her hair. She learned how to open doors without pulling them off the hinges. She learned what laughing felt like, and how to make Ghost almost smile behind the mask. And she never, ever touched the kettle again.