One shoe was completely undone and kicked aside. The second shoe was nearly gone.
If Arahab had noticed, she did not comment. She only raised her head again, pushing up on her hands and baring her beautiful wet throat to Bernice, who had no weapon to push against it. And perhaps there was sorrow after all. She knew how to make the mortal sound of it, if not the shape.
I want to know this, child. If you tell me this, and if you speak the answer truly, then I may yet find some mercy in my heart. I may yet conclude that there is use for you, and hope for you. I would prefer to believe as much, because I have loved you, too, and wished for your companionship.
“What?” Bernice asked in a voice that was midway between a gasp and a whimper. Her other shoe was off, and her bare feet squished the exposed ocean floor between her toes.
Did he plan this with you, too? Was he willing to see me dead, and replaced, or did you tell him some sweet lie to deceive him? From you, I will accept and believe treachery, and it is a nuisance to me, but little more. From him, it would break my heart.
Bernice shook her head slowly, back and forth to mask the motion of her feet stepping away from the shoes. The tears swung away, dripping down her cheekbones and joining the rest of the salt water that pooled and puddled in the space around her.
“Is that all it comes down to? I can’t kill you or become you, so there’s no place for me in your heart or in your plans except as pet or princess?”
Arahab used her starfish eyes to glare down hard. Did you do this alone, or did he conspire with you? She asked it carefully, slowly. A letter at a time.
Bernice couldn’t look Mother in the eye. She tried, but her neck wouldn’t crane back that far and her eyes were snagged by the sight of the small bronze shell, swirling and dipping in the place where Arahab’s heart should be. She reached out her hand and could almost touch it, where an enormous breast came down, almost to the waterline. She reached for the shell like a baby stretches out its fingers for a rattle.
Arahab misunderstood, and softened her crouching, looming stance above the woman at the edge of the shore; and as she dropped her tremendous body down low, Bernice’s hand pressed against the false flesh. Her fingertips pushed past the surface tension that passed for skin, and she grasped the frilled end of the call.
With a swift jerk, she pulled it free.
Arahab felt the little theft. She swiveled her head, and when she shifted her position, sliding and rotating in the water, Bernice was able to meet her eyes after all.
“He did it with me,” she said without blinking. “It was his idea.”
And then she turned, one heel slurping at the sodden sand, and she ran.
Her feet pounded fast even where the water curled, bubbled, and slapped around them. Arahab had made her daughter strong and swift. A torrent of fast, irrational options sloshed through Bernice’s mind as she pumped her feet one after the other, driving them down into the wet earth and knowing that every drop of water meant that the danger was still close behind.
The world has many deserts; there are huge continents with land for miles and miles, and no water anywhere to be found. I am not like José. I don’t need the water to live. I never even liked it very much. I can run farther than she can chase me. . . .
But first she’d have to get away, and—
Arahab’s longest tendril-like finger looped itself around Bernice’s ankle and pulled her down hard. Facedown she dragged the woman back into the surf, and then she lifted her up out of the water, higher and farther than Bernice had ever been in her life.
This is what balloons see.
And then Arahab hurled her back down into the water. The blow was not a splash but a slap that would have flattened an elephant.
Bernice did not see stars.
The force of the blow from sky to sea had blinded her; her face was seared by the salt and smashed by the pressure. She couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t even tell if her eyes were open or closed. Her hand was closed, around the shell. It bit into her skin and carved the muscles with its ridges.
Arahab lifted her again, and there it was once more—the sky, and she was in it. Blue and white and so thin, so high that it was hard to breathe. The seconds stretched into hours. They sprawled out in front of her, and when her vision cleared enough that she could peer down onto the shore and into the trees and over them, people were running and pointing. None of them were any bigger than baby mice, pink and scattering.
Down.
The second blow was harder because it was brought down from higher, and Arahab had worked up enough steam to be angrier still. Bernice gasped, and was astonished that she could do so. She sucked in air and was shocked that she still had lungs to hold it. She couldn’t feel them, after all.
Up.
Her eyes were open, because she could not close them. She couldn’t remember how to do it. But when she could see anything at all, it was shot through with lightning and fire. Everything was backlit as if the sun were shining behind it, so the details were foggy.
Over there, cars were straggling slowly along roads that looked like strips of sugar scraped into the ground with a spoon. Over there, the tops of the trees were green and furry; and in the other direction she saw a strange, lumbering beast that moved fast for its size and shape.
Down.
Smashed, and crushed. Her bones had turned to powder in her skin, or so it felt. All vision in her right eye went dark as the side of her face caved against the surface, and she didn’t even feel it.
She didn’t feel the shell anymore, either—even though it had crushed itself through the bones in her hand. It did not matter how tightly she’d been holding it before. Now she couldn’t let go of it if she tried.
She felt her body rise again. There was a shift in height and temperature, but she was so far beyond pain that it didn’t matter what came next.
Through her remaining eye, and through the bloodshot and lightning haze of its faulty signals, she saw the lumbering monster running. It was trying to catch up with something smaller and swifter, with smooth gray-white skin and hair that spun and swung like a cloud of angry snakes. The running was familiar. The gait struck some chord of memory in Bernice’s scrambled and ruined head.
It’s Nia, she thought in an addled, half-amused burp of lucidity. Coming to—
Drawbacks of Rescue
Nia didn’t slow down to gape at the gigantic human-shaped monster with tentacle hands. It would have been easy to stare, because it loomed high above the trees, flinging its appendage and snapping it skyward like a whip—pulling something up and slapping it down again into the water with a crash she could hear even half a mile away.
But she glanced up every now and again. She couldn’t help it. The thing in the water was so big that it ate up a corner of the sky; it covered the horizon line, and yet she was charging toward it.
So she kept her head down as much as she could, and she ran through the trees, one arm held out to smack away branches and both legs pumping and pounding.
She had no idea how fast she was going. The trees slapped and scraped past her with a stinging force.
Never before had she been able to move so quickly. She’d been quick once, but now she was strong and quick, and the difference moved her through the woods with the speed of a javelin.
Behind her, something heavier came after her.
It had to be Mossfeaster.
It was calling her, urging her to wait, to listen, but she was moving too fast with too much determination. She knew where the call had gone. She knew who was wielding it, and who wanted it, and what she wanted it for, and Nia did not slow down partly because she wasn’t sure she knew how. The inertia of her movement thrust her legs without any thinking behind it, and the sheer force of the speed was carrying her forward more than any real intention.
She burst free from the tree line and pitched herself onto the beach.
The sudden shift from turf to partially powdered sand slowed her with sud
denness and pain. She tumbled forward, thrown from her rhythm and confounded by the new terrain.
It was strangely dark, there on the beach in the middle of the afternoon. The shadow Arahab cast pitched the strip of sand into dusk. But the shadow undulated as she moved, and speedy, broken rays of light cut through her gestures and scattered on the water.
Now Nia could stare. How could she not?
The goddess was taller than any building she’d ever seen, and wider than any whale or elephant she’d ever heard of. She was made of water as if it were poured into her skin, which was loosely held in the shape of an angry woman the size of a storm cloud. Where eyes should be, there were bright gold slits with streaks of red; where her fingers should be, there were boneless, twisting tentacles with spurs and suckers as big as tree stumps.
And in one hand there was something small and limp. When Arahab held it up to smash it down again, something caught a passing sliver of sunlight and glinted a warning flash of light.
Arahab held it aloft and smashed it down onto the water’s surface with a furious, flailing motion. She beat the thing the way a child knocks a toy against the ground if it breaks, or commits some imagined transgression. She crushed it against the water from the full height of her extraordinary reach, and Nia found herself hoping for decency’s sake that whatever it was, it wasn’t alive.
Mossfeaster stopped behind her. Flecks of dried leaves scattered where he stood, and clods of earth dripped away to the lighter-colored sand. He wasn’t panting, because he didn’t need to breathe, but the rattled flaking of his decaying form created the same effect.
“It’s there, in her hand.”
“That thing she’s beating?”
“That thing she’s beating is your cousin. She is holding something very important in her hand, the little thief. She’s cunning and arrogant, but ignorant, too. Forget her. Arahab will have killed her momentarily; we need only the trinket the girl clasps—and I’ll tell you, I’m impressed that she’s held it this long.”
“Bernice?” Nia almost called her name loudly, hoping to be heard. She changed her mind and said it as a question to her companion instead.
“Bernice, if that was her name. Whatever she’s holding—”
“If it was her name?”
“Look at her,” it said, and it was backing away, into the trees again. Arahab’s knuckle-less fingers were nearing the ground again. “She’s dead. Her corpse has such tenacity. She must have been—”
Mossfeaster might’ve said more if it hadn’t retreated under the threat of the water witch’s fist.
Nia did not. She watched the hand with its curly, slick fingers come whistling toward the water, and she again saw a spark of sun catch something bright and small. She leaped forward, onto the wet sand where the tide ought to be, and she dived headlong.
But Bernice hit the water with the smacking crack of a cannon being snapped in two; and a tidal wave coursed out in concentric rings, lunging away from the point of impact. One such traveling ring of water caught Nia square in the face and carried her back to the edge where the sand was dry. The sand stuck against her skin, powdering her down like a biscuit on a baker’s countertop.
Before she could fully halt, she got up again and dashed back to the water . . . where she was spotted by the hulking creature who was drawing stares, screams, and frantic summons from people near and far.
She could’ve been a storm, localized and shocking. She might’ve been a waterspout, swirling and thrashing over the water. She was losing her shape in her fury, not dissolving or falling apart but simply unwinding into a nebulous, angry form that lashed with whiplike appendages and lunged with the weight of the ocean.
Nia had no idea what to do, but she had a target—the glimmering slice of light that twitched, jerked, and intermittently disappeared as the water monster flung it to and fro.
There was a rhythm to the movement—up, back, and down in a lassoing circle.
Nia timed her jump, and then—just as she was ready to leap—the swinging rope of Arahab’s boneless arm flopped to a halt. It dropped its load down onto the sand a few feet away from the crouching girl, formerly made of stone and presently scared speechless.
The gigantic lump of water held still and quivered around the edges. Although it had no physical eyes, Nia was certain that it was staring at her. She hunkered in its immense black shadow, poised to jump or to run.
Bernice was only a few feet away from her. It was once Bernice, anyway, that broken sac of skin and crumbled bones too pulverized to bleed. From the corner of her eye, Nia saw the pile of shattered parts move. It was a convulsive gesture made by a body too weak to convulse. And in its hand, pierced through it and smashed against it, was a brown-gold shell.
The mass of water was shrinking, splashing itself down to a size more conducive to communicating with a creature that was barely over five feet tall. Arahab decompressed and reformed smaller, but still larger than Nia. The water witch retreated until her torso was the size of Nia’s body, and she stayed out in the surf a few yards away.
She was not afraid. But she was very, very interested.
What is this? she asked.
Nia was too frightened to rise up. She lingered on the sand, knees bent and one hand outstretched, bracing herself in case she needed to fly. “I’m . . . ,” and she didn’t know what else to say.
Arahab cocked her head and her eyes were back, all translucent and white. You’re not any kind of theirs. She waved a hand at the ambulance, where Sam was climbing inside, trying to hide.
Nia could see him at the edge of her peripheral vision. She didn’t dare look at him, lest she give Arahab an excuse to pay more direct attention.
“No,” Nia agreed with a shuddering cringe. “I’m not any kind of theirs.”
And you’re not any kind of mine.
“No, I’m not any kind of yours.”
Arahab turned her attention to the gurgling pulp that lay on the sand, now in the water. As the creature reduced her bulk, the water table rose back to its usual level and there was less sand and more waves. Bernice was moving, shaking herself left and right. It sounded like pebbles and pasta shifting in a wet leather bag.
“She’s healing?” Nia said, because that’s what it looked like to her.
She’s healing, but she’ll never mend. You’re like her, aren’t you?
“More like her than you. More like her than them.” Nia indicated the shore, where the first astonished trickles of a crowd were coming together. “I guess,” she added.
What are you, small thing?
She tore her eyes away from Arahab and openly stared at Bernice. It seemed like she was coming back together—re-forming in her skin.
You do not answer me? Arahab asked, but the question didn’t sound altogether offended or aggressive. And when Nia continued to stare at Bernice, the water witch drew her own conclusions. You do not answer me, because you do not know.
Nia nodded at her. “Is she . . . can I look at her?”
Arahab made no move to stop her or intervene, so Nia half walked, half crawled over to her cousin. She put her hand under the other girl’s shoulders and used her hand like a spatula turning a pancake.
Bernice rolled and flapped onto her back, there where the water was almost deep enough to let her float.
The right side of her head was caved in down to the bridge of her nose, but it was trying to puff itself back out again. Her mouth was stripped of skin and her naked teeth knocked against each other as her body swayed in the rippling small waves.
I know you, Arahab said.
“You don’t,” Nia argued softly, and without any bite.
She corrected herself. I remember you. You were in the water, the night I took this one. You refused me. I told you my name, because you asked.
Nia nodded, agreeing to that much. “She’s my cousin,” she said, as if it offered some explanation for everything.
But you drowned.
“No, I didn’t.” r />
But I did not preserve you. Arahab was working her way closer, not swooping exactly, and not creeping. She was gliding, cutting through the water without displacing it. She moved as smoothly as a marble on a mirror.
Nia reached down to Bernice’s hand, the one that clutched the shell. The shell had been so thoroughly pounded into her flesh that there was no disentangling it now. It would have to be cut away more than pried.
Bernice’s other hand came up, flapping out of the water. The bones were not yet repaired and they gave her arm a disjointed, monstrous look; but they were strong enough to grasp at Nia’s shirt. “Save me,” she sputtered, and it was hard to understand. Some of her letters were missing, because she didn’t yet have lips again to shape them. “Trying to save the world. Take me with you.”
She betrayed me, Arahab dispassionately confirmed. But she is wicked, and she would betray you, too. Again, as she did before.
“You wouldn’t let me bring her, anyway—would you?”
No. Not now, when I want you to stay. I want to know what you are. If you don’t know, or will not tell me, then I wish to learn for myself.
“No,” Nia said back. “No, I can’t stay here with you.”
Arahab nodded, but it was not in agreement with Nia. Yes. You can. She slithered up closer, close enough that Nia could have sneezed on her. She took one properly hand-shaped appendage and extended it to Nia’s face.
Nia tried not to flinch or back away, but it was not like letting Mossfeaster hold her on the ferry. It was not like lying in pain in a bed of grass and leaves; this was being touched by something wet and shapeless, but firm and grotesque. Arahab’s fingers felt like the arms of an octopus looked, and when she ran those fingers along Nia’s skin, they left a trail of saltwater slime.