It wasn’t scales. It wasn’t skin. It was rubber. A huge industrial pipeline, slick with algae and stained brown-green from months underwater. The thing that had looked like a monster in the dark was really just a massive length of industrial tubing that had broken loose and drifted upward where it never should have been.
One of the workers explained that it had come free from its restraints farther along the riverbed. Trapped air inside the line had been forcing its way out in strange bursts, creating the eerie groaning sound Joaquim had heard in the dark.
The broken hardware had floated up. And the current had done the rest. For a few seconds, nobody said anything. Then someone laughed. It was the kind of laugh that only comes after fear has nowhere else to go.
Because if you had seen only part of that thing rise beside your boat before sunrise… you would have thought exactly what Joaquim thought too.