Our Bloody Pearl

by D. N. Bryn

  It’s an ugly thing that sprouts between the peak of his shoulder and the beginning of his arm, a mar against his freckled skin. The scarring bothers me little compared to the knowledge that Dejean won’t ever lift his arm in certain ways. Because of my oversight.

  Because I sang in his presence.

  “Something took a good bite out of you,” Simone mutters, examining the wound.

  “A siren; last week.”

  Simone’s eyes flash toward me, but Dejean shakes his head before I can respond.

  “Not Perle. A dark blue loner, in the cove,” he says. “Perle saved me.”

  “I don’t know whether to thank them or scold them. If you weren’t here, I’d have two fine vessels to my name.” Her face remains expressionless, but a teasing edge clings to her words. “What happened to this other siren?”

  Dejean glances at me.

  “I killed them.” It hurts to say, but it won’t stop being true just because I deny it.

  I sink into the water as Dejean translates. Simone nods, but her words are cut short by Murielle racing at her through the back door, a blur of brown in a red and blue swimming sack.

  Murielle tackles Simone, throwing her arms around the taller woman. Simone spins her once and sets her down, burying her face in Murielle’s hair. When she lifts her head, her expression is alight with something distant and happy. Murielle laughs.

  “Elle!” Simone snaps, her eyes traveling over the scrapes Storm left on Murielle’s chest.

  “It’s nothing. It’ll clean up easy, don’t you worry none,” Murielle replies, grinning. She plops down on the table and it wobbles, rattling a pile of odd metal bits she stacked there yesterday. Batting her eyelashes, she shoves the medical kit in Simone’s direction.

  Simone’s expression turns deadpan, but she takes the box and begins to clean the small cuts. “You should put a few stitches here,” she says.

  “Bleeding’s already stopped. Why the hell would I want to prevent cool scars? No damn fun in that.”

  A huff leaves Simone’s lips, but she says nothing further.

  “Ask her about Kian,” I sign to Dejean, poking my finger extra hard in Simone’s direction.

  “What’s the status on Captain Kian?” As he speaks, he leans in and takes a few supplies out of her box to tend to his shoulder.

  “Not great. You still have that stack of maps in the front room, I take it?”

  Dejean nods. “Of course.”

  “I imagine they won’t be relocated unless Murielle uses them as fuel for one of her crazy machines,” I grumble.

  Only Dejean notices my hands move, but he chuckles and replies with signs I interpret as, “You aren’t wrong.”

  He pulls tube the doctor gave him, now almost empty, out of the little drawer where he keeps the blood rejuvenators and squeezes the rest of its contents onto the scarring. From the changes I see in each daily redressing, the end of the medication means he should be healed soon. Healed, but not returned to the way he once was.

  There’s a difference between those two things. I know that now more than ever.

  I still wish beyond all else that Dejean could go back to what he had before. Physical change is a hard current to ride. No greater than most others, but still hard to be sure.

  Simone breaks up my thoughts by spreading out a large map on the floor in front of me, kneeling beside it. Murielle lounges over her fiancée’s back, playing with her hair, and Dejean sits across from them.

  “As far I can gather, Kian took the dinghy she escaped with and made it to this port here—” She points out the island nearest to the spot where Dejean first attacked Kian’s Oyster. “She gathered a crew and a new vessel, offering payment in the form of knowledge about her song blockers, and then returned to the place where you left your ship.”

  Dejean’s brow shoots up.

  Simone waves her fingers at him. “Would I be here if I lost the Tsunami?” She sounds offended. “Kian arrived hours too late, but she’s been tracking us since. I hid our route as best I could, working up through the northern lanes and around Soleil Isle.” She draws it out on the map, and I track the area based on the little I know of the route. “We’ve lost her for the moment, but if the ships stay here, she will catch up.”

  Squatting beside the map, Murielle glares at it. “What does Kian want that she’d go to all this trouble over? She has those blockers, and she can make back the gold she lost right quick with them, yeah? Why give a week’s chase when you could spend the time catching sirens?”

  “Me.” Even Simone knows that sign. “She wants me.”

  “You’re certain?” she asks.

  “Kian is possessive, aggressive, vengeful,” I hiss. “The way she interacted with her crew—with me… She must be furious Dejean stole me from her grasp.” In some places I use signs that aren’t the word I want and in others I make them up, but it will have to do.

  A mixture of confusion and worry crosses Dejean’s face, but he shakes his head and translates. “Kian’s controlling and violent even with her own people. Perle doesn’t doubt that she’ll come for them.”

  Simone nods once. “Then we’ll have to be ready.”

  “Agreed.” I glare at the map, the wide expanse of the ocean stretching in all directions, far beyond what this single paper shows. “You said Kian offered knowledge of her blockers as payment for her new ship and crew? Are there others now creating the same instruments?”

  Dejean translates.

  “No. From what I’ve heard, she’s only promised it, not delivered,” Simone replies. “She seems to have plans to mass produce them herself when she grows tired of hunting. My guess is, she’ll delay handing over the information as long as she can, or else dispose of those she promised it to.”

  Dejean taps his chin, his gaze distant. “Does Kian have the blockers with her now?”

  “If she didn’t, my kind would have long since killed her,” I answer in Simone’s place.

  With a nod, Dejean relays the information to Simone. Their expressions sink into thoughtful creases, tinged with worry.

  Murielle stares at me, unblinking. “So,” she says, her voice unusually soft, but extremely intent, “how do you plan on killing Captain Kian?”

  Simone’s brow shoots up. “You want to fight Kian?”

  “We want to fight Kian,” Dejean corrects her.

  A shiver runs through me at the thought of what this means, for them, for me. Going up against Kian will be a dangerous undertaking. The hole in Dejean’s shoulders might seem like a scratch compared to our state after the battle. If something happens to Murielle or Dejean because of this…

  I swallow down a sticky mess in my throat. They are my pod. I can’t tell them not to stand by me, not when I mean to stand by them through whatever trials come. Besides, I don’t think I can do this alone.

  “We shouldn’t wait for her here. We’ll need a place to regroup if we fail.” I sign with slow motions, giving Murielle enough time to decipher what she can, and Dejean a chance to translate to Simone.

  “Will the other side of the island be far enough?” Simone asks, her gaze on the map. She continues without waiting for my answer. “Fighting Kian headlong on the water won’t be optimal. We had luck and surprise on our side last time, but if we want to guarantee those again, we’ll have to make our own. There’s a massive rocky outcropping just here…” she points to a spot of ocean off the southern coast.

  “Luciole Rock.” Dejean hums. “We can send Chauncey with the Tsunami around the far side of it. He should have no problem hiding the ship long enough for us to use the Oyster, and Perle, to attract Kian’s attention and lead her around to it from the north. Once Kian follows us past the outcropping, Chauncey will come up behind her, cutting her off.”

  “It sounds like it might work.” I nod as I sign, so Simone understands. “What’s my part in this? Kian is my…” My what? My flash of panic in the dark. I combine two signs Dejean already knows, shoving them together to create s
omething new. “Kian is my sleep-fear. I need to be a part of killing her.”

  Dejean looks thoughtful. “We’ll figure out something as we plan further. You’ll be a part of this, I promise.”

  “I’ll need to finish Perle’s prosthetic,” Murielle says. “Won’t be any guide ropes out there this time.”

  Nodding, Simone rolls up the map and taps the end against her palm. “How many days do you need?”

  “How many we got?”

  “Four. Maybe five, but I would place my bet on four.”

  “Then I’ll whip this shit together in two.” A grin fills Murielle’s face, and she springs to her feet. Pulling her curls up, she shoves a stray tool and a pair of pencils into the cloud of red. Not a moment after, she vanishes into the other end of the house and a metallic racket starts up.

  With a sigh, Simone stands too, carrying the map toward its place in the front room. She glances back at me. “I’m glad he kept you.”

  The hints of pride in her tone make me smile long after she leaves the room.

  Dejean leans backward, crossing his unrestricted arm behind his head. “Are you nervous?”

  “Nervous?”

  “About facing Kian.”

  “I suppose.” A light tingle in my stomach confirms it. “I’m not afraid to fight her,” I conclude. “But when I do fight her, there’s a chance she might capture me a second time. I don’t think I could survive that. Those first few days…”

  Dejean’s brow tightens, a look of sorrow weighing down his eyes. He opens his mouth, but closes it again without speaking.

  Sinking deeper into the water, I lean against the edge of the tub. “It was our second ship that week. It didn’t look like anything special, just another pirate vessel.” The words spill forth on their own, signs following out of habit. “I was the first on board, as always. The net came out of nowhere, metal, warm in the sun.” The searing, terrifying sting of it first pinning me to the deck still crawls across my scales. “I called a warning to my pod, and they fled.”

  Dejean sits up. “They left you with her?”

  “I told them to. It’s our way, to let our pod-mates go down with honor. I don’t blame them for it. I would’ve done the same, back then.”

  Again, his mouth hangs open. I take his hand, tracing the lines of his palm. He relaxes under my touch. His rough skin calms me, too, the little dark spots distracting from darker thoughts.

  “What are they from?” I ask, pointing to a large speckle.

  His brow lifts and his lips quirk. “They’re freckles, made by the sun.”

  “Humans are weird.”

  A laugh rolls out of him. “I guess we are, yes. But so are sirens!” He leans over, running his fingers over the short rays on my head. “What’s this supposed to be? Hair? A fin?”

  “Watch what you’re calling hair!” I snap, but a grin scrunches my cheeks and I flick water at him as I finish signing.

  His next tease is buried under a crash of metal from the room over. He shakes his head.

  “You might as well go help her.”

  “Yes, fine.” He chuckles again, rising to his feet, and a moment later he leaves my sight.

  I miss him already.

  The noise continues all through the evening and part of the night, pausing only when I shriek loud enough to get Murielle’s attention. It takes a grumpy lecture from her fiancée and quite a lot of glaring on my part, but she finally stops her work and shuts off the lights long enough for us to sleep. When she finishes the prosthetic midmorning the next day, she complains that it took too long and it’s our fault, but she’s bubbly and excited as she helps me into it.

  It’s an odd thing, and I’m not sure what I think of it. Murielle shaped it like a fin, made from the same soft fabric and lightweight metal-like material she used for the framework of the brace. It holds my dead and mangled fin within it, and if I pull strings in the upper parts of my brace, the fake appendage opens and closes as mine would.

  But it’s not my fin.

  It’s a dull machine meant to replace it, and I can’t look at it and see anything but harsh ridges and unnatural shapes. It makes me yearn for my old tail; makes me feel emptier instead of fuller. But more than wanting my own fin to work and function as it once did, I want to function in the body I have now, without trying to change myself into an imitation of what I was before. If I change something, I want it to be the ocean, not me.

  But I don’t know how to do that yet. So I smile as I let Murielle help me into it. The elevator terrifies me a little less this time, but I sit at the edge of the clamshell long after it hits the water, staring into the cove.

  No trace of Storm remains. Wherever they lie now, only the crabs know. But my memories of them linger, a dark, taunting mass upon my heart.

  Dejean plops down on the edge of the clamshell. He scoots closer, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. His unrestricted arm. I lean into him, sighing.

  “You can take your time, you know.” He speaks the words softly, his voice nearly lost in the gentle rush of the water as it hits the cliff. He doesn’t use his other hand to sign, as he would have before Storm’s bite. Once all this is over, we should adjust our hand motions for the loss of his arm.

  “We have two days still,” he continues, “And if you need longer, you can have it. I know after all Kian’s done to you, you want to help us confront her, but we’ll take her down either way. Because it’s important to you, we’ll see it through.” He smiles, his eyes resting on the horizon. “Just by creating this life for yourself and embracing it, you’re already winning against Kian in the most important battle.”

  My words fail me, the warm ache in my chest too incredible to describe. Instead, I rest my head onto his chest and close my eyes, signing him a single motion. “Thank you.”

  For a long while, we let the gentle lapping of the waves and the distant calls of seabirds fill our pleasant silence. When I finally open my eyes, my gaze rests on a long, tubular case attached to the side of the clamshell.

  “What’s in that?”

  Dejean smiles, his eyes twinkling. “Spears,” he says, opening the case and pulling out a long pole. Attached to one end is a springy band, and the other splits off into two sharp points. “We’re going fishing.”

  I snatch the strange hunting device away from him, my hands shaking from excitement. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier!”

  “You seemed caught up in the moment,” he says, drawing another spear out. He holds it awkwardly, barely lifting his restricted arm. “It’s not powerful enough to bring down the really large fish, and you’ll still have to get close, but it should give you the extra distance you need to catch things.”

  I reposition mine in my hands. The whole thing is flexible but sturdy and longer than my tail and half my torso combined. “How do you use it?”

  “Hold it in one hand. With the other, pull the band toward the spear tip and aim. When you let go, the tension in the band will propel the spear forward.”

  “Easy enough,” I mutter. Most of the humans’ contraptions seem pointlessly complex to me, but I like this one. I grin at Dejean, baring pointed teeth. “I’m going to murder some fish.”

  “Bloodthirsty siren.” He shakes his head, but his expression fills with admiration.

  Giving him one last smile, I slip into the water. I let the air leave my lungs in a burst of bubbles, the weight of my body and the prosthetic combined drawing me toward the sand. Holding the spear close, I reposition myself, giving a tentative beat of my hips. The new fin propels me forward. The moment I try to turn, it catches the water, dragging me off my course.

  I hiss to myself, pulling one of the strings in my brace to adjust its shape. I feel the shift from the way it interacts with the water, pulling here, pushing there. Fixing my gaze on the reef, I try again.

  This time it manages to turn the way I wish, but each new movement requires a thought process I’m not used to. It’s a foreign way of swimming, mechanical, everything d
one in stages.

  I hate it.

  Sneaking up on fish is hard enough when I only have to concentrate on the motions of the water and the sight of my prey, but the tail distracts me even more. It takes three tries to get near enough, and the first shot I launch bounces fruitlessly off the sand a hand’s length to the side. Grumbling, I realign myself and creep toward a spotty, brown grouper hovering along the edge of the rocks.

  I draw the band forward and release it. The spear flies from my grasp, piercing through the grouper, and the fish streaks off, flapping about in shock. I surge forward. Recapturing it, I yank it off the spear and bite down. Its juices flood my mouth and I moan, letting the taste linger.

  The grouper stops moving as I take another slow mouthful, savoring my kill. Colorful fish dart through the coral, and a pair of turtles swim in the distance. A whale’s song rings out from somewhere far beyond the rocks, where the ocean floor sinks away to darkness. At the clamshell elevator, Dejean kicks his bare feet slowly in the water.

  The song rises in my chest, trembling through me like a swell of joy. I push it back down. For Dejean’s sake, I can be happy in silence.

  I toss away the fish’s remains, the larger bones sinking to the reef floor to be picked on by crabs. My stomach feels pleasantly full, but after waiting for me all this time, Dejean deserves a part of the catch as well. Besides, I want to hunt something else.

  Moving along the edge of the reef, I peer into the rocks, glancing through crevices and tunnels. Uselessly small fish dart away. A sandy-colored octopus stares at me, and I pat its head. It recoils, flashing to a dusty red.

  “It’s all right, I won’t make you leave.” I laugh, moving on.

  The next few clefts give me little more than odd, wispy white coral. Holding my spear with one hand, I brush aside some dense wisps covering a crack that runs up the side of the rock and stick my head through. A massive spotted eel darts toward me, its great spiky teeth bared.