by Chloe Garner
“They aren’t entirely wrong,” Aland said.
“We don’t need it,” Jeen complained as they walked.
“We’re in the middle of a war,” Aland said.
“We aren’t going far,” Jeen said. “And the tides just passed. This is the safest time for us to go out.”
“We take risks on behalf of more than just ourselves,” Aland said.
“That’s the nature of what we are,” Jeen answered.
“But here there is no reward.”
“That isn’t true. We must see the world and how it works without the filters created by other people,” Jeen said.
“You guys fight a lot,” Cassie murmured. They were to the stairwell, headed down. “Did you ever intend to wait for an escort?”
“No,” Aland said. “But we have to disagree about it.”
“You know that doesn’t make any sense, right?”
Jeen laughed.
Cassie waited a moment on the stairs while they set up a flotilla of food and water and then called her down. She felt like a child, but she wasn’t looking forward to being in the water again. Aland handed her the end of the tube.
“The other end floats, so you might get some spray that you’ll have to deal with, you should be fine breathing with your face underwater.”
She nodded and he hooked her arm over his shoulder and around his neck and with their strange, magical flipping motion, they were off.
Cassie tested the goggles first, finding they were easier to see through underwater than above, then plugged her nose and breathed through the tube.
It was comfortable.
Aland had been waiting for her to make some signal that she was settled, and he dove deeper, swimming alongside Jeen as she relaxed into the motion of it, keeping her head ducked in close against the spine along his back to avoid the inevitable tug of the water.
The two of them were marvelous.
It was her first time really getting to see Adena Lampak swim, having only been tangentially aware of it, before. They swam with their arms in, just using their hands to direct themselves, powerful legs forming a long, blade-shaped tail that flicked them through the water even when they didn’t use their bodies for propulsion. The power they represented was amazing.
Mermaids, Cassie thought. No silly tail and pointless upper body, this is what mermaids would be like.
They found their way to a reef before long and they waited there. Jeen and Aland surfaced, checking the provisions and Cassie’s air.
“Are you getting too much water?” Aland asked. “We don’t have to go that fast.”
“No, that’s… it’s awesome,” Cassie answered. “What’s that?”
“One of our farms,” Jeen answered. “Building rods are Calenna’s cash crop. Everyone will want to know that they survived the tides okay.”
“You guys trade?” Cassie asked. Jeen gave her a strange look.
“What else would we do? Just give everything away?”
“Well, you have the Url, and… the war…” Cassie said, feeling a bit dull-witted.
“We aren’t that kind of utopia,” Aland said. “The military is one thing. Everyone has their job and they’re expected to do it. The civilians do what they do. The Url doesn’t have the capacity to tell everyone what to do. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah,” Cassie said, shaking her head. “I just thought, with you being philosophers and whatever…”
“That we would have eliminated the need for trade?” Aland asked. “Everyone does their best and gets their share of what everyone else does?”
“Even then we would need to trade,” Jeen observed. “Even if it was just to distribute everything.”
“Would it be trade, then?” Aland asked.
“Depends on how you define the concept,” Jeen answered.
“You shouldn’t be out here by yourselves,” someone else said. An Adena Lampak stuck his head out of the water a few yards away looking cross.
“A field worker,” Aland said softly to Cassie. “They’ll be the first ones to be out here after the tides, to make sure scavengers and parasites don’t steal the crop.”
“We have the authority to do anything we see fit,” Jeen answered the worker.
“With the hunters all out in the towers, watching for Others, we’re hard-pressed to keep the fields safe, not to mention ourselves,” the Adena Lampak said.
“We’re armed,” Jeen said.
“You shouldn’t be out here,” came the answer.
“We’ve noted your concern, but it does not change our decision,” Aland said. The Adena Lampak looked from one to the next, then shook his head.
“What is that?”
“Human,” Jeen said. “New species. The Url thought we could learn from each other.”
“Bad swimmers belong out here even less than you do.”
“We’re practically in sight of Calenna,” Aland said. “Have things really gotten that bad?”
“Look out for yourselves,” the Adena Lampak said. “We lost a corner of the field, turned over in the tides. We’re trying to get it repaired to see if we can salvage any of it. I need to go.”
Aland dismissed him with a nod, and Cassie put her head back underwater to watch him swim away, marveling at the vast field of straight coral. She surfaced again.
“Can I go see it?”
“Feel free,” Jeen told her. Cassie checked her air tube, draining water out of it, then swam over to the front edge of the field and dove. She couldn’t get down to the coral before her ears started to hurt, but she got close enough to see tiny creatures, smaller than her hand, scuttling along the coral. She surfaced again.
“Are those parasites?” she asked. Aland dove with her this time, plucking one of the bright orange animals and bringing it to her. She turned it over in her hand. Dozens of grabby legs tried to roll along her hands, sucker-ended with tiny, grippy claws around them. It took a certain amount of mental force not to shake her hand free of it, but it didn’t appear to mean her any harm. A great sucker mouth tested her skin as it moved, but the amount of force it generated was little more than ticklish to her wrist. She let it walk up her arm, then intercepted it with her other hand and let it walk up the back of her other arm, then handed it back to Aland, who went back to put it back on the coral. She surfaced as he came back up.
“They eat the smaller parasites, but don’t damage the plants,” he said.
“We’ve fed them poison for hundreds of their generations,” Jeen said. “It’s what turns them orange, and it keeps them from turning into meals for bigger animals.”
Cassie put her head underwater again to watch the creatures run up and down the coral, missing something one of the Urls-to-be said. She lifted her head again.
“What was that?”
“I said we should go to the wild fields,” Jeen said. “I think that’s where we should go eat.”
“We can check in on some of the other farms on the way back in,” Aland agreed.
Jeen boosted Cassie onto the floating platform and she got a drink, then dove back in and Jeen took over pulling Cassie along under water while Aland pulled the platform.
The sea was full of life, the warm water and the stability of their seasons meant that sections of the sea floor swarmed with life. Plants drifted lazily in the even current, small animals akin to shellfish scuttled for cover, and swimming animals wove through the plants like extensions of the even, gyrating motion. Occasionally, something would jerk, and something would eat and something would die. It was mesmerizing.
She’d been snorkeling before. She’d talked about getting scuba certified, but never found the time. This blew all of that away. Jeen moved like the sea itself and Cassie, for a time, felt like the ribbon of muscle that a fish was, something that cut through the water like a current, rather than the awkward accumulation of arms and legs and torso that she was by herself, even with flippers. The ease of motion the Adena Lampak had underwater had been lost on her, before
, but without air stress, and with the ability to see what was going on around her, the journey took on a fantastic quality and completely lacked the panicked motion-sickness of her first few days at sea.
They swam for perhaps an hour, stopping twice to let Cassie drain water back out of her breathing tube, before arriving at a vast field of coral and seaweed that danced and shimmered with life.
“What is this place?” Cassie asked.
“This is one of the old fields,” Jeen said. “We haven’t planted it because it’s so far from Calenna, but there are a lot of us who think we should preserve it, even if the fields eventually go out beyond here.”
Cassie put her face back under the water, drifting with the waves over the thriving space. The animals here were even more diverse, many resembling fish, but often taking other forms as well. It also became apparent how much domestication had gone into the coral. Here, it grew in wild forms, fighting for real estate with its neighbors and throwing back sunlight in a dazzling color palette. Some were pastel, probably calcium-based, but many were much flashier, and a few were iridescent.
Eventually, Aland tugged on her heel and told her she should come eat. She sat on the platform eating fish and sea vegetables in the sun, her body tired from the constant pressure of the water and the inherent dehydration that came along with the salt. At the same time, though, there was the contentedness of sitting with her feet in the water, good food in her stomach, and as much fresh water as she could drink that felt like a memory from childhood.
Jeen and Aland chatted idly about the city and the war, fighting in their strange way, switching sides, sometimes, when one made a particularly strong argument. Cassie checked her skin a few times for signs of burn, but concluded that the energy content in the local star was in a bandwidth low enough to not bother her. Or the atmosphere was thicker and bounced more of it. Either way, she was ready to get back in and continue exploring when Jeen’s head jerked to one side and she pulled herself up higher out of the water, peering over the dark-skinned waves, then disappeared underwater.
Aland disappeared a moment later, then came back up.
“Stay up here,” he said.
“What’s going on?” Cassie asked.
He didn’t answer, disappearing again into the water.
A few seconds later, she saw it. Ridged backs cresting in the water only yards away. There was a tremor in the water to her right, then two Adena Lampak broke the surface, roiled in combat, and disappeared again. Cassie pulled up her feet and stood as another engagement drew her attention from behind her. The platform jolted, and she stumbled, finding her feet and kneeling to drop her center of gravity, watching distorted forms dart by underneath her.
There were too many.
Even without being able to see them all at once, she knew Aland and Jeen were outnumbered at least three to one, potentially worse. Something darted by her, leaving a purple streak in the water behind it. Something else gave chase.
There was a thumping below her that she felt rather than heard, and an Adena Lampak breached the surface at speed, getting his full body out of the water before diving back in. Cassie couldn’t tell if it were Jeen or Aland, or another Adena Lampak.
Something bumped the platform hard, and Cassie gripped the edge, trying to get her mass further toward the center of it to keep it from tipping. She scanned through the small implements they’d brought for the meal, finding two small, hard bone fragments they’d used as knives. She gripped them in her palms, and the platform bucked again. A long gray arm came up out of the water and grabbed her knee, and the platform jerked out from under her as the hand held firm. She was in the water.
Too late, she realized she didn’t have her breathing tube.
She could pick Jeen and Aland out, not by form, but by role in the fight.
They were losing.
The water around Jeen was clouded with purple as she fought off three other Adena Lampak, and Aland was only just holding his own with two. Three more Adena Lampak weren’t directly committed to either fight, including the one holding Cassie’s knee. Cassie slashed at the long fingers wrapped around her knee, feeling the bone bite into her own palm as it skidded across the rubbery gray flesh. She kicked at the creature’s head, but it didn’t do a lot of good, underwater. It watched her with wide, emotionless eyes as it held her, no longer dragging her further under. Cassie pulled her body tight, the momentum of the motion getting her in range of the Adena Lampak’s head. She stabbed both knives into its neck and shoulders, then thrashed for the surface. It let her go, and her hands broke into the air, but her ankles tangled again before her mouth could reach.
Her control was gone. She thrashed and kicked, not seeing what was going on around her in anything more than colorful flashes as her vision spotted. Her lungs overpowered her throat and she dragged a lungful of lukewarm saltwater into her body, coughing on it even as her lungs filled, in another attempt at breath.
Things were happening.
She no longer cared.
Her mind and body gave up in the same moment, and the world was dark.
Coughing hurt.
Everything hurt.
She couldn’t see, or if she could, she couldn’t understand it, but the world pitched and she coughed harder as air and water mixed inside of her.
And then there was the first clear breath. Everything still bubbled, and she coughed it back out, but her head cleared and she blinked. The concerned face of an Adena Lampak peered into her own and she struggled to place it, but they all looked too much alike.
“Are you okay?” he asked. She shuddered, dragging more air into her lungs, then nodded. He didn’t wait, diving back into the water. Cassie lay on the platform for a few moments, feeling her limbs twitch. She folded into a ball, forcing her body to relax, forcing her mind to catch up. She crawled to the edge of the platform, keeping her center of mass squarely in the middle of it and her body low. If someone was going to drag her back in, they were going to have a fight on their hands.
There were more shadows in the purple-tinted water.
More than there had right to be.
“Human, help me,” someone ordered. Cassie turned to see an Adena Lampak head and shoulders out of the water, holding another. Jeen. Cassie knocked the remaining containers and plates off of the platform, crawling over to Jeen and helping the Adena Lampak ease Jeen up onto the surface.
“Keep him on his side,” the Adena Lampak ordered, then disappeared again.
The platform was small enough that Cassie could reach both corners laying diagonal across it, and Jeen didn’t fit easily. Including her tail, she was most of eight feet long, and Cassie took a second to figure out how to curl her so that she was out of the water. The Adena Lampak’s body was riddled with gashes and punctures, her skin drawing purple blood away from the wounds in such a way that she was quickly stained with the color. Cassie was at a loss. Her first aid wasn’t up for this. She scanned the wounds she could see, trying to see if any of them bled worse or differently than the others, then finally just held closed a long gash down the Adena Lampak’s abdomen, trying not to push too hard as the flesh easily gave way under her hands. It was like pressing a balloon.
“I appreciate what you’re doing, but you’ll make it worse like that,” someone said.
Cassie turned.
Aland eased himself onto the platform, purples spreading across his skin from various points, but the wounds clearly smaller. He looked weary, but okay.
“We need to get him back in the water as soon as we can,” he said. “Too much pressure up here.”
“I can’t just let Jeen bleed,” Cassie said. Aland sighed and nodded.
“Like I said. I understand, but you’ll damage his organs like that.”
The platform shifted and Cassie gripped for the edge.
“We’re going back to Calenna,” Aland said. “Someone will take care of Jeen there.”
“There’s nothing I can do?”
“Not in a
ir. We have physicians, and then we’ll put him in with the caretakers. They’re very good at this kind of injury.”
Reluctantly, Cassie let her hands fall to her sides. Aland noticed something, tilting his head.
“The red. It’s yours?”
Cassie frowned, looking at Jeen’s side and finding the red marks that Aland had noted. She looked at her palms. Both were gashed open from the knives. She showed them to Aland.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“You showed bravery,” he said.
“I’m a soldier, back home,” she told him. He nodded.
“We are exposed here. I am going to help tow.”
“Aland?” Cassie asked. He paused, turning back. “What happened?”
“The patrols smelled the blood in the water,” he said. “It was foolish of the Others to attack this close to Calenna. They had surprise on their side, but they chose to attack us rather than find a more tactical target. We killed them all.”
Cassie nodded, thinking to herself that the new Url was about the best tactical target she could think of, but not saying it. Aland hesitated another moment, then slid back into the water. The platform accelerated again and Cassie turned to watch over Jeen. It may have been all she could do, but she would do it.
“Cassie, are you okay?” Jesse called from the bottom of the stairs. Cassie leaped across the gap, landing awkwardly in the water while the Adena Lampak eased Jeen off of the platform.
“I’m fine,” Cassie said. “Help him.”
Jesse waded down the stairs while hands pulled Cassie up and out of the way. Dozens of Adena Lampak gathered to carry Jeen up the staircase, and Cassie stayed obligingly in front of them. Jeen hadn’t stirred. Her skin was cold to the touch, but Cassie didn’t have a strong sense of how warm it should have been, to begin with.
The crowd of Adena Lampak made it to a landing where one of them opened a door into the core of the tower and Cassie and Jesse followed them down to the water.
“They know what they’re doing,” Jesse murmured as the procession didn’t pause at the water, but continued on. Cassie and Jesse waited on the stairs. “What were you doing?” he asked.