FLUENT IN FORBIDDEN — CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"The clock has struck three, the coffee is cold, and the shadows are beginning to speak. Welcome back to the desk of The Night Writer, where the stories are brewed in the dark. Tonight, we find that the hardest part of surviving an explosion isn't the fire—it’s the silence that follows when the world stops burning and starts waiting."

​The fire was a memory now, an orange smudge on the black velvet of the horizon. The Odyssey had taken its secrets to the seabed, leaving us in a rubber life-raft that felt less like a vessel and more like a floating coffin. The ocean was no longer a highway; it was a hungry, rhythmic beast, breathing beneath us in slow, nauseating swells.

​I sat at the stern, my hands raw from the salt and the rope, clutching the emergency paddle like a talisman. Across from me, Julian was huddled with Layla. The "Prince of the House of Elias" was gone. In his place was a shivering man in a soaked tuxedo shirt, his teeth chattering a frantic code against the cold.

​"They'll have seen the flare," Julian whispered, his voice barely audible over the slap of water against the raft's sides. "They'll have seen the explosion. Mansour isn't the type to assume we're dead. He's the type to count the teeth in the ashes."

​"Let him count," I said, though my own chest felt like it was lined with lead. "By the time he realizes we aren't among the debris, we need to be within the perimeter of the Trench. The fog is our only ally now. It confuses the radar."

​Layla stirred, her small face pale and ghost-like in the moonlight. "Mikael? Is the fire gone?"

​"It's gone, Layla," I said, softening my voice. "We’re just drifting now. Like a message in a bottle."

​"But who is going to find us?" she asked.

​That was the question I didn't want to translate. In this part of the sea, being found was often worse than being lost.
​I pulled the blue folder from my vest. The plastic was slick, and the weight of it felt immense—not just the physical weight of the paper, but the gravitational pull of the names written inside. I thought about Elias’s face when I’d showed him the footage. I thought about the car "accident" that had claimed his parents. The family business wasn't just shipping and logistics; it was a slaughterhouse built on the foundations of silence.

​"You're looking at it again," Julian noted, his eyes tracking the folder. "The map to the end of the world."

​"It’s not a map, Julian. It’s a confession," I corrected. "Your brother didn't just let that car be tampered with. He provided the schematics for the brake lines. He didn't just inherit the empire; he executed the previous administration."

​Julian closed his eyes, a single tear tracing a path through the salt-grime on his cheek. "I knew he was cold. I knew he was ambitious. But to kill our parents for a seat at a table that Mansour owns anyway? It’s a pathetic kind of evil."

​"The most dangerous kind," I added. "Because a man who will kill his own blood for a middle-management position in a coup is a man who has nothing left to lose. He's not running a company anymore; he's running a crime scene."

​The raft dipped sharply into a trough, and a spray of icy water hit us. I looked toward the bow. The fog was thickening, turning from a mist into a solid, grey wall. And then, I heard it. Not the whine of an interceptor's turbine, but something older. Something heavier.
​A rhythmic, metallic thud-thud-thud. The sound of a heavy-duty pump.

​"Stay down," I hissed, pushing Julian and Layla toward the center of the raft.
​A shadow began to coalesce within the fog. It wasn't sleek like Mansour’s boats. it was a jagged, towering silhouette of rusted iron and protruding cranes. A "Dead Ship"—one of the massive oil tankers that had been abandoned in the Trench years ago, now used as floating outposts for the very people we were looking for.

​"Is that... a city?" Layla breathed, looking up at the tiers of rusted decks that seemed to touch the clouds.

​"No," I said, grabbing the hook-rope from the raft's emergency kit. "That's the front door."

​A single red light flickered high above us on the tanker’s hull. A signal. They knew we were here. They had been watching us drift for miles. In the Trench, nothing happens by accident. Everything is a transaction.

​"Mikael," Julian said, grabbing my wrist as I prepared to signal back. "The people on that ship... do they know you?"

​"They know my work," I said, looking him dead in the eye. "And they know that I never come to them unless I’m bringing something they can use. Today, I’m bringing them the downfall of a kingdom. I think that’s worth a night’s lodging."

​As a rusted metal basket began to descend from the heights of the tanker, creaking and groaning on a grease-blackened chain, I realized that we weren't just fugitives anymore. We were the new architects of the chaos.

​I looked at the folder, then at the girl, then at the broken prince.

​"Welcome to the second act, Julian," I whispered. "Try not to forget your lines."

​"Daylight is coming to claim the quiet, but these words stay with you. We have left the fire for the rust, and the ocean for a fortress of iron. But in the Trench, the only thing cheaper than life is the truth. Can Mikael navigate a world where there are no dictionaries, only demands?

​If you enjoyed this journey into the midnight hours, leave a heart or a tip to keep the candles burning. The story is rising from the depths, and it’s hungry.

​Sleep well—if you can.

​— The Night Writer."