Girl at the Bottom of the Sea (7 page)

Syrena nodded. “Once, very long time ago. I was young, perhaps your age. Was very terrible.”

“What happened?”

Syrena sighed. “Here,” she said, and held out her tail to the girl. “You hold on, I pull you.”

And they headed off like that in the direction of the North Sea. At first it was fun, but as Syrena gained velocity, Sophie started to panic.
She might as well have been a fish caught in the mermaid's hair or a hermit crab stowed away in the crook of her hip fins, for Syrena pumped her tail powerfully, beating against the waters as she rocketed against the current, with no thought about the teenager hanging on to her tail for dear life.

Clasping the mermaid's dense, slippery tail with her hands wouldn't work, so Sophie wrapped her arms around the end in a desperate hug. With the force of the waters pulling at her and the relentless twisting of the mermaid's movements threatening to shake her off, Sophie's body shook like a flag in a hurricane. She thought of fake cowgirls on mechanical bulls, how they got flung off, their butts on the ground. Where would Sophie land if Syrena flicked her off her tail? And would the mermaid even know she was gone?

“Syrenaaaaaaaaaa!” Sophie hollered. But her mouth filled with water as her cry bubbled out, lost in their wild wake as they cut through the ocean. Could she risk lifting a hand off the tail, to give the mermaid a smack? Even loosening her grip destabilized her. She would go spinning off into the water, a one-girl whirlpool. There was only one way to get the mermaid's attention. Sophie bit Syrena's tail.

Her first try, just a nibble, didn't even register. The mermaid's scales were tough, thick, and they were slick like the rest of her skin but not nearly as soft as the skin of her upper body. So Sophie went in harder the next time, channeling a shark. And it worked. With an underwater shriek, the mermaid bucked and slammed her tail, and Sophie's curiosity about what would happen to her if she flew off her ride was
satisfied. She was flipped, head over heels, high into the water above their heads—catapulted, as if shot from a cannon. In the dark waters she couldn't tell which way was up and she flailed, trying to right herself. The rapid ascent hurt, shooting cramps through her chest and making her ears pop like gunshot.

Sophie groped blindly at the ocean around her until she noticed, coming from above, the faintest blue light growing stronger. It was the mermaid, appearing not from above but below. With a yank of the girl's arms, Syrena straightened Sophie in the waters, then hung there, glaring at her. The girl was dizzy from her tumbling, her ears clogged and popping. The ocean around them was cloudy with the black curls of water spouting from vents in the floor beneath them.

“What that about?” Syrena demanded. “You hungry? Here—” she shot her hand out into the dark and snagged a baby octopus, thrust the squirm of it at Sophie. “Eat this. Don't eat mermaid!”

“I wasn't
eating
you, Syrena!” Sophie accepted the small octopus and let its tentacles twine her fingers. “I was trying to get your attention! I can't hold on to your tail like that. We need to do something else.” The octopus half climbed, half swam, in its mysterious octopus way, up Sophie's arm.

“You very much baby,” Syrena observed. “I know this be tough for spoiled human girl from the land. To bring you into
Maumarr
.”

“To bring me where?” Sophie asked, confused.

“Maumarr,” the mermaid repeated. Her voice in the first part of the word sounded low and sonic, like a whale, then ending in what sounded
like a growl. “This place is Maumarr. Mermaid word for the sea.”

“Maoooooo,” Sophie began awkwardly, and Syrena shushed her.

“Don't,” she said. “Human girl cannot make mermaid sound, cannot speak mermaid language. I use your words for things, so you understand. But mermaids have our own words, you know. Older words than your human words. We be down here longer, we know it all forever. Humans not understand life here. Is cold, and hard. You must be strong.” The mermaid shook her head, remembering that she was annoyed with the girl for biting her tail, and even for riding along on her body in the first place. “What am I, a bus?”

“Well, I don't know,” Sophie tried not to whine, not to be “very much baby.” The octopus had drifted up her neck, tickling as it moved into the salty tangle of her hair. “You really can't carry me?” she asked the mermaid. “Am I too heavy?”

“No, Syrena sighed. “Very light. Tell truth, can't feel you at all. Is just principle. I am not donkey. I was told—when I come for you—that you are magic girl, and I think magic girl can swim.”

The octopus had settled itself on the top of Sophie's head, sort of off to the side like a little hat. It nibbled some crab larvae from her hair, its many legs burrowing into Sophie's snarls. She reached up and gingerly stroked the tiny beast the way she had taken to stroking Livia's feather, wound in her curls. Her hair was becoming a real catchall.

Syrena sighed deeply, releasing a chain of shimmering bubbles in the water. “Okay,” she thought out loud. “You are part girl, which cannot swim like mermaid. You don't have this,” Syrena stretched
the marvel of her tail before them, gathered it into her arms, petting herself. Frowning, she picked at some scaly bits that hung from her long appendage. “I am mess,” she said grimly. “When all is over, I get my tail fixed. Anyway—girl part cannot swim with girl body, ya. But Odmieńce has magic.” The mermaid's flashing eyes lit upon Sophie. “Do not try to swim like girl. Swim like Odmieńce!”

Sophie gathered herself in the water. Swim like Odmieńce? She tried to feel powerful. She would charge powerfully forward, like a superhero bursting into the air! She counted to three in her head and lunged forward sloppily, tripping over her feet. She sunk into a hot cloud and emerged with her face sooty from minerals. It was even more bumbling than when she was simply trying to swim. Syrena cringed and covered her face with the tip of her tail.

Gritting her teeth, bits of sand and minerals crunching beneath, Sophie hurled herself through the water again and again. But each time she just flailed, lacking even the grace of slapstick. She kicked the underwater geysers and muddied the waters. Syrena grew weary. It did not take long; patience was not one of the mermaid's magics.

“Listen, I told you are big special! I not abandon my river to the
Boginki
unless you real big deal! But this? This, how you say—bullshit!” Syrena's hands were balled into fists, planted on her hips above her little fins. “You want to go against Kishka? Kishka command the water into a fist to pummel us! You can't even swim through it!”

Sophie remembered her terror as the creek rose up at her grandmother's command. What she saw as she was punched into the
sky—her grandmother's many faces reflected in the water as if in a million shards of glass. Kishka did not move through the water, she made the water move. She was Odmieńce, 100 percent. But Sophie was only half. And was it even half? It's not like she'd been tested at some sort of Magic Lab. Who knew—maybe her Odmieńce gene was weak. Maybe there had been a rotten mistake. She looked glumly at her impatient tutor.

“You command the waters,” Syrena said flatly. “Or I summon a dolphin to bring you back to creek in Chelsea. I'll be done with you.”

Sophie gazed out into the water. It was like looking into a dark sky—grayness all around, monsoon clouds erupting from the floor. She knew there were millions of molecules here, but it looked like nothing. Darkness. She felt her magic pouch still tied to her belt loops, hanging soggy in the water. What was even inside it now? Mud? She poked and squeezed it, but was not called to it. She dropped it, and it floated limply beside her.

While she waited, Syrena plucked a piece of shell from her hair and busied herself filing her opalescent fingernails into wicked points. She curled her lips and brought down her baleen, coated in debris from the geyser. With a huff she blew it all back into the ocean.

Sophie turned away from her. She didn't want to waste her time hating the mermaid. It wouldn't help her out of this problem, this terrible problem—thousands of miles beneath the sea, far from any land,
and barely able to swim. She bit down her rising panic. She closed her eyes and floated. She breathed in and out slowly, slowly, letting the water hold her. And it did, it did hold her. She was suspended ever so lightly above the vents in the ocean floor, the hot clouds billowing around her.

What was holding her, exactly? What was water? It moved at the command of the moon, coming in strong and pulling back. It moved at the command of her grandmother, gathering itself, working against nature. Was Kishka the ocean itself? Had they swum deeper and deeper to escape something that was now all around them, something endless just waiting to strike them again? Would the sea suddenly hurl them into the sky, or would it wrap around their throats like an ocean-sized anaconda? What was this water they moved through?

“Syrena, is the water… could it be Kishka? Could she turn into the whole ocean? Is the ocean on her side?”

The mermaid looked at Sophie evenly and shook her head. “Ocean my home always. Ocean is ocean. Is water, is element. Basic. Like air, like fire and the earth, the lava and sand and dirt. Elements are neutral. If you have magic to work them, you make them good or evil, like puppets.”

Sophie remembered the fist-shaped wave punching up from the water. She remembered the flash of her grandmother in her beastly bird formation, reflected in every drop of the creek. How powerful was Kishka, able to summon and control nature itself: perhaps she was nature, an unknown force of it. But Sophie was Kishka's granddaughter.
She might not be able to summon the waters and make them box for her, but surely she could figure out how to swim.

Sophie calmed herself and grew quiet. She began to truly feel the water, alive all around her. Though she felt stillness in its embrace, she became aware of its motion, its constant shifting, the way it perpetually morphed and flowed over her body. The waters accommodated her, filling the space around her as she bobbed and floated. Its motion was never ending; its thought—
thought?
—ancient and eternal.

The waters, Sophie suddenly understood, were
alive
. She understood it deep in her body, half girl, half Odmieńce, a body made up of so much water—indeed,
most
of her body was water, and Sophie started to feel the communication happening. Her body's water in conversation with the ocean around her, like the beating of her heart, the motion of blood in her veins, an automatic, subconscious activity. Like a whisper. Sophie was water. And so she spoke to the ocean, and asked that it carry her.

Syrena felt the motion of a new current at the bottom of the sea. A rippling, a whirling. The girl was stretched out as if upon a magic carpet of water, thick with salt and sand, alive with primal intelligence. The water responded to Sophie as it did the moon. The girl had created a tide, and the waters rushed together and brought her forward, stopping short before the mermaid. They idled there, the harmonious interaction of a million drops of water, and Sophie could feel them all, buzzing like a hive of bees working in concert, with her as a conductor. When the current stopped short Sophie exploded into giggles.

“I
get
it!” she cheered, wild with glee. “The water is
alive
!”

“Everything is alive,” Syrena nodded, pleased. “Everything is alive, and has its own magic. This you will see, my girl.” The mermaid smiled so wide that Sophie caught a glimpse of the gritty baleen tucked above her teeth. “Now, you swim. Not like girl, not like mermaid. Like Odmieńce.”

Chapter 7

A
nd so the two shot off into the waters, in the direction of the North Sea, where the Swilkie spun itself atop the surface, a great white froth. Syrena pushed through the ocean with her muscular tail, her head bowed down, her arms forming a knife that cleaved the waters.

Beside her, Sophie worked the sea, not so much with her body as her mind. With great focus she commanded the waves and they carried her with a swiftness that rivaled the mermaid herself. Syrena tilted her head at her charge, smirking through the net of hair webbed in her face.

“You think you so smart now, huh? You think you faster than mermaid?” Her tail thundered behind her and she moved through the waters like pure sound.

“Ha!” Sophie spat. “You think
you're
faster than water itself?” And the current surged violently, propelling Sophie forward and knocking Syrena off course with the strength of its waves.