by Nikki Logan
‘I’d like to see those odds recalculated in the middle of an electrical storm.’ Which was effectively what swimming out into their domain was like. Doubly so at night. On a reef.
He could stop there. Leave Mila thinking that he was concerned about sharks. Or whales. Or Jules Verne–type squid. She looked as if she was right on the verge of believing him. But he didn’t want to leave her with that impression. Sharks and whales and squid mattered to Mila. And it mattered to him what she thought.
He sighed. ‘Open ocean is not somewhere that mankind reigns particularly supreme.’
‘Ah...’ Awareness glowed as bright as the quarter-moonlight in Mila’s expression. ‘You can’t control it.’
‘I don’t expect to,’ he pointed out. ‘It’s not mine to control. I’m just happier not knowing what’s down there.’
‘Even if it’s amazing?’
Especially if it was amazing. He was better off not knowing what he was missing. Wasn’t that true of all areas of life? It certainly helped keep him on track at WestCorp—the only times he wobbled from the course he’d always charted for himself was when he paused to consider what else might be out there for him.
‘As far as I’m concerned, human eyes can’t see through ocean for a reason. Believing that it’s all vast, empty nothing fits much better with my understanding of the world.’
Though that wasn’t the world that Mila enjoyed, and it had nothing to do with her superpower.
‘It is vast,’ she acknowledged carefully. ‘And you’ve probably become accustomed to having things within your power.’
‘Is that what you think being CEO is about? Controlling things?’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘It’s more like a skipper. Steering things. And I’ve worked my whole life towards it.’
‘You say that like you were greying at the temples when you stepped up. What are you now, mid-thirties? You must have been young when it happened.’
He remembered the day he’d got the call from the hospital, telling him about his father. Telling him to come. The sick feeling of hitting peak-hour traffic. The laws he’d broken trying to get there in time. Wishing for lights or sirens or something to help him change what was so obviously happening.
His father was dying and he wasn’t there for it.
It was his mother all over again. Except, this time, he couldn’t disappear into a child’s fantasy world to cope.
‘Adult enough that people counted on me to keep things running afterwards.’
‘Was it unexpected?’ she murmured.
‘It shouldn’t have been, the way he hammered the liquor and the cigarettes. The double espressos so sweet his spoon practically stood up in the little cup. But none of us were ready for it, him least of all. He still had lots to accomplish in life.’
‘Like what?’
He hoped the low light would disguise the tightness of his smile. ‘World domination.’
‘He got halfway there, at least,’ she murmured.
‘WestCorp and all its holdings are just an average-sized fish on our particular reef.’
‘I’ve seen some of those holdings; they’re nothing to sneeze at.’
Rich tensed. That’s right; she’d done her homework on him. He searched her gaze for a clue but found only interest. And compassion.
So Mila hadn’t dug so deep that she’d found Wardoo. She wasn’t skilled enough at subterfuge to have that knowledge in her head and be able to hide it. Of course it wouldn’t have occurred to her to look. Why would it? And Wardoo—big as it was—was still only a small pastoral holding compared to some of WestCorp’s mining and resource interests. She’d probably tired of her search long before getting to the smaller holdings at the end of the list.
‘For a woman who hangs out with sea stars and coral for a living you seem to know a lot about the Western Australian corporate scene. I wouldn’t have thought it would interest you.’
He saw her flush more in the sweep of her lashes on her cheeks in the moonlight than in her colour. ‘Normally, no—’
Out on the water, a few gulls appeared, dipping and soaring, only to dip again at the glittering surface. The moon might not be large but it was high now.
‘Oh! We’re on!’ Mila said, excitement bubbling in her voice.
Compared to the last time she’d stripped off in front of him, this time she did it with far less modesty. It only took a few seconds to slide the strings holding up her slip of a dress off her shoulders and step out of the pooled fabric, leaving only bare feet and white bikini. Her shell necklace followed and she piled both on the table with the same casual concern that she’d balled up the paper from their fish and chips. She gathered her snorkelling gear as Rich shed a few layers down to his board shorts and he followed her tensely to the high tide mark. Their gear on, she handed him a headlamp to match her own and a calico net.
There was something about doing this together—as partners. He trusted Mila not to put him in any kind of danger, and trusting her felt like an empowered decision. And empowerment felt a little like control.
And that was all he needed to step into the dark shallows.
‘What do I do with this?’ he asked, waving the net around his head, as if it was meant for butterflies.
‘Just hold it a foot above any coral that’s erupting. Ten seconds maximum. Then find a coral that looks totally different to the first and repeat the process.’
‘This is high stakes.’
He meant that glibly but he knew by the pause as she studied him that, for her, it absolutely was.
‘You can’t get it wrong. Come on.’
She waded in ahead of him and his headlamp slashed across her firm, slim body as she went. Given they were on departmental business, it felt wrong to be checking out a fellow scientist. It would have helped if she’d worn a white lab coat instead of a white bikini.
Focus.
The inky water swallowed them up, and its vastness demanded his full attention even as his mind knew it wasn’t particularly deep. He fought to keep a map of the lagoon in his head so that his subconscious had something to reference when it was deciding how much adrenaline to pump through his system.
They were on the shallow side of the drop-off, where everything was warm and golden and filled with happy little sea creatures during the day. There was no reason that should change just because it was dark. Robbed of one of his key senses, his others heightened along with his imagination. In that moment he almost understood how Mila saw the reef. The water was silky-smooth and soft where it brushed his bare skin. Welcoming.
Decidedly un-soupy.
He kept Mila’s fins—two of them this time—just inside the funnel of light coming from his headlamp. Beyond the cone of both their lights it was the inkiest of blacks. But Mila swam confidently on and the sandy lagoon floor fell away from them until the first corals started to appear a dozen metres offshore.
‘They need a good couple of metres of water above them to do this,’ she puffed, raising her head for a moment and pushing out her snorkel mouthpiece. Her long hair glued to her neck and shoulders and her golden skin glittered wet in his lamplight. ‘So that the receding tide will carry their spawn bundles away to a new site while the embryos mature. Get ready...’
He mirrored her deep breath and then submerged, kicking down to the reef’s surface. At first, there was nothing. Just the odd little bit of detritus floating across his field of light, but between one fin-kick and the next he swam straight into a plume of spawning coral. Instantly, he was inside a snow dome. Hundreds of tiny bundles wafted around him on the water’s current, making their way to the surface. Pink. White. Glowing in the lamplight against the endless black background of night ocean. As each one met his skin, it was like rain—or tiny reverse hailstones—plinking onto him from below then rollin
g off and carrying on its determined journey to the surface. As soft as a breath. Utterly surreal. All around them, tiny bait fish darted, unconcerned by their presence, and picked off single, unlucky bundles. The bigger fish kept their distance and gorged themselves just out of view and, though he knew that even bigger fish with much sharper teeth probably watched them from the darkness, he found it difficult to care in light of this once-in-a-lifetime moment.
Mila was right.
It was spectacular.
And he might have missed it if not for her.
He surfaced for air again, glanced at the lights of the beach car park to stay oriented and then plugged his snorkel and returned to a few metres below. Just on the edge of his lamp, Mila back-swam over a particularly active plate coral and held her net aloft, letting the little bundles just float right into its mesh embrace. He turned to the nearby staghorn and did the same. On his, the spawn came off in smoky plumes and it was hard to know which was coral and which was some local fish timing its own reproductive activity within the smokescreen of much more obvious targets. He scooped it all up regardless. For every spawn bundle he caught, thousands more were being released.
Besides, the little fish were picking off many more than he was.
Ten seconds...
A sea jelly floated across the shaft of his lamp, glowing, but it was only when a cuttlefish did the same that he stopped to wonder. He’d only ever seen them dead on the seashore—as a kid he’d used them to dig out moats on sandcastles—like small surfboards. Live and lamplit, the cuttlefish glowed with translucent beauty and busied itself chasing down a particular spawn bundle, with a dozen crazily swimming legs.
But, as he raised his eyes, the shaft of his light filled with Mila, her limbs gently waving in a way the cuttlefish could only dream of, pink-white spawn snowing in reverse all around her, her eyes behind her mask glinting and angled. He didn’t need to see her smile to feel its effect on him.
She was born to be here.
And he was honoured to be allowed to visit.
The reef at night reminded him of an eighties movie he’d seen. A dying metropolis, three hundred years from now, saturated with acid rain and blazing with neon, the skies crowded with grungy air transport, the streets far below pocked with dens and cavities of danger and the underbelly that thrived there.
This reef was every bit as busy and systematic as that futuristic world. Just far more beautiful.
She surfaced for a breath near to him.
‘Ready to go in?’ she asked.
‘Nope.’ Not nearly.
She smiled. ‘It’s been an hour, Rich.’
He kicked his legs below the surface and realised how much thicker the water had become in that time. ‘You’re kidding?’
‘Time flies...’
Yeah. It really did. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this relaxed. Yet energised at the same time.
‘I’m happy with that haul,’ she said. ‘I missed the Porites coral last year so they’ll be awesome for the spawn bank.’
‘Is that what I can smell?’ he said, nostrils twitching at the pungent odour.
‘It’s probably better not to think about exactly what we’re swimming in,’ she puffed, staying afloat. ‘But trust me when I say it’s much better being out here in freshly erupted spawn than tomorrow in day-old spawn. Or the day after.’
She deftly twisted her catch net and then his so that the contents could not escape and then they turned for shore. They had drifted out further than he’d thought but still well within the confines of the lagoon. He could only imagine what a feeding frenzy this night would be beyond the flats where the outer reef spread. In the shallow water, she passed him the nets and then kicked free of her fins to jog ashore and collect the big plastic tub waiting there. She half filled it with clear seawater and then used her snorkelling mask to pour more over the top of her reversed net, swilling out the captured spawn into their watery new home. Maskful after maskful finally got all of his in too. They wrestled the heavy container up to their table together.
After the weightlessness of an hour in the dystopian underworld his legs felt like clumsy, useless trunks and he longed for the ease and effectiveness and freedom of his fins.
Freedom...
‘So what did you think?’ Mila asked, straightening.
Because they’d carried the tub together, she was standing much closer to him than she ever had before and her head came to just below his shoulder, forcing her to peer up at him with clear green eyes. Even bedraggled and wet, and with red pressure marks from her mask around her face, he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anything quite as beautiful. Except maybe the electric snowfield of spawning coral rising all around her as she did her best mermaid impersonation.
He’d never wanted to kiss someone so much in his life.
‘Speechless,’ he murmured instead. ‘It was everything you said it would be.’
‘Now do you get it?’
Somehow he knew what she was really asking.
Now do you get me?
He raised a hand and brushed her cheek with his knuckles, tucking a strand of soggy hair behind her ear. She sucked in a breath and leaned, almost easily, into his touch. It was the first time she hadn’t flinched away from him.
His chest tightened even as it felt as if it had expanded two-fold with the pride of that.
‘Yeah,’ he breathed. ‘I think I do. What is it like for you?’
‘A symphony. So many sounds all working together.’ Her eyes glittered at the memory. ‘Not necessarily in harmony—just a wash of sound. The coral bundles are like tiny percussions and they build and they build as the sea fills with them and the ones that touch my skin are like—’ she searched around her as if the word she needed was hovering nearby ‘—a mini firework. Hundreds of tiny explosions. The coral itself is so vibrant under light it just sings to me. Seduces. Breathtaking, except that I’m already holding my breath.’ She dropped her head and her wet locks swayed. ‘I can’t explain it.’
He brought her gaze back up with a finger beneath her chin. His other hand came up to frame her cheek. ‘I think I envy you your superpower right now.’
Lips the same gentle pink as the coral spawn parted slightly and mesmerised his gaze just as the little bundles had.
‘It has its moments,’ she breathed.
Mila was as much a product of this reef as anything he saw out there. Half-mermaid and easily as at home in the water as she was on land. Born of the Saltwater People and she would die in it, living it, loving it.
Protecting it.
This land was technically his heritage too, yet he had no such connection with it and no such protective instincts. He’d been raised to work it and maximise its yield. To exploit it.
For the first time ever he doubted the philosophy he’d been raised with. And he doubted himself.
Was he exploiting Mila too? Mining her for her knowledge and expertise? Wouldn’t kissing her when she didn’t know the truth about him just be another kind of exploitation? As badly as he wanted to lower his mouth onto hers, until he rectified that, any kiss he stole would be just that...
Stolen.
‘You have spawn in your hair,’ he murmured as she peered up at him.
It said something about how used to the distance of others Mila was that she was so unsurprised when he stepped back.
‘I’m sure that’s the least of it,’ she said. ‘Let’s get this all back to my place and we can both clean up.’
He retreated a step, then another, and he lifted the heavy spawn-rich container to save Mila the chore. Her dress snagged on her damp skin as she wriggled back into it but then she gathered up the rest of their gear and followed him up to her truck.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT ONLY OCCURRED to Mila as
she pulled up out the front that Rich was the first person she’d ever brought into this place. When she needed to liaise with work people she usually drove the long road north to the department’s branch office or met them at some beach site somewhere. She never came with them here, to the little stack of converted transport modules that served as both home and office.
Safe, private spaces.
Rich stood by her four-wheel drive, looking at the two-storey collection of steel.
‘Are those...shipping containers?’
The back of her mouth filled with something between fried chicken and old leather. She looked at the corrugated steel walls in their mismatched, faded primary colours as he might see them and definitely found them wanting.
‘Up here the regular accommodation is saved for the tourists,’ she said. ‘Behind the scenes, everyone lives in pretty functional dwellings. But we make them homey inside. Come on in.’
She led him around the back of the efficient dwelling where a weathered timber deck stretched out between the ‘U’ of sea containers on three sides—double-storey in the centre and single-storey adjoining on the left and right. He stumbled to a halt at the sight of her daybed—an old timber dinghy, tipped on an angle and filled with fat, inviting cushions. A curl of old canvas hung above it between the containers like a crashing wave. He stood, speechless, and stared at her handiwork.
‘You’re going to see a bit of upcycling in the next quarter-hour...’ she warned, past the sour milk of self-consciousness.
Mila pushed open the double doors on the sea container to her left and stepped into her office. Despite the unpromising exterior, inside, it looked much like any other workspace except that her furniture was a bit more eclectic than the big city corporate office Rich was probably used to. A weathered old beach shack door for a desk, with a pair of deep filing cabinets for legs. An old paint-streaked ladder mounted lengthways on the wall served as bookshelves for her biology textbooks and her work files. The plain walls were decorated with a panoramic photograph she had taken of her favourite lagoon, enlarged and mounted in three parts behind mismatched window frames salvaged from old fishing shacks from down the coast.