Child of a Hidden Sea (48 page)

“I sent the phone home in the pouch, with Verena, when she came back here for Beatrice. I told her I'd sent Mom and Dad an e-mail so they wouldn't report us missing. Which I did, incidentally.”

“So Verena brought it here, the phone sent the text and synced all your files up to that point to the cloud, and … Sofe, what if
she
gets into trouble?”

“Haha! Thought of that. She couldn't get into the courier pouch. Even if she'd realized what I was up to, she couldn't have done anything about it.”

“Maybe you are a lawyer's daughter after all.”

“See?” By now she'd gotten the phone online and accessed her cloud storage. “Here are my video files up to the point where she went to get Beatrice. And here's the stuff you filmed in Erinth, all those books from the library, and some of your measurements.”

She saw the relief on his face.

“Your otter raft … that stuff's gone?”

“I need to to go back and dive it properly anyway. With a partner and a plan and no damned monsters! And at least a week to look at everything. But in the meantime, we have pink narwals and the Tallon shipyards and the Erinthian market and a respectable chunk of the Conto's library and John Coine being a creepy, threatening ass.”

“Sneaky,” Bram said. “You're learning to hide your cards.”

“Is that a compliment or an insult? Oh!” She pointed as a shopping center loomed out of the mist. “I know what we'll do. You can buy me a normal outfit somewhere, so I can go to the airport, and we'll get a gym bag for the dress.”

“I can buy?”

“I maxed out my credit card buying cameras.”

They hopped off at the next stop.

“Mall air,” said Bram as they stepped through the doors. “Air conditioning and French fries. I thought we were never gonna get home.”

“Dry land, and the smell of pizza baking under heat lamps,” she said, raising her skirt above the food court floor. A gust of breeze—air conditioning, or a current from the open doors, caught the skirt, tugging her forward and in, pressing it and her samples against the backs of her legs.

Wind in my sails,
she thought, and that was exactly it. Even though she didn't know anything—how she was going to get a toehold into Stormwrack, what Cly was truly like, whether things would work out with Verena—she felt, perhaps for the first time, like her life was on course.

“Princess!” A little girl bounded up and down in a booth, waving a hot dog. “Mommy, look! Princess!”

“Princess Sophie,” Bram said. “Of Sylvanna?”

“Of no great nation,” Sophie corrected, feeling strangely cheerful. Sketching a curtsy at the kid, she locked arms with her brother, sweeping into the familiar fluorescent-lit world of the mall.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A. M. Dellamonica is a recent transplant to Toronto, Ontario, having moved there in 2013 with her wife, Kelly Robson, after twenty-two years in Vancouver. She has been publishing short fiction since the early nineties in venues like
Asimov's
,
Strange Horizons
, and
Tor.com
, as well as numerous anthologies. Her 2005 alternate history of Joan of Arc, “A Key to the Illuminated Heretic,” was short-listed for the Sidewise Award and the Nebula.

Her first novel,
Indigo Springs
, won the 2010 Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic; she is also a Canada Council Grant Recipient.

Dellamonica teaches writing courses through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.
Child of a Hidden Sea
is her third novel.