The Weight of Glass

The submersible, *Ares*, groaned, a familiar, metallic complaint against the crushing blackness outside. Leo watched the sonar display, a faint green heartbeat, his fingers tight on the stick. Beside him, Clara adjusted her headset, her profile etched by the console's glow, pale and sharp. Two hundred meters down. The Mariana Trench was less a destination and more a tomb, but for them, for a decade now, it had been a calling. Their calling, once. Now it just felt like another job, another expensive, silent trip into the dark, trying to find something whole in the shattered parts of the world.

Then, it shimmered. Not a blip, not a shadow, but a sudden, impossible bloom on the main viewport. Clara gasped, a small, involuntary sound that still made the hairs on Leo's neck prickle. It was always like this, the first sight of it. The sunken city, built entirely of some strange, bioluminescent crystal, catching the *Ares*'s powerful floodlights. Spires, domes, arches, all impossibly delicate and impossibly ancient. A city of pure glass, suspended in the abyssal current, reflecting their own small, contained world back at them. Clara leaned closer, her breath fogging the viewport for a second, then clearing. He knew what she saw: a miracle. He knew what he saw: another thing that needed mapping, cataloging, protecting. A job.

He felt her gaze, a weight, even before she spoke. "Clara, maintain bearing. Five degrees starboard." His voice was flat, professional. It had been years since he'd called her anything else in the sub. Years since he'd reached for her hand, just because. She didn't respond, just shifted, a sigh escaping, silent inside their helmets. He could almost hear the thoughts clanging around in her head, the ones about how this place was supposed to fix things, to make them remember. Remember the starry-eyed PhD students who’d met in a dusty archives, dreaming of the deep, dreaming of each other.

A jolt. A sudden, sharp shudder ran through the *Ares*. Red warning lights flared across the auxiliary panel. "What the hell?" Leo barked, his calm cracking. The sub listed, pulled sideways, brushing against something unseen. A faint scratching sound, like fingernails on a chalkboard, vibrated through the hull. He wrestled the controls, fighting the current, fighting whatever unseen snagged them. "Pressure seal integrity dropping, port side!" Clara's voice, suddenly sharp, cut through the comms. Her hands flew across her own panel, faster than he’d seen them move in months. The glass city outside seemed to mock them, its crystalline spires momentarily reflecting their own frantic faces.

"Hold on, I'm bringing us up," Leo grunted, sweat beading on his forehead. The scratching grew louder, then abruptly stopped. The *Ares* stabilized, though the red light stubbornly glowed. He saw it then, through the viewport, a long, thin scratch across the thick, reinforced glass. A crystalline shard, broken off from one of the city's impossibly sharp structures, had scraped them. "Damn it, Leo! We're lucky that wasn't worse!" Clara snapped, her voice tight with fear and something else. Resentment, maybe. "You were distracted, weren't you? Thinking about… whatever it is you think about down here." Her words were a colder, deeper cut than the shard.

He didn't answer, just ran diagnostics, his jaw tight. He knew what she was talking about. He always knew. The quiet, the long stretches of silence between them, the hollowed-out feeling that had settled in their small apartment, in their even smaller sub. It wasn't just the pressure of the ocean that was getting to them. He remembered the first time they’d seen a coral reef, years ago, on their honeymoon dive. Her hand in his, warm and sure. The way her eyes had widened, full of a joy that was infectious, beautiful. He’d kissed her right there, underwater, through their regulators. A clumsy, wet, perfect kiss. He didn’t even know how to begin getting that back.

"We need to surface. Now," Clara said, her voice softer, almost pleading. "This isn't worth it." Her gaze met his, not angry now, but tired. So tired. He looked at the infinite, impossible beauty of the glass city, its fragile perfection, and then at the faint, star-shaped crack that had spiderwebbed across *their* viewport from the collision. Not the main hull, just the outer layer, thank God, but it was there, a flaw in their protective bubble. He thought about the risk, the fragile barrier between them and oblivion, and then he thought about the barrier between them and each other. He took his hand off the stick. "Alright, Clara. Let's go home."

He engaged the ballast tanks, the *Ares* shuddering as it began its slow ascent. The city of glass, once so dazzling, began to recede, swallowing itself back into the inky black. The red warning light still glowed. Clara just sat there, her shoulders slumped, her eyes fixed on the retreating lights of the crystalline ruins. He reached out, slowly, his fingertips brushing the back of her gloved hand. She didn't flinch away. She didn't squeeze back either, just let his fingers rest there, a feather-light touch, lost in the vast, cold space of their sealed chamber.