Sirens and Scales

by Kellie McAllen

  Like I needed any more convincing. What does it look like I’m doing, you big blue bully? Maybe if you’d actually let me get on with it, I could make some progress. Put Riles back on.

  But the tones had possessed the headset, and it would seem they were there to stay.

  I pulled the headset off and thrust it back toward my middleman assistant. “There are whale sounds coming through.”

  Frowning, he took a listen. “Riles? Are you there?” Adjusting the settings, he tried again, to no avail. He toggled more dials, flipped more switches. I grew impatient watching him struggle, recognizing quickly that it was no use. He was battling the metaphysical. My Abyssal curse. I thought about interrupting him, but he wouldn’t hear me, with the headphones over his ears. And what would I say? Excuse me, sir, but don’t bother trying. The whales have come for me, and they won’t take no for an answer.

  So I twiddled my thumbs, tapped the heel of my boot against the chair. Tried not to pull out my hair while he went about troubleshooting. I decided to dub the man ‘Salty’, since he hadn’t bothered to volunteer his name. No doubt he figured we wouldn’t be acquainted long enough for me to need it.

  Finally, exasperated, he gave up. “Stay here,” he said, and stalked from the cabin.

  Well, at least I was on board a ship. That was one stepping stone, checked off my list. I swiveled back and forth in my chair while I waited for Salty to return, twirling a springy lock of hair around my finger.

  Eventually he came back, looking more frazzled than when he left. “Communications with the Salt Queen are down on all fronts. As a precaution, we’re heading out to check her status. Looks like you get your wish. Sit tight, don’t touch anything, and in half an hour you get one face-to-face with Riles, if she’s not too busy to see you. But if what you have doesn’t impress her, it’s straight back to shore and you won’t be getting another audience. Clear?”

  Crystal-shmystal. “Sure thing, Salty,” I said before I could catch myself, and didn’t miss the look of chagrin that shadowed his face. I cleared my throat. “That is, sir.” Sir Salty. I bit back a snort, resolving to assume my best behavior. I couldn’t blow this. Against my better judgment, I tried to smooth things over. “Didn’t…someone call you Salty? I might have heard wrong.”

  “The name’s George,” he clarified, nipping that in the bud.

  Well, that wasn’t nearly as much fun. But George it would be. “Ahoy then, George. Anchors away!”

  Unamused by my lingo, he gestured for me to follow him out. “You can join me on deck as we ready to make way.”

  Oh jeepers, could I? Now that I was officially on the water, the Thalassophile in me was reawakening, and longed to soak up the essence of the ocean like a sponge.

  That other part of me still wanted to punch a few waves in their faces, but I could get to that after a nice, deep, salty French kiss.

  6

  The sea ran at me with far-flung, open arms, its smile horizon-wide, its laughter a breathy spray of foam on my chest and warm gust of tropical wind in my face. It was glorious. I felt like we could pick up right where we left off, without missing a beat. Except for the tiny little thing that had scared me away from the water and everything to do with it in the first place, all those years ago. I could not just forget about that.

  Accept that I couldn’t outdistance it, sure. Fine. But I could not just pretend that there wasn’t a kernel of terror lurking underneath my calm, that I hadn’t put on a pair of rose-colored glasses and sat on that screaming teakettle.

  It was there, clawing at my resolve, a rasping hiss urging me to run for the hills. But no hill had proven tall enough to block the tsunami determined to wash me back out to sea. And, to be honest, once I’d caved to the obnoxious Call long enough to give the ocean a piece of my mind in person, every step in that direction had had just a little too much spring in it, like I’d just been waiting for an excuse to plan a reunion.

  Terror mixed with elation had a funny taste to it. Like grapefruit, bittersweet, times a million.

  The sky seemed to mirror my fickle turmoil, clouds forming and darkening as we made the crossing to the Salt Queen’s coordinates. I couldn’t help but take it as an omen, the summery welcome I’d stepped into off the plane evaporating as the deceptive front to reveal the tumultuous conspiracy brooding underneath it all. The ulterior motives that had been using questionable means to lure me here from the start. It had all come to a head now that I was here, either my reckoning for defecting or simply the un-named Abyssal crisis that couldn’t hold itself together any longer.

  Really? A storm? How cliché.

  I didn’t need a storm to reinforce that something momentous was going on out here, that the ocean was in an uproar over some undercurrent of ambiguous events. The powers-that-be were really laying it on thick, weren’t they?

  The cherry on top was the rain as we reached the larger vessel that was our destination. It started as a gentle pitter-patter, and then unleashed its wrath unceremoniously on us like the rush of a dam breaking.

  The floodgates were open, the breath of Atlantis raining down around me.

  I turned my face to the sky, squinting into the downpour. “Is it monsoon season?”

  “Not for another month.”

  People were running about the deck of the Salt Queen, covering things with tarps and trying to get certain equipment out of the rain altogether. Clearly, this particular storm had come on too quickly for anyone to predict.

  I wiped my sleeve across my dripping face, skittering after George who was heading for the other vessel without pause. We boarded the Salt Queen and fell into step beside someone striding about with the air of a supervisor, George exchanging a few words with him and establishing that their communication devices had likewise gone kaput.

  We ran into Riles shortly, and George pawned me off onto her, and suddenly I was skipping to keep up as she barked orders at deckhands, awaiting my chance to cram a word in edgewise. “Hop to it, Ollie. *Something in Dhivehi*. Don’t forget the lens! Get that out of the rain, man! Who are you, again?”

  It took me a moment to realize she’d shifted focus and was addressing me, as if suddenly remembering I was shadowing her.

  “I’m an archaeologist,” I said, getting tired of repeating my persuasive script. It was clear she didn’t have time for all that, anyway. Maybe that was a good thing. Perhaps she’d be distracted enough not to bother challenging me, and I could just slip in under the radar. This storm thing could really work out in my favor. Hey, thanks, storm. “I’m here from Egypt to assist.”

  “I heard something about parallel discoveries within your expedition?”

  Drat it, so she had retained something of the crafty ammo I’d used to get to this point. Well, I’d been prepared to use it then, and if that was my story I was sticking to it. “Um, that’s right. An artifact that bears striking reminiscence to your unearthings here. Come to light within the same timeline. I’m sure it will be of great interest, but we can get to that. For now, is there anything I can do? I can see you were ill-equipped for this impromptu monsoon. Priceless equipment first, scientific jargon later.”

  “Fine. Yes. Help Ollie with those cameras. Of all days to take advantage of the ‘optimal lighting’ up on deck…”

  I didn’t need to be told twice. The sooner I could squirm away from my reckoning and start fitting in with the rest of the crew, the better.

  Ollie, of course, didn’t question whether I belonged. He was grateful for the extra hand, and together we stowed those cameras with what I daresay was unprecedented teamwork. I was determined to become indispensable as quickly as possible.

  ‘Indispensable’ just didn’t happen to cover acts of God, and in the end it was one of those that dispelled me. I’d been right to view the brewing storm as an omen. It blackened and soured until the sky looked like a torrent of volcanic ash covering the sun, and the sea went from sloppy to downright topsy-turvy beneath us.

  Beneath us, all around us,
over the railing of the deck and on top of us. Wind and rain joined forces, wailing and spitting. My clothes were soaked immediately, my hair flung from its knot.

  How quickly my summery return debut had been washed into the gutter. If it had been a vacation, I’d have wanted my money back.

  Since it was more of an epic rendezvous with fate, it was probably well within its rights to make a grand entrance. I didn’t really have any other epic culminations of fate to compare it to, so I wasn’t in much position to comment on standards.

  But after that day, I would say it had established a definite precedent for overkill.

  Like a tidal wave rippling out of sight across the ocean floor, an invisible current bombarded the already-drunken vessel, sending me keeling across the deck. Everyone was disappearing below, and while I stumbled close behind, I was the rookie trying to keep up with protocol, the odd one out who didn’t know the ship’s layout. I was caught in the middle of the deck when the wave hit, and sprawled face-first with a sopping crack onto the planks.

  Breathing slammed to a halt, the wind knocked clean out of me. I struggled to suck oxygen back into my lungs as a fresh dose of water splashed over my head. Choking instead of recovering, I crawled forward to free myself from the pummeling currents. My waterlogged sleeves had sopped down over my hands, making my grasp clumsy. I couldn’t find purchase on anything, couldn’t get clear of one wave before another was dumped on top of me.

  All amidst the abuse and turmoil, there was that voice in the back of my head:

  Stop fighting, Sayler. You don’t need to breathe.

  And of course the other voice, that was still very much mine, even though my mouth was full of water and I couldn’t form a coherent thought in the physical world: Shut up, Phantom of the Agua. I’m dying.

  But instead of shutting up, that phantom reared his ugly invisible head, the sea churning into a maelstrom that sputtered a few chords of wayward pipe organ music up from the depths. I felt it reverberate in the planks of the deck, saw a shimmer of aurora-green light shoot from the center of the vortex.

  As far as dying, well–the deck tipped at the angle of an A-frame rooftop, and the swirling pit yawning wide below saw me poised to pitch from the height of a skyscraper.

  This was exactly why A-frame skyscrapers had never been a thing.

  If I thought my breath had caught already, even the notion of breathing bottled up in my throat at the dizzying vantage point waiting to swallow me. I flipped over, back-pedaling as gravity dragged me down toward the edge of the ship. The leaning vessel groaned around me, something crashing and flying past my body. I slid and skidded after it, flailing limbs doing nothing to secure myself to the deck.

  Vertigo spilled through me, the terror of my impending fate curbed only for one surreal instant in which I watched a mother orca and her calf leap from one wall of the vortex to the other, arcing in graceful tandem through the eye of the storm–whales in the sky–and then I collided hard with the railing and spilled like a rag doll over the edge.

  My fingers clawed desperately for my salvation, catching like a grappling hook and nearly jerking my shoulder from its socket. Fleetingly, I hung suspended, astonished at how quickly my conversion back to a coastal conspirator had led to me drowning at sea.

  That escalated quickly.

  A carousel of shark fins stabbed through the whirlpool walls, spinning like an inverse saw blade beneath me, ready to shred me the instant I fell.

  Which I did, of course. My sleeve-slick fingers could only cling to the railing for so long, my useless white-knuckled grip slithering off the beam and casting me into the sickening weightlessness of the whirling ocean pit.

  Down past the sharks I fell, into the vortex that had been pulling on the fibers of my being all the way from Egypt, down into the churning gray depths of the sea.

  7

  All I’d had in mind was stargazing.

  Stargazing.

  We packed blankets and the telescope and headed out into the desert beyond the reach of city lights, parked off-road on the red-baked Arizona clay, and nested down in the truck bed to dissect the galaxy.

  Apparently, Zeik had the exploration of a different sort of universe in mind.

  It started with a peck. A quick, impulsive pressing of his lips to mine, his breath lemon-lime fresh from the can of Sprite nestled in the corner of the truck bed–Zeik’s favorite. Not at all unpleasant as far as kissing flavors went. His shaggy dark hair dusted my cheek as his face hovered over mine. I looked inquisitively into his serious brown eyes as he checked for my reaction. I couldn’t lie–with the stars unfurled in glittery torrents behind the frame of his shadowed, prettily-handsome face, I was more wonderstruck by the kiss than I should have been.

  I’d come to nerd-out over the telescope, but, well…Zeik was comparably breathtaking to the stars, at least according to my raging teenage hormones, and I’d put off that first kiss longer than I’d wanted to already.

  So I let him kiss me again, and he leaned closer over me, his ripped-jean legs tangling with the blankets and with mine, a clumsy attempt at intimacy.

  I was glad of that, those intercepting blankets, because right on cue, as his kisses grew more insistent I grew increasingly less enthused, red flags going off like bomb alarms in my head.

  When his warm, callused fingers found their way under the hem of my shirt, I’d had enough.

  Abort, abort, abort.

  My fingers snapped onto his wrist, pushing away his groping, sleazy feelers. I tore my lips from his, clamping my jaw shut and pressing my back hard against the truck bed, suddenly averse to his nearness. He felt me seize up, and to his credit he withdrew the pressure.

  But it was already too late. I shut him down, broke off our relationship, and never spoke to Zeik again.

  The poor sod never really had a chance. No doubt from his perspective it fell in the category of big, baffling overreactions, given our perfectly agreeable platonic history. I could have just put a hand against his chest, told him “No”, could have opened a dialogue about not wanting that.

  But it was more than that.

  Because his fingers hadn’t just treaded too close to what might have been an understandable boundary; they had brushed the fringes of my best-kept, most personal secret.

  I could have played it off as some believable normalcy, maybe–scar tissue from an injury or surgery–but I shied away from having to explain it at all.

  Same way I dodged similar close-calls every time after.

  Protecting the deformity that melded with my flesh on either side of my ribcage.

  8

  They say falling into water from any great height is just like an unfortunate skydiver with a faulty parachute falling into concrete.

  Splat.

  Surface tension is no joke–it’ll pulp you. So maybe it was the way the vortex closed around my fall, folding me into its gushing embrace, or just that I had certain affinities within my elemental heritage. Whatever the case, I was not knocked senseless on contact. Nor was I torn limb-from-limb by the maelstrom or shredded by the carousel of sharks.

  I was whisked into a raging, pulverizing current that took the rag doll thing to another level, salty cold foam shoving itself down my windpipe and blasting fluxes of water forcing me down an oceanic wormhole, making me feel like a bubble-trampled comet tail.

  When the chaos finally released me, I didn’t even notice, my limbs still tingling, my head still spinning. And then, suddenly, I realized I wasn’t rocketing through space and time anymore, every direction torn asunder. I was floating. Levitating. A cold, all-encompassing sensation hovering around me.

  My limbs jerked once, coming back to life, and the sinuous and lethargic feeling of water swished around me. I opened my eyes, hardly daring to hope I’d survived, wary of finding out where I’d come out of the turbulence.

  A dark but tranquil expanse stretched in every direction. I kicked into a vertical position and craned my head back, peering up toward the
surface, but if it was up there it was only a faint rippling glisten lost behind layers of murk. Eddying in a circle, I scanned the depths, just to double-check for sharks.

  It would seem I had been cast far out into the underwater middle of nowhere. Trepidation and wonder did a little dance inside me, twirling together, neither gaining the upper hand for long. Something long dormant in my soul uncurled like a flower in the morning light, reveling in the atmosphere, my pores tingling with mirth at the way the water felt against every inch of my skin. But I was all alone in the middle of the ocean, however-many-meters down, and a fluttery panic was the next bud waiting to snap open.

  The thing that tipped the balance was the moment I realized not only had the pandemonium stopped, the wormhole releasing me, but I no longer struggled for air, either. A small quiver tickled either side of my ribcage, and, almost afraid to look, I peeled the hem of my shirt up to my chest. The two matching marks I might have passed for scar tissue in a pinch fluctuated ever so slightly, fan-like layers catching on the water and flaring open so that they looked much less scar-like and much more gill-like. What might have passed for ridges were actually the puckered edges of slits, drawing water into my body.

  Yes, gills.

  The things that doctors themselves had always diagnosed offhandedly as scars from some unknown past abuse or accident, like they couldn’t see plain as day the exotic qualities that made them obviously not scars. Given that my own mother had never been able to see anything alarmingly out of place, I probably shouldn’t have worried that some boyfriend would notice anything either, but I had always been able to see them, and the phenomenon that was everyone else’s strange blindness was not something that would ever make sense to me, and therefore not something I was ever willing to test.

  Likewise, I had never much wanted to test their function by throwing myself into the depths, but there I was and it would appear they worked like a charm.