by D. N. Bryn
“Perle?” He interrupts my thoughts. “I think I know what I want to call you.”
A little wave of excitement rushes through me. I nod.
“It’s still Perle. But I have a reason now.” He takes a deep breath. “You’re a pearl because of your iridescence, yes, but you’re also a pearl for other reasons. You’re like the sand that you love so much, but when your oyster trapped you, you took the sorrow it tried to instill in you, and you survived it. You’re stronger than any sand.”
My chest warms at his words, and I give him a little grin. “It took you that long to figure out the obvious?”
He smirks in return. “Well, that and pirates want to keep you near.”
“Pirates are all idiots.” I dip my fingers into the water, pooling it into my palm, and flick it his direction.
He laughs, ducking out of the way, his dark eyes alight.
“I… have a name for you too,” I admit.
His face lights up all the more. “Let’s see it then.”
I tap just beneath my eye, and then open and close both my hands, imagining the twinkle of the stars. “It’s for the joy that shines in your eyes; the light you’ve kept despite everything you’ve been through. It’s intoxicating, in the best of ways.” If I’m a pearl, then a few of my luminous coats certainly came from him, from his incessant kindness and overwhelming compassion, from the warmth that spreads through me whenever his eyes sparkle—the way they’re alight right now. “But don’t think I won’t use the idiot version when I think you deserve it!” I add, twirling our old sign for his name.
Every line of his face softens in a look so bright and tender my very bones melt within me.
“Sparkling eyes,” he whispers his nickname. “Sparkling eyes and the pearl.”
His words are met with a storm rumble too faint for human ears. Gathering my thoughts to more pressing matters, I glance at the clouds gathering above us.
“I should practice with my new aids before the waters grow choppy,” I sign.
He slows the boat but follows my gaze to the approaching storm. “I don’t think we should stop. If the storm comes in before we return to the harbor, we’ll have to pull onto the nearest beach and wait it out.” The unbroken line of rocky cliffs along the coast ahead of us speak for his worry.
I nod. “I’ll be quick. If they work you can keep sailing at full speed and I’ll swim alongside.”
Holding one of Murielle’s inventions in each of my hands, I slip off the boat and sink into the water. Beneath the touch of the wind, the waters hang eerily quiet, the minor currents shifting uneasily. I drop to the sea floor, releasing the air from my chest in a stream of tiny bubbles. My attention moves to my new aids. I’ll call them tides… if they work.
They’re small enough to fit comfortably in my spindly hands, round metal spheres with pieces of flexible fabric to wrap around my knuckles like gloves. The metal isn’t quite so light as whatever makes up my brace and fin, but it gleams the same gray color. A series of little buttons trace along the sides of the spheres, a perfect fit for my finger’s natural reach.
Flipping my hand over, I check the inside of the tide. The small glowing bit in the center pulses the vibrant blue that means it’s running. I know little of how it works, but the core’s rare power draws in energy and channels it to a concise burst of power—something not even Murielle’s machines can mimic.
I turn my palms down and press the middle-most button. A pulse surges out of it, shooting me upward. It comes in a wild flood, and it takes skill to aim the tides, pushing myself in the right direction. I swivel my hips to help guide, still rocking them rhythmically.
I race past the catamaran, smirking at Dejean. The water rushing at me in full force brings a giddy laugh to my lips. But more importantly, I turn with precision, shoving the ocean away and launching myself smoothly in the direction I wish to go. When I near the rocks, the energy from my tides stirs the sea grass, and when I come close to the surface, their surges shoot into the air, throwing off my movement.
I swoop through a wide canyon and release another sharp burst, swerving to avoid a skeletal mess of metal and rope lodged between a tight passage. The bones of a long-dead siren lay across the sand within it, metal spines jutting through their vacant rib cage. With a shudder, I keep moving.
By the time I’m far ahead of Dejean, the power the tides spit out fades to a mellow ripple, not enough to propel me. I turn them over and check their core. It gleams a dim blue-gray, like a polished pebble in the sun. My heart sinks, but as I watch, the glow slowly returns. Relief floods through me. Slipping them off my hands, I attach them to a strap on my brace.
I flip over, my back to the sand, and work on the motion of my hips, waiting for the catamaran to catch up. Without the aid of my arms, I manage no more than a slow drift. I can accept that—for now.
From down here the approaching storm looks distant, the water not yet turbulent. But I sense it in my bones, a sharp tingle at the back of my neck. I watch the bottom of Dejean’s approaching catamaran, checking on my tides in increasing intervals. They shine with nearly their original color, which should mean they’re almost ready for another use. I hope.
When I turn my attention back to the surface of water, my blood goes cold. The catamaran skims the water just above me, but a series of small boats sail toward him from farther down the coast, dinghies and little fishing vessels and some other tiny ship I can’t identify, their hulls piercing the surface. Dejean slows the catamaran, and I swim for it, using a few surges from the tides to help me along. Coming up on the far side, away from the approaching ships, I hide my body with the hull and peek out.
Humans occupy all five boats. A few of them wear proper clothing, dresses or breeches with strips of fabric around their waists and forearms, but the others flaunt the fabric humans like to swim in, small baggy outfits composed of fancy patterns. Many of them hold weapons: spears and tridents and nets. The unpleasant tang of the human’s happy-liquid carries on the breeze.
It’s a hunting party. But the question is, what do they intend to catch?
A properly dressed human with a head of black curls waves Dejean down. “My good sir!”
“Chivalry at its finest, aye Renaud!” Another calls, their bottle sloshing as they stagger against a shorter human with a spear and a swimming outfit, slurring out, “He’s a mess, that one.”
The Renaud human pays them no mind. He swings his arm in the air once more as his friends bring their single-sail dinghy up beside Dejean’s catamaran. “Dear sir, mind helping us out?”
“Renaud Savatier?” Dejean’s voice sounds light, but it holds an edge. “Don’t you live on the opposite side of the island?” He stands in the center of the netting area, leaning against the top of his oar, his posture relaxed. He holds his restricted arm in such a way that it almost looks natural.
“Do I know you?” Renaud’s brow scrunches and the human at his side smacks him in the arm, to which he grumbles a slurred, “Jaquelin!”
“He’s the captain of that big ship come to harbor a few nights back. Dejean Gayle,” Jaquelin says, so soft I can barely hear it. She tucks her brown hair behind an ear glinting with the ring of a woman and flashes a brilliant smile at Dejean, white against skin the beige of the sand on the sea floor. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
My insides crawl like a million tiny crabs are scampering over them. She carries a blade the size of my torso with arm muscles so toned that I can’t help envisioning all the giant chunks she could cut out of her prey.
Dejean tips his head to her. “The pleasure is mine. What are you folks doing out here? That storm’s coming in quick.”
“We’re hunting an oversized fish,” Jaquelin says. “Sturdy gray-blue one. Someone got close half a week back. Said the thing’s got scars already, fingers missing too.”
The air refuses to fill me, leaving my chest aching and my head light. Storm. I did their work for them. I feel sick over the thought, but something els
e pulls at my attention. They mean to kill a siren, with swords and spears and nets. Only Kian pursues my kind like that.
“Hunting a siren?” Dejean parrots my thoughts with a laugh, but bitterness seeps into his words, and his bare toes curl against the net. “How do you plan to attack a siren up close like this? Being in immediate range of their song is a death sentence.”
Renaud’s sloppy grin stretches itself, and he answers in Jaquelin’s place. “That’s the mystery now, isn’t it!” He drops his voice, as though there’s someone he wants to conceal the information from, despite Dejean being the only human not in his group. “You heard of the great Captain Kian, picking off sirens like anchovies? Don’t spread it around, but we got a load of her little mechanical doohickeys, on loan you see. Storm or not, we’re gonna use them to get that fish off our coastline.”
I grate my nails into the hull of the boat, closing my eyes until my anger settles enough to think straight. They have Kian’s blockers. Here, at the edge of my territory, hunting sirens with the very devices I want most to destroy. If only Kian had come with them.
I scan the faces on the boats, though I know I won’t spot her. She’s loud and brash and would have knocked Renaud down for speaking without her say. But my eyes catch on a different familiar face, one I’ve seen many times haunting the space just behind Kian. Kian’s first mate, Theirn, leans against the mast of the farthest boat, most of his many braids covered by a large brown hat. His full lips form a firm line, his eyes narrowed. They lock onto me.
Ducking my head behind the hull, I hold absolutely still. No one would look for a siren resting casually behind a human’s boat. But then, Theirn knows me, and he knows more of sirens than the others.
For a long moment an uneasy silence stretches out. It’s not Kian’s first mate who breaks it.
“What’re ya lookin’ at?” One of the humans on a boat near Theirn’s speaks the slurred words.
Don’t tell them, please. Let me be. Theirn never hurt me the way Kian did; his hands were lighter, his gaze distant. He showed hints of pity in the only way he knew, coupled with cowardice, hesitation, and small doses of something almost near to compassion.
The other humans all shift about. I can feel their eyes scanning the hull until a few of them mumble, “Something’s there, see the shadow?”
“Ay, Thirm? Theon? What’cher name?” One of them shouts, banging the edge of their spear against their boat’s deck. “You know these fish, yeah? You see one or not?”
Theirn finally speaks, his soft voice somehow carrying as though riding on the strong wind. “Yes. I see one.”
The humans’ steps turn to scrambling, mimicking the rattle in my chest. I lurch under the surface. Dejean transfers his weight between his feet, the netting sinking and rising beneath him. Pulling myself under the boat, I poke my head out of the water, just beneath him. Maybe they won’t see me. Maybe they’ll move on…
The tight knitting hides Dejean’s face, but his toes curl. He yelps and catches his balance as the catamaran rocks, and the bottoms of Jaquelin’s boots appear on the netting. She charges across the boat to look over the other side. I tuck my tail in as best I can, but the brace keeps it stiff, and my shredded fin trails behind me.
“Ha! I see it. A little light to be the one we’re looking for,” she says in a frenzy. “It’s beneath the boat now.”
“It must be a part of the darker one’s pod,” Renaud replies. “If we catch it, we might lure the other out.”
More humans speak after him, but my ears ring, their words a meaningless echo. They want to capture me. They will pull me out of the water, like Kian did, strangle me, then roast me. Nightmares flash through my mind, with Kian’s face haunting in the background, but I know these are real, memories I’ve taken and recycled time and time again. I can still feel the pain of them, the burning of the sun, the rough wood of the deck and the biting stale air, the pinch of the cuffs around my wrists and the heel of Kian’s boot in my sides.
I won’t go back to that.
I drop further into the water, fighting the instinct to swim out from under the boat, as far and as fast as I can go. I can’t risk that. Even with my tides fully charged, I can’t swim much faster than a human, nor the mechanical weapons they’re are so fond of. Then there’s Dejean. Can I leave him? What would humans do to their own kind if they know he’s been helping a siren?
Above me, Dejean protests, but Jaquelin cuts him off.
“Throw the snag and circle the boats around! I want a diver with a readied spear at every edge. If it escapes the wrap, we’ll cut it down,” she shouts to her friends, before turning to Dejean, “Stay back from the edges. If it starts singing, we’ll keep you from jumping in.”
As she finishes speaking, a hefty wave crashes along the underside of the catamaran. It pushes up through the netting to hit Dejean’s feet. As it continues forward, it shoves me into a crooked roll. The shadow of the boat vanishes, leaving me exposed in the water. A dozen eyes turn, just as many weapons following. My blood goes cold. I bare my teeth.
I sink into the water, but the shimmer of something below catches my gaze. Four of the hunting party’s boats hold the corners of a massive fishing net, sunk deep into the water. They sail around the catamaran, pulling the net beneath me. Panic strikes like a bolt of lightning as the frayed edges of my fin brush against it. It rises up. Without a second thought, I throw myself at the end of the catamaran. Grabbing the edge of the hull, I pull onto it, choking on air as I fail to open my chest cavity the first time I breath in.
The boat rocks, and I whip my head up. Jaquelin rushes at me, hand on the hilt of her weapon. Tackling her from behind, Dejean forces her out of the way and shoves past. He moves between us, struggling to catch his balance as another wave crashes against the side of the catamaran.
“This—this siren is mine.” His words sound louder than a gale. “They are mine, and you will not touch them,” he repeats, firmer this time, his stance stiff. The hand on his lowered arm tightens into a fist. “Leave.”
I don’t know what else to do, not with the nets or the weapons or the threat hanging over us, not with my arms trembling against the hull as I hold myself there, my tail still in the water. So I do the only thing I can. I coo at him, a soft sound I hope he finds encouraging. “I love you.”
His shoulders rise and fall and the tension drains from them, replaced by solid determination.
“A pet?” Jaquelin makes the human equivalent of a hiss as she speaks, voice deep and anger in her eyes.
Renaud staggers toward the edge of his boat, a drink in one hand and a spear in the other. “You’re one of the ones Kian gave a live fish to? Lucky bastard.” He laughs, as though he cracked a joke. “How did you get it to stay? Thought a monster like that couldn’t be broken.”
“They shouldn’t be,” Jaquelin snaps, but she seems curious beneath the ferocity. “Did you really… train it?”
A shudder runs through me, my mind jumping to Kian, terror and anger surfacing with it. I am Dejean’s pod-mate, not his pet. Sirens are to be feared or loved, never trained. But Dejean knows as much, and that is enough for me. I want us to come out of this alive.
“Lie.” I whisper, my fingers aching to form the sign I know he can’t see. “Tell her anything. Make her go away.”
But Dejean seems to grow taller, his head rising and his curls bouncing in the wind. “Their name is Perle,” he says, his voice deep and strong. “They’re my friend, not my pet.” Without turning, he points his finger in my direction. “You will treat them as they deserve, with respect and compassion.”
I want to scold him, to tell him how stupid he is, how these cruel humans will never understand, but I want to crush him in one of Murielle’s giant hugs just as much, to show him what his support means to me.
“A friend?” Renaud sounds confused, his voice echoed by a few others.
But Jaquelin’s louder voice wins out, and the angrier companions take her side. “This is ludicrous. Yo
u’re a traitor to your own kind, choosing the side of a monster like that, treating it like it’s human.” She lifts her voice over the shouts of the other hunters. “Take the siren!”
“Dejean!” The net drags me backward by my tail, yanking me away from the boat. I cling to its sides, barely keeping myself there. Something in my brace snaps, relieving a bit of the pressure, but it builds up again just as quickly. My chest tightens. Dejean turns, and I find his eyes, begging him to answer. I don’t know what to do. I can’t go with them. I’d rather die first.
He bursts toward me. A glass bottle flings through the air and knocks onto the side of his head, spilling sharply scented happy-liquid out as it shatters. He stumbles forward, collapsing onto one knee as a human—perhaps the one who threw the bottle—laughs wildly. Jaquelin draws her sword without faltering and places it against the side of Dejean’s neck. He stays still. The look on his face breaks my heart, all the terror and vulnerability I feel inside painted across his features.
A trickle of blood wells along the side of his neck, but I flinch in his stead. My grip on the hull slips, and I dig my fingers in, shrieking at everything at once.
“Tell it to let go,” Jaquelin demands.
He says nothing. His eyes never leave me as he lifts his hands, running them through a few familiar signs, one arm never quite raising as it should, “I am happy to have known you.”
“No!” I scream at him, my chest tight and my head aching. The sound echoes through my ears. I let go.
As the netting drags me away from Dejean, the sound in my throat turns to a song, a high bitter screech that builds out of my chest, composed of a few brilliant notes. Half the humans sink to their knees, looking faint. Dejean is among those, his eyes glazed over.
Jaquelin is not.
She appears as fierce and resolved as before. Her blade doesn’t waver, though Dejean’s blood pools at its tip. A tiny device inside her ear begins to glow, making itself visible. Kian’s blockers.
Jaquelin stares me down as the net caught around my fin rips me backward into the waiting hands of her companions. My tail is wrenched out of the water, along the edge of one of the hunter’s boats, pulling the rest of me with it. A wave surges over my head for a moment, and when I come back up, one of the humans shouts in dismay, another three calling back in alarm. I twist my head in time to see the outline of a huge swell as it hits the farthest boat out. It washes over the small dinghy, tipping it on its side. Then it slams into me.
