Elemental Origins: The Complete Series

by A. L. Knorr

  With their protective cover, my eyes saw better underwater than they did above water. Even murky water, while a challenge, still proved relatively easy to navigate, although I didn't enjoy swimming in gloom very much. It was the vast expanses of clear, clean, life-filled water that thrilled me the most. My body quickly went from soft to strong and I felt indestructible.

  I passed several weeks this way while skirting Antoni successfully. The men were bringing up items from the manifest and checking things off their list every day. Mom reported that the Novak team members who had free time had begun to come along on the dives just to watch the Bluejackets work, and they were amazed.

  I ventured into the dining room one day at dinnertime to see that Simon, Martinius, my mom and a few other divers were having a meal together. Mom sat at the end of the group, always on the outskirts. She slid the empty chair next to her back from the table and patted it. I filled a plate from the buffet and joined them. They were talking and laughing and seemed relaxed.

  Simon held up a glass of beer and the rest lifted their glasses too, I lifted my glass of water as he toasted, "To the Bluejacket luck, long may it continue."

  "Luck?" said Eric, a little more red-faced than usual. "Skill's more like it. There's no such thing as luck in salvage. To us, the best in the world, and to our bonuses!" They all drank. I glanced at Simon but he was too happy to care that Eric had hijacked his toast. Martinius raised an eyebrow at Eric's vulgar mention of money in the presence of their contractor, but didn't say anything.

  "Truly, you have a remarkable team," said Martinius to Simon. "What do you credit for your success?" Martinius was a consummate actor; there was no hint of sarcasm in his question.

  I watched Mom out of the corner of my eye as I shovelled mashed potatoes into my mouth. She was a blank canvas.

  "We hire only masters. Our divers are extremely experienced, they have thousands of dives between them, maybe even tens of thousands," answered Simon. He leaned in closer to Martinius. "She doesn't like it when I single her out, but Mira is by far the most gifted diver I have ever found. I know you've read an article or two but they cannot possibly do her justice. She pretends she hates it, but no one who is that good could ever hate diving. Watching her work is almost eerie," he said, barely over a whisper.

  "Is that so?" Martinius answered as though this was truly a revelation. Martinius snuck a glance towards my mother. She caught his eye and hid a small smile behind her napkin. I stifled a laugh at their subtle exchange and then tucked in to my roast beef and gravy.

  Sometimes, I would go down to the beach and meet the team as they came in with the day's salvage. I'd always have wet hair so, of course, I told them I had been out for a swim. They'd shake their heads at me and tell me I was just like my mother.

  I would help them unload the haul and Micah showed me how to label and tag the artifacts. A lot of what they brought up had to stay submerged in seawater until it had gone through a process to prepare it for exposure to the air. The Novak team would take the items they'd recovered that day and ship them to their preservation lab to clean and catalogue.

  I had been congratulating myself for the excellent job I had been doing of dodging emotional and confusion-riddled interactions with Antoni when, a little over three weeks after our last interaction, he finally cornered me.

  Chapter 25

  I knew I couldn't dodge him forever but I wished it had been on a different day. It was a day that I'd gone trawling for garbage. I was dragging the net, which was full of trash, towards the 1960's dump truck, which I'd borrowed from the Novak's garage. I always had it back in less than an hour so people hardly even knew it had gone missing, not that I would have been in trouble for it, I was allowed to take it. I just wanted to draw as little attention to myself as possible. I had become very good at being a ghost.

  As I hauled a huge net full of garbage across the sand, I recognized the Jeep that Antoni drove as it pulled up to park on my abandoned beach. I swallowed and took note of which way the wind was blowing, I needed to keep my thoughts and emotions as clear as possible. I braced myself for whatever it was that he'd come to say.

  At least I was clothed and finishing up, I had been in mermaid form less than fifteen minutes before. Since my rebirth, I had undergone some physical changes that made even my human appearance a bit different than it had been before. My hair had darkened from dark brown to blue-black, just like my mother's, and had grown at an astonishing rate. My eyes had taken on a supernatural teal colour, not unlike my mother's. Hers were more blue than green, while mine were more green than blue. My skin had become even more pale and took on an opaque and slightly iridescent cast. It was subtle, but I knew that some people had noticed because I was getting a lot more stares than I used to. Freckles, veins, and scars had smoothed over and my skin became more reflective. I suddenly felt extremely conscious of all of these changes and tried to squash the panic fluttering in my breast as Antoni turned the engine off. Would he notice the differences?

  I had a kerchief tucked into the back pocket of my shorts and I whipped it out. I raked my hair back into a low haphazard bun and tied the kerchief over my locks like a fifties housewife.

  My clothes were damp from my wet body and I had large circles of moisture at my crotch and armpits. I was not a pretty sight and I told myself that, with Antoni, that was a good thing. I picked up the net of trash again, pulling it up out of the water and onto the sand.

  Antoni got out of the truck, shut the door, and ambled across the sand. He wore a pair of aviator sunglasses which, along with his recently clipped hair, made him look like a fighter pilot. He was wearing a white Novak company polo that had an embroidered mermaid crest over his heart, red shorts and navy deck shoes.

  I'd come to learn that European guys liked to dress this way, unlike the boys back home who liked to wear ripped t-shirts and their pants half falling down. Why did Antoni always have to look so sharp, so together? He made me feel like even more of a beach bum. As he approached, my heart did a little flip and I realized just how much I had missed him.

  "What on earth..." He took his sunglasses off, his eyes widening. "I thought I'd find you reading a book and lolling on a beach towel not dragging what looks like about four thousand kilos of trash across the sand in a fishing net. Seriously, what are you doing?" His eyes moved from my trash haul to me and they skimmed my body from kerchief to bare feet. "You look incredible by the way. What is this, your daily workout? You know we have a gym, right?"

  I'd stopped pulling the garbage and tried to make like its weight was too much for me. "Are you going to stand there gawking or are you going to help me?"

  He hooked his sunglasses into the top of his polo and grabbed a corner of the net. Together we dragged it up into the bed of the truck. It was nearly overflowing.

  "Targa, have you lost your mind? How did you even do all this by yourself?" He gestured at the mess.

  "There's a lot of crap in the ocean. Or hadn't you noticed?"

  For the first time since I'd met him, he looked really stung. "Of course I've noticed. It offends me too. In fact, I organize a volunteer crew every summer to do a clean up. But what are you going to do? Clean the entire Polish shoreline all by yourself?" He gestured down the length of beach.

  It was good that he'd put it that way. At least he thought that I was hiking along the shoreline and picking trash up off the beach instead of dragging the net along miles of ocean.

  The trash tended to gather in eddies. I used my sensitive tail to detect where the currents on the top of the water met, creating large, slow moving whirlpools which collected floating refuse.

  "If I have to. I have to take the truck back. The dump closes at three. Thanks for your help.” I headed around to the driver's side. I hoped he wouldn't kick up a fuss at me driving without an international licence. At least they drove on the right hand side of the road here so it was easy for me.

  He followed me around to the driver's side. "Targa," he said, and the
sincerity in his voice gave me pause. I had a feeling that my lack of a license wasn't on his mind. "I know you've been avoiding me, but will you please just let me talk to you for a minute?"

  I took off my glasses and rubbed at the tender spot on the bridge of my nose. I looked him in the eyes, expectantly, "So talk." My human self knew that I was being unnecessarily rude, but my siren self didn't care, even if my heart was straining through my ribcage towards him. Sirens didn't get their mates by being polite. Manners had gone from a necessity of life to something that took too much energy.

  As soon as I'd looked at him, he stopped and something in his face changed. "You... look different," he said, slowly.

  I sighed, but didn't say anything. He hadn't asked a question, and I didn't feel like making up some dumb excuse.

  "How are you even paler than when you first arrived? Haven't you been spending every flipping day outside?" His eyes scanned down my legs. "You haven't been in your suite, that's for sure."

  I chose to redirect. "Did you come here to talk about my skin tone?"

  "No, I didn't." He sighed. "I came to say, first of all, that it's not necessary for you to avoid me like I have some contagious disease. And second of all..." he paused, looking as though he was searching for words. "This is really dumb. I get it, you played a prank on me to show off to your friends. You apologized. Can we just put it behind us now and be friends? I miss hanging out with my Canadian buddy."

  Now he sounded more like the Antoni I knew, the platonic one that I'd spent the first week with. I wished that I could go back to my old feelings, the new ones were so complicated. I took a breath, feeling myself softening, my defences coming down just a little. I was infinitely grateful that the wind was blowing his scent away from me.

  "You're not mad? What I did wasn't nice," I said.

  He shrugged. "I'm not mad. I was a teenager once too. We've all done stupid shit." I suppressed a laugh. It was the first time I'd ever heard him say 'shit' and it sounded funny in his accent.

  He raised his eyebrows. "Friends?"

  "Friends," I agreed. "But, you know the job is more than half over. I'll be going home soon anyway."

  "Yes, the salvage is going at an unprecedented rate. I was hoping you wouldn't bring that up," he sighed. "Look Targa, I do feel something for you, something amazing that I've never felt for anyone before. And I'm trying not to imagine how I'll feel when you go home. If what you said was true..." he trailed off.

  So, he still wasn't convinced. I couldn't tell if I was happy or sad about that. Everything was muddled.

  "If what you said was true then I'm happy just to have met you. You are one of a kind and I can only hope that there will be a woman in my future who makes my heart feel like it does when I'm around you."

  This sweet monologue was so humble, so vulnerable and so honest that it made me feel like a complete shit. How could I think that the desire he had shown me wasn't real after a speech like that? He cared about me enough to let me go because that was what he thought I wanted.

  I wanted to tackle him into the sand and cover him with kisses. I wanted to tell him that he made my heart explode out of my chest. He made violins come out of my throat for crying out loud. I wanted to scream with frustration.

  Instead, I lied to him again. "I hope that woman is in your future too." Something wilted inside of me like a blossom charred by the sun. What was I supposed to take away from this? Was I even doing the right thing?

  He stepped forward to give me a hug and I turned away from him and opened the truck door. "Now, help me get rid of this heinous load of crap, please." I got in and shut the door.

  I could see him in my periphery, through the open driver's side window. I couldn't turn my head and look at him, this was already hard enough. I turned towards the passenger's side and grabbed a bottle of water. A hot tear slipped down my cheek and I angrily brushed it away. I opened the water bottle and chugged it.

  “Sure, Targa,” he said, quietly. "I'll follow you so you don't have to come all the way back here and drop me off."

  I nodded and he disappeared.

  As he followed me the few miles to the dump, I couldn't stop the flow of hot tears. I wasn't sobbing; my eyes just wouldn't stop watering. This was new. Was this the way mermaids wept?

  When we got there I had to make a show of splashing my face with bottled water to make it damp so it covered my tears.

  As we unloaded the trash together, I could feel Antoni watching me but I still couldn't look at him, and I kept my sunglasses on.

  I didn't feel strong enough to keep denying what I wanted most. Only a few more weeks to go. But the emotion that came with that thought was not relief but heartbreak.

  Chapter 26

  After the day on the beach, Antoni was back to his old self. By which I mean he was perfectly behaved and professional. I stopped avoiding him, and there were no more seduction attempts from either side. I made sure that I kept my physical distance whenever we spent time together, which wasn't as much as before because I still wanted to be in the ocean as much I could, and it was hard to be around him.

  I was running out of time. The job was winding down and we were scheduled to leave in a little over a week.

  Towards the end of the job, I'd stopped going out to The Sybellen with my mom at night. She said there wasn't much left to do and she was happy to do it on her own. She told me to enjoy my time in the Baltic before we headed home, and to build up my strength as much as I could, so I'd been swimming all day everyday.

  I collapsed on the couch in our suite with my usual cup of tea. It was after dinner and I was full and tired. It was one of those evenings where I felt the deep exhaustion from the last few days' activities and suspected that I'd be dead to the world for 16 hours or so. Mom was in a meeting to talk through a few things about the final schedule with the team.

  My eyelids had begun to droop when the door to our suite slammed open and my mom came in. My eyes snapped open. "Mom!" My heart skittered.

  She had a hard look on her face. She was upset about something. "Sorry, sunshine.” She closed the door with more care than she'd opened it. "I didn't realize you were sleeping."

  "Such manners.” Interesting. Since we'd arrived in Poland, my mother's manners had improved markedly, while mine had degenerated. She'd been spending a lot of time in nearly salt-less water, a huge change from the Atlantic, while I'd gone from human to siren. I supposed it made some kind of strange sense. "What's wrong?" I pushed myself up straight and set my teacup on the coffee table. "Do you want some tea?"

  "No thanks." She sat in the chair across from me. She put her fingers to her temples as though she had a headache. "It's Eric. What a piece of work."

  "What did he do now?" Eric had been making himself a thorn in everyone's side for weeks. He'd been surly and disagreeable, distracted and disorganized in meetings and rude to both the Novak employees and his own teammates.

  At one point, when I had gone to the beach to help the team unload artifacts at the end of the day, I heard angry voices as I came over the bluff. It was Jeff and Eric, who were supposedly friends. Jeff was saying, "Get out of here, Eric. You need to cool down."

  I could see them standing on the beach and facing off. Jeff gestured to some men who were bringing gear off The Brygida, the Novak vessel they took out to the site of The Sybellen everyday. There was a mix of Bluejacket and Novak employees among them.

  "They've got nothing to do with your problems, so you either figure out a way to be civil, or you get on the first plane home. We don't need your garbage attitude. You're spoiling a good thing, mate." Jeff's voice was harsh but there was also sympathy in it, like he knew why Eric was behaving the way he was, he just didn't think it was right.

  Eric had planted a hand on Jeff's chest and shoved. "What, are you giving orders now?"

  "That's enough you two," said Simon as he emerged from The Brygida's cockpit. “This ain’t preschool. Eric, we already talked about this. Go back to the estate, you'
re done for the day."

  Eric had stormed off the beach, muttering to himself. He'd passed by me without even noticing that I was there. As soon as he'd left, the mood of the team completely changed, it was like sunshine after a storm. Soon, they were laughing and talking as we worked, me among them.

  I imagined that Mom had been dealing with something similar, but normally she never let stuff like that get to her. "I thought you didn't really care about your colleagues, Mom? What's got you so riled up?"

  “He's never been a bowl of peaches, but Eric has really cranked up his inner asshole lately. I've always had the label of being the prickliest person on the team and that's the way I'd like to keep it. But Eric's become a real bastard." She sighed and leaned back in the chair. "Simon negotiated performance bonuses with Martinius before he signed the contract, he always does that. Payment should be partially made based on how successful the dive is and we're always successful so it's good business to do it this way. The client is happy, too, since it means that if they don't get what they want, then it doesn't cost them so much," she explained.

  "My guess is that you're the reason the guys get those bonuses every time," I commented. Her team would never know how much they had to be grateful to my mom for, and for her trouble she was either ostracized or hit on.

  She gave me a tired smile. "Yes, I suppose I am." Her smile faded. "Since the dive has been going off like clockwork, Eric has been harassing Simon to renegotiate the terms of the contract."