Tentacle and Wing

by Sarah Porter

  Maybe that’s why Rowan was crying. Maybe that’s why he was ready to lie to Gabe and Ms. Stuart. If he thinks he’s found a parent who actually loves him, he’ll probably do almost anything it wants.

  In the dining room Ophelia catches my hand to tow me over to the table where Gabriel and Rowan are already sitting, both of them staring at me, though in very different ways. I pull away from her. “I hope you don’t mind. I need a little time alone right now. Seeing Marley like that really upset me.”

  She gives me a little hug. “Don’t worry, Ada. And I bet Marley’s going to absolutely adore her brand-new self when she hatches, even if she doesn’t think so now. You should be happy for her! But I understand. We won’t be hurt if you want to sit by yourself today.”

  I head for the table where Marley huddled on her own our first night here. Breakfast is oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins and an apple on the side. I stir the oatmeal and swallow a few bites, but it’s hard to feel hungry. Gabriel and Rowan go on looking over at me to the point where it’s embarrassing, and Ophelia leans in close to Gabe. They keep whispering into each other’s ears, and I know I’ve made another mistake by not sitting with them, because now I can’t stop wondering what they’re talking about.

  I watch while Gabe slides his arm around her shoulders, just above the place where her wings jut out. He’s never done that before, I’m certain. I watch her blush. But he’s smiling at me while he holds her. I have to remind myself that Ophelia has no idea what he did to me—​that I lied to her about it myself—​so of course she doesn’t think of cuddling up to him as a betrayal. But it still hurts. She must at least realize how much he hates me.

  Is he just using her as a way to hurt me? If he is, that’s so sick I’d like to smash his sprained ankle with a hammer.

  Way before everyone else is done eating, I clear my place and walk out. I weave through the corridors and find a torn vinyl chair in a dark corner of the library. I feel cold and nauseous, and I stare at the screens of those two old computers as if my parents’ voices might start bubbling out of them, telling me they miss me, telling me they never should have let me go. But I still can’t make myself turn one on.

  It’s time for class. I never cut classes at my old school, and I know I shouldn’t try it here. Everyone will notice. They might even send somebody to search for me. But suddenly I don’t care.

  Maybe my parents don’t want me, but I still have a sister. She’s strong and wild and fierce, bashing her way through the ocean, not hanging around here for everyone to treat her like she’s some kind of enemy. Soraya goes where she wants, and she doesn’t follow anyone’s rules.

  And if she and Rowan invented their own language, then maybe the two of us can learn to communicate, too. She’s got to be just as lonely as I am.

  I stay where I am while the hallway outside turns into a river of laughing, cooing, shrieking voices. The shadows are deep, and a maze of bookcases fills the space, so probably no one will notice me through the glass door. The vinyl chair slurps at my bare shoulders and sweat pools under my thighs, but I don’t move, and eventually the voices drain away. Maybe Ophelia will tell everyone I’m so agitated over Marley that they’ll decide to let me have some time to myself. Maybe no one will bother me.

  When it’s been quiet for a few minutes, I slip to a spot where I can peer above a row of books—​the bookcases are the cheap kind made of riveted metal with no backs to them—​and then through the door. Gray shadows cling to the scarred, graffitied paint, and the lights buzz in the emptiness. There are rooms used for classes along this hallway, including our conference room, so I slide out of the library and walk along fast with my head bowed, heading back to my bedroom. I need to get something. I need Soraya to hear me, to know how much I care about reaching her.

  Five minutes later, I’m running through the parched golden grass with my violin case thudding against my thigh.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  IT’S A hot day, but the air feels muggy and closed in. The sky is sunless and covered in fuzzy dots of cloud like gray mold. In the dimness between the clouds, shapes like lilac feathers spin. I wish there were a cliff to stand on, even a low one, but there isn’t, and the grassy shelf seems too far back from the water. The last thing I want Soraya to think is that I’m trying to keep my distance so she can’t touch me. After scanning the waves for a few moments, I decide to walk right to the sand’s edge, but not into the water. It’s high tide so I don’t have to walk far.

  The sea is exceptionally rough today, the waves huge. The wind isn’t that strong, but it has a strange, stifled feeling, as if there were something it felt too shy to say.

  Like me. Now that I’m here, I wonder what right I have to bother her. I’m taking it for granted that she’s horribly lonely, and that she needs me as much as I need her, but Ophelia said that Soraya likes being on her own. Just because she didn’t let me die, I can’t assume she wants anything to do with me.

  I take my time tightening the bow and stroking on the rosin, and while I do, I’m wondering if she’s watching me. From what Rowan said, I know she saw my face before I ever saw hers, maybe the first time I was playing in the water with Ophelia. She could have been hiding under the surface on the far side of the fence the whole time, looking in at me with the same weird recognition I felt when I saw her. Maybe she even slipped through the hole to watch me. Since she’s cold-blooded, it wouldn’t necessarily be easy for me to spot her.

  Thunder screams and then grumbles away to nothing. I don’t have time to spend being indecisive. The waves arch up, steely and dark, then burst on the sand and fan almost to my feet. Knife-thin pink glints twirl through the receding water, and I remember my dad saying, No, no. The sea is only blue or green or gray, except at sunset. This isn’t sunset, Ada.

  I lift the violin to my shoulder and let a high, slow note vibrate out across the air. A call. Will she understand?

  Again. I play longer, deeper, seesawing notes, trying to imitate the groaning cries she made when she was searching for Rowan. If they have a language together, then I’ll try to speak it. Say it with music, Ada. Never words. Music is safe.

  Meanwhile my own voice keeps rising in my throat, making a sound somewhere between laughing and stifled crying. I don’t think my dad would call it safe to try and summon a giant human-squid hybrid, even one who shares my face, out of the sea. My eyes fill with tears, and the sparks of pink light on the waves spread out into blurry, cherry-laced stars. How can I miss someone I don’t even know, someone who can’t speak a single word to me?

  My sister, I try to play. My twin. We were ripped apart before we were ever born, but we’ve found each other now. I’m land and you’re sea, but we can look into each other and see ourselves for the first time. Chimera, chimirror. Please come, Soraya, I’m waiting.

  Lightning breaks the sky like a teacup. If it starts to rain, I’ll have to give up—​I can’t let my violin get wet—​but right now I can’t make myself stop. So much has happened, and I haven’t let myself really feel any of it, because if I do it will be too much, too overwhelming. But I can let it sing and clang out from the instrument vibrating against my chin. I can try to explain it all to her.

  My eyes drift closed. I see ruby lights shimmered over with dancing flecks of icy green.

  A raindrop pocks my cheek. I have to stop, to stop, to stop, I play, but I can’t pull myself out of the music I’m making. I guess to most people it would sound horrible, a yowl, a shredded-metal cry. But it’s the truth. Marley is dissolving into juice and Gabriel wants me dead and there’s a really dangerous plot going on, and maybe even the people here I care about most are in on it. If I try to stop them—​though how can I stop them?—​then possibly even Ophelia and Rowan will turn against me. I can’t be sure of anything, and there’s no softness in that. No harmony.

  But there is a kind of beauty in it, just like Dr. Jacoway said.

  Another drop thuds down, right on the fingerboard this time. I force my
eyes open. I have to pick up the case where I left it on the sand, put the violin away, shut the clasps.

  A dark swell is slicing through the water in front of me. It’s inside the fence and moving at fantastic speed, tiny lacy wavelets pouring along its flanks like long hair feathered back by the wind.

  I have just time to gasp before Soraya wraps a tentacle around my waist and swings me up into the sky. It’s so sudden that my bow slips from my hand. She catches it delicately in a single sucker and passes it back to me, and I take it before I have time to feel surprised.

  It’s incredible how strong she is. One tentacle is enough to keep me swaying in midair, sea foam snaking away below me as the waves crest and smash. She gazes up at me, her huge gray face tipped back as if the water were a pillow, her green-gold eyes sad and serious. How can I see myself in a being so different from anything I’ve ever known? But I do.

  I didn’t notice last time, but Soraya has two shorter, thinner tentacles in addition to her twisting mass of long arms. The short ones end in enormous, slippery-looking gray hands the size of the seats on the cafeteria’s chairs. She reaches up with one hand now and strokes my cheek. Because I’ve been crying. She’s brushing away a tear.

  Maybe she hated me before, but she doesn’t now.

  “Soraya!” I say. “You knew, you understood me. I’m so happy.”

  She puts one of her human-shaped fingers to my lips—​just the tip is enough to cover half my face—​and then moves it to touch the violin. Of course she doesn’t want me to use words, not when she can’t. It’s not fair.

  I know I shouldn’t be playing my violin out in the rain. If it gets ruined, I’ll have no way to replace it, and then I’ll be even lonelier here, and even more voiceless, than I am already.

  But this is more important.

  I play for my sister: fragments of Stravinsky’s concerto in D mixed in with whirls of improvisation, long tonal cries. And as I play I’m racing through the air, dipping and weaving in her grasp, with my long hair tangling in my face and gusts full of raindrops striking me at odd angles. She’s zooming me around like a four-year-old would a toy airplane. Sometimes my eyes are full of violet-ringed storm clouds, sometimes dashing waves. Sometimes Soraya moans beneath me, speaking to me in a language I can only understand if I completely forget about words. I’m breathless with laughter and giddiness, flying over the sea.

  Then I feel something soft churning at my feet, and look down to see my shoes skimming through the sand. Soraya lets me go, and I stumble onto my knees, too dizzy to keep my balance. My violin jolts from my grip, but luckily it lands softly. I lean forward with my head still spinning to pick it up.

  Soraya bellows and I hear a warning sharpness in her tone. Ms. Stuart is standing on the bluff watching us, and Soraya is already thirty yards back from the shore, only her eyes peering above the water. I understand at once: she doesn’t want Ms. Stuart to see her face. She doesn’t want her to know what we are to each other.

  It’s private.

  “Ada,” Ms. Stuart says dryly. “That was an impressive performance. From both of you. It’s unfortunate that I was your only audience.”

  “I wasn’t performing. I was trying to communicate.”

  “And what were you trying to say?”

  That’s too complicated to answer, even if it were any of her business. “Soraya saved my life. I wanted to say thank you.” I scramble to my feet, pick up my case, and shake the sand out before I settle the violin back in its hollow and tuck the bow into its groove in the lid. I snap the case shut without looking at her. I wish my cheeks weren’t getting hot, that my stomach wasn’t tight with anger. My meeting with Soraya was so magical and so secret that I hate the thought of anyone watching us, especially her.

  When I glance back at the water, Soraya’s already gone. A circle of foam, already fragmenting with the surge, shows where she dove to slip through the hole in the fence. Why couldn’t she just take me with her?

  Probably because she knows as well as I do that I have nowhere else to go.

  “You’ve made your point, then. And since attending class wasn’t worth your time today, perhaps now you’d be willing to walk with me?”

  I think about that. “Where would we go?”

  “Why not show me where you went when you chose to go adventuring in the dead of night? I heard you sustained some damage from the blackberry thickets.” She nods at my calf. I hadn’t noticed, but one leg of my jeans is shoved up, damp with sea spray. My exposed skin is striped with the dark scabs I got while I was running away from the blue.

  “I didn’t go anywhere special. Just to the edge of the woods.” I feel a little sick, though, at the realization that Ophelia must have reported on me. She’s the one who saw me go to bed the other night with unmarked legs and wake up covered in scratches. Every time I start thinking I can really trust her, something happens to rip that trust away from me.

  Rowan said that Ophelia is on my side as much as she can be. I guess as much as she can be just isn’t much at all.

  “To the edge of the woods, then. I have something I’d like to say to you. I think a misunderstanding has come between us, Ada, and I’d like to clear it up if I can.”

  I don’t think it’s a misunderstanding, I almost say, but then I decide it’s smarter to keep my mouth shut. And maybe this way I’ll learn something. “Okay.” I shove my case up onto the grassy shelf and climb after it. The rain seems like it’s backing off for now, though the clouds are dark and pushing along in huge blue currents.

  “Do you know what we mean, Ada, when we talk about someone internalizing the prejudice against them?”

  That takes me a moment. I pick up the case and hold it tight against my chest. I miss my sister already; why did Ms. Stuart have to come here and interrupt us? “It means—​taking it in. Believing that you’re not worth very much just because other people tell you so.”

  “And how would you respond if I said that you’ve internalized society’s irrational fear of the chimeras? That you’ve taken in their idea that what you are makes you somehow less worthy? Less deserving of freedom?”

  I don’t want to listen to this, but my cheeks flush with the suspicion that she might be right—​at least a little bit right. “It’s not that I think we’re not worth as much! I just think we might be dangerous—​and until they really know for sure that it’s safe to let us out—​I mean, I understand why we have to be here. Everybody outside has a good reason to be afraid of us.”

  Though, realistically, Soraya is free. That must be the true reason they didn’t want me to know about her. And there could be hundreds of other kimes out there, for all I know: mostly animal ones that aren’t supposed to exist and that nobody has really noticed yet. Spiders with tiny human mouths could be lurking in people’s woodpiles; crows with human eyes could be watching people’s parking lots. Probably Rowan is right, and we’re just locked up to make everybody feel better.

  “Yes, that’s what they’ve told you. Again and again. You’ve taken in their message about the threat you supposedly represent—​the end of humanity, no less. You’ve made that message part of yourself, and now you stand here and repeat it. This is precisely the internalization I was referring to. I began my career as a lab assistant for Dr. Jacoway, before he worked at Novasphere; did you know that? I was entirely devoted to the ideals of science. When he first came here, he asked me to join him, and because I admired him so much I accepted. Being some combination of foster mother and prisoner was nothing at all like the life that I imagined for myself when I was young, but then—​I came to care. I’m sure that most people would say I care too much. Ada, no one alive is more committed to the rights of children like you than I am. No one has worked harder on your behalf.”

  “I know that.” But the blue doesn’t trust her, and I don’t, either.

  “If you struggle against me, then you are also struggling against yourself. Against your own future. You see why I might find this cause for c
oncern.”

  I hesitate. “I know you want to help us. You’d probably fight to the death for us. I know that.”

  “But?”

  “But I think you might be fighting in the wrong way.”

  We haven’t even made it to the edge of the woods, just strayed a short distance over the grass. Now we’ve stopped dead to stare at each other. The grass is an eerily bright mustard-gold under the moody purplish gray of the clouds.

  “I suppose you know exactly what way that is? You’ve pursued your investigations, come to your own conclusions?”

  There’s something horrible in her face now, but I don’t know what it is. If I’m right about what she and Gabriel are plotting, then it seems obvious regular humans would retaliate. Does she really think they’d let us get away with it? “Not really. I know you’re trying something.”

  A pause. “And can you try to understand how utterly frustrating it is to raise children, all the while knowing that they’ll be thwarted from fulfilling their true potential? Of course I want to change the situation.”

  When she says it like that, I almost start to wonder if she’s right and I’m the one making a mistake. Almost. “But what if trying to change it just makes everything worse?”

  “You know, Ada, I’ve had another thought about you. I was reluctant to entertain it seriously, though, since it would imply that you’re the pawn of some extremely unscrupulous people. There might be a simpler explanation for your behavior than ordinary self-loathing.”

  “Like what?”

  “Your father. Isn’t he Dr. Caleb Lahey?”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “YES,” I SAY. “He is. But I don’t see—”

  “It’s time you returned to class, Ada. I have work to do. As always.”