by Ellen Datlow
A MOMENT BEFORE BREAKING
A. C. WISE
The wave gathers itself, grows, and waits to fall.
Ana stays close to her mother as they crowd onto the boat. Water slaps the pier. Everything smells of salt, fish, and rotting weeds. When they’re herded below deck, the smell becomes too many bodies, too much breath. Everyone talks at once. Ana’s mother obsessively checks the bag held tight against her body, the one with their paperwork and refugee visas.
Ana wants to go home. She misses her room, and her cousins, but her mama says they’re going to a better life. America is the land of opportunity. Her mama will get a new job, and Ana will go to a new school. Ana is afraid she’ll have to do the fourth grade over again even though her auntie has been teaching them English.
They’re shown to a cabin with two other families. There’s a boy, no more than three years old, who cries and clings to his father’s hand. Later, there is strange food in a room with long tables. The engines grind, and the ship chugs through the water. Everyone is nervous, excited, afraid.
After the meal, Ana returns with her mother to the cabin and they climb into one of the lower bunks. Her mother lies down with her back pressed against the wall, and Ana tucks herself against her mother. She doesn’t expect to sleep, but Ana wakes to the scream of metal. It is the sound of the world being torn apart. The deck shudders, and a klaxon blares, accompanied by a flashing red light. A crackling voice comes over the loudspeaker, but Ana can’t hear over the general panic.
Then, for a moment, everything goes still. Underneath the human chaos, there’s a noise like a song, a rising chant making her stomach feel like it’s dropping to her toes, but it also sounds like a hurricane, a storm.
The deck shudders again. The groan of metal, worse than before, and her mother pulls her toward the door.
“Mama, what is—” But her mother doesn’t hear her.
The ship lurches violently, rolls. Ana smashes into a wall that is now a floor, losing her grip on her mother’s hand. She tastes blood. Everything is black and red, black and red. The alarm wails, but the chanting threads through it, growing louder. Ana’s heart pounds, her fear turning it into a beacon to call the song, then falling to its rhythm. She wills it to slow, to change, but it refuses to obey.
So instead, she curls as small as she can. She doesn’t want the singing people to find her. She makes herself into a ball, her face covered in snot and tears, but her traitor heart keeps on screaming Here! Here! I’m here!
Once upon a time …
Ana’s eyelids are sticky, crusted closed. She can’t open them, and everything hurts.
Once … The voice falters. Stops.
Mama? Her lips shape the words, but no sound emerges. It isn’t her mother’s voice. It’s coming from inside; she hears it in the space between her ribs, and echoing in her head. Her throat is dry, her mouth swollen. Someone is crying, but it isn’t her. It’s coming from inside, too.
Panic. She tries to thrash away from the sound and waves of pain rip through her body. She chokes on a soundless scream, breath wheezing. Her skin has been peeled away, everything scraped raw. She remembers a sound like bees, buzzing and buzzing. Needles, going in and out of her skin.
Once upon a time …
The voice again. It comes in fragments, stutters. It is a cold voice, coming from very far away, but also very close, and it isn’t human.
Where is her mama? The question comes full of aching need, but Ana already knows the answer. If her mama could come for her, she would. That means she isn’t here. Ana is alone, scared, but the voice sounds frightened, too.
Once upon a time, the King Under the Waves did not sleep as he sleeps now. He ruled at the beginning of time, and he will rule at the end. He is a wave, waiting to fall, and his crown is dead men’s bones. He was ancient when the world began.
Ana doesn’t like the story, but it isn’t quite as scary as being alone. Knowing someone else is in the dark with her is comforting.
Now the King Under the Waves sleeps in his court, which is lost, but he will wake in time.
Before the King slept, his court magician brought him whispers. She said his people no longer believed in him. They thought him weak, old, tired.
The magician was a liar.
She challenged him to make something new, something never seen under the waves before to prove his power, baring rows of ghost-pale teeth as she did.
So the King rose up in veins of lightning and became a storm. He screamed rain down on a ship, smashed it to splinters and took its wheel. Upon the wheel he hung the bones of drowned men, and the flesh of creatures born in the lightless deep. In his vanity and pride, the King made a creature caught between land and sea. He made a child, a prince, an heir. He made me.
Weird purple-blue light seeps beneath her lids, thick like the blood inside a bruise. Her lids are still sticky, but this time, Ana can open her eyes. She’s lying on her back, her arms and legs strapped down. She turns her head as much as she can. Everywhere she’s able to look there are glass tanks lining the walls, glowing softly in the dark.
She remembers a voice in the dark, telling her stories. Ana blinks. The motion makes her eyes sting. Why isn’t her mama here? Where is she?
Her skin still feels raw, worse than the worst sunburn. To distract herself, she focuses on the tank at the foot of her bed, taking up nearly the whole wall. Something sloshes within the cloudy, blue-lit water. She can’t make sense of the shape, then it gets worse, a tangled knot of darkness unfolding too many limbs.
A memory, like a blade driven through her skull. Underwater, she lived underwater, and there were things like the thing in the tank, things with needle teeth, hissing at her, hurting her. There are too many people inside her skin. A sob, bigger than a tidal wave, threatens to overwhelm her. Her entire body shakes—a cage, rattled from within.
Ana wakes for the third time. Calloused fingers press against her wrist. Her first instinct is to jerk away, but the voice, the one inside her head, whispers, Be still. Hide. Don’t let them find you. Fear tastes like brine at the back of her throat, and she fights not to gag, not to do anything that will let them know she’s awake.
“Her pulse is normal.”
A man’s voice. He runs a finger over her forearm, and her skin crackles like static electricity. The voice inside her flinches, an almost physical shape she can feel moving inside her. The man lowers her arm and replaces the restraint.
“The ritual worked. The prince is contained. Let’s dump the others.”
Footsteps move around the room, then retreat. When she’s certain she’s alone, Ana opens her eyes. She turns her head to look at her restraints, and her breath catches. Her skin shines, and it isn’t just an echo of the tanks’ blue-purple light. Her cousin showed her a video on the internet once of bioluminescent jellyfish, the tide lit up at night with thousands of tendrils. It looks just like that, whorls and swooping lines needle-marked onto her skin. When she tries to make sense of the pattern, her head hurts. There are plants and underwater animals, but it’s also a language that tastes like wrong-colored stars and brine and the black depths of the ocean.
A hot, stinging pressure builds behind her eyes. She has to get out. She has to find her mother.
Her wrists are small, and the cuff the man reattached isn’t as tight as it should be. She twists her arm. The leather chafes, breaking already raw skin. The tattoos glow brighter, and she swears one of them moves.
Her wrist slips free, smeared in blood. With shaking fingers, she fumbles the other cuffs open. Cloudy water sloshes in the tanks, and she catches a glimpse of something impossibly large pressed against the glass. She scrambles up, ignoring the pain, and runs to the door.
Footsteps from the far end of the hall, the men returning. Ana bolts in the opposite direction. The papery gown covering her newly glowing flesh crinkles and rustles. She ducks through an open door, flattening herself against the wall.
She scans the room, searching for
another way out. It’s like the one she left, lined with tanks, dimly seen things moving within. And on three cots, three blanket-draped bodies, which makes Ana think of the crying boy on the ship.
The light flicks on. Ana freezes. The men enter the room, heading straight for the cots, and not looking to where she hides.
“You grab that one, I’ll take this one, and we’ll come back for the third.”
The thing inside her coils and uncoils, a pulsing knot of tension. Hatred seethes through her like molasses, thick and dark. The thing inside her hates these men. The men who hurt her. Who held her down. Who marked her skin. Ana hates them, too.
She launches herself forward. Startled, the man closest to her drops the blanket he’s carrying and the body slips free. It’s not the boy from the cabin, but still. His skin is partially tattooed, angry-looking and red. Whatever they did to her, they tried to do to him, too. Now he’s dead.
Ana latches onto the man’s arm, biting down.
“Son of a bitch!” He kicks her, and Ana folds.
She tastes blood on her teeth, and licks it clean. The second man speaks a word in a language she doesn’t understand. It crawls, twisting through her, making the marks on her skin shudder. Ana gasps. She can’t breathe. She’s drowning in the air. The word isn’t for her, it’s for the thing inside of her. They’re hurting it, hurting her.
“No,” Ana says, but the sound that comes out is something else entirely. It is ships torn asunder and the tide thundering against the shore.
The glass tanks shatter. The things inside surge forth in a rush of foul-smelling water, weak and half dead. As they do, Ana changes. Dark limbs snatch up the men. She is no longer a girl made of skin and bone. She is cartilage and rage and teeth in rows and her body is so much bigger than it should be, filling the room. She tears and tears, not just the men, but the things from the tanks as well.
She bites and swallows and chews. When she is done, chunks of flesh, human and not, and splinters of bone cover the floor. Ana is shaking. She is soaking wet. She is alone. The room stinks of seawater. She looks at her hands and they are hands again. Her stomach roils. What did she bite? What did she swallow? The tattoos pulse. Sated, the thing inside of her rolls over to sleep.
Ana runs.
Rain pounds the overhang, just deep enough to keep her dry. The alleyway smells like garbage. Ana wedges her back against the wall, a stack of jumbled crates hiding her. Yesterday, she stole clothes from a Laundromat. They mostly fit. This morning, she watched the back door of a bakery until a man emerged with a bulging plastic sack of trash, then gorged herself on three-day-old bread and pastries, thick and crusty and sugary sweet.
She has no idea where she is, how far the boat sailed, or where she was taken afterward. She doesn’t know how much time has passed. She doesn’t know anything.
She’s heard people around her speaking English, and other languages, too. She can read some of the signs from what her auntie taught her. The thought that she made it to America, without her mother, makes her heart ache.
She needs a plan. Somewhere to live. She cannot survive on old bread alone. Her mama is gone. Her mama’s bag with the papers saying she belongs here is gone. She can’t ask anyone for help: she killed two people. Or the thing inside her did, but she wanted them dead, too. She draws her knees up and wraps her arms around them.
“Tell me a story?” Ana’s teeth chatter, her stolen clothes inadequate against the cold.
The thing inside her turns over, waking up, unfurling like the things in the tank. Maybe it’s a monster, but maybe she is, too. And all they have is each other.
Once upon a time …
“What are you?” Ana asks softly.
Once … Something about the voice makes her think of whales singing to each other, a resonating sound she feels in her breastbone. The same cousin who showed her the video of the jellyfish played a clip of whale songs for her once. Tony. He wanted to be a marine biologist. Ana suddenly misses him fiercely.
Once upon a time, there was a weakling prince.
There is sorrow in the voice, shame.
While the King Under the Waves slept, the court magician gathered followers. She called the prince a traitor, a creature half-made for the land and so unable to fully love the sea. Her words passed among her followers, from needle-toothed mouth to needle-toothed mouth.
The King has abandoned us, she said. While he slumbers, we must take matters into our own hands.
So the King’s courtiers, with their strong limbs and rending beaks, bright lures and endless hunger, sought out the prince. They hunted him. They threatened him and beat him, hissed traitor at every turn, and drove him from the palace until he couldn’t find his way home.
The magician rose out of the waves and caught a man fishing alone. She coiled her body around him, and held her dripping face over his. Her words were sibilant, water gurgling through ancient channels cut in stone. With her teeth inches from his flesh, she poured instructions into his ears.
She told the man where to find the prince, and taught him secret ways to bind the prince in human flesh. She swore him to be her priest, to pass her word onto the next generation, and the next. When the prince’s human body failed, rotting and dying around him, the priest’s descendants would find another body, and another. She promised her priest power, a weapon—the immortal prince driven mad by dying over and over again with each fragile human body he inhabited.
She promised that when the time came, the priest and his followers would turn the prince against his father and take the kingdom under the waves for their own.
She lied.
Though the man who would be her priest suspected she would kill those who served her once the kingdom was in her hands, it would be a problem for his children, or his children’s children in days to come. By the time the magician’s plan came to fruition, he would be long dead, but if he did not agree to serve her now, he would not even live to see another day.
“This is less than half what you promised to pay.” Ana bristles.
The man is a head taller than her, and almost twice as wide. She isn’t a child anymore, but she’s a collection of scrawny twig-limbs compared to his solid bulk. He grins, showing glints of gold among the ivory.
“I changed my mind. Take it or leave it. You wanna be stuck with a handful of stolen goods when those new ICE agents come sniffing around?”
“Why would they—” She stops, every bone of her spine going rigid. The man’s grin widens.
Underneath her clothing, her tattoos squirm. The prince remembers bared teeth, not glinting gold, but translucent-pale like fish bones. He remembers hisses of traitor and being told he doesn’t belong. He wants to burst through her skin at the man, and she fights him down.
“I don’t want any trouble,” Ana mumbles.
It’s a lie. She wants to demand the money she’s owed. She wants to rip this man apart. A thick finger goes under her chin, tilting it up. The man leans close; his breath stinks of beer and garlic.
“You’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you.”
There’s a knife in her pocket, a small blade she could open with a flick of her wrist. It would be kinder than letting the creature inside her unfold. She imagines driving it into the man’s gut, the side of his neck, his eye. Sometimes she remembers the prince’s other deaths, the bodies he inhabited before hers. The memory of dying over and over makes it hard to care about the small life in front of her. Ana’s hand creeps toward her pocket.
“Hey!” The man grabs her wrist, and she lets out a yelp.
She stomps on his foot as he tries to pin her against the wall. Doesn’t he understand she’s being kind? She’s sparing him? She uses his momentum to pull him off balance, making a run for it when he stumbles. He’s surprisingly fast, bouncing off the wall and catching her by the collar, yanking her off her feet.
A shadow falls over her as Ana wheezes, the air driven from her lungs. Her skin burns, the prince pushing at her from inside. Hu
ngry, hungry, hungry.
“There you are, cuz. I’ve been looking all over for you.”
A young man grins down at her. He can’t be much older than her, but he carries himself like he knows a hundred times more about the ways of the world. He holds out a hand; Ana is so stunned she lets him help her up. The coiled knot inside her calms. The young man turns his attention to the big man with garlic breath.
“This here is my cousin,” he says. “I’ve been looking all over for her. I hope there isn’t any trouble.”
Ana has never seen the young man before, and he’s certainly not her cousin, but she keeps her mouth shut. He wears an easy smile. His stance is loose, but there’s a threat implied, only this time, the threat isn’t directed at her. A white man with buzz-cut hair and tattoos covering half his face stands behind the man calling himself her cousin. He cracks his knuckles and watches the man with garlic breath.
“No trouble.” The man with garlic breath holds his hands up, eyes on the tattooed giant.
“I’m Theo.” The young man turns his attention back to Ana. “This is Antonin. You’re with us now.”
“That man owes me money,” Ana says, jerking her chin at the man scuttling away.
Theo and Antonin exchange a look, and Antonin turns to follow the man. Ana feels a moment of guilt, but whatever Antonin has in mind is still kinder than what she would have done. Theo throws an arm around Ana’s shoulders, not possessive, not threatening. She can’t say why, but something about him feels like family, like home, like they really could be cousins. If Ana squints, she can almost see the resemblance.
“You like pizza?” he asks. “I’m starving.”
Once upon a time, the King Under the Waves dreamed a box into existence. The box was also a map, and a city, and a palace. A way to find what is lost. A way for the prince to find his way home.
The alarm beeps and Ana snakes an arm out from beneath the covers. A chalky after-taste coats her tongue, like she’s been devouring powdered bones in her sleep. She takes a moment to remind herself she is no longer the child in the room with the tanks. No longer the stick-thin girl on the streets.
