Time stretches out around me, shapeless, vast. Hours pass, and then a day. I ache for water. I hate the sun. I grieve for people I’m not sure are dead but probably are. I also huddle where Pavoya once sat because depending on which way the raft is facing, the fragment of hull that juts up casts a small shadow. It’s also something to lean against.
That night the stars seem unusually bright and low. It’s as if electric uppy lights dangle on wires around the raft. I lie on my back and watch the wind ripple through them, making them sway in unison.
I feel alone, but maybe I’m not. The Water Goddess could surround me. She could be in every wave, in every drop of the tide. If so, that would mean she’s holding me up, cradling me, carrying me along.
Hugging the floatvest, I whisper. “Mother Tide.” And what did Sir Mauricen call her in Beth? “Oro-Lemah.”
As if answering me, the stars glow brighter and brighter, until it’s almost as if they blaze down daylight. I squint. The tidewater has also become thick and cloudy like seaweed milk. Then silently, even though water pours off of her in great torrents, the Water Goddess rises out of the waves, huge, terrible, and beautiful. She’s larger than the Trident, and she bears sharp, gleaming teeth and the fins on her elbows stretch out like sails. She looks down at me, calm and serene.
I feel a rush of love and bone-deep comfort, and I feel as if I could ask her for anything. When I open my mouth, though, I find I can’t speak, and yet I feel my wishes being drawn from my heart, unspooling in a way that is purer and more honest than if I used my voice.
The Water Goddess then reaches up into the stars, causing them to shift and ripple as if they float on the surface of a different ocean. And when she brings her hand back down, someone rests on her palm—a person I know.
Melily.
She lies sleeping, perfectly healthy, dressed in a silvery, shimmering gown, and her short, dark curls spread out from her head like a shiny, black halo. The Water Goddess lays her on the raft beside me.
And then slowly, massively, Oro-Lemah leans down. Her face draws nearer, huge and vast, until all I can see are her shimmering, dark eyes, long nose, and sharp, pearly teeth. Is she going to devour us?
I feel a surge of joy.
And then there’s scraping pain in my shoulder again.
And hot sunlight.
And the horrible, scratchy desert that is my tongue, mouth, and throat.
The sky is blinding. The tide goes on forever. But as my vivid dream recedes, I hear a peculiar, soft noise.
I let my head loll to one side, and there sleeping, her skin scratched and covered with angry burns, is Melily.
I open my mouth. It’s impossible.
My insides feel dry and brittle, firewood that could instantly ignite, but I manage to roll weakly toward Melily and put my hand on her arm.
Her skin is warm and peeling in places. She’s really here.
My eyes twinge and twitch, wanting to cry, but I’m so dehydrated tears won’t come.
Is she curled around a ball? No, it’s a waterpod. But what’s a waterpod doing here?
None of this makes sense. Now the rest of my body tries and fails to cry. I gasp ragged breaths.
Melily’s eyes open. “Nerene,” she says, and she sits up. She may be battered, burnt, and covered in splotchy bruises, but she seems to have more energy than I do. “Nerene, oh wonderful, you’re all right.” She hugs me. “I’m so glad. You said some strange things last night. I was worried I hadn’t found you in time.”
I can barely talk. “But… how?” My voice sounds like a crushed, dried kelp leaf.
She gives me a look that seems out of place here on this broken shard of Wanderlea—as if she has a secret—but she says, “Oh, how I survived is really interesting, and you’ll be so shocked, but first you probably need this. Aren’t these what you sludges use for fresh water?” She rolls the waterpod forward, and it’s a large one, nearly the size of a coast melon. It’s surely full of enough liquid to last us a day, maybe even two. “So how do we open it?” she asks.
With an awl, ax, sometimes a knife, or maybe even a sharp stone. But we don’t have any of those things—and really, where did this waterpod come from?
I moan. I’m so close to water, and I still can’t drink it.
“Hmm, maybe a rock?” Melily says suddenly, and a bit stupidly I think, for we won’t find a rock floating on the tide.
But then I think of something more powerful. I hit my leg, trying to show her where the gunnerife is. And oh, it’s so hard to move.
Her eyes brighten. “Of course!”
It takes some thinking to figure out how to fire the gunnerife into the waterpod and not hurt ourselves at the same time. In the end, Melily holds the heavy fruit high with trembling arms, and I summon enough strength to reach up and shoot.
There’s a loud crack, and then fresh water trickles down on us. Thankfully Melily is quick, and she twists the waterpod sideways so that we don’t lose too much of the precious liquid. I laugh scratchily for suddenly everything seems absurd. I’m on a broken piece of steamship with a spoiled uppy who reappeared after vanishing for two, or was it three days? And now we’ve shot a waterpod? I half expect a fringed bear to rise up from the tide and serve us shallowberry cakes.
I’m so weak Melily has to help me drink, holding the waterpod so I can I sip from the hole in the side.
I want to drink a lot, but I stop, coughing, when my stomach begins to hurt.
“Do you want some?” I gasp, wiping my mouth on my arm and feeling bad that I drank first.
She shakes her head. “Nah, I’m fine.” It’s a strange response, but I’m too weak to question it.
After a few more sips, my neck stops feeling like it’s full of crumpled paper, and I’m able to speak more easily.
I keep expecting Melily to vanish. I’m surely losing my sanity, or…
“You’re a siren,” I say, realizing it all at once. “You’re a water siren—like in the stories.”
“I am! And I’m just as surprised as you!” Melily smiles brightly. “I mean, I don’t have a fish tail—I suppose everyone had that part wrong—but otherwise can you believe it?”
“But… but how did you figure it out?” I say.
Melily clunks the waterpod down beside her. “Well, the other night, I was trying to find the saveship for us because I knew it was the only way to survive. And I took off that ridiculous floatvest because I couldn’t move in it, but then there was this other blast, and I woke up way down deep in the tide. It was all dark and cold, and I got scared because my chest was full of water, and that felt awful at first, but then I realized I wasn’t dead or dying, and that I was actually breathing—breathing the water.”
I stare at her in amazement. “And you didn’t know you could do that?”
“No! I mean I’ve always been an extremely good swimmer,” Melily says with a little eye roll as if I should already know that. “But what sort of person tries breathing water? I mean—that would be very stupid.”
I suppose she’s right, and I feel stunned. All the sirens I’ve met don’t just have siren-like wavurl then, they are actual sirens. “So… Lord Osperacy, Douglen, Cressit… all of them, they’re from the tide?” I manage to take another drink from the waterpod. “Do you think they know?”
“Father must,” Melily says, frowning. “I suppose he never told me so that it would be impossible for me to find my true family.”
“Cressit must know too,” I say, feeling freshly betrayed by him, although I do remember him hinting that he had secrets that were too dangerous to share.
“It’s beautiful down there,” Melily says, peering over the edge of the raft. “Like a very expensive painting. But it’s scary too, and you wouldn’t believe the things that tried to eat me. And you know how your eyes adjust to the dark? It’s like my whole body did that in the water. I could see and hear differently, and I wasn’t as cold as I probably should have been. And there are all these little currents down t
here, and when I found the right ones, I swam really quickly.”
I’m happy she’s made such an interesting discovery about herself, but I also feel like everything I know to be true has tipped onto its side. For a while we sit quietly, rocking up and down on the waves and leaning against the jagged triangle of decking. I drink more from the waterpod, which Melily must have brought up from the flooded deeplands. It’s strange to imagine her swimming down there through the icy darkness.
“It was hard to find you,” Melily eventually says. “I almost gave up. I just hoped your raft was following the same currents I was, and then, there you were—a tiny smudge, way up on the surface.”
“Did you see any other sirens?” I ask, wondering if they would be kind to her or not, and wondering if they’d be kind to me. I try to imagine the hidden places where they live, curious about how they dress and where they sleep. I also think of the ancient artwork I saw in Beth’s museum, of the people on the mountain, the people in the deeplands, and the mysterious people who seemed to be standing in a lake—those must have been sirens. Long ago, maybe we were all friends.
“What’s this?” Melily asks, picking up the framed ink drawing.
“It was Pavoya’s.” My heart feels heavy thinking of him. “He might have drawn it himself; I don’t know. He died.”
“I don’t know if Sharles reached a saveship either,” Melily says somberly, handing back Pavoya’s ink drawing and wiping wet eyes. “I swam around the wreckage for a long time, trying to find him, but I couldn’t.”
It’s hard to muster up sadness for Sharles, but I’m sorry Melily is grieving, and he certainly didn’t deserve to die—no one on the Wanderlea did.
Melily swims back into the depths of the tide for another waterpod, and this time she returns with a sharp rock to smash it with. She leaps up out of the water in a powerful, graceful way, landing on the raft with the waterpod in her arms, but then she spends a few moments gagging, coughing, and spitting up a lot of water—and I suppose she’s emptying her lungs. “That part isn’t as much fun,” she tells me in a strangled voice when she can finally breathe air again.
She kindly dives down a second time and returns with several huge kelp leaves that are far larger than the kelp leaves we have in Saltpool. First we lie beneath them as if they are wet, leathery blankets. Then when they’re dry, we create crude, wide-brimmed hats for shade. Melily quickly gets an angry, red sunburn. And although my brown, freckled skin usually takes a while to burn, after two days of unrelenting sunshine, it’s tender and peeling.
“Can you catch us something to eat?” I ask.
“I’ve tried,” Melily says. “But it’s so hard! Just imagine trying to grab a diver rabbit with your hands. Small fish and amphibs are really fast. Large ones are really fast and dangerous.” Her leaf hat can’t block out all of the bright sunlight, and her skin seems to glow yellow-green. “Also, ew, I don’t want to hold a fish. It would be squirmy and disgusting.”
“Can you drink the tidewater?” I ask.
She looks thoughtful. “I don’t think I need to drink when I’m breathing the water. I only feel thirsty up here.” Adjusting her leaf hat, she sighs heavily. “Do you think we’ll be found?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But do you want to be rescued? You belong somewhere down there, and your family’s there too.”
Melily frowns. “Well, I haven’t seen any sirens yet. And… I don’t know. I don’t think I’m ready to stop living up here. All the things I like are up here. You’re up here.”
And she says it so casually, but it almost makes me cry. “Well, I think we’re still in the trade currents,” I say. “So that means thousands of steamships travel this way. Hopefully we’ll be found.” It’s hard to be positive though. I haven’t seen anything but endless tidewater since the Wanderlea sank. I also wonder if that’s why the ocean is so empty below us. Maybe the sirens avoid the trade routes.
That night, the air is cold and we huddle close together, and in the morning, Melily does catch a fat, yellow fish. She breaks the surface of the tide making a very odd, yet happy, shrieking noise while holding her prize high in the air. She’s so proud of herself that—after she hacks up a great deal of water—she gives me a detailed account of how she slowly swam over and surprised the fish, snatching it with both hands. I do the unpleasant work of killing our meal, while Melily covers her eyes. Then I cut the fish up as best I can with the sharp rock, and we eat it raw, which is something I’m more used to than Melily. She looks ill but is hungry enough to eat her share. “I mean I’ve eaten raw fish before in fine cookery houses,” she says. “But those are marinated or seared, and there are, you know, really tasty sauces and things.”
For the rest of the day, we weave and build a better shelter. Melily gathers armfuls of reeds, and each time she swims down out of my sight, I’m nervous. She could be attacked by a shark or dragged off by something worse, and who’s to say that if she did meet sirens, they’d be nice to her? They might trap her and keep her down there, or even kill her.
I see a group of fur-covered amphibs swimming in the distance once while Melily is down gathering reeds. I think they might be fog raccoons, and I wonder if I could shoot one with the gunnerife. If they come closer, I’ll try. I also spot a ship, but it’s too far away to shout to, and it soon vanishes.
A storm gusts in a day later. It first unfurls dark clouds on the horizon, then as it prowls closer, it rumbles thunder at us and lashes out jagged wires of lightning. And when Melily says, “Just keep your head above the water, and I’ll keep us together,” I know it’s going to be bad. At least I still have my floatvest.
The wind hits first, an invisible wall that not only rips away our reed shelter but then maliciously shreds it, twisting it off into the dark sky. The water turns on us next, rising in sharp blades that curl and slam into our raft. I hug Pavoya’s ink drawing to my chest with one arm, as I also cling to the upright, triangular shard of our raft and splutter and cough out the saltwater that keeps slapping into me.
“Let go of it!” Melily shouts over the waves, eyeing the frame.
“No!” I howl back.
But when our raft flips over, I’m plunged into forceful whorls of water that rip the drawing out of my arms anyway. I can’t even cry out with sadness because my mouth fills with water. Hands grab my ankle and then my left arm, and I’m hauled in a direction I think is upward. My head breaks the surface of the water, thanks to both Melily and the floatvest, and I gulp in air as the storm keeps stirring the ocean up into watery cliffs.
Melily clings to my arm, shouting, “Ship! There’s a ship!”
And yes! I also see red and white lights glancing off the ragged surface of the water.
“Help! Help!” Melily cries. “Please!”
I join her with wordless screams—the loudest noises I can muster. Waves keep smashing over us with the lung-popping force of felled kelp trees, but no matter how many times I’m forced underwater, Melily somehow finds me, and with the help of my floatvest, yanks me upward again.
The ship moves closer and closer until it looms like a mountain over us, blotting out the dark clouds and sounding like a mechanical giant. Melily and I keep yelling, our cries growing hoarse and frantic, but finally, miraculously, distant voices shout back.
And even more amazing, ropes and ringfloats drop down. We struggle toward the white circles as lights skip over the waves, surely searching for us. A saveship lowers with impressive speed and burly shipsmen haul us into it. Then as Melily and I shiver and cling to each other, shipsmen winch the swaying little boat back up the side of the massive hull.
Once we’re on board, the crew hurries us across the wet deck into an unfamiliar, large gathery. The bearded shipsmen then wrap blankets around our wet shoulders and speak to us excitedly in an unfamiliar language.
The man with the biggest beard seems to be the captain, and thankfully, he speaks Equitorian. “First catch of the day, huh?” he booms.
That�
�s when I stumble and fall. The maybe-captain grabs me and barks something in the unknown language to the rest of the shipsmen. Two younger crew members then help Melily and me down stairs to a small cabin. One brings us some soup while the other bandages my shoulder, then they leave us alone to rest.
“That was incredible,” Melily says. “Did you see me swimming through that storm? I’m so good at being a siren.”
And I’m glad she’s feeling proud, but for some reason, even though we’ve been rescued, I don’t feel relief—I feel despair. At first I’m not sure why. We’re much safer than we were hours ago. But after lying in my cot for a while with sadness clinging to me more tightly than ever, I finally understand.
Sande is surely dead.
After what I just went through—and I had Melily to help me—I don’t think he could have survived.
Tears collect in my eyes, and I try to cry quietly, but I can’t.
Melily shifts, and I tense, expecting her to tell me to be quiet. Instead though, she surprises me by saying, “What’s wrong?”
“Sande is dead,” I say between sobs. “He has to be.”
And just like I cradled her when she cried about Sharles, Melily crawls into my cot and wraps her arms around me.
After a quiet day of recovery, Melily and I learn that we are still traveling to Leistelle. Melily says this isn’t surprising because Leistelle was the next major city currentways when we were on the Wanderlea. She also says that even though it felt like we were stranded on the tide for a long time, we probably didn’t drift that far.
Therefore we arrive in Leistelle about two days after we’re rescued, and ringed with walls, the city reminds me of Varasay. The walls here seem both older than Varasay’s and more imposing, though. They are made out of huge, tide-rounded, deepland rocks, and I see spikes and plenty of towers with stern, pointed roofs. The city is also surrounded by smaller islands with similar rocky defenses. Inside those walls though, stand tall green trees and simple kelpwood buildings. I ask Melily why the city is so fortified, but she doesn’t know. “I never pay attention to boring politics,” she says.
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