Water

by Hardy, Natasha

  “What happened here today?”

  “We were carrying out your majesty’s request, to ensure that he,” Neith pointed at Merrick, “complied with your instructions to test Alexandra, and if necessary to test her in the pool ourselves.”

  “And what are the implications of Joshua remembering us?” she asked.

  “He will likely jog Luke’s memory and expose us,” Neith replied. “We have too many sick Oceanids at hand to move them quickly, and that could result in us having to leave them behind to whatever the humans decide to do with them.” His shoulders had slumped as he looked at his feet before finishing. “Humans have not been kind to the Oceanids they have discovered before, my Queen.”

  I glanced from Neith’s despondent figure to Merrick.

  His eyes were wild, his forehead creased as he stared past Neith to where Luke and Josh stood blissfully unaware. The terror on Merrick’s face translated all too clearly.

  “What do you suggest we do then, Neith?” Talita asked him.

  Neith straightened his shoulders. “My Queen, we cannot allow this to happen,” he hissed, baring his teeth.

  “Alexandra,” she said, her voice genuinely sympathetic. “The law of the pod allows them to take what precautions they feel are most prudent to protect themselves from Josh and Luke.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, my voice wobbling a little.

  But I didn’t need her to answer me because Neith straightened, revenge twisting his features and lighting his eyes. He stalked forward until he stood behind Luke and Josh.

  Like something from a sci-fi horror he twisted his head slightly, and I heard the sickening crack as he unhinged his jaws, opening his teeth-lined mouth wider than humanly possible and twisting, snake-like towards Josh’s neck.

  I screamed as he encased Josh’s neck in his mouth, unable to wrench my eyes away from the horror of watching Neith behead him. To my surprise he released Josh, leaving a dribble of blood down either side of his neck, before turning to Luke and doing the same to him.

  Both boys became instantly stiff, their eyes opened very wide, their shoulders heaving as their lungs desperately tried to pull in air.

  “What have you done?” I screamed at her again, trying to find a way around the Oceanids that now encircled the pool and blocked me at every angle.

  “Neith is venomous,” she replied quietly. “It paralyses its victims, but works through their system relatively quickly. They will be all right again in about fifteen minutes, if…” She paused and nodded minutely to an Oceanid standing close to Merrick.

  I watched in shocked horror as he took two springy steps towards Merrick, before leaping a graceful arc over him and placing an expertly aimed double kick into his abdomen and face, sending him sprawling across the rock before he hit a tree and lay there motionless.

  “If,” continued Talita, “you save them.” She stepped forwards and casually pushed both of my friends over the ledge.

  I watched helplessly as they fell into the water, sinking immediately out of sight.

  It took me a few short seconds to assess the situation in cold, startling clarity. Merrick couldn’t help me, and the others wouldn’t.

  I ran and dove into the middle of that black ominous pool, balling the fear that threatened to incapacitate me and shoving it aside impatiently.

  It was a dark as night, the water frigid as I pushed my body to swim faster and faster into the black, a long stream of bubbles a terrifying reminder of the finite nature of my oxygen supply.

  My arms were stretched in front of me, my eyes wide as I searched for any glimmer of them.

  “Come on!” I screamed at myself, willing the supersensitive sight Merrick was so sure I had to manifest, because if it didn’t we would all die.

  The pain searing up the sides of my head irritated me, and I mentally swatted at it, pushing myself to swim harder. The black spots that had assaulted me the day before when I’d run out of oxygen reappeared.

  I screamed at them mentally, using every ounce of pent-up fury, buried from three years of pretence, to force them away.

  And then quite suddenly the pitch darkness lightened slightly to a fainter shade of night, almost as if the water was backlit. I could see Josh and Luke’s spread-eagled forms far below me, still sinking.

  I was out of air, my lungs burning. But I kept swimming, forcing the water away from me as I gained on the two boys.

  I reached Josh first, grabbing a handful of his shirt and towing him with me as I pulled him down even faster to reach Luke.

  They were so heavy. And as I flipped us up to what I knew must be the surface, I wondered if I’d merely prolonged their death, because the gloom didn’t lighten in any way above us.

  I hung there for a few precious moments, the boys’ weight pulling us further down, as I tried to calm the panic that threatened to engulf me. I closed my eyes to concentrate, realising for the first time as I did so, that my lungs were no longer screaming for oxygen.

  My eyes snapped open and I blew a stream of bubbles out of my mouth, bubbles that I hadn’t inhaled, because that air was long gone.

  I was breathing underwater, or more accurately extracting air from the water. I hadn’t used my lungs once since diving into the pool, but somehow oxygen was in them.

  I grinned underwater, closing my eyes momentarily to focus on the need to navigate my way out of the pool.

  When I opened them again, I was sure I was dead. The whole pool was covered in distinctive lines. They widened at the top and narrowed at the bottom. Instinctually I began to swim towards the wider part, stunned as the water around me grew almost luminescent.

  Josh and Luke also seemed to get lighter as I swam to the surface, no longer afraid of drowning; I was almost disappointed when we reached the surface.

  Only Merrick, Maya, Sabrina and Talita remained of the audience I’d had when I’d leapt into the pool.

  Merrick helped me get the boys out of the water. Maya helped them to breathe again, before Sabrina, supporting her, took her back to the cave.

  Indra and Aerowen stepped out of the shadows. They nodded to me in grudging respect and went to attend Josh and Luke, who were both very confused.

  “It’s time to say goodbye,” Talita told me solemnly.

  “You are not killing them again,” I argued, horrified.

  She smiled. “I am sparing them, Alexandra, they are going home.”

  “What?” I asked in confusion.

  “We had to look like we’d gotten rid of them or the other Oceanids would have hunted them down and killed them once we released them,” she told me quietly. “This way, the Oceanids feel safe and your friends can go back to their lives.”

  “So they won’t remember me, right?”

  She smiled sadly. “Or anyone else. It’s the easiest and kindest way.”

  I knelt beside each of my friends and hugged them both. “Look after yourselves,” I whispered.

  Luke hugged me back awkwardly as if he were being hugged unexpectedly by a stranger, but Josh clung to me for a few moments, almost desperately, before Indra touched his arm and he loosened his hold.

  As soon as the boys had left, all of the strength and excitement drained out of my body, making my knees shake and my head spin.

  Merrick caught me, hugging me as he supporting most of my body weight and smoothing my hair from my face, pressing his face into my hair.

  “Well done. A good day I think!” Talita told me with a warm smile.

  I turned from where my face had been buried in Merrick’s chest, pushing myself away from him to confront her.

  “How could you do that?!” I asked her, calm at first, but my voice increasing in volume to a screech at the end of the question.

  The fury I’d managed to access to push the pain aside in the pool, reappeared rapidly. My palms tingled with rage as I watched her smiling smugly.

  “You just needed the right motivation,” she told me.

  “And what if you’d been wrong?�
� I shouted at her.

  “They were collateral,” she told me, waving her hand. “Anyway, I knew you wouldn’t fail.”

  Without really knowing what I was doing, I lifted both my arms, my palms facing each other.

  To my shock and horror, a blue ball of energy appeared between them. It tasered between my fingers, arcing between my palms, until I dropped it in fright.

  It fell to the ground with a whump, leaving a black hole where it had fallen, surrounded by a spider web of burnt rock.

  The three of us stared at the blackened rock, triplicate astonishment echoed in each expression.

  Talita recovered first. “Merrick, no more work today please, we wouldn’t want Alexandra to overextend herself.”

  Chapter 31

  Traduzir

  Merrick and I were sitting on top of a boulder that was the start of what he called the waterslide. I’d almost collapsed a few minutes after Talita had left. He’d caught me before I hit the ground, worrying over how pale I’d gone.

  “It’s probably just shock,” I’d managed to whisper as the spots I’d avoided earlier blacked out bits of vision.

  He’d settled me in some grass before rushing off only to return a few minutes later with some fruit.

  The sugar and rest had helped, and I wanted to try breathing on my own again. The dark pool held no more fear for me. I’d faced it and won, and now, almost in triumph, I’d wanted to explore it more.

  Merrick had, instead, brought me here.

  I’d gasped in amazement. The flat rock ledge in front of us was covered in pock marks. Some of them were as much as a metre deep, some shallow indentations in the rock and some went straight through the rock revealing glimpses of the river below. Each hole was a different size, in varying shades of creamy beige streaked with rust red.

  Without warning Merrick had jumped feet-first into one of the holes shrieking with delight as he’d disappeared. I’d immediately followed, wrapping my toes over the edge of the hole he’d disappeared into and staring in fascination as the rock formation corkscrewed downward to the river which swept upwards into the hole, lapping greedily at the rock in a swirling eddy.

  His laughter had drifted up to me on the breeze invitingly as I’d jumped into the swirling ice-cold mountain water. It had clutched at me hungrily, pulling me under so rapidly, and with such dizzying force, that the air whooshed out of my lungs.

  My initial instinct had been to panic, kicking desperately toward the circle of light above me bruising my knees and shins on the confining rock in the process. The current continued to tug me under as the circle of light above me spun dizzyingly, always just out of reach.

  And then I’d let go. I’d stopped trying to control it and just relaxed, and with only the slightest nettle of pain, I’d been breathing underwater again.

  In moments I’d shot out of the short tunnel, swirling and corkscrewing over slippery rocks until I’d been thrown out into space before falling feet first, arms flapping in panic, into the deep wide sapphire-blue pool I’d recognised as Sabine’s pool, the pool where our adventure had begun.

  He’d been waiting for me in the middle of the water, laughing at my delight.

  “Show me the bottom of this pool?” I’d asked, suddenly curious about what must lie beneath.

  “You don’t need me to show you anything any more,” he’d told me, his voice teasing but with a sad undertone.

  I’d bobbed forward in the water, putting both of my arms round his neck, the way I’d held him before I’d discovered my ability to breathe underwater.

  “I’ll always need you,” I whispered.

  He’d smiled, flipping us with blinding speed into the beautiful water. He’d held me very close, but didn’t breathe for me, searching eagerly for the bottom of the pool as we gazed into the darkening water.

  Merrick had suddenly twisted us to the left, corkscrewing around the edge of the pool slowing as we went. After a short while he’d shifted the orientation of our bodies until we were swimming parallel to the surface of the pool and shortly thereafter he had flipped us around and pushed my feet onto the slippery bottom of the pool.

  My eyes had struggled to adapt to the gloomy light. I’d pushed away from him treading water a little as my natural buoyancy lifted me off the bottom, turning around clumsily as I’d tried to see the cave we must be in and what must lie beneath it for the colour of the pool to be turquoise and jade green.

  He’d popped up beside me.

  “Stay here for a moment,” he’d said, his mouth tickling my neck as he spoke. The water had swirled around me, and begun to glow faintly.

  I’d looked around for the source of light and watched in delight as the sides of the pool began to glow behind Merrick’s finger tips as he ran them over the rock. The light grew stronger as he made his way around the pool illuminating the water with an eerie glow and showing just how vast the space was. I’d expected the pool to narrow as we got deeper, but in fact the opposite was true. The beautiful pool we had dived into at the surface was a fifth of the size of the cave we were in now.

  I’d watched, fascinated, as Merrick continued to circle the pool. He’d swum in a wavelike motion his movement infinitely more graceful in the water than he had been on land. He was so fast, so comfortable in the water, that for the first time I understood just how inhuman he actually was.

  And then the realisation hit me, that I was just as inhuman, that water was now my home too, my refuge, my haven.

  I laughed, the sound as clear as a bell.

  “What’s so funny?” he’d asked on one of his laps around.

  I’d twisted to follow him, imitating the wavelike motion in which he swam.

  “I’m just like you.” I’d laughed again.

  It was freedom and excitement and joy but most of all it was an intense feeling of “rightness”, of really belonging.

  He’d curled in toward me, spiralling us into a tighter circle before pushing my feet onto the rock.

  “Look at your feet”

  I’d looked down in time to see him sweep his hand along the bottom of the pool, revealing what I hadn’t been able to see earlier.

  The black rock was marbled with jade stone running in frozen swirls out from where I was standing. My feet had been at the epicentre of the green rock and when I’d looked up, I could see a small circle of light that must be the very centre of the pool.

  “It’s so beautiful,” I’d told him, not just referring to jade.

  “It’s almost as beautiful as you are, Alexandra,” he’d murmured before running his fingers through my swirling hair.

  “Race you to the top,” I’d giggled, laughing as I easily outpaced him.

  We had been sitting on the boulder at the top of the waterslide for a little while talking, the topics drifting from childhood memories and friends to the most beautiful places we’d ever been.

  The comparison was almost funny if they hadn’t been so bizarrely different.

  Merrick really listened to me as I related what I considered to be a normal school day, asking fascinated questions about the dull routine that had filled my life before this incredible adventure. He’d wanted to know about my teachers and the subjects I’d been learning.

  Trying to explain the purpose of each subject had proven very difficult. I’d always just assumed the benefits of learning were obvious, but he questioned how I’d use them practically and how they’d prepared me for life.

  In contrast his childhood had been a very practical one. He’d learned the habits of the creatures that they lived with, turtles, eels, rays and sharks.

  I’d shuddered at the mention of the great predators, expressing what mindless eating machines they were.

  He’d been shocked and saddened at my perception of them, claiming them to be incredibly intelligent and highly social, both characteristics I’d never associated with them.

  He’d explained the languages he’d had to learn, first and most obvious being the language the Oceanids spoke,
but then different dialects of Dolphin, Orca and Whale.

  He’d explained what Oceanids ate, how they hunted, how they prepared food, and the flavour of his favourite dishes.

  In return I’d tried to explain the ingredients of cottage pie and chicken salad and peanut butter.

  After the twentieth question of the texture of a peanut butter sandwich, I’d promised him I’d make him one, in return for a clam and seaweed wrap, which he claimed was his favourite snack.

  I had described my family for him. I’d told him about Brent, how much I missed him, how sometimes the only picture of his face I had left in my head was the dead one. How I longed to be able to undo that afternoon in the pool, because it somehow felt like my fault.

  He’d held my hand and let me talk, not trying to make me feel better.

  I’d described my Mom. The way she loved me, how she looked, and how I didn’t know how to leave her. He hadn’t tried to convince me, he’d just listened, allowing me to express the argument that had been raging within me as I struggled to come to terms with two equally painful losses.

  “If I could just say goodbye to her, Merrick, just spend a couple of weeks with her, it would make all of this so much easier.” Tears had filled my eyes, and he’d squeezed my hand, promising me that we could talk to Talita about it.

  I’d explained what Dad looked like, and how much fun he was, how I felt betrayed by his silence about my heritage, which was quite obviously a reality.

  “Don’t be too hard on him,” Merrick had told me quietly, the first comment he’d made the entire time I’d been talking. “From what I understand, he has only ever wanted what’s best for you.”

  “How is lying to me what’s best for me?” I’d asked hotly.

  He’d smiled. “He wanted to keep you from all of this, Alexandra. He wanted to keep you safe. I can understand a little bit of what he’s been through, because any possibility that you might be harmed frightens me more than anything I’ve ever feared.”

  “Tell me about your family,” I’d asked, wanting to change the subject.

  He’d described his parents, what they had looked like, how they had moved, how his mother had taught him and his siblings about manners and the etiquette that ruled Oceanid life. How his father had taught him to hunt and ride ocean currents and play the games young Oceanid males played.