Oceanborn

by Amalie Howard

  “Sorry, man, just playing around,” Sawyer says, chucking him in the shoulder. “We all know who you are. You’ll remember soon enough.”

  “I guess we haven’t really seen you since school started,” Jenna pipes up. “You’ve been over there.” She nods across the room.

  “Sorry, Cara’s been helping out,” Lo says a trifle defensively. “I didn’t want to be mean.” His eyes dart over to where said stony-faced helper is sitting with her entourage. “I think I’ve made her mad by even coming over here.”

  “The old Lo wouldn’t have cared,” I blurt out, earning a swift glance from Lo.

  “The old Lo sounds like he was a dick.”

  “Hardly. He just saw through the bullshit. He knew how to read people.”

  “Like you?”

  “Especially me,” I say quietly. The memory of a different type of conversation, on a boat in the middle of the harbor, whispers through my mind. Lo had always been able to see right through me, even at my worst.

  “Wow, you two want to take it down a notch, or what?” Jenna interjects to diffuse the sudden tension hovering over the table. “Dick or not, you’re still our friend.”

  Lo lounges back in his seat. “So, what else did I do? Or not do? Besides not caring about school, seeing through bullshit and being an amazing surfer, according to Nerissa.”

  The sound of my name on his lips makes my stomach feel all fluttery, but I stuff a huge bite of cheeseburger in my mouth so I don’t have to talk. Sawyer does instead. “Well, she’s right. You were pretty awesome, but you’re getting there,” he says. “We’ll have you back surfing double overheads in no time. Right, Riss?”

  Lo’s eyes meet mine. “Sure,” I choke out, stuffing another bite into my mouth. “Sorry, hungry,” I say by way of apology and stare at my tray, avoiding Jenna’s amused look.

  “So, since we’re on the topic, can I ask you guys a weird question?” Lo says, his eyes making the rounds at the table. Jenna nods on behalf of everyone. “Did I...date Cara?” The dead silence is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Everyone around me stares at the tabletop. Surprised, Lo hurries to explain. “I mean, it’s just that she’s so possessive sometimes, and I feel as if she expects me to be a certain way, so...” He trails off, a helpless expression on his face.

  “Do you like Cara?” Jenna asks carefully.

  “She’s all right,” he says. “A little neurotic, but who isn’t? And she’s been supernice over the last few weeks.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  I try to act like the real answer to Jenna’s question won’t affect me, but it’s a losing battle. The silence thickens to uncomfortable proportions, and I realize that I’m holding my breath. I exhale silently.

  “I guess I do. Or did. I don’t know. I mean, it feels like we’re close.”

  “So, which is it?” The question isn’t from Jenna. It’s from me. I’m shocked that I’ve even said anything, but obviously I have, if Jenna’s open-jawed expression is any indication.

  “I don’t know,” Lo says. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make things weird.” He laughs awkwardly. “Please tell me I didn’t insert my foot in my mouth because I dated any of you?”

  To everyone’s surprise, Speio leans in, his face grave. “Well, I didn’t want to have to tell you this way. But, well, we dated. We were in love. I’m heartbroken that you don’t remember the glorious nights we shared.”

  Relieved at Speio’s thoughtful intervention, I try not to burst out laughing at the convincing wounded expression on his face, but the look on Lo’s face is priceless. His eyes are wide and he’s staring from Speio to each of us in turn.

  “Really?” Lo asks just as Sawyer muffles a snort.

  Speio and Sawyer convulse into gales of laughter. “No, dude. Not really.”

  “Not that I would care either way,” Lo says, grinning good-naturedly at their teasing. “I mean, you’re a good-looking guy, and, well, I’m me. So naturally, I could see how you would be devastated.”

  “There’s a spark of the old Lo.” Speio grins. “But yeah, not devastated.”

  “Yeah, that would be Nerissa,” Sawyer blurts out, and Jenna kicks him in the shins. His eyes widen in delayed realization of his gaffe and he gapes, panicked, from me to Lo, his mouth opening and shutting like a fish. A part of me hopes that Lo didn’t hear, but of course, I don’t have that kind of luck.

  “What?” he says. “Why would she be— Oh.”

  “We dated briefly,” I say in as normal a voice as I can manage, despite my quickened pulse.

  Lo’s eyes are liquid. “We dated?”

  I’m saved from having to answer as a shrill voice interrupts us. “I’d hardly call throwing yourself at someone dating, but whatever. Nerissa never says no, if you know what I mean.”

  As much as I want to stuff Cara into a tiny box for her catty comment, I’m grateful for not having to answer Lo’s husky, far-too-intimate question. Pushing back from the table, I grab my backpack and tray. I’ve had enough of this conversation, and I have no interest in rising to Cara’s baited words. Jenna, however, has no such compunction.

  “You wish that were true, Cara,” Jenna says with an eye roll in Lo’s direction as she, too, stands and gathers her things. Her eyes are glittering like an avenging angel’s, leaping to my defense. “If you must know, Cara was the only one who couldn’t help flinging herself at you. If you don’t believe me, ask her what she went as last year to Junior Prom.”

  “Shut up, Jenna,” Cara seethes.

  But Jenna doesn’t wait for Lo to ask. “You were Neptune, and she was your slutty little sea snake.”

  “I was an electric eel!” Cara screams shrilly.

  “Eel, slutty sea snake. Same diff,” Jenna tosses over her shoulder, nearly shoving her chair into Cara. She’s about two inches shorter than Cara, but it doesn’t make a difference as she steps up a hairbreadth from Cara’s nose. “I’d be very careful if I were you,” she says to her softly. “When Lo regains his memory—and he will—you’re going to look quite the fool because you’re not his girlfriend. So remember that when you’re trying to rag on my friend. Nerissa may have the patience not to respond to your crap, but I don’t, so back the hell off.”

  I swear that everyone’s collective jaw is on the floor, mine included, as Cara swings on her heel and storms off.

  “You coming?” Jenna asks me in a casual voice as if she didn’t just flay my archnemesis alive in front of the entire cafeteria. “See you after school, hon,” she says to Sawyer, and bends to kiss his cheek.

  “You are so hot right now,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “Thanks, I think,” I say to Jenna, following her into the hallway. I wave halfheartedly in the general vicinity of our table, not interested in seeing what anyone thinks of Jenna’s outburst—particularly Lo. Or Speio, for that matter. “What happened to your speech about forgiveness last year, and taking the high road with Cara?”

  Jenna grins. “No one but me calls my best friend a tramp and gets away with it.” She sends me a sidelong glance. “Sorry, I couldn’t help it. I know you don’t like scenes, but with all the Lo stuff, I just kind of lost it.”

  I smile. “No, it’s okay,” I say. It was oddly satisfying to see Cara looking like she was throwing up in her mouth. “But you know there’s going to be payback, right?”

  “I’m not afraid of Cara,” Jenna says, wiggling her eyebrows. “Plus, I can feed her to my very own sea monster as a snack if she gets out of line.”

  I snort out loud. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”

  A toothy grin. “See? I don’t have to have fins to be fearsome.”

  I nod vigorously. “No. You definitely don’t. We’ll make an honorary Aquarathi of you yet.”

  “I’m going to hold you to t
hat.”

  6

  Make Your Move

  “Poisoned? What do you mean some kind of biological agent?” I’m nearly screaming the rapid-fire questions at Echlios. “And how would someone even get close enough to poison Lo? Was it Cano?”

  “All we know is that it’s some kind of biotoxin,” Echlios says. “And we don’t know that it was Cano, although he is a strong possibility.”

  I know it’s him—every instinct inside me says it’s him. Cano is still on the loose, and out there...trying to destabilize us. He’s the only one who would attack Lo with something like this, something this diabolic. He was the one to help Ehmora with her hybrids and to combine the DNA strands in the first place—and he’s the only one who would know about Lo. From what we’ve all learned last year, he is not to be underestimated, notwithstanding the fact that he’s a brilliant biologist. This has his signature all over it.

  My body is shaking so hard it feels like my teeth are going to shatter inside my mouth. I can feel the dull knuckle of bones already protruding from my brow, see the freckle of fins appearing and disappearing down my cheek like a wave of reptilian skin in the mirror across the hall. I’m as weak at controlling the transformation impulse as I am at controlling the chaos in my head. My breath comes in shortened, desperate bursts, and I grab the edge of the wooden table in my fists. It crumbles to splinters at my touch.

  “My queen...Nerissa, please calm down,” Echlios says, his eyes anxious.

  “Don’t tell me to calm down,” I rage, my clothing popping as razor-sharp fins emerge along the length of my spine, ripping through my cotton shirt like butter. “You’re telling me that someone deliberately poisoned Lo. How?” Soren’s fingers reach across to mine, her calming energy sweeping across our human skins and sinking into me. Accepting her gesture, I breathe slow and deep. “How, Echlios?” I ask less forcefully this time.

  “Injected or ingested, we presume,” Echlios says, resuming his seated position. I follow his lead and focus on keeping my breathing even. “But we have no way to be sure. We got lucky. The tests were inconclusive at first. The memory loss was just that—retrograde dissociative amnesia from the shock of what happened with his mother. But then Dr. Watson saw something and ordered more tests, this time checking for specific blood and neural toxicity. He saw some kind of odd discoloration in a group of cells near the memory center. He’d had a hunch that the memory loss didn’t seem fully consistent with dissociative amnesia—it appeared as if it were being aggravated by something else. A marine biotoxin of some sort.”

  “What is that?” Speio asks softly. “Something from the sea?”

  “It’s an organic toxin that occurs organically in nature from certain types of oceanic algae blooms, like the red tide,” Echlios says. Speio and I exchange a glance. We’ve both surfed at night during the red tide in San Diego, when the phytoplankton bloom makes the water turn a psychedelic blue.

  “We’ve never gotten sick from that,” Speio blurts out. “Or any of our friends.”

  “That’s because our Aquarathi immune systems aren’t affected by this toxin, but even so, the tide isn’t necessarily caused by toxic algae. Some blooms are toxic, some aren’t.”

  “So humans can get sick from it?” I ask.

  “Sometimes. In rare cases, mammals and humans get infected from eating contaminated shellfish. In its natural form, it’s called domoic acid, and the normal side effects range from nausea to coma to death,” Echlios explains. The blood drains from my face. “However, in Lo’s case, it appears that it has been chemically altered, which is how we knew that he has been poisoned.”

  “Altered? Why?”

  “Because his Aquarathi DNA would find a way to combat the infection. They’ve somehow made it more resistant and human-centric at the same time. Meaning that it only targets the human cells and that it can’t be detected by his Aquarathi immune system.”

  “That’s just perfect,” I mutter. “Trust Cano to come up with a marine toxin to weaken the hybrids he engineered in the first place to be sea creatures like us. It just seems wrong.” I can’t help shuddering.

  “He’s clever,” Echlios says. “It’s the perfect fail-safe.”

  Echlios is right. If something had gone wrong during their species-grafting experimentation, they would have needed something immediate to weaken the hybrids. Since human DNA is weaker than ours, it makes sense that they would have targeted the human cells. But I’d bet anything that Cano wanted to make the toxin as lethal as possible, not to use just as a fail-safe but as a weapon.

  Snapping out my smart phone, I quickly run a search for domoic acid poisoning. According to the first website, it’s also called amnesic shellfish poisoning. I scan the immediate symptoms—vomiting, nausea, cramps—but I’m more interested in the neurological symptoms farther down, like dizziness, disorientation, short-term memory loss and seizures...the ones that could lead to comas and death. And then my gaze spans down farther and my breath hitches in my throat.

  There is no cure.

  The rush of fear nearly makes me double over, but I can’t afford to let it derail me. Nobody creates a poison without creating its remedy, especially for someone as valuable as Lo. Not even Cano would be that foolish...at least I hope he wouldn’t. With a fortifying breath, I process all of the information from Echlios and the website as clinically as I can, but I can’t seem to get my mind around one thing. I glance at Echlios, pocketing my phone.

  “Even if it were Cano or Ehmora’s people, Lo was—is—her son, and the perfect hybrid specimen. Why would they want to hurt him?”

  Echlios spreads his palms to the sky. “If it means getting you out of Waterfell, I can see that being an option. Ehmora viewed him as an expendable bargaining chip. Why wouldn’t they continue to do so? Bringing you here disrupts the courts and could create chaos.”

  “Wait a second,” I muse. The vision of my dream, of Ehmora telling me she isn’t dead, hovers over me like a wet, dark cloud. Even from the grave, we can’t escape her influence. “You think Lo was poisoned to draw me back here?”

  “It’s possible. In Waterfell, you are safe. It’s impenetrable.” Echlios shakes his head. “Here, it’s open and we are vulnerable in human form. They knew you’d have no choice but to come back for him once you felt him deteriorating.”

  “Deteriorating? You mean from the amnesia?”

  Echlios stares at me. “No. From his failing body.”

  Of course. Lo’s dying. As if I could forget.

  Soren clears her throat, the soft pulsing sound reminding me to breathe, despite the fact that my body has gone completely immobile after Echlios’s quiet words. “We also believe they—both Neriah and Cano—have been watching him, and that they still have ties to the school. Spies,” she says.

  The mention of my mother’s name makes my stomach twist into ugly knots. It’s been hard not to think about her, but I’ve taught myself to be numb if and when I ever do. After her being instrumental in my father’s murder, her betrayal had become unforgivable when she and her lover—Ehmora—decided to kill me for my throne.

  “That’s not possible,” I say. But of course it is. Just because we killed Ehmora and chased my mother and Cano inland doesn’t mean that they’d give up on Ehmora’s plans. If either of them is still alive, we are at risk...as they’ve obviously proven with Lo. Castia, the Emerald Court queen, was partially right. They wanted me back here.

  “There’s more,” Soren continues, glancing at her son. “We suspect that there is a spy in school who’s feeding Cano information. Keeping tabs on you and on Lo.”

  “Like who? The acting headmaster?”

  “No. Echlios glimmered her weeks before we arrived,” Soren says. “Could be a teacher. The school nurse. Other students.”

  “Can’t we just leave?” Speio asks. “Take Lo with us to Waterfell and fig
ure it out there?”

  Echlios shakes his head. “That was my plan until Nerissa saw something when she glimmered him last week. He doesn’t seem to know what he is, so—”

  “So we can’t take the risk of him freaking out a hundred thousand leagues under the sea,” Speio finishes, wide-eyed.

  “Or trying to return to human form,” Echlios says grimly.

  “It’s not just that,” Soren interjects. “How do we even get him to remember who or what he is? If this is part of a greater scheme to weaken the Aquarathi, that needs to happen sooner rather than later. The longer we stay here, the more we are at risk.” She glances at me. “The more our queen is at risk.”

  “And Waterfell,” I add.

  “There is another alternative. Castia—” Echlios begins, but I cut him off with a furious glare, already preempting what he’s going to say. The very thought of what Castia suggested about letting Lo die alone makes me sick to my stomach.

  “That’s not an option,” I say. “We can’t abandon him. That’s a death sentence and you know it. The High Council has given us a chance and time to do something. We have to try. For him, and for Waterfell.” And for me.

  Echlios nods, bowing his head, and for a second I think I see what looks like relief flash across his face. A cold feeling slithers through me.... I left Lo behind before the last time we left for Waterfell. Did he think I’d do it now?

  “We stay together,” I say firmly. “We have just under four months to find Cano, figure out what he’s plotting and find a cure.” I break off abruptly and stare at Echlios, recalling what I read on my phone not two minutes before. “Please tell me there is something that can save him, Echlios.”

  “I believe there is. Cano is far too meticulous not to have reengineered a natural toxin without also creating its counter remedy.” Echlios pauses. “And if Lo were to die, they would have no leverage, which leads me to believe that the effects of this toxin can be reversed or at least stopped.”