Fathom (6 page)

Nia flipped over and kicked with her free leg, pounding Bernice in the jaw with a resounding crack and sending her sprawling. She let go of Nia’s leg, leaving long red scrapes where her
fingernails had clutched at her, and although the wounds must have stung in the salt water, Nia did not feel them. She threw herself back into the water and swam like mad against the incoming current, trying not to think about her bloody leg.

Something big and solid rushed by underwater, bumping against her side.

Terror shot up her spine. Besides her freshly scratched leg, her clothes reeked of Antonio’s blood, and the Gulf abounded with sharks.

Oh God
, she prayed.
Let it be a dolphin
.

She couldn’t hear Bernice behind her anymore. Only the sound of her own feverish splashing filled her ears. She glanced over her shoulder, causing her eyes to sting with the sticky-sharp heat of the ocean. She still couldn’t locate Bernice, so she quit swimming and stood up. When the waves rolled past and around her, they came to her collarbone.

Her cousin bobbed a few feet away, eyes closed and mouth shakily agape. Water lapped at her face and she winced, but her eyelids didn’t flutter or open. She coughed and sucked in salt water, but did not seem to awaken. Her head slid under the next wave and bubbles popped to the surface as she started to sink.

That thick, strange form pushed past Nia again.

A moment later, Bernice’s body bobbed as if it had been bumped, too. She did not respond, but drooped even farther below the surface.

“Shit,” Nia swore like one of her grandmother’s farmhands. “Shit!”

Making damn sure she didn’t see the knife, Nia grabbed Bernice’s collar. She hauled her cousin along behind her, walking backwards so she didn’t have to take her eyes off the injured girl. Her face was still underwater, but Nia figured that it could stay that way until she could get them both onto the sand.

The mysterious thing collided against them again, and Nia frantically tried to believe it was a dolphin. Anything else would have attacked already, or that’s what she told herself as she tried to get a better hold on Bernice.

Desperate, she grabbed Bernice’s hair and lifted her head up. Her eyes were half-open, but Nia saw nothing there except for the whites, and in the darkness she was so drained of color that she seemed to glow. Water dribbled from her nose and mouth.

“Come on,” Nia said through gritted teeth. Her fear of the thing in the water had tipped until it was greater than her fear of Bernice, so she shook her cousin and tried to bring her back around. Anything, anyone—she’d talk to anyone right now; she just couldn’t be alone with it, out there in the water.
“Bernice?”

Nia wrapped an arm around the other girl’s chest and pulled her as far above the water as she could, but Bernice was deadweight, and it was all she could do to merely tow her. By the time they reached a waist-deep tide, Nia was almost completely exhausted.

Bernice hacked violently. She began to breathe again with a wet gasp.

“Nia?” She choked on the name. She rotated slowly in Nia’s grip and clung to her. “Nia, I think—”

With incredible force, Bernice was torn out of Nia’s arms and back underwater.

It happened so quickly, Nia couldn’t tell which way she’d gone, but she knew without a doubt that this was no farce. A few waves away, Bernice’s hand shot up and thrashed, then disappeared.

“What’s going on?” Nia yelled, and she was starting to cry because she was too afraid to do anything else.
“Where did you go?”

Her feet tapped something cold and hard. The knife? She ducked under the waves and felt for the blade, rooting around until she touched the fine silver handle. She almost had it. She’d
almost pulled it to the surface when another hand latched itself on to hers.

Out of pure shock, she blinked.

She shouldn’t have seen anything at all, but she could swear there was another pair of eyes, swaying before hers in the swirling undertow. She tried to scream, but it was muffled by the water.

You can come, too, then
.

She shook her head furiously and twisted her arm, but the hand that held it might have been made of steel or stone.

“No,” she burbled. “No.”

It was not Bernice. It couldn’t be.

What felt like seaweed looped around her legs, constricting and binding her as she fought. She needed air. The hand released her and she tried to swim, knowing the surf was only a few feet deep, but not knowing which way was up. The weeds grew tighter, pulling her in all directions at once, rubbing her skin raw and squeezing all the air out of everything.

Stars fizzed across her sight and she felt so light, she was sure she must be floating. She nodded her head, trying to clear it, and opened her eyes again—not feeling the burn of the salt so much as tasting it with her whole body.

The eyes were still there, evil underwater. Her fear was the only thing keeping her conscious, but even that hold was slipping.

The eyes peered closer, zooming up to her face.

“No,” she mouthed, waving the creature away. She squinted over her arm and pulled her legs up to a fetal position. “Stay away. . . .”

Never
.

The world was going dark. Nia wondered where Bernice was.

Come join her. I can take you both. I will make you strong beyond belief
.

She shook her head.
No
.

She tried to push the eyes away, and the feeling of lightness passed, and she was sinking.

The last she remembered, the eyes were retreating. They looked angry, and Nia wondered why. She felt so heavy. She settled to the ocean floor and thought disconnectedly about how this must be what it felt like to die.

“But who are you?” she asked the eyes before they vanished.

I’m Arahab
.

Bedtime Stories of the Gods

U
nder the water, beneath the place where sharks circle low, their noses hovering above the sand, and below the shimmering, shifting schools of fish that move through the Gulf, there is a safe place where an old, long-abandoned being may rest and wait.

She collects other things like herself, or other things that she might fashion after herself. She holds them down and presses them against her. She makes herself mother and master, and maker, and queen.

Arahab holds the blind, water-sick young woman and coos into the still girl’s hair.

“Before you, I took another,” she says. “I plucked him from the water as I plucked you, pulling him down into this abyss where I hold you now. By that point, I’d been watching him for years.

“First I saw him as a child. He was still a boy when he reached into the river and drew the girl out. She was small and frightened; he hid her in his house and tried to make her family buy her back. The lawmen came, and the family cried out for justice. They were powerful people, powerful enough to pay a ransom—but they were also powerful enough to bring down vengeance. The little Spaniard was afraid. His plans had not been fully formed when he seized the child; for look at him, he was just a child himself.

“But he was learning. He was gathering ideas, and coming to understand the way the law of men shows mercy, or fails to.

“Since he was only a boy, the courts gave him a choice. He could go to prison, or he could go to sea. I held my breath, and I smiled when he chose the boats and the waves. I waited for him to learn.

“He sailed on the
Floridablanca
and learned which ropes to tug to pull the sails, how to watch the sky for a sign of the weather, and how to guide a wood-framed vessel by the stars above and by his compass.

“And he learned that a war on land will take to the waves, in time.

“His ship was overtaken. It was pounded and ruined; it was blasted with cannon and riddled with lumpy round bullets; it was overrun with uniformed men who seized whom they liked, executed whom they pleased, and took whatever moved them.

“But my little Spaniard—who was now less little, and more man—he survived the battle and fled from the government ship. He could find no honor in serving a nation whose best efforts met failure; he could not justify risking his own life to further a cause in which he did not believe. And out on the seas, between the land
masses where men build their cities, there were other men like him. Other men had seen what bounty the water might bring; they, too, had learned the ways of the ropes and the sails; they, too, had buried in their hearts the ways of the stars and the horizons that stretched from world to world’s end.”

Arahab uses her terrible, ancient mind to share the scene with the water-sick woman in her arms. Her memory is perfect and infallible. Her recreation is flawless and fearsome.

The water-sick woman listens and watches.

She has no choice, but she has no desire to do otherwise. She learns and waits, and clutches her new mother. Mother means life, and strength, and air. Without her mother, without the primordial voice that rumbles and hums beneath the ocean floor, without her mother’s arms around her body, there is no breath and no being.

“He found a crew and a ship of his own; he severed his ties to the land, to its laws, and to its lords. He called himself king of the coast, and in time he chose this coast. It was not an empty place, even then. Even then, there were men traveling between the ports, between the islands, between the nooks in the Gulf where other men had gathered to trade. But there was not so much competition on the west side of the peninsula, few others stalked the ships that sat low in the water, fat with gold and slaves.

“The Spaniard learned to kill, and he learned to sail with a flag of terror. His ship moved fast across the Gulf and around the rocky edges, rough with coral, where the land sticks its fingers out into this place of mine. He accumulated wealth, and captives, and ransoms. He earned esteem, and respect, and fear. He investigated the forgotten places where the fresh rivers flow into the salt; and in
these places he found estuaries and wells and places where things can be hidden, and lost, and forgotten.