by Ellen Datlow
“Name one of your children after me, okay, cuz?”
She flashes a grin at his confusion, and before he has time to answer her, she unzips the windbreaker and lets it fall to the deck like shed skin.
“Aren’t you—” Theo starts, but the rest is lost as Ana launches herself off the bench and over the rail—no tank, no fins, no dive computer—just the air burning in her lungs.
The water is dark, but she follows instinct. The pain when the skin at her neck slits itself open is barely noticeable this time. She remembers holding her mama’s hand as they crowded onto the ship. She carries that pain with her as she goes deeper. She carries the pain of an ill-made child, too, a pawn in a power struggle, despised and afraid. She winds them both around her like armor, and she doesn’t feel the cold.
A warning spike of fear makes her jerk to the side. A spear tears her dive suit, just missing her skin. Cold water rushes in, and she whips around, faster than human limbs should allow. The spear is polished bone; the creature that wields it is nothing human. The torso is like a man’s, the cheekbones angled hard, eyes flat black, sloping skull giving way to thrashing tendrils like a nest of snakes. Needle teeth part with the familiar hiss, traitor.
She grabs the knife from her dive belt, and when the creature lunges again, she slashes its forearm. A shriek of pain, then an elbow driven in her face. Her nose gives with a sickening crunch. Blood clouds the water and pain blooms behind her eyes. Her fingers open, losing the knife. Through the haze, another figure appears. She is snake-long, and there are symbols cut into her blue-gray skin. The magician.
Ana feels the bruises, the cuts her father—the prince’s father—never saw. Hears the taunts and the threats and they blend with her own memories of the terrible sound of the ship being torn apart, and the magician’s priests chanting, and the needle going in and out of her skin.
No.
Ana becomes inky blackness, unfolding. She opens an infinity of mouths. Ill-made as she is, she’s more like her father than anyone knows. She is liquid smoke poured through the water; she is pain, and she is hunger.
Blue-flame eyes meet the magician’s. Then a dozen, dozen, dozen more open all over her body, every shape, every color, every size. And they see. Together, her rage and the prince’s fear are stronger than the magician’s tattoos and spells. The magician’s flat black gaze goes from triumph to fear. She tries to turn away, but Ana is faster. She thinks of the men on the boat, and the man in the alleyway, and even Zarah. She lashes out in every direction at once, catching the magician, and this time, she doesn’t hold back. She gives the prince free rein; together, they bite and rip and tear.
Ana is alone. Shreds of her dive suit drift around her, but not even scraps of her attackers remain. She should be cold, but she’s not. She should be afraid, but she’s not. Ana swims.
Figures pace her, keeping their distance. They’ve seen what she is, not the frightened, whipped princeling anymore. She is her father’s son, come home, and so much more. It is time to wake the King from his slumber.
She passes carved statues whose blind eyes are taller than her body. There are bones, the carcasses of sea creatures from the beginning of time. She feels the beating heart of the kingdom, its sluggish black pulse. Her father. Home. She holds the word like a stone on her tongue. She passes through a carved archway so wide she can’t see its edges. Home.
She opens her mouth. The voice that emerges is and is not hers. It has a thousand tongues, all of them belonging to dead men, save her own. She uses all of them to push out words like drowned coastlines and the shifting of tectonic plates.
WE ARE :::: WE ARE HOME.
Something stirs in the dark. It is not one thing, it is everything. It is every drowned ship since the beginning of time, shattered boards, torn sails, rotting corpses. It is the hungry maw of ocean trenches, every lightless abyss, every dead spot on the map where things disappear. It is lighthouse eyes, and foghorn voice, and the crash of the tide.
CHILD.
A word for her and for the thing inside of her. Eyes open, so many of them, surrounding her. She is seen, utterly and completely, then they blink closed.
Everything leaves her in a rush, a single thread of her pain and the prince’s, braided as one. It is pulled from her, and she gives it willingly, every cut, every blow, the needle tattooing her skin, the tanks, her mama, the rage.
And when she’s hollow, the King Under the Waves holds her without holding her, considers her with eyes sealed closed, even as he still dreams. In the stillness around her, there is a question.
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
She know the prince’s answer—unmake me.
But what does she want? The magician is destroyed, but her cult is still out there. Even now, they are searching for her, thinking they can control her, make her into the weapon the magician promised long ago. The prince may want unmaking, but Ana wants to live.
And just like that, the thought is plucked from her mind. All around her, the King Under the Waves unfolds. She feels the prince pulled from her, an ache like a lost tooth, part of her ripped away, but in the absence, she is remade.
The wave curls, and at its peak, it waits.
Ana is in the wave, and she is under the waves with the King, and she is on a boat, a frightened child, long ago. Time folds and unfolds around her, and she sees what is and what was and what could be.
In a time that isn’t now, a field of golden wheat turns bloody under the light of the setting sun. Theo stands on the porch of a house, surrounded by people Ana doesn’t recognize, except for one woman she maybe saw once in a dream. The wind howls, flattening stalks, and Theo shelters his eyes. The first drop of rain hits, and the people huddled beneath the edge of the roof look to the horizon, glad they are far from the ocean, and watch the storm rise.
Ana is that storm.
On a beach that isn’t now, but sometime soon, the magician’s priests and priestesses chant to call her from the sea. The tide hisses over wet stones, pulling back impossibly far. The sound is tumbled bones. The men and women sway. Their voices rise. They don’t notice the tide curling into a wave high enough to block the moon.
Ana unfolds and she is limbs and teeth and dead men’s bones. She is the wave curled above the beach, full of broken ships, splinter-sharp. She is a monster. She is a little girl clutching her mother’s hand. She is the heir to the King Under the Waves. Ana smiles.
Above the beach, the wave finally decides where it will fall. The sky is dark, darker, darkest, drowning the moon. By the time the cultists finally think to scream, it is too late. The wave crashes over, into them, through them. And the wave is full of terrible things.
Once upon a time, a child went under the waves and did not drown. Once upon a time, a child rose, a dripping, monstrous thing, climbing up from the waves again.
SISTER, DEAREST SISTER, LET ME SHOW TO YOU THE SEA
SEANAN MCGUIRE
When I went to sleep, it was in my pink princess fantasy of a bedroom, canopied in taffeta and silver sparkles, head cushioned by goose down wrapped in the finest silk. It was all too young for me, and most of my friends assumed that it was somehow ironic, but I loved it. My mother’s hand was in every fold and unnecessary spangle. She was never going to hem my prom dress or fuss over my wedding favors; I could at least let her linger in the places where she’d already been.
When I woke, it was because a wave had slapped me hard across the face, sending salt water shooting up my nose and into my eyes. I sputtered and gasped, trying to snap out of this horrible dream.
I did not wake up. Another wave hit me, this time filling my mouth as well as my nose, and for one horrifying moment, I couldn’t breathe at all. The world was water, and water was the world, and I was so small in comparison to it. This was where I was going to die, choking on the waves that had replaced my breath.
My body felt like it had been wrapped in cotton, insulated from everything except the cold. I tried to raise my hands—like an open hand h
as ever done anything to fend off a wave—and realized I couldn’t move my arms, or my legs, or anything. Something was holding me in place. The world might be water, but I? I was nothing more than a disembodied head, somehow still alive, at least for the moment. Somehow freezing and drowning at the same time.
Even with my eyes open, there was no real light, apart from the silver spangle of the stars overhead. How bright they were, how bright and how beautiful. If I squinted, I could almost pretend they were the stars on my bedroom ceiling, the ones Mom had placed with such precision in the last few good months, before she’d grown too sick to balance on the stepladder.
“If you need me, look for the brightest star, and know that I’ll be watching you,” she had said, and I’d believed her, seven years old and too naive to understand that when mothers die, they die. They don’t Cinderella their way into the nearest hazel tree and live on as some intangible but positive influence. They go away, bones and rotting meat under the dirt that covers their grave, and they never come back, and they never come home, and they never help you repaint your bedroom. So it stays the color of roses and rainbow mornings, the color of a dead mother’s love, and whenever someone questions it, the answer is quick and clean and easy:
“My mother chose the color. My dead mother.”
Another wave hit me in the face, knocking my head backward against what felt like stone. Rough stone, like the edges of the volcanic tide pools that ringed the local coast. And just like that, I knew where I was, where I had to be:
Olympia Beach. Private. Secluded. Unsafe for the last five years, as the rising sea levels had knocked out the sunbathing and diving areas one by one, leaving only the rocky tide pools and the jagged edges of ancient lava flows. People think Hawaii when they think of lava, not coastal Washington, but we’re made of fire as much as anyplace else. Fire, and ashes, and the jagged edges where the water hits the shore.
“Help,” I gasped as the wave receded. I was starting to learn their tempo. Every time one of them hit me, I got a four-second gap to breathe. It wasn’t enough. I was going to be out of air soon, no matter what I did.
That wasn’t going to stop me. I breathed in, holding it as the next wave struck, and then howled, “Help!”
“Mmmm,” said a thoughtful voice from behind me, outside my limited range of vision. “I’m going to go with ‘nah.’ Hope that answer’s okay with you.”
My shock and outrage were enough to make me mistime the next wave. My attempt at a retort was swallowed by a wave of water, turning into so much helpless blubbering. I could feel the wave on the back of my throat, trying to shove its way further inside, further into me.
“Aw, wow, I bet that one hurt. If you stay calm, you’ll live longer. At least, that’s the theory. Maybe even … long enough.”
My sister’s voice moved as she spoke, going from slightly to my left to slightly to my right. Neither direction changed the fact that it was my own damn flesh and blood that had put me in this position. Another wave hit me. This time I managed to hold my breath until it receded.
“Maya, what the fuck?”
“Remember last month when I had to go to the dentist, and I had that whole massive panic attack about it, until dear old Daddy agreed to let me see a phobia specialist?” Her voice came closer, malice and self-satisfaction dipped in a hard candy shell of hatred. “Oral conscious sedation, sweetie. Valium and Triazolam and you’re off to la-la land while the nice dentist fixes your ouchie tooth. Only I’m not afraid of the dentist. The nitrous was more than enough for me. I palmed the pills. Did you enjoy your chocolate milk last night? Was it delicious?”
An image flashed through my mind as the next wave struck home: Maya, darling Maya, the sister I’d never been able to figure out or connect with, bringing me a glass of chocolate milk before bed. She’d sworn on our mother’s grave that she hadn’t spit in it, and foolish little me, I’d taken that to mean she hadn’t done anything to it. The thought that my own sister might drug me had never crossed my mind.
The wave receded. I gasped for air before moaning, “Why?”
“Why? Gosh, Tracy, I just don’t know.”
I thought I felt her fingers brush the top of my head, a fleeting touch that was gone as quickly as it had come. I thought she was leaning in close. If I had been able to feel my hands, move my hands, I could have grabbed her and pulled her into the water with me.
It was the biggest “if” in the world.
Lips close to my ear, she murmured, “I don’t remember what our mother smelled like.”
Then she was gone again, retreating to a safe distance as the next wave hit home.
It took longer to catch my breath after that one, longer to come back into the moment. I barely had time to close my eyes before the next wave was hitting me, driving my head into the rock wall once again. This wave felt higher, colder, and my chest grew tight with more than just asphyxia.
The tide was coming in.
“Man, dental drugs are amazing,” caroled Maya. “Maybe I should rethink my career plans. Now that I’m about to be an only child, I bet darling Daddy would be happy to pay for me to go to dental school. Let me get established in my career, and hey, maybe I can kill people on the side. Wouldn’t that be fun? People think dentists are monsters, but they never think of them as monstrous.”
Another wave hit me. I spat salt water back into the sea and hissed, “You’re not going to go through with it. Stop playing around right now and get me out of here.”
“Aw. Pretty Tracy, always got everything she wanted. Got the perfect looks and the perfect social life and the perfect smile, got to remember our mother as a living, breathing person, not a skeleton strangling in her own skin, got everything, everything, and now it’s like you can’t see the forest for the trees. You’re going to die tonight. I’m thirty pounds lighter than you are. I couldn’t pull you out of that tide pool if I wanted to. You’re dead weight, sister mine, and soon you’re just going to be dead.”
Waves kept hitting me while she spoke, slapping me further down into the water, until it felt like everything she said was being filtered through a screen, distorted by the cutting cold.
“I tried. Never think I didn’t try to learn to love you. There’s just one problem.” For the first time, she moved so I could see her. She was smiling, bright and brilliant as if she’d just won a beauty pageant, and that smile didn’t waver as she leaned in and spat her final words at me.
“You’re unlovable,” she said, and the water closed over my head, and the world I’d known was washed coldly and cleanly away.
I am not unlovable. No one is unlovable. Many people say that I’m a good and valuable human being, the sort of person they’d like to have on their team when they need to get something done. I’m not unlovable, I’m not.
But Maya was only three years old when Mom died. She was barely more than a toddler, all chubby cheeks and grasping hands, while I was the older sister wrapped in grief, drowning in my own sorrow. The gap between three and seven may not seem like very much when viewed through the jaundiced eye of adulthood. At the time, it was a chasm bigger than the world.
By the time she had been able to find a way to the side where I was standing, the Big Girl side, I was still four years ahead, and more, our father and I had formed an unwanted, inescapable society of two. The Remembering Mom Society. We would have given up our membership cards in a second if it would bring her back to us, but that wasn’t going to happen, and more, I had enough resentment for Maya to burn down any bridges she tried to build between us. She was the reason Mom hadn’t been diagnosed sooner, as pregnancy had masked certain symptoms, making them seem like business as usual. She was the reason Mom’s time had been divided during the last years of her life, instead of focused entirely on Dad and me.
It hadn’t been fair. It could never have been fair. Maya had been a little girl, and it had never been her fault, and I had taken it out on her anyway, and I had told her a hundred times that I was sorry, tried to
make it up to her in a thousand little ways, but …
But sometimes damage done is damage done, and it can’t be repaired. We had been circling each other in a slow détente ever since. I’d assumed that we’d graduate from high school, go to college, and only see each other on family holidays, where we could play nicely for Dad’s sake.
I had certainly never thought that she’d kill me.
As the waters closed over my head and the weight of the ocean dragged me downward, lungs emptying and bound limbs numb from the cold, it was easy to regret, and to resent, how wrong I’d been.
The water was dark and fathomless around me. I knew the beach was only a few yards away from where I had been deposited; the tide pools came almost up to the breaker wall, missing the parking lot by a stone’s throw. Maya wasn’t that strong. She would have dragged me to the first tide pool where she was sure I’d be secure, where she was certain that I’d drown.
Drown. God. Was I drowning? Was this what dying felt like? Floating in the endless dark while safety, while freedom waited only a few yards away, as unreachable as the moon?
Dying sucked.
Something moved in the water ahead of me, something long and pale as a silver ribbon slicing through the black. I tried to struggle, and once again, I failed. My limbs were as dead as the rest of me was about to become. Drowning suddenly seemed like the better option, when compared to being eaten by a shark.
No. Not a shark. An eel, a silver razor of fins and scales and gaping jaws, which swam closer and closer, finally wrapping itself around my shoulders, its mouth pressed to the tender line of my jaw. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see the moment when the water grew even darker with my blood. At least it would be quick. At least I wouldn’t have time to suffer.
Hello, little mermaid, whispered a voice in my ear. It was the sound of the undertow rolling through the halls of a sunken ship, the sound of bones rattling in the deep. It was the sound that seashells echoed in their oceanic screams, when held up to the ears of children a hundred miles from the shore. It was the voice of a goddess, of a sea witch, of the cruel and timeless tide.