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It was a beautiful day outside.  Fresh, golden, blue and cloudless.

“Tima, look after your sister.”
And just like that the whole thing was ruined. 

“But moooooooom,” she said in her most reasonable voice, “she’s BIG now, and-”

“No buts.  Go and pick out the flowers for the meal.”

And that was the Firm Voice, so she pouted but did it.  She took her flower-bag and her little sister’s hand and her pout and she stalked into the meadows with ill grace.

Bip wasn’t a bad sister, honestly.  But she was so small, and stupid in that way only very clever and very young children could be.  A cat was the only creature as troublesome.  So while in theory all she had to do was thrust her own (very small) flower-bag into Bip’s hands and say ‘fill this’ and ignore her, in practice she spent a busy who-knows-when picking over a very fine bush before she looked up and realized that Bip had gone missing exactly one who-knows-when ago. 

“Fuck,” she said, because mom wasn’t around and these things needed to be cherished even in the face of disaster.  “Double fuck with peppers,” she said, because innovation was to be embraced, and then “fuck,” because three was a good rhythmic number for anything. 

Then she started looking. 

“Bip?” she called in the meadow.

“Bippy?” she called under the flowerbushes. 
“Bippy mo mippy!?” she yelled in the shrublands. 
“Bip you little shithead!  WHERE ARE YOU?” she screamed in the forest.

Silence.  There would’ve been at least a giggle.

No, her little sister wasn’t there.  Which meant she was somewhere else, the one somewhere else she hadn’t checked yet because it was no fun and no good and just generally a bad time – not brutal, not painful, just wearisome and dreary.

Her little sister had gone off to see the dead.  Which meant she had to go too.

Ugh.

***

The gateway to the village of the dead was very pretty.  Smooth-polished stone, well-cut, and surrounded with carefully-groomed flowerbushes.  A bird’s-nest had been eked out atop the archway.  Probably a crow’s.  They liked crows. 

Tima had always thought it was all a bit insincere though.  You kept the gateway of the dead as pretty as a postcard for them, but you never visited unless it was a holiday. 

Or, apparently, if you were Bip and all you had to do was pick flowers with your big sister for more than five minutes.

She was absolutely going to give her shit over this. 

And with that thought to keep her warm and angry inside, Tima walked into the village of the dead and fell over, which was normal.

“Oh dear,” said a dry, dry, dry voice, and a brittle hand helped her up.  That was normal too.

“Are you alright?”

“Fine.  Thanks,” said Tima shortly.  The dead fussed over her a little anyways, brushing off dust and dirt and making annoyed noises.  She thought they might’ve been a relative once.  Maybe a great-great aunt?  Or a granduncle.  It was hard to keep track of your living relatives, once the dead got involved things got messy fast.  Best to let them care about it instead of you.  They had the time. 

“Have you seen Bip?” she asked. 
“Who?”
“My little sister.”
“Not sure, not sure.  Was just passing by, you know?  I had to go get some flowers and a crow-feather, so I was headed to the gateway.”
“You aren’t allowed out.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to go OUT, just put my arm out.  Sometimes the crows give you things if you ask nicely and have a few treats for them.  They like marbles.”

“You have marbles?”
“Why not?  Barrie makes them.”
Tima wondered how old Barrie was, and how long he’d been forgotten down here, and then she realized she was asking pointless questions in her head and dropped it like a hot brick.  “Thank you,” she said, because her mother had taught her long ago that rude thoughts in your head went away if you put polite words out of your mouth.

“Oh it’s nothing.  Best of luck.”
They must not have been a very old dead.  One of the things everyone knew was true: luck was for life.  The dead happened when it all ran out. 

***

Tima started with the obvious places first, the landmarks.  The places a curious not-quite-a-toddler-anymore would glimpse and scamper straightaway towards, wanting to get a closer eyeful. 

Bip wasn’t in the village square, where the dead merchants gave away bread and raisins for free to long patient lines of shoppers. 

Bip wasn’t in the cold forest, with its icicle trees and its snowflake bats that meeped and chuckled. 

Bip wasn’t playing in the sand at the edge of the wine-dark eversea, with its single towering wave that loomed up above the horizon and made the sun shimmer through it like a curtain. 

Bip wasn’t in the thickets at the edge of town, where the roads dissolved and the paths grew thin and the air was choked up with pollen and must and thick wetland air. 

Bip wasn’t even at her grandmother’s house, which was so new and shiny that it was barely even rotten yet.  Tima sat and had a cup while grandmother fussed over her and showed off all her new dead possessions, like her pet mice and her books and her clock with no hands that never needed to be wound. 

“It’s so nice,” she told Tima, “just to rest.”
“Yes,” she said.  “But I’ve got to find Bip first.”
“Oh, there’s no rush, no rush at all.  Things will happen.  That’s what being alive is all about, isn’t it?”

***

Tima was getting fed up with being alive.  It was very stressful when you were in the village of the dead; like being the only person wearing a hat on a sunny day.  People’s nods and cheery smiles seemed mocking, and it was a terrible battle not to scowl at them.  It was very rude to be angry with the dead, her mother had always said.  Mind you, her mother always told her to keep an eye on Bip, so she was already breaking some rules today. 

“Have you seen my little sister?” she asked the dead burglar, who was jimmying a window open. 

“No,” she said patiently.  “I’m very busy today.  There are lots of locks to snap.  It’s dangerous to leave things locked up here.”
“Have you seen Bip?” she asked the dead ferrywoman. 

“Nope,” she said.  “I’m fishing.  Can’t fish without paying attention, and I don’t think a little kid would be interested in that.”
“You’re really right,” said Tima. 

“No need to be grumpy about it.”

“Have you seen my stupid little sister?” she asked the dead fish. 

They flopped at her insolently on the dry bottom of the riverbed. 

“Stupid fish,” she told them, because there was no rule against insulting dead who were animals, and that made her feel better. 

“You’ll hurt their feelings,” admonished the dead ferrywoman.

“They don’t feel it.”
“No, but I do.  Why do you think my line has no hook?  Go get your sister and leave me be.”
“I would, but I can’t find her!” shouted Tima.  “None of you stupid dead know a thing about where she is!”
“Of course I know where she is,” said the dead ferrywoman.  “She’s on the isle of the ogre, being baked into a pie.”
“What!?  But you said-”

“I said I hadn’t seen her,” said the dead ferrywoman.  “And I haven’t.  But I hear a lot, sitting out here and keeping quiet.”
“How-”

“The fish, mostly.  Now go away.  You’re scaring them off.”

So Tima said “thank you” in her most begrudging and least sincere voice and left the ferrywoman and her fish behind as she trudged through the dusty riverbed all the way to the dry lake that held the isle of the ogre, which was mostly caked and crusted mud, thick with fibrous algae and sludgy with long-gone lakelife. 

“Hold still,” said a big grumbly voice as she approached the shanty-shack that took up most of the island’s peak. 

“I ammmmm,” said Bip – and it was definitely Bip, in high whine-form.  Nothing could cut through the air like a properly aggrieved Bip.  “But I’m bored, and it TICKLES.”
“It’s meant to tickle,” said the ogre, who was probably the ogre.  “It’s pepper.”
“It’s in my nooooooACHOO!”
“Careful!  Now I’ll need to add more pepper.”
“But it TICKLES!”
“But it’s meant to!”
Tima kicked open the door, and the first thing she saw was the ogre’s pepper-grinder, which was enough to capture her imagination for a long time.  Surely nothing needed that many teeth that wasn’t a shark?  Surely it didn’t need to be the precise size and shape of a cannon?  Surely, surely, surely. 

“It’s made from a cannon,” said the ogre defensively. 

“Oh,” said Tima.  She’d been thinking aloud again.  “Sorry.”

“That’s fine,” said the ogre, putting down the grinder one-handed.  “Is this your sister, Bip?”
“Uh-huh,” said Bip, who was picking at the edge of the pie crust.  The dish was bigger than their bathtub at home, and a lot deeper.

“And what did we agree on, Bip?”
“… I got to be in a pie?”

“No, Bip.”
“Please?”
“No, Bip.”
“Pleeeease?”
“You’re going home right now,” said Tima, who recognized this conversation and also how to mercifully nip it in the bud.  “And if you don’t tell her I wasn’t paying enough attention to you, I won’t tell her about how you tried to get yourself made into a pie.”

Bip pouted – and it was a good pout, all lower lip and burning sulkiness – but it was a white flag of an expression.  Tima had won, even if she hadn’t received the announcement of it.

“I take it we’re done here?” asked the ogre politely. 

“Yes please thank you,” said Tima.  “Sorry about your pie.”
“Oh, it’s no problem.  I wouldn’t have put her in the dish, but she insisted.  Wouldn’t stop talking about how I had to do it because it was in all the stories.”

“She’s pretty little,” said Tima.  “Sorry.”
“No, no, god no.  That’s where all the fun is.  Best have it while you can.”
“Here,” said Tima, and she threw her flower-bag to the ogre, who caught it in her big paws. 

“What’s this?”
“Some fun,” said Tima.  And she left, before she thought too much about why she did things.

Her mother would’ve said something about ‘building character.’

***

Bip was quiet all the way home – first from sulk, then from thought, then from exhaustion.  It was always an uphill walk out of the village of the dead. 

“Promise you won’t tell?” she blurted out as the gateway came into sight. 
“Won’t tell what?” asked Tima. 

“Won’t tell that –”

“Already forgot it,” Tima said hastily.  Maybe in a few years she’d understand figures of speech a bit better.  “It’s okay.”  And it was, which surprised her. 

“But I wasn’t supposed to see the dead.”
“Says who?”
“Says everyone.”
“Bippy, everyone says that, but nobody means it.”

Bip’s face did that thing where it turned inside out.  “Whaaaaatttt?”
“Mom says if we didn’t see the dead now and then nobody’d understand anything about everything.  It’s not allowed, but you’ve got to do not allowed things or else you’re not properly alive.”

“Oh,” said Bip. 

“And you’re not allowed to say any of that to anyone.”
“But you told-”

“What did I just say about doing not allowed things?” demanded Tima, and the puzzled silence while Bip worked that one out followed them both all the way home to mother.

She could see why people liked teaching things.  It was almost as fun as teasing.  And that satisfaction lasted her all the way through her scolding for losing her flower-bag. 

It had been a very good century for the people of Pallist.  At its dawn they hadn’t known anything about anything, and by its conclusion they knew everything about everything.

They didn’t know anything about the sky.  So they sent up balloons full of instruments and big metal tubes full of cameras and eventually small noxious capsules crammed full of bodies and then they felt satisfied enough to proclaim themselves experts.

They didn’t know anything about the sea.  So they dragged it with great nets and diligently recorded and named the strange things that died, gasping, on the decks of their ships; and plumbed it with radars and sensors; and sent down small but invincible robots with fiendish sample jars and mechanical arms, and by the end of THAT they were confident that they could be called its masters.

As above, so below.  Above and below were both known, so that put an end to that alright.  And throughout the classrooms and lecture-halls and churches of Pallist there was a great satisfaction and reassurance, bordering on smugness.  It was good to be in the know, and what was left to know?  Five years left until century’s end and they had mastered it all.

This was very dissatisfying to adjunct-professor Hilbert.  But nobody listened to him. 

His colleagues wouldn’t listen to him because he was just an adjunct-professor.  His students wouldn’t listen to him because he was still technically a professor.  His administrators wouldn’t listen to him because he wasn’t their boss. 

“How good it is, to know everything!” they would all say. 

“Well, not quite EVERYTHING,” he told them.

“Yes indeed!” they all said.  And then they went back to not even pretending to pay him any attention. 

In retrospect, this might have been the last point at which someone could have easily done something.  Five minutes of some generous stranger’s life and that would’ve been enough.

Well, maybe ten.

Fifteen?

***

Adjunct-professor Hilbert was going on sabbatical.

“You don’t get sabbaticals,” his administrators told him.  “You’re an adjunct-professor.”
“It’s very, very, very important,” he told them earnestly.  “I’m on the cusp of finding out everything we don’t know about everything.”
“We know everything about everything already,” they told him.

“No we don’t.”

“You’re fired.”
He left the building unusually determined and cheerful for a man who’d just gotten sacked without leave, but nobody was paying attention to ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert.  This had its advantages, because he got to bring home all his personal belongings and also some interesting odds and ends from a few of his former colleagues’ laboratories. 

Nobody suspected Hilbert.  How can you suspect someone that doesn’t exist?

***

Ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert’s husband was worried about him. 

“I’m worried about you,” he told Hilbert.

“That’s nice,” said Hilbert, who was up to his elbows in something on top of their roof under a downpour at midnight.  “Can you bring me some tea, please?  It’s a bit nippy.”
Ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert’s husband – whose name was Bernie – sighed and groused and called him out very thoroughly inside his head but still went ahead and got him some tea. 

“What does this thing do again?” asked Bernie as he handed Hilbert his tea (chacomale, with a squirt of lamenn). 

“Oh, it finds things,” said Hilbert.  “Things nobody’s paid attention to; things we don’t know anything about.”

“But we know everything about everything,” said Bernie.  “We know everything about everything above us, and we know everything about everything below us.  What else is there?”
“The horizon,” said Hilbert. 

“What about it?”
“What indeed,” said Hilbert smugly.  Then he chugged his tea and sent Bernie back with the mug and responded to further questioning by pretending he was deaf, something that he was very fond of despite being thirty-five and in possession of perfectly adequate health and genes.

Bernie felt bad about this later, but realized (correctly) that there hadn’t been any chance in hell he could’ve changed his husband’s mind.  Everyone needs someone to ignore, even the most ignorable of us – and once they’ve found them, they never let go. 

***

Of course, Bernie wasn’t the only person who had a chance to be let in on some of the details of what was afoot.  Careful retracing of Hilbert’s weekly routine allowed for some witnesses to be found after the fact.

“Distances should be clear,” he said.  “Precise.  Measurable.  None of this – this – this perspective helps with that.  Lies and nonsense, all of it!  Look at my finger – see?  Does it REALLY seem smaller now that it’s farther away?  Look at it again – see?  Does it REALLY seem bigger now that it’s closer.”
“Please get your finger out of my face, sir.”
“This is very important!  It’s about the TRUTH!”

“Sir, you need to let go of the cart.  It belongs to the store.”
“The TRUTH!  And that’s why I need this grocery cart.  To give us all the truth.  To damn the illusions that reality has swathed us in.  To eat away at the ignorance that has stultified our collective consciousness like a wet warmed blanket.  To show us all what we’ve been missing!”
“Let.  Go.  Of.  The.  Cart.”
“MURDER!” screamed Hilbert.  “HELP!”  And while the stockswoman was busy calming down the startled flocks of senior citizens and rubberneckers that heard THAT nonsense, ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert absconded with his grocery cart. 

It had been one of the only ones without a sticky wheel, she recalled.  That really sucked. 

***

The neighbours complained.  The hammering was going on too long and loudly, to say nothing of the chainsaw.  Very strongly-worded and stern letters were left on Hilbert and Bernie’s doorstep by the bushel, and Bernie read them thoroughly before forwarding on the most persuasive to Hilbert, who shredded them for use as insulation in the cryonic compartment of his mechanism, which now covered their entire roof and was beginning to ooze off its sides like melting ice cream. 

“What is that thing?” inquired their next door neighbour suspiciously.  Her name was Beetrace, and she was very old and very tolerant of weirdness.  But she preferred it to be happening somewhere else, to someone else. 

“A tool,” called down Hilbert. 

“What for?”
“To murder the horizon.”
“Oh,” said Beetrace.

Then she went back indoors and called the police.  They thanked her for her time and said they’d send someone over as soon as they got around to it, which was never.

***

Four months later the science reporters and chief editors of the Alembic, the Macroscope, the Files Quarterly, and every paper of Pallist received a letter.

Dear sirs and madams and all others.

This night I will pierce the final, unknown veil of ignorance that pervades our great land: the one that is so comfortable and known to us that we cannot perceive of its limitations.  I speak, of course, of the horizon.  Too long has it hidden our world from itself through this paltry medium of ‘distance.’  What the hell is distance anyways?  Garbage, that’s what.  A needless constraint forced upon our eyes and minds by curvature and deceit! 

I, ex-adjunct-professor Boran Hilbert, intend to discard that deceit.  Tonight.  History is in the making at eight o’clock.  Be there promptly, please.  And bring some cameras. 

All of the recipients immediately sorted it into their trash without reading past the first headline, with the exception of the Beddergle Bugle, which needed a local interest column and had about four hours left to get it filled. 

So they sent Stipley, who was the youngest and least likely to complain aloud about it. 

The traffic was bad and Stipley had to stop for gas, and thus was history preserved.  He arrived five minutes past in a terrible wheezing mess and had to stop and catch his nerves and get out his notepad and pen and go back for his pen and find it under his car’s seat and forget where his notepad was and find it in his left hand and swear for about thirty seconds and then he found the ladder leading up to the roof and had just put his hand on it when something went ‘bzop.’

It wasn’t a sound.  It was a feeling that ran through Stipley‘s hand and the ladder and the house and the ground and the air and everything, absolutely everything. 

He said it made his nose ache, or at least the space that comprised his nose, which he insisted to his grave was quite different. 

Then the ladder made sense. 

It made perfect sense.  Stipley could see every bit of it in direct relation to every other bit of it and its precise position in everything in every way, and it was the worst thing he’d ever seen. 

So he looked at the house.

He saw that too.  Perfect position.  Perfect location. 

Stipley, who at this point didn’t much care if he got fired, staggered away from the horrible, horrible, horrible place he’d been five minutes late to, towards his car, which might take him away.  He fumbled at the door-latch, confused by how he could see its exact proportions from every angle and that every angle was both everything and nothing, and in an effort to tear his eyes away from the angst of seeing something so boring and familiar turned into something so alien he made the grave mistake of looking up.

The Hilbert family home was atop a small hill that trailed down towards the lake.  It had a good, long view, and Stipley saw every inch of it. 

Every particle of it.

Every place in it. 

Every house, every tree, every leaf, every bit of asphalt, every speck of pavement, every (temporarily comatose) squirrel, every pebble, every wave.  And then his eyes crawled upwards, inexorably, and he saw that the horizon was gone. 

Or more precisely, dead. 

So Stipley saw all the way.  Mercifully for only a few seconds before he blacked out, but they were the longest seconds of his or indeed anyone else’s life.  Not that time or space meant much to him on that evening. 

***

At some point the machine went ‘bzip’ and everything went back to normal.  Bernie, who’d been napping, woke up with a start and went up to the roof to check on Hilbert.

He wasn’t there anymore.  He was the most not there anyone had ever been. 

***

It was a very, very sober dawn the next morning.  Some people sat in bed with their eyes shut; some made very strong tea (baronet bakely, with a splash of milt) and went outdoors to stare at the sky as hard as they could.  Some just fidgeted with their pens.  Everyone was thinking far too hard about not thinking about it.  And throughout the classrooms and lecture-halls and churches of Pallist there was a great terror and nervousness, bordering on hopelessness.

In the end, things didn’t go back to normal because normal is a negotiated subjectivity that doesn’t truly exist unchangingly but flows from the past into the present and towards the future only within human perceptions.  But Pallist’s perceptions of it never did go back to the way they’d been, and they never took as much pride in what they knew about the worlds above and below. 

The machinery that was taken from ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert’s roof was incomprehensible, besides the shopping cart.  It was returned, and it still didn’t have a sticky wheel, but it would only ever go in straight lines and was eventually donated to a museum because the lines were too straight to make sense and it drove four separate shoppers into nervous fits. 

Beetrace died in her sleep two days before the machine was turned on.  It probably had nothing to do with it. 

Bernie remarried six months later to a nice man who listened to him. 

The Beddergle Bugle had the most important exclusive ever known.  Six months later the paper folded, but Stipley had already quit and gone to live in a valley somewhere. 

Not one person ever claimed that they knew everything again.  Or spoke of the notion as if it would be good. 

Nobody blamed Hilbert.  How can you blame someone that doesn’t exist?

It was a quiet night.  No birds, no bugs, even the surf seemed to have shut its mouth.  Combined with the soft liquid afterglow of the sunset, and the whole world looked like it was ready for bedtime. 

Not that Eliza would be sleeping anytime soon.  It was rude to nap at a funeral, especially if you were half the guests and also responsible for taking a shift at the oars.

“Almost there?” she asked.

“Little bit,” said dad.  He was chewing his pipe again.  She’d still never seen him smoke.  Maybe that was what this was about; he wanted to make sure there were no witnesses before he lit up.  He was going to push her overboard to keep his secrets safe, just like the pirates of old. 

“How little?”
“You’ve got air enough to row,” he said.  His jaw flexed, and she wondered if he was just going to bite through the stem. 

Eliza sighed and wheezed and bent back to her task, and once again let her eyes brush over the bundle tied in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in sailcloth and the strongest mooring-line the docks could offer. 

If only her grandmother hadn’t been such a sturdy woman, this would be a lot easier. 

***

“That’ll do,” dad said.  “We’re in a good spot.  Has to be five fathoms.”

“Really?” asked Eliza, rubbing her arms.  “Why?”
“Don’t ask me, I don’t know.  This is a lot older than me, zizzy.  Older than granny too.”
“How do you know about it then?”
He nodded at the bundle.  “From when we sent off HER mama.  Now sit tight and keep an eye out, best as you can.  We don’t want to miss the start.”
“Start of what?  Shouldn’t we be putting her over?”  Not that she was in a rush or anything, but what was there to wait for?

“You’ll know it when you see it.  Trust me.”
So she sat, and she watched, and the rubbing of her arms turned from soreness to shivers as the dark cold air came rolling in with the night.  It was getting hard to see… whatever it was that she was looking for.  Not that there was anything to look for at all.  Smoky clouds, black sky, dark water, and a single little slice of something moving through the waves, rigid as a plank, intense and sure as a prowling mother.

Eliza pointed at the solitary shark-fin.  “Is that it?”
Dad nodded.  “Yep.  Good eyes.”
“Now what?”

“Now,” said dad, as he took off his cap and settled just a little more firmly into his seat, “we watch.”

***

It was hard to see until it came alongside the boat, slow and steady as it was.  Not much light left to work with, and the fish’s own countershading.  But it circled slow and steady closer still and at last it was close enough to touch as it patrolled, ramrod-stiff, soldier-sure, a hand’s-span from the  gunwhales. 

It was an awfully big shark, Eliza thought.  And they weren’t in a very large boat.  But dad was relaxed – no, not relaxed, but not nervous – and if he wasn’t worried she wasn’t about to show it either. 

And besides it wasn’t doing anything worrisome.  No bumps, no nudges, no mouthing.  Just a steady march, an endless spiral, each twist and turn of the ring coming with a barely-exaggerated roll of its sides to flash its milky underbelly into the night and show the strong curved line of its mouth, tight-shut. 

Then she saw the second fin. 

And the third.

And the fourth. 

She stopped counting at six and looked at dad, just to be sure.  He was still sitting, sucking his pipe, eyes wide but nostrils unflared. 

“Dad?” she prodded, just to be sure.

“More than I remembered,” he said.  “That’s all.  Keep watching.”
She turned back to the waves and the circling half-moons and tried to count them again.  This time she got up to sixteen before getting confused and second-guessing herself.  Were more of them coming in that quickly or were they already there, rising and fall beneath the surface?  Big and little and thick and slim, pointed-snouted and snub-nosed, there were so many of them, so many kinds.  A fat tiger, a needle-faced blue, a little slip of a thing with black-smeared fins, a slow and swaggering white-tip and a surly broad-sided bull, and so many more, from the length of Eliza’s arm to twice her height and more, dancing and revolving and turning just out of reach of the oars. 

However many there were, it doubled.  Then doubled again.  One more time.

And it was then, with the ocean more thick with sharks than water, that the singing began.

***

It was low and solemn and as weighty as a hammer-blow, and it pressed down with the force of a time that had nothing to do with clocks or calendars and everything to do with the grinding ache of geology, measured in accumulated drifts, in erosion, in speciation and extinction. 

There were no words and there was also no sound that came from no throat, no vocal chords, no lungs, not even a tell-tale splash.  Just waves and wind and darkness and the song, thick and heady and rich as blood in the water, swaying from side to side and vibrating up through the boat and into Eliza’s bones.

Dad’s pipe was quivering in his mouth.  So was his mouth.  So was his entire body. 

Eliza’s palms were itching like mad.  This wasn’t the first time, and she felt a moment’s deep regret for never asking granny about it before it was too late.  She might’ve told her a few things.

Of course, she hadn’t ever told her about THIS, so. 

Maybe it was because she’d never asked?

It was crawling deeper now, past the skin and muscle and calcium, up into the parts of her that watched.  She’d never really felt her own nerves-as-nerves before, but now they were lighting up, reporting on a sensation she’d never really imagined before: something just for them.  Living lightning, sparking and hissing from where her body moved, breathed, beat. 

Her freckles felt like they were glowing. 

Smell it.  Touch it.  Feel it.  She’d never imagined a song that appealed to every sense but the ears, but it was shockingly good and she wondered how they all knew the words, even if there weren’t any.  A lot of these animals – the ones she recognized – weren’t exactly social butterflies.  But they were flank to flank, tail to snout, mouths swallowing the same water and in each other’s spaces and there were no arched backs, no gaping jaws, no exaggerated swings of the skulls, just a smooth dance.  No personal space.  No space at all. 

There was no song.  The emptiness in everything screamed wide so hard that Eliza almost yelled. 

“Now,” said dad, and he sounded as loud and intrusive as a barking seal at a Sunday service.  “Help me with her.”

So she did, clumsy though her body felt in the thinness of the empty world above the real one, and as the heavy mass of sailcloth and mooring-lines slipped free from her hands into the water she could’ve sworn it felt more supple and flexible than it had when she brought granny aboard back on land.  But it was out of her hands now before she could think on it, and then it was sinking and the choir was in hot pursuit, mouths open wide now, jaws lunging from their bodies in lightning snaps, teeth aglitter with the very same last reflected scraps of light that made their eyes into little torchlights. 

Down, down, down, as the scraps of cloth and shreds of rope came free, a spiral inside a spiral, and then at its conclusion a stillness that made Eliza’s brain jump and her body freeze. 

Dad held up his hand. 

***

It was too dark to see now, but the fin was unmistakable anyways.  It poked up through the water almost shyly at first, hesitant, but then it built and built as the body beneath grew in strength and surety until it was full-sail, proud as a mainmast in full flight, steady as a drumbeat, alive as sure as anything that could be. 

She circled the boat once, twice, three times – close, then far, then close again.

And then she was gone. 

***

Dad lowered his hand.  “NOW it’s done,” he said.  And he threw his pipe overboard. 

***

Eliza had the oars the whole way back, but she didn’t complain and didn’t groan under it.  She was thinking.

At least now she thought she might have an inkling as to how granny had always brought back the best catches. 

Or why dad had married someone who’d never so much as seen the sea before she came to town with him. 

Or why he never swam himself, and had been so put out when she’d learned how, alongside all the other children – and such slow learners they’d been too. 

And, maybe, just maybe, why granny had always told her not to speak of her wisdom teeth, all sharp sixteen of them.

She didn’t share any of her thoughts.  Dad looked cross – although that might have been because of his pipe.  His lips were still trying to chew on something that wasn’t there. 

So they went back in silence – dull silence, not the kind they’d just lived through – and dad went inside and Eliza stowed the boat and the oars and stood up and bent over and without actually thinking it through crawled underneath it, inside it, and breathed in.

It was very dark and damp and it smelled of seawater and life and death.

Oh, it was right. 

It was very right.

But she had a long ways to go before she could be there, so she sighed away the air in her lungs and stood up on her legs and walked indoors, to the light and the land and her warm family, and put away her thoughts for a while.

They would be there when she was ready. 

The bell had tolled. 

The swan had sung.

And the sign on the front door had been swung from OPEN in blue to CLOSED in red.

Archmage Gilbert, master of the arcane arts and proprietor of Gil’s Diner, Souvenir Stand, and Bait Shop was close to death. 

Atop his highest chamber, three floors above the customer’s entrance, he summoned his employees by intercom and made manifest his will. 

“Apprentices,” he told them all, through jaundiced eyes and haggard beard-breath, “I am at death’s door.”
“Told you to quit smoking,” said Terry.

“Shut the fuck up, Terry.  Now I am due to leave this world, but for a wizard of my potency, such things are not inevitable.  When I die, leave the left window of my room open and I will return.  But I will not leave you to do this out of the goodness of your hearts – or even for the wage I pay you.”
“Below minimum,” said Terry.

“Shut the fuck up, Terry – and besides, I let you keep the tips.  Mostly.”  Archmage Gilbert coughed phlegmily.  “Now, stand you there and let me bequeath your inheritances.  George!”
George straightened up.

“As the chief oilaturgist of my diner, you have sweated and steamed over many carcasses animal, vegetable, and mineral alike.  To aid you in your further endeavours, I give unto you mine All-Fryer, which can bread and grease up just about anything you can fit in it – and most things will fit in it, if you try.”

George bowed low.  “Thank you, archmage Gilbert.”

“Yeah, yeah.  Krystal!”
Krystal saluted. 

“You have hawked many wares to many morons for many moons as my scammagician, and I respect that level of scheming in an apprentice.  To you I give my tricky scanner, whose laser will read any barcode not once not twice but three times, and will never give away what it’s up to through tell-tale beeps.  Charge everyone and spare no wallets.”
Krystal grinned.  “Will do, archmage Gilbert.”
“Wonderful thanks.  Terry!”
“What?” asked Terry.

“You have sold the least out of all three of my apprentices, and indeed the least of any apprentice I’ve ever had.  In fact, more than once I’ve caught you actively encouraging customers not to shop here but to go to Pete’s Prawnhooks down the road, and twice that I’ve heard of you’ve insinuated that I chop up people’s stray pets for chum.  As thanks for your unstintingly lousy job, I decree that you shall be thrown into the fibbling octobeast’s tank.”
“Hey-”

“Immediately.”
“Bu-”

“Chop chop!”

It took six minutes for her fellow apprentices to get Terry down the stairs, mostly because she wouldn’t stop biting.  In the meantime, and with great annoyance, archmage Gilbert, master of the arcane arts and proprietor of Gil’s Diner, Souvenir Stand, and Bait Shop, expired.

***

“Got any more band-aids?” asked George.

“Nope, used the last one on my finger,” said Krystal.  “Fucking hell that hurt.  Now we just need to go upstairs and open that window.”

There was a loud crunching noise.

“Fuck,” they agreed, and then they ran up the staircase two at a time until it ended on a splintered set of steps in the middle of the air.

Above them two great flocks of gulls capered in the sky, a thousand strong all told, angrily fighting over the crumbling remains of the third story of Gil’s Diner, Souvenir Stand, and Bait Shop and more specifically archmage Gilbert’s extremely mortal remains.  An agreement was reached when the body unspooled down the middle, and away they sped, screaming and shitting as they went.

“I’ll take the north flock,” said Krystal.  “That’s his left half.  That’s his good half.”
“I’ll the south flock,” said George.  “Can’t do much without a right half, even if it’s the bad half.”

And so the two former apprentices and employees of the great archmage Gilbert girded their loins and cleaned their teeth and packed up their toolbelts and set off.

***

Three hours later Terry finally got the flibbering octobeast to let her out of the tank.  It had been exceptionally clingy today, and kept hoping she’d give it extra treats. 

“No, I didn’t sneak any fries today, fuck OFF,” she told it as she pried the last hopeful tentaclaw from her shirt. “That’s a good boy.  Good fuck off.  Now where the hell is everyone?”
The lights were off, the fans were silent, and there was a note on the counter explaining everything in a rough sort of way. 

“Figures,” said Terry.  “Well, serves them right.  I’ll just clear out the safe and leave.”

Five minutes later she remembered Krystal had the safe key, broke a window, and crawled out. 

***

In the meantime, long had George quested southward, over hill and through dale, up and down and all around, to the farthest tip of the edge of the rim of downtown, where the restaurants lurked all along the waterfront and took the wallets of many a tourist.  He hadn’t seen feather nor flitter of a gull the whole way, but he was confident that he was on the right track.  Archmage Gilbert had given them some serious indigestion. 

At length the tell-tale white spatter ended at the rim of a great steel wall that soared up to nigh the height of the restaurant itself, a bin fit to trash creation, a garbage skip that could hold a dump in itself and have room for more.  And from high high up on its rim came the distant aaike aiiike awk awk awk awk awk of seagulls.

“There we are,” he said with satisfied surety, and so spitting swiftly, started to scale the surface.  But though George pulled and heaved and clambered until his arms were sorer than a monkey’s buttocks, the peak of the dumpster came no closer. 

“Haw!” came from below him.  “Looking for something?”
George looked down and then back up and was eye to eye with a great ogre of a restaurateur.  His teeth were tombstones and his eyes were deadly burning coals and he never stopped smiling. 

“Yes,” said George guarded, putting one hand to his belt.  “The remains of my late master, the archmage Gilbert.  They have been stolen by a flock of seagulls who reside atop your dumpster.”
“My dumpster, my property,” said the restaurateur unfeelingly.  “Code of the cooks.”
“Be that as it may,” said George stubbornly, “I am a cook myself.  And I know that if I challenge you to a fry-off, you’ll have no choice but to accept.  If I win, I claim my master’s body.”
“Sure!” said the restaurateur brightly.  “And if I win, I get to eat you!”
“Wait,” said George.

“Nah,” said the restaurateur.  “Starting now, time limit of five, we’ll use my kitchen.  GO!”
And they went, George unsheathing the all-fryer as he went.  With fury and vinegar and onion tears he roared through the degrees, pouring all his heart and soul and hope into the All-Fryer, which swallowed his every ingredient and begged for more.  Though the ogre’s cabinets were damp-sealed shut and his shelves seven feet and more off the ground, they finished at the same time. 

“Deep-fried hamburger salad with funnel cake rings,” said George, shaking clean the All-Fryer and sheathing it with a smug expression.
“Why, that’s just what I made,” said the restaurateur, with far too big a smile.  “I believe I win the tie, however.”
“What?  Why?”
“I also deep-fried my fryer.”
“Fuck!” swore George, but he was already shoulder-deep in the ogre’s mouth and vanishing fast and so he could do naught but flip the cheeky bastard the middle toe as he went down.

***

Krystal walked north and north until she found the place where the boardwalk ended, the long pier.  And at the tip of the long pier, on crumbling concrete and purest rust, huddled together for warmth and peevishness, stewed a full flock of gulls. 

“There you are,” said Krystal happily.  And she walked forwards to them, but the gulls saw her coming and noisily hopped into the water, swearing in bird words at her. 

“Hah!” cackled a creaking voice.  “You’ll never get close to them that way!”
Krystal looked up and saw that she was being watched by an ancient purveyor of beach glass knick-knacks of glittering eye and craggled sun-crisped ears.  “Mind your own business, you old fart,” she said politely.  “I’m just retrieving the body of my master, the archmage Gilbert.  Those flying rats have taken it.”
“Fat chance you’ll get it back,” sniggered the glass-seller, scratching at their chin until the flakes fell.  “But I can do it for you.”
“Hah!”
“BET I can do it for you.”
“Double hah!” said Krystal.  “Hah, then hah.  Now I’m going to go get it.”
So Krystal moved towards the end of the pier again, where the gulls had resettled, and she moved with all the silent and ingratiating grace of a true salesperson, nothing but a velvet touch and a warm smile and a comforting sunny aura that encouraged you to think that maybe the world wasn’t such a bad place after all and maybe you really were getting the long end of the stick this time, just because someone was such.  a.  nice.  guy.

The seagulls swore a blue streak at her and took off again.

“Shitlizards!” she screamed at them.

“Shitasaurs,” said the glass-seller.  “Those are dinosaurs, not lizards.  Bet you I can get to them before you can.”
“Not likely,” snorted Krystal. 

“Bet you a million dollars.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bet you five bucks.”
“Eat my shorts.”
“Bet you that shiny-looking hand scanner you got on your belt.”
“Sure, why not, see if I care.”
“Cool,” said the glass-seller.  Then she tucked her thumbs into her belt, hoisted up her singular pant, and strolled down to the end of the dock. 

“Nice day we’re having oh eh what’s going on here nice to see you nice to see you same shit different day eh nice weather oh but I heard it might rain later on can’t complain nobody’s listening hah hah hah you know me right don’t mind me just passing through-”

The gulls were dead asleep by the time the glass-seller stood among them. 

“How’s that then?” she called back, but Krystal too had been bored utterly unconscious, and so with a shrug the glass-seller took the tricky scanner from her belt and also her belt and also also her shoes. 

***

Terry moved slowly but surely, tracking footprints in fecal material, sniffing the air for bodyspray and fried foods and cheap plastic and strawberry shampoos.  She muttered as she walked, dark words from dark languages learned from prawn buckets and worm cases, invertebrate slurs that would make boneless bodies grow limp with horror. 

The anger kept her going all the way to the great gleaming surface of the dumpster, and atop it she heard the shrieks and roars of a seagull flock.  And beneath it she saw an ogre restaurateur taking a smoke break. 

“Hey there,” he said. 
“Fuck off,” she told him. 
“I like your attitude.  Hey, I ate someone that smelled sort of like you but less tentaclawy a while ago.”

“My co-worker,” said Terry.
“Yeah, they lost a bet.  Double or nothing?”
“What’d they bet you?”
“Oh, the body of some old guy up there.”
“Sure, I’ll take those prizes-”
“Great!”
“-and for the double I take them back too.”
“Aw shit.  Well, rules are rules.  I challenge you to a fry-off.”
“Your kitchen?”
“My kitchen.”
“Deal.”
The restaurateur’s mouth was only worse when grinned wide.  “Let’s go.”
Terry walked in and swore a blue streak.  “Fucking hell, seven-foot shelves?  Really?”
“Last guy didn’t complain.”
“Last guy wasn’t five foot three.  This isn’t fair!”
“Life isn’t fair,” said the ogre, with the warm glee of someone who had a lot to do with that. 

“Aw, c’mon.  Please?  Just give me a stepstool.  Please?”
“Nah.”
“Okay, fine.  But I need a fryer at least before we start.  That’s part of the setup.”
“Seems reasonable,” said the restaurateur, and he reached up and leaned over and pulled a fryer off the shelf and as he did so Terry kicked his feet out from underneath him and held him face-down in his own oil vat until he stopped squirming. 

“Something smells good out there,” said someone from around the ogre’s mid-gut.”
“Get out of there, George,” said Terry.  “Krystal in there with you?”
“No?  She went north.”
“Great.  Great.  Just great.  Listen, cut your own way out or whatever.  Bye.  It’s been shit working with you.”
“You too!” said George.  And as Terry walked out the door she heard the tell-tale hum of the All-Fryer’s blender attachment starting up.

***

Finding Krystal was easier.  Terry just walked north up to the pier and found her sitting on a park bench. 

“Hey.”
“Hey.  Didn’t we feed you to the fibbling octobeast?”
“Yeah.  You got the key to the safe?”
Krystal frowned.  “No?”
“Wow, great job.  Better take keyholder off your resume.”
“Hey, it wasn’t my fault.  That glass-seller took my shoes.”
“So?”
“That’s where I kept them.”
Terry sighed and rolled her eyes and blew a raspberry.

“Fuck off.”
“Make me, shithead.  I’m quitting.  If I get your stupid shoes back, I keep the key.  Deal?”
“Whateverr.”
“Whateverrrrrr.”
The old glass-seller perked up as Terry approached. 

“Want some beach glass wares?” she inquired.  “Hand-carved myself.  This one used to be a beer bottle.  This was a lightbulb!  And this is a window-pane someone smashed down on Lakeshore Boulevard last week!”
“No thanks fuck off,” said Terry.  “I want my ex-coworker’s shoes back.”
“Won ‘em fair and square.”
“Don’t care.”
“I know you are but what am I?”
“Rubber.  And you’re glue.”
“Safety!” said the glass-seller.
“Only works in tag.”
“Shoot.  Well, I like those shoes.  I wanna keep ‘em.”
“Tell you what,” said Terry.  “First one to pick up a seagull and bring it back over here without hurting it wins the shoes.”
“Deal!” said the glass-seller.  “And I get to keep your shoes too.”
“Whatever.  I’m going first.”
So Terry cleared her throat and squared her shoulders and straightened her back and narrowed her eyes and jutted out her chin and clenched her fists and flexed her biceps and braced her legs and took one step and the entire flock of seagulls took off the end of the pier as one, screaming fucking murder at the top of their lungs.  It took an hour for them to settle down again, mostly because the glass-seller wouldn’t stop laughing. 

“Shut up,” said Terry crossly.

“ahahahahhahHURKahahahahahahHURKahahh.  Aha.  Hah.  Okay, I’m fine now.  Watch how it’s done!” cackled the old merchant.  And she spat on her hands and began to lurch forwards, half-amble and half-mosey, a stream of nauseating drivel oozing from her and suffocating the air itself with leaden banalisms.  Ears sank.  Minds fogged.  Time died. 

“… and that’s the problem with people today,” said the glass-seller, as she cradled the rigid, glassy-eyed body of the seagull back to her stall.  “No respect no how for age and experience and wisdom why when I was young I knew better and if I didn’t my mother would thrash me black and bl-”

Her voice died in her mouth.  Terry was still standing.  Still staring. 

“How?” demanded the glass-seller. 

“I sold bait to fishermen,” said Terry.  “For six summers.  Full-time.”
“Oh,” said the glass-seller.  And that was when she realized she’d stopped droning, but only a little after the seagull put its beak in her face and wouldn’t stop.

“Bye,” said Terry to Krystal. 

And she left, but with the key.

***

At length the two apprentices of the archmage Gilbert made their way home to Gil’s Diner, Souvenir Stand, and Bait Shop, worn and tired and dripping gastric juices and gull feces.  At their heels circled five-a-hundred birds each.

“I bring the mortal remains of our master,” intoned George, “within the fibres of these birds and their digestive systems, his soul sings strong.”
“I also bring the mortal remains of our master,” said Krystal.  “These ones ate him too.”
“Bones and all?”
“Yes.”
“They were VERY hungry.”

“Yep.  Now usher them in.  Go on!”
They ushered them in, and in, and in.  Five hundred wings times two for birds times two great flocks, spiralling up the stories of Gil’s Diner, Souvenir Stand, and Bait Shop, filling up the air.  The kitchen was a birdcage; the souvenirs were pelted with guano; the fibbling octobeast quivered in its tank.

“Archmage Gilbert!” called George.

“Master of the arcane arts!” yelled Krystal.

“Proprietor of Gil’s Diner, Souvenir Stand, and Bait Shop!” roared George.  “Here is your body!”
“Here is your soul!”
“Beyond death you have travelled, beyond you will still!”
“Return now, and let the world see you once more!”
“Arise!”

“Arise!”
ARISE

Every bird alit, every bird flew, and every single seagull spiralled up up up the staircase and out of the broken shell of the building’s third floor and up into the skies with a thunderous blast of flatulent spellery.

“That didn’t work,” said George.

“No.  It didn’t.”
“Hey, did you count the gulls?
“No.  Did you?”
It took nine tries to get it done, and by the time they did they still hadn’t remembered to check the safe.

***

By then Terry was miles away on the bus and still moving.  It’d been easier to get passage than she’d hoped; the way the seagull refused to let go of the glass-seller’s eye had been surprisingly helpful.  She’d have to buy it some fries when they got home.

Wherever home was.  Ah, they’d figure it out. 

The plesis were the first warning when the wave came. 

It must’ve been something in the water, some tingling pressure they could feel from afar.  They honked their long calls and swung their long necks and dove and all of a sudden Tarci was the most alone she’d been while fishing in a very, very long time. 

And she was also without fish.  They knew what was up too. 

Then the pteros were screaming and all in the air at once and if that hadn’t been her final wake-up call, the water vanished. 

Yes, ten minutes ago had been time for Tarci to do something.  Now was the time to be too late. 

***

She was running uphill, and she wasn’t going to get far enough, and for some stupid reason all she could think of was her dock.

It was a good dock.  Tarci had pulled it together herself; sunk the piles amongst curious marine saurs, turned straight trees into trim planks, seasoned it and proofed it and guarded it against rot and worm. 

Hell, it was a good day, too.  Blue, blue, achingly blue sky with just enough wispy white to contrast and flavour it pleasant.  The sun was strong but not deadly.  The breeze was light and happy.  What a miserable thing to have happen on such a good day!  You finally got yourself some room to… yourself, you turned a piece of mesospace into a place, a home, and what happened?  Some little tectonic belch a thousand miles away sent god’s ripple hurtling at you.

Ah, her legs were hurting and she was smacking her feet into rocks.  She shouldn’t look back now.

She looked back now.

The horizon had risen and was growing clearer.

Tarci tripped, spun, and accelerated.  Too slowly.

***

The dock had been the last thing she built, really. 

The hou – the home was an ongoing project, but that wasn’t a work of ‘building’ by now, not really.  Just accumulation and the odd bit of subtraction.  There was a roof, sort of, and there were walls, kind of, and she’d been responsible for some of them and the jumble of stone on the hilltop had taken care of all the rest.  Now she removed leaf litter, evicted any fellow tenants who starting trying to bite her or leave over-smelly messes, and put in shelves.

The cache had been something she’d built, but it wasn’t really hers.  The important pieces of the boat were sealed tight and safe under earth and boards and cloth, where the world couldn’t touch them and she could reclaim them if the need came.  It was a ship-place, a cradle. 

And the tools and odds and ends like rods, spears, splints and spars weren’t really ‘building’ things.  That was just practical fidgeting.  Keeping her hands busy.

So Tarci was surprised to find herself realizing, at that very busy moment, that she had an awful lot of investment in that dock and she was going to be very very sad to see it wiped off the face of the world.

There was a sound like surf, but walking closer. 

She tried to run faster and couldn’t.

***

It wasn’t lonely. 

Tarci had neighbours, just not the talkative kind.  Stand-offish, but not impolite.  They did their business and she did hers.  The pteros fished over the shallows; the plesis foraged the reefs and snuck fish from her line; and the odd passing therasaur island-hopping generally stayed out of the rocky heights she’d made her principle home, so there was no need for unfriendly business.  In the end everyone was comfortable ignoring each other at almost any range.  She knew the nesting rookeries of the pteros almost as well as they did by now; and they would sun themselves on her roof.  She’d fished next to a birthing plesis pod for hours without them so much as raising a flipper to her.  She knew every tree that would inevitably ram into her face on her midnight walk back from her makeshift still to her home, and thinking of how all of that was about to be very very different was so suddenly painfully sad that it almost drew her mind off the change in pitch she was hearing in the roar of the oncoming surf.

It was peaking.  It must have hit the shallows.  Maybe the reef would block some of the worst of it ahahahahahaha no. 

The heights were still ages away; had she really walked this path so casually just this morning?  Dying out of breath and sweaty was just embarrassing. 

The trees would go, the brush would fly, and she’d be swept clean off the island and out the other side in whatever number of pieces would seem appropriate except there, to her right, was the cliffside.

And there, in the cliffside, were crevices.

Tarci was already dead if she thought about it, so she didn’t bother thinking about it.  Just turned, lunged, twisted, dropped, wheezed, shimmied on her belly, plunked into a cranny in the rock that seemed tall enough to just barely hold a fat lizard.  And had frequently, judging from the smell.  Something edged in fluff scraped at her palms.  Feathers.  Maybe a juvenile therasaur had moulted in here.

The roar was too loud to hear anything, but she felt the snort of warm air in the cramped space as clearly as if it had been a bellow.  And that was when she saw the glittering eyes.

Oh.  A juvenile therasaur WAS moulting in here.  A good-sized one too; bigger than Tarci and with its adult teeth coming in; proper and sturdy serrated blades to carve through anything it could hunt, fish, or beachcomb.  Amazing it had managed to fit into this crevice.  Maybe it had been using it for weeks and weeks as it grew up; how had she failed to notice it, anyways?  Maybe one of the passing adults had left a clutch.  Maybe

And then the wave came. 

***

There were three parts to it and they each lasted ten thousand years.

First the shadow.  Pitch black in the afternoon, sudden as a thunderbolt.  The therasaur’s eyes were the only thing in the world, shrinking back as it hissed and bared its teeth.

Then the push.  The air, the ground, everything vibrating, a drumroll that refused to die down until it drowned itself out and there was nothing left but

The water.

***

It’s tearing claws. 

It’s solid stone.

It’s a hand the size of the world squeezing.

And it’s in every single cranny corner and crack of Tarci and the therasaur’s little nook; trying to carry them with it and tear them apart and smash them together all at once and after another.

Her leg might be broken.  Or torn off.  Or buried knee-first in the therasaur’s stomach.

It might have drowned.  It might be alive.  It might be chewing on her.

Her hand is holding something and it could be the stone walls she was clinging to for dear life or empty iron-hard currents or just her own fingernails as she was abducted by the sea.

***

But life can get used to anything anywhere, so after one thousand years by her mind’s reckoning and about ten seconds by her heartbeat’s Tarci started to relax a little.

She was holding something.  It was probably stone.  Her back hurt.  That was probably stone.  Her foot felt like it was being torn off and smashed into pieces.  It was probably poking out of the crevice.  Something very heavy but slightly malleable – and occasionally pointy –  was smushed against her torso.  That was probably the therasaur.

That was probably the only reason both of them hadn’t been sucked out along with the rest of the water, gentle and kind though the current that had slid in with them had been.  They’d combined their meager body masses into a sort of impromptu cork.

Nose to nose, actually.  She thought.  It was still sort of hard to find anything, but there were some bubbles flowing over her face that could be it panicking quietly.

Oh right.  No air.

***

The current was reversing.  The wave had passed over the island entirely.  This was just the backwash.  Just a little longer with her muscles aching, with her hands scrabbling for new grips as the ungodly pull at her body turned backwards and tried to drag her away.

Just a little longer.

A

Little

frustrating that her mother had been half-right and she was going to die alone and unhappy alone she didn’t mind unhappy yes but she wasn’t alone she had a terrified drowning animal with her if it didn’t claw through her trying to keep its own grip lose her grip lose it lose it lose it lose ah ah ah

Ah, there it was!  A gasp, a shudder, an inhalation that shook her down to her toes, and she was coughing violently into the face of a wheezing therasaur, choking to death on her own newfound breath.  If her throat wasn’t already-occupied and didn’t feel like it had been rubbed down with sand she’d laugh at it, poor squawking thing, as damp and feeble and half-dead as a newborn.

So instead she kissed it on the nose.  Then it made the most horrible undignified snotty sound and she kissed it again and it did it again and finally she was laughing, really laughing, and it was the absolute most painful thing imaginable and the best thing she’d ever felt in her life. 

***

The therasaur was more distressed than she did.  It clung to her as dead, shivering weight, only moving itself at last when she (slowly, painfully) began to eel her way free of the rock crevice.  Then it scrabbled after her with terrified haste, clawing her foot somewhat badly on the way.

She swatted its nose and swore at it.  It chirroughed wetly and ducked low in the universal subadult symbol of I’m Very Sorry, Mother. 

“Fine,” she said, looking around the denuded, shredded remains of what had once been a perfectly tangled hillside. Yes, she reckoned this was as close as anything could come to being born twice.  Out of a cramped wet safety in a wide horrible place, weakly.   “Come on home.  Let’s see what shelves are left standing.”  Something silvery flopped at the corner of her eye, then the other corner, then all over the place.  Fins.  Gills.

She grinned.  “And I hope you like fish.”

Wrong again, mom.  Wrong all the way. 

***

It did.  A lot. It was a good thing she had time to work on a new fishing rod.