Surface Tension

by Valentine Wheeler

  “It is?”

  “It is. I’m not planning on staying much longer, anyway. I only need another year or so’s pay to save up. Then, between Rory’s savings and mine, we’ll be ready to buy our place.”

  Sarai rubbed a shaking hand over her face. “Why are you doing all this for me, Gretchen? Most people would be kicking me out right about now.”

  Gretchen reached out and patted Sarai’s shoulder, squeezing it reassuringly. “You’re family. I love you. I like you. And I missed you. Isn’t that reason enough?”

  “Wasn’t enough for my dad,” said Sarai quietly. “Wasn’t easy for him.”

  “I know.” Gretchen pulled her into an awkward hug across their folded legs. “And it won’t be for my family when they find out Rory spent his early years on the streets with his mother. But I’ll still have you, and you’ll have me. That’s what’s important.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “So if you want to quit—if you want to try to find something else, you should.” Gretchen pulled back, resting her hands on Sarai’s shoulders. “When we buy our little farm, you’re welcome there. So at least you have somewhere to go if you can’t find anything better. Maybe getting out of the castle will help.” She cracked a slight smile. “I know you’ve experience with pigs, at least.”

  Sarai nodded, smiling back a little. “It might come to that.” She pulled away from Gretchen to lie back on the bed. “I don’t even know what I’m so afraid of, Gretchen. I don’t know what my mind is so stuck on, why I can’t get away from the memories, or the place where the memories should be.”

  Gretchen sighed. “Something strange happened to you, Sarai. Something strange and terrifying. If you’d simply survived a shipwreck, I’d expect you to struggle, but you were gone so much longer than we could account for. And who knows where you were. I’d be scared of drowning, too, if I were you.”

  “I don’t know if it’s drowning I’m scared of. I mean, drowning is scary, but I don’t think it’s what I’m worried about—it’s more like being trapped, I guess.” She closed her eyes and took a deep, slow, careful breath, trying not to let the panic seep back in. “It’s as if I forget I can breathe, I guess. I can’t breathe, and I can’t get out.”

  “That sounds awful.” Gretchen glanced at the window. “I admit when I first got a room with a glass window, I was a little scared too. It felt like I was stuck in amber or something. As if there was no way of getting out if I needed to.” She laughed. “Which is stupid, because I’m on the fourth floor. If I tried to get out the window, I would be in trouble. But at least with the shutters, I felt the air sometimes. It’s a nice part of the year, at least.”

  “I miss the sea,” admitted Sarai quietly. “I miss the salt, and the waves.”

  “At least here there’s no risk of drowning.”

  “I guess not.” Sarai shook her head. “I don’t know what happened out there, Gretchen. I don’t. But I can’t stay here.”

  “I know you can’t.”

  Sarai rested her hands on Gretchen’s shoulder, pulling her in until their foreheads touched. “Thank you for everything.”

  Gretchen kissed her forehead. “You’ll come visit? Once we’re settled, once we’re on our own land?”

  “Of course I will,” said Sarai. She pulled back. “I’ll go talk to Agatha and let her know.”

  SARAI LOOKED BACK at the castle a last time and then turned toward the road, not sure what her next step was. Her feet led her in the direction of the docks automatically, but the sight of the ships made something in her heart ache sharply. She turned instead and wandered along the stretch of sand curving around the bay. She needed the water’s soothing roar to settle her.

  The beach was empty, not a soul to be seen in the middle of the workday, and Sarai plopped herself onto the sand, chin on her hand. Her hair was coming loose from its braids and pins again in the breeze off the sea, tendrils drifting across her face and tickling her neck. She shoved it all behind her ears impatiently.

  “What am I going to do?” she mused aloud. The despair she’d fought for the months with Gretchen was hitting her again, even harder than before. She couldn’t fight the feeling she’d been smothering ever since she woke up on the beach—that the whole life she’d worked so hard to build had all come crashing down in one spring storm, and nothing was going to bring it back. She wasn’t going to ever sail again, not really. She might be a passenger someday, if she was lucky, but never as part of a crew. Not as a man, certainly not as a woman, and not with the fear lingering in the back of her mind. Three months in the castle had done nothing to soften the blow. She stretched her legs out in the sand and leaned back on her hands, muscles trembling with exhaustion and anxiety, staring out at the water and letting the panic finally course through her. Silent tears poured down her cheeks and she let them, closing her eyes and shuddering with a wracking sob.

  She’d seen a few signs posted around town looking for shopkeepers or runners in the market. Maybe a job in a shop would be more bearable. She would have to apply for one of those, stay respectable, wear a dress, and build a life on land. She couldn’t get her old life back. After all, what other captain would take on a sailor whose only references were dead at sea or maids in a castle? Lone survivors weren’t known for being good luck, after all, and she doubted her dock-market acquaintances would point her toward another friendly captain after this.

  Something was bobbing out in the bay, a hundred yards away, and Sarai raised a hand to shade her eyes. A woman?

  No, she realized, a figurehead! And not just any figurehead: it looked very much like the slender nereid that had graced the bow of the Blessed Angeline, her own beloved lost ship. Before she’d even thought about it, she was moving, tugging her castle-worn dress over her head and kicking her shoes aside under a drooping flower-filled bush, before diving into the surf, churning her way into the shallow water and striking out toward the floating wood. It felt good to be back in the water, to stretch those muscles and feel the spray on her face. The fear didn’t rise, no panic pressing on her breastbone. Instead, she felt freer than she had in months.

  Waves pushed the figurehead back, and it rolled along them, vanishing and reappearing until she was only a few dozen feet away, and it disappeared for good.

  Sarai tread water for a moment, disoriented this far out, and scanned for any sign of more wreckage. How could it have taken this much time to wash up? Maybe her ship hadn’t been destroyed—maybe it had lasted months longer before running afoul of some other storm. She squinted at the water’s surface once more, then dropped beneath the waves and opened her eyes.

  Another set of eyes stared back at her.

  They were dark and hooded, shockingly, vividly green around wide midnight-black pupils, and Sarai gasped in a lungful of cold water at the sight. She kicked her way to the surface to cough and choke on air. She tread water and propelled herself backward, stared frantically through the water, holding her place as she whipped her head around. She spotted it directly to her left, floating a few feet below the water, between her and the beach. The creature was long and lithe, a pale green fading into a deeper emerald through its tail and the waving, squid-like tentacles spreading from its waist. Sarai, too stunned to be afraid, dropped below the waves and squinted through the murky water at its wavering form before bursting to the surface again to take another breath.

  Something brushed against her leg, something smooth and scaled and cool, and she jerked backward.

  Mermaid, she thought suddenly. That’s what it looks like. But they’re not real. Her grandmother’s face swam up through her memory like a ghost, the old woman warning her of things lurking in the deep, fairy tales too terrifying to forget. Sarai kicked backward with increased vigor, to no avail. Her feet fought for purchase, for land, but swung uselessly through the frothy sea as thick, muscular tendrils wound around her leg and tugged her forward. Something was so familiar about the feeling of panic, of loss of control, of a hard loop closing a
round her feet and pulling her under. She screamed, letting a gush of water into her lungs, water that choked her and weighed her down. She tried to kick upward, tried to reach the surface, but instead, the tentacle dragged her down, down, down into the dark depths.

  She struggled for breath at first, as the light dimmed and the reds and oranges faded, but when she finally sucked in a full lungful of water out of desperation and neither choked nor died, her mind stuttered to a stop, the terror filling her mind to bursting. She was underwater, deep underwater, deeper than any human should be, and she was breathing. She was alive, and she was trapped, and she gave another frantic thrashing kick.

  Something strange was going on beneath the water, and she struggled to keep her mouth closed to keep from breathing any more into her lungs. Then a giant fish flashed past her face, glittering silver with tiny scales, and she gasped again with shock, the water cold and heavy. Then the light faded, the water darkening around her. A small, rational part of her mind noted she didn’t feel the horrifying panic of water in her lungs as she should, or the crushing weight of the depth. She gritted her teeth, then forced her mouth open, taking a deep breath, and let her lungs fill with the strange, breathable water. She’d been caught below the sea before: she only remembered fractured feelings from when she was lost over the edge of the Blessed Angeline, but what she remembered was terrifying. She tried not to wonder about whatever unknown magic was being used on her. She had to get free; she had to get to the surface. Getting away was the only thing that mattered right now. She thrashed in its firm grip.

  The creature towing her slowed, turned, and glared at her—a very shockingly human expression—and Sarai had the sudden, terrifying thought of how deep she was, and of what would happen if the magic stopped working on her. She stopped struggling, going limp, and craned her neck to see more of her captor.

  It moved through the water like an eel, fast and sleek, two human-looking arms on a muscular chest and four tentacles around its waist, more like those of an octopus than a squid. Below that was all fish: a forked tail covered in iridescent green scales that brightened as the colors changed with the depth.

  The creature hummed, the sound resonating through the water around Sarai, and grasped her other ankle in another of its four tentacles. It sped up as the water darkened, adjusting its grip to hold Sarai tighter as she forced herself to relax.

  Ahead, the ocean floor loomed, and with an audible pop, the darkness gave way to glittering illumination across the sand. Sarai stared at the glow of lights, with eyes stinging with salt as they adjusted, not sure what she was seeing.

  A series of shapes had appeared, a chaotic huddle of rectangles and domes and strange oblongs, and as they came closer, she saw that many of the hollow, glowing piles had the look of coral—organic, wild shapes of structures collected and grown, not built. Everything leaned at odd angles, not square with the ocean floor, and shapes floated in and out of openings at every height.

  The lights spread out as they approached, far larger than she’d first thought the place could be, the size of a small town below the waves. The creature dove through a narrow gap between structures, a giant slab of dark rock on one side and a sandy, smooth, cemented wall on the other. Sarai tucked her hands as close to her body as she could, tucking her chin into her chest and praying she wouldn’t smack into the surfaces. The stone and coral were rough and jagged and would scrape her skin to pieces if she hit it at this speed, especially in the thin slip that was all she wore.

  Some of the walls were rougher than others—the construction of the buildings was eclectic, stone and worn-down driftwood against pink and white corals, all blending together. Fish darted through the windows and walls, and crabs scuttled along the ground below.

  When they came to a halt outside one of the smaller domes, the creature tugged her inside, the door sliding shut behind them, and Sarai was deposited gently on a stone slab in the center of the room. She stared at the empty stretch of cream-colored coral where the door had vanished like magic. What was this place?

  “Greetings,” said the creature who’d taken her, hovering before her in the water. Its voice was low and clear through the water.

  Sarai stared at it, trying to reconcile a long, dark-green and scaly tail, sleek lighter green torso, muscled arms, and four long tentacles tucked against its sides with a shockingly human face: two wide, dark eyes, a long, pointed nose, and a blue-lipped, broad mouth. She—because her long hair, curved hips, and narrow waist left Sarai with the assumption of femininity—was strikingly beautiful despite the bizarre hue of her skin, alien and gorgeous and terrifying.

  “I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” she said. “My name is Ydri. What is yours?”

  “Sarai,” said Sarai automatically, then scuttled backward on the slab, familiar panic rising in her chest and bubbling through the water in her lungs that she was somehow breathing. “Where am I? Why have you taken me? Please, I haven’t done anything!”

  “Oh, no, of course you haven’t!” The creature swam closer, hands raised non-threateningly. Its body was long and sinuous, at least ten feet in length, tentacles supple and muscular coming from its—her—back, and a long, scaly tail stretched more than twice the length of the rest of her body. Sarai backed away, inching along the slab, trying to control her movements in the strange buoyancy of the underwater room.

  “Please,” she said. “Please let me go, I promise I won’t tell anyone about you.”

  “I know you won’t,” said the creature. “But you’re safe, I swear it. I want to learn from you, nothing more.”

  “I don’t know anything!” Sarai felt a wail building in her chest. “I’m just a sailor—or I was—and I’m nobody now—just a castle maid! Please, let me go! Bring me back to the surface!”

  The creature frowned. “I can’t, not yet, but you will be safe here. And you will be rewarded for your assistance.”

  “Will you let me go home?” asked Sarai, still pressed against the stone, gripping it with both hands. “Please, if whatever magic you’ve got on me wears off, I’ll die. I need air, and—and to not be under thousands of feet of water!”

  “You’re in no danger,” said the creature–Ydri. “We know what your people require. And, of course, we will return you to your home, once we’ve spent some time learning from you.”

  “Experimenting on me, you mean? I’ve heard the stories! I should have listened to my grandma, I never believed any of it, but—”

  “No, no, I only want to understand how your people live,” said Ydri. “No experiments. Some demonstrations, perhaps, if you’re willing, and I have some items we’d like to know the purpose of, some books that need some explanation. Your biology we understand well enough already.”

  “Because of all the people you’ve abducted and experimented on?”

  Ydri shifted.

  Was she uncomfortable?

  “No, we don’t experiment on your kind anymore. We haven’t for years! We have books, lost from your sunken ships, which detail your anatomy.” She sighed. “And perhaps sometimes we find bodies—”

  Sarai shuddered. “Oh, I don’t want to know what happens next. But you take a lot of people, too, for whatever weird research you’re doing? That must be why I lost a week of memory, then. Gretchen wasn’t going crazy. Do I give off some kind of ‘Hey, abduct me, please’ aura for you people?” Sarai shuddered. “So, last time I was taken, if I had died when I fell overboard before you people found me, my body would be stuck forever in some kind of a—” Sarai looked around frantically, trying to make sense of what she was seeing, and finally just gave in to her grandmother’s voice in her mind. “—mermaid laboratory?”

  Ydri was inches from her in a flash. “What do you mean, last time?” Sarai pushed herself back, shivering.

  “During the storm, when I went over the rail of the Blessed Angeline. I remember seeing something that looked like you, but I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. When I got back to shore, though, they said
I’d been gone a week. A whole week! What did you do to me down there?”

  Ydri’s hand shot out, curling around the back of Sarai’s neck, and Sarai let out a shriek as cool fingers traced up the column of her neck. “Oh, no,” said Ydri, the pads of her fingers gentle on Sarai’s skin.

  “Oh no?” Sarai shoved Ydri’s hand away, fighting the goose bumps running across her back, and backed into the wall. “Don’t touch me!” She felt along the wall for something, anything, that might indicate an opening.

  Ydri’s hands flew to cover her own mouth. “This is not good.”

  “Please,” begged Sarai again, reaching behind her neck to grope for whatever the mermaid had felt. There was a slight lump there she didn’t recognize, and she pulled her hand back as if she’d been burned. “What is that? What’s in my neck?” Her breath was coming faster, in great gasps.

  Ydri didn’t answer, flipping through a notebook and squinting at the writing.

  “I won’t say a thing,” Sarai said again, desperately, scratching at the little scar, panting, trying not to let the knowledge that all she was breathing was deep-sea water, “not to anyone. Just bring me back to land.”

  “There are protocols,” said Ydri stiffly. “Excuse me. I need to see what they are for this situation.” She shot out of the room, tail whipping behind her, and the door slammed shut behind her, leaving Sarai alone with the sloshing water the door’s movement had set to undulating and her own harsh breathing. In a distant part of her mind, she realized she wasn’t getting woozy the way she would be on land. The water in her lungs was helping with the attack, somehow, and she put her hands over her mouth and closed her eyes, floating. After a few minutes, her chest stopped heaving quite so hard and her pounding heartbeat faded from her ears.

  She was alone, though, alone and trapped in a tiny room under a mile of water. She pounded on the door, screaming and kicking and shoving at it, but no use. She swam upward and tried the window near the top of the dome, but that was just as solid. Finally, she slumped against the wall, curled in a ball, cradling her scraped hands, tiny swirls of blood drifting in the currents. She held them close to her chest, praying whatever kept her from drowning also kept sharks from sensing her blood. She wasn’t panicking anymore, but mostly because she’d exhausted herself.