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The alarm went off and the clipboard was already scratching.

“7 AM, Brian.” Tsk tsk tsk, half cluck and half near-articulated word, scratch scratch scratch, pen on paper. “You fucked up. You could’ve gone to bed earlier. You could’ve woken up earlier. You could’ve gotten some cleaning done. You could’ve gone for a run before work to stay healthy. You’re too old to pretend you’ll stay in shape no matter how you treat yourself”
“Yes,” agree Brian, whose eyes were open and who was sitting up but remained wholly unready to find the alarm.

“You didn’t go to bed until 2 AM because you’re a dumb little kid. Just scrolling away, just reading crap that wouldn’t improve you. You didn’t want tomorrow to start, did you?”
“Yes.”
“Thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s a fuckup squared then because making a mistake you know to avoid is worse than making it because you don’t know better. Now get your ass out of bed and let’s go.”

So Brian got out of bed too slowly and made breakfast.

“Cereal? Well well well, looks like someone doesn’t want to put any effort in AND wants to run out of energy before lunch. Eat a piece of fruit at least.”
“I’m not that hungry,” said Brian, chewing each mouthful too many times each.

“That’s because you had an unhealthy snack late last night.” Scratch scratch. “Good going, at this rate we’ll be in double digits before we leave home.”

Brian rinsed the bowl without soap.

Scratch scratch.

***

“Well, you fucked up. Didn’t do that last room carefully enough at ALL.”
Brian took his time with the next set of windows and got all the corners with the broom and the mop. He wiped down the lights and the lightswitches to spotlessness. He desmeared the sink until his reflection was in the taps, wide-eyed and bulging.

“Good job, you just took twice as long as you needed to. If they were paying you for a sixteen-hour shift you’d be right on target.”

Brian sped up. He scrubbed and flushed and sprayed and mopped and wheezed.

“Good job, you just forgot to check the lights. Are you being paid to clean or go home early? And you forgot to take down the slippery surface sign. You should return your paycheck.”

Brian returned to pick up the sign, grabbed it, backed out of the way of oncoming traffic, smiled and nodded and said ‘sorry.’
“You mumbled that. He doesn’t understand what you said and your expression was disconcerting. Good going, his day’s a little worse now.” Scratch scratch scratch. “Hey, stop making that face or the next person to come by will get freaked out.”

Brian stopped making that face. He wiped down tables and vacuumed under desks and emptied trash bins.

“You still don’t know what to do when the fan makes that noise? Jesus, what are you even doing in this job.”

He left a note for the technician.

“Wow, you made it someone else’s problem. Good going. Might as well have lunch now, you’ll need it early since you had cereal for breakfast. Remember?”

Lunch was a sandwich and an apple.

“Jesus, this won’t be nearly enough. You’ll be lucky to fall asleep on the trip home instead of mid-shift.”

Lunch was a sandwich and an apple and a bag of chips from a vending machine.

“Wasting money? Good job. And learn how to make something more impressive than slapping some slices of prepackaged gunk between bread. And you’re five minutes late. Oh, were you looking at your phone again? Right, because you can’t wait for another three hours to read trivia you don’t need coming from idiots you shouldn’t listen to.”

***

Brian was home. His boots were off.

“You fucked up and forgot to buy milk. Guess that means either you try harder with breakfast tomorrow or you don’t get it, isn’t that helpful. What’s dinner? Oh, precooked glop frozen and reheated in the microwave – you can’t muster the patience to use the oven even if you don’t have to cut things?”

“Yep,” said Brian. “Shower time.”
“You should clean the shower. You should’ve cleaned the shower a week ago.”
“Yep.”
The scratching continued throughout the shower, throughout the meal.

“Forgot to get more hot sauce.”
“Yep.”
“Now what? Going to catch up with your friends – you should have more of those – or your family – so they don’t have to do it for you – or maybe read a book? Sign up for a course? Learn something? Talk to anyone?”
“No.”
“Gonna sit on the internet until you’re forced to go to bed again?”
Brian shut his eyes and sighed.

“Ignoring your problems. That’s helpful.”

***

It was 2 AM. Brian turned off his phone and waited for the list.

“Eighty-four-and-a-half. Up from yesterday, but only a little. You even half-ass halfassing.” Tap went the pen, dropped onto the clipboard with weary disgust. “Honestly, I don’t know why I’m still here. You’re wasting my time. You’re wasting your time. Eighty-six-and-a-half. Now, you know the drill.”
Brian looked at the list. Clean, legible, precise. Everything his handwriting wasn’t (item thirty-seven).

He pointed at item fifty-three.

“Oh, when you said ‘thanks’ too loudly at the checkout, ruining the clerk’s day. Classic Brian move. Right.” The brisk sharp rip of a sheet of paper being tugged clear from a pad. “I’ll put it in the eternal loop with the others – make the prompt looking at the supermarket, talking to other people, and just sitting in the dark at 3 AM with your eyes shut. Remember: you can’t trust yourself, which means you can’t trust either of us. Now go to sleep already. Tomorrow’s another day and another chance.”

Bailey was halfway dressed for work when the call came, and halfway frustrated with that before she saw the number.

It was from the shop. That didn’t happen, not unsecured. So she answered the impossible call with an awkward compromise between appropriate formality and appropriate security, which consisted of saying “yes?” but in a very deferential way.

“You’re off shift,” said the shop. Terse, but not aggressive.  Urgent.  “Come on down and bring a change of clothes or two; this could get messy.”

“Alright.”
“Talk to you in an hour.”
Click.

Bailey got fully undressed for work, halfway dressed for casual, completely mentally undone at the seams, and all the way down to the shop – (behind two false fronts and never you mind the details) – before she dared consider what was going on, which was at the same moment she was bowing politely before Chandelier. 

“Esteemed,” she said.

“Not a lot of time,” Chandelier told Bailey, ignoring both of their manners with similar ease.  Her grey hair looked greyer, her big tired brown eyes looked heavier, her rumpled suit was verging on crumpled – crumpling farther, as she bent over and began to dig through the bottom drawers of her desk.  “The ‘keep is going to be out of town for the weekend. We need someone to housesit. You’re up. Know it’s in here someplace…”

“What, esteemed?” asked Bailey, in a terrible compromise between saying what was on her mind and maintaining operational professionalism.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get a detailed list and we’re fitting you with a nictitating meninx,” said Chandelier, effortlessly introducing several new things for Bailey to worry about. She gave a small grunt in small triumph and swayed back to desk height, a little grey cardboard box in her palm.  “Here it is. Take this and get it to Candlemaker, the third door on the right down the pink hall. She’ll set you up.”
“Esteemed,” said Bailey, hands shaking, brain shocked, mouth unwisely let off the leash. “Why me?  I’m not even third watt.”
Chandelier actually looked at Bailey for the first time since she’d entered the shop, and it was terrible. Sympathy, weary jealousy, irritation, a little contempt that stuck out like the red spot on Jupiter.

“Because the rest of us will be going with the shopkeep and doing a lot worse than housesitting this weekend,” she said, each word heat-sterilized before it entered the world. “So take your new meninx and your self down to Candlemaker and be happy for the time off. Now.”

“Yes, esteemed,” said Bailey. And fled to somewhere safer, to the office of Candlemaker with his wild shock of hair and his inappropriately big smile and his complicated and overwrought razorblades, who laughed in her face at her delivery and shook his head at her meek request for more information.

“The list’ll set you up,” he said, picking up and putting down things somewhere between scalpels and dental floss.  “Honestly? The less you know outside of it the better. The meninx will do its job, no fear, but if it has to face pressure from you AND the environment?  It might strain, a little. And if you strain it a little, it might stretch. And if it might stretch it might snap. And then you’re in trouble. So stop asking questions and do as you’re told, alright?”
“Yes, esteemed,” said Bailey.

“God, you sound like you’re up against a firing squad. Hey, look at my chin.”
Bailey looked at Candlemaker’s chin and fell asleep. When she woke up her head hurt, her leg was asleep, and she was sitting in a wooden lounge chair on a nice deck attached to a polite little two-story house that would’ve been middle-class twenty years ago and now was the height of unfeasible luxury.

The world was wrong.

She blinked.

No, that wasn’t it. The world was fine, but…

She remembered when she was six years old and she’d finally gotten a magic eye picture to work. How it had felt when her eyes had unfocused just right, her brow had furrowed just so, her brain had slid loose just enough, and then the sailboat popped out of nowhere, floating off the page.

Right now she felt like the whole world was a magic eye picture, she couldn’t stop seeing it, and her head was already as creased as Chendelier’s suit.

There was a list in her hand. Big, bold handwriting, easy to soak up even in her state.

A little bird sang its heart out in a tree altogether too close to her ears.

Autostereograms, that was what those pictures were called.

Well.

Thank God it’s Friday indeed.

***

Besides the little knot tied between Bailey’s eyes and her brain, the house was nice. Clean. Furnished. It was a little over-populated with knickknacks in the way that reminded her of her great-grandmother’s place when she was a small child: half the accumulation of a long life, half the relics of a style of decoration long-since passed-by. The fridge was almost overflowing. There was a tank of goldfish in the living room, and a birdfeeder in the backyard. There was a small almost-grove of tall, sober trees that didn’t seem to be able to decide if they had needles or leaves.

There was a big and not necessarily overwhelming sofa, which Bailey sat on as she read the list.

It was divided into a DO section, which was long, and DON’T section, which was short.

DO

-Water the plants. Half-a-can of water per day per plant, two in the living room, one on the shelf in the kitchen.

-Fill the birdfeeder with a cup of the black birdseed and a pinch of the purple birdseed every day.

-Shovel the front and back steps with the big blue shovel resting on the front porch.

-Feed the goldfish in the living room. One spoonful of feed per goldfish per day.

-Make polite conversation with the spider above the stair in the morning. The weather is best.

-Sleep in each bed once.

-Keep the thermostat at 17 degrees.

-Check the pump in the basement before going to bed.

-Pick up the phone and put it down again twice a day.

-Eat the food on the bottom shelf of the fridge.

DON’T

-Use the little yellow-handled shovel.

-Sleep in any bed more than once.

-Be rude to the spider.

-Eat food from anywhere other than the bottom shelf of the fridge.

-Feed anything the red birdseed.

At the very bottom of the list Candlemaker had written ‘Have Fun!!!!’ 

Bailey stared at this and wondered if it was technically attached to the DON’T section by placement, then decided she had better things to do and started from the top.

It didn’t take too long. The plants were odd and unrecognizable; the spider didn’t talk back; the goldfish were pleasantly rounded and healthy. The birds were not quite chickadees, but even though Bailey and her birdwatching app couldn’t identify their song it was quite pleasant. The phoneline sounded quite normal when she gave into curiosity and listened before putting it back down. The first container she found in the bottom of the fridge was humble takeout poutine of average quality (i.e., bad and therefore excellent), and the grey salt-studded slush on the steps peeled away easily under the big clumsy blade of the blue shovel. The only odd thing was the thermostat: someone had set it to 19 degrees.

Bailey fixed that and spent the afternoon reading, which had been neither DO or DON’T. She tried the books from the overstuffed study first, but abandoned that plan quickly – each of them were filled with lorum ipsum that made her eyes water on contact – and retreated to her phone.

The pump in the basement was innocuous and unmoving.

The one disconcerting thing was the master bed. Bailey sank into it like a pebble dropped over the Mariana Trench and woke at 4 AM Saturday after indiscernible, troubling dreams to find herself deeper still.  She decided an early morning was a safer bet than switching beds.

Breakfast came in the same takeout container as the poutine: an immaculate beef wellington. She microwaved it and felt a sense of inevitable, righteous doom overtake her until the first bite.

The thermometer was at 15 degrees. She fixed that.  The steps were covered in (still salty, oddly) slush again. She shoveled that.

“I’m not sure where it came from,” she told the spider honestly, “there’s no snow anywhere else. Not on the branches, not on the roof, nothing. I guess I’d better not think about it.”
The spider did not reply, no more than the goldfish did, and the birds still sang. Long trills and clicks, like Morse code set to music.

Dinner was what appeared to be plain scraped-from-a-can beans in molasses, and this Bailey felt far less guilty about microwaving. It tasted like university desperation and retail overtime, and raising her spoon felt like work. She read a paragraph for every bite, and the meal ran so late into the evening that at first she almost mistook her visitor for a flicker of the shadows in the old half-buzzing lights, or even one of the little twitches in her field of view she’d almost gotten used to by now.

A roach. Not too big, but unpleasant to even look at.

“Guh!” said Bailey articulately, and – thanks to her quick reflexes – this became the insect’s epitaph. It thrashed and died and one leg twitched and clawed at the air and her and the universe and oh.

Oh, that was a sensation.

Despite what migraines might advertise, Bailey knew that the human brain was famously devoid of pain receptors.

So, what she was feeling right then, that tearing, scraping, rending….thing?  Inside her skull.  That was very specifically not pain.  It was completely not like pain.  Pain and bright pink and strawberry-scent and velvet-soft and salty-taste were all much closer cousins to each other than this was.

But Bailey still felt very strongly that the correct response to it was to scream. Not a lot, or for long, but definitely to scream. Short and sharp and shattering like glass, with a hand slapped over her right eye.

Her right eye.  Very specifically her right eye. Quicker than thought, like a hand snatched from a burning stovetop.

She looked at the dead cockroach with her left eye. A dead, mashed cockroach.  No twitch left in the legs. Gross.

She looked at the dead cockroach with her closed right eye. She thought about opening it. She thought about what she would see.

She thought about how the pressure in her head had let up. About how the furrow in her brow was gone.

So instead of opening her right eye Bailey made an eyepatch out of one of her socks and some duct tape and she threw the cockroach out in the garbage, and then she went downstairs to check the pump in the basement.

It was innocuous and unmoving but it was also at the far end of the basement from where it had started.

Bailey’s right eye itched.

She ran up the stairs to bed in such a hurry that she nearly forgot herself and took the master bedroom again, but when she set foot in the room she looked at its deep, soft folds and felt its dusty breath and saw it wriggle – just a little – and remembered herself so fast she backed out without even turning around.

The guestroom bed, by contrast, was firm.  Immobile. Hard as a rock.

Baily didn’t fall asleep on it. But she did SOMETHING, because the dreams started before she’d even finished getting comfortable.

The birds sat in the window and watched her. The plants moved downstairs and talked in damp, dark voices. The books merged and split and recombined like microbes, filled the downstairs, the upstairs, to the ceiling, past the roof. The shovels marched into the mass and carved it away and slipped back downstairs to report to the pump and the pump couldn’t stop messing with the thermostat.

And all the while the birds watched her.

***

As she hadn’t slept, Bailey didn’t wake up.  But she did start moving around again.

Her phone said it was Sunday. She hoped it was right. She also hoped she was reading it right; part of her field of view was…odd… right now. Swollen, like a bruise. Despite the eyepatch, despite a firmly-clamped-shut right eyelid, she could see things on the right side of her nose. Somehow.

She swallowed the lump in her throat and her thoughts in one gulp and went downstairs to water the plants. She didn’t enjoy it. They kept making contact, brushing her wrists, and no matter how often she pushed their hands away they wouldn’t listen. No ears.

The goldfish were better. Their little hands only moved to cup the bones from the water and drink them down, their mouths murmured in gratitude and blessings. They reminded her of her grandfather after gramma died, all prayers and no thoughts.

The birds weren’t watching her. The birds were making eye contact. The birds were making eye contact with her right side. She was making it right back.

Her eyepatch was still on.  Her eyes were both shut.

Bailey screamed a little and ran back inside and slammed the door and shook herself for a few minutes, then went to talk to the spider.

“I’m really sorry, esteemed,” she mumbled. “But this is going very badly.”
The nictitating meninx was torn, the spider explained. She was seeing things that were there.

“That’s not good.”
The spider agreed. It suggested a solution, if she could go to the kitchen and find the sharpest knife. It would help.

Bailey did that.

The spider told her to point the knife at her right eyeball.

Bailey didn’t do that.

She really should, explained the spider.

“Maybe later,” said Baily.

She went to check the thermostat. It was at eleventeen. She spun the dial, spun the dial, spun the dial, then saw seventeen at last and twisted it home true only to realize she was looking at it with her left eye shut and her right eye wide and the sock eyepatch had burned its way into dust.

She looked behind her and caught the pump in the middle of moving from one end of the basement to the other. 

It hissed.

Bailey went back upstairs, picked up the knife again, and did as the spider instructed.

Leave it with me as payment, it told her.

“Take my eye. Please,” said Bailey. And giggled, but in relief. Her left eye was twitching again in that offset rhythm, her brain’s brow was furrowed and aching once more. How did that even work? Surely autostereograms need stereo vision, that was just common sense.

Hee hee who cared.  Not her!  Not Bailey! She was seeing single now, and one thing at a time was enough for her. She had mapo tofu for brunch from the fridge (and boy was she glad she hadn’t looked in it earlier), she checked the phone, she went down to the basement and gave the (now-relocated) pump a quick look and a middle finger, and she went out to the porch and boldly reached out and picked up the little yellow-handled shovel.

Oh wow, she thought.  Missed by six inches.  Depth perception DOES matter.

***

Bailey woke back up with a face against hers and a set of fingers in her right eyesocket.

“This is alright,” said the face. It was a very ordinary face, so ordinary that it was extraordinary that it remained ordinary. A face that ordinary should be memorable.

She agreed with it. Compared to what had happened after she touched the little yellow-handled shovel, this was perfect. 

“You have done nothing wrong.”

Arguable.

“The pest should not have been there. Killing it was good. Your suffering was a narrow escape. The spider gave good advice.”  The face clucked its tongue. “You should not have touched the little yellow-handled shovel. That wasn’t wrong and that wasn’t right. It was entropy, it was statistical decay. I came home early. Statistical decay.”

Oh alright then.

“You are going home now.”  The face moved away. The fingers went deeper. “And you will return with two eyes. You orphaned this one, and it will help you.”

***

Bailey saw everything.

She saw the look of disgust and shock and hidden envy travelling from Chandelier’s brain to her glands to her face and back.

She saw the experiments Candlemaker ran on the tatters of the nictitating meninx she’d carried home in her coat pocket, staining the fabric with cerebrospinal fluid.

She saw that she wasn’t a third watt anymore, whether or not anyone had said it aloud or not.

She saw that the pest had not been a cockroach.

She saw forwards and backwards and side to side and up and down and all around and beyond.

And she saw that standing there with her hand on the door to the shop wasn’t going to stop any of those things from happening.

So Bailey sighed deep, blinked with the eye that could still blink – the one that fit inside her eyesocket – and turned the doorknob, and stepped into a life that popped loose and floated above the page.

It was twenty seconds past nine o’clock when the customer arrived for his bar fight.

Unforgivable if he were a regular, but he was a tourist, and one with that combination of embarrassment and eagerness in his apologies that was all clumsily earnest. There was traffic, he’d lost reception on his navigation app, he’d hit five red lights in a row and he hadn’t checked the weather last night so the messy half-snowfall had caught him off-guard Doug forgave people like that, deserved or not.

“There’s no harm done,” he said, which was a lie but only on a very small scale. A little sloppiness and corrosion to the sense of timing and precision he’d be trying to maintain today, this year, this decade, this life. Life was full of those, one more or less was as harmful as any other. That was how they got you. “Now please, take your seat.”

Tourist, embarrassed, cursed by traffic or more, the customer was only so ignorant or slow on the uptake. He followed Doug’s cue perfectly and took the quiet-type seat at the bar, just near the far end, spaced double from its neighbours. A good position for an amateur, which meant he was one of the sorts with self-awareness. “The seat is comfortable?”
The customer shimmied quickly, rocked it sharply forwards once, twice. “Yep. All set and secured.”
“Then we shall begin.”

So speaking, Doug reached below the bar – a carefully pre-pitted and ancient slab of cheap wood – and withdraw a spray bottle. His arm moved in a broad, sure sweep, spritzing everything across the countertop with a thin shimmer of stale beer and sour sweat. The customer twitched, but only slightly, trusting in Doug’s aim to avoid his eyes as he donned the present from Doug’s other hand: a battered baseball cap, tattered from front to back. You couldn’t help but slouch under a hat like that, and so he did, back naturally relaxing into a shallow slump in the tireless fist of gravity. He took the third gift offered almost by reflex: the tall, smeared glass mug, brimming with half-drained yellow dregs and the last foam of the pour.

Doug slipped beneath the hidden cut-out of the bar, hinges in perfect oiled silence, and interrupted this moment by stepping beside the Fella and slapping one palm down on the counter.

“You lookin’ at me?” he demanded.

The Fella looked up. Slow on the uptake, but that was expected, and that it was accidental made it better to any except the most refined witnesses. “Huh?”

“I SAID, you lookin’ at me?”

The Fella shook his head. “Don’t want any trouble, bub.”

“Then why you lookin’ at me like that?”
“Like what?”

“Like you got a PROBLEM. You the kinda fella that’s got a problem with me?”

“No.” Short and surely, only a hint of eagerness expressed in the speed it came out at. Acceptable, could also be read as nerves.

“Then why. You. Lookin’. At. Me.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You callin’ me a liar?”
“I’m not calling you anything. Got wax in your ears?”
The Bub grabbed the mug. “Say WHAT there bigmouth?”
“Got glass in your ears?”
“Wh-” and just like magic, up came the Fella’s hand, right on cue, clenched and on target to the thickest part of the Bub’s chin, where impacted dead-on the target pad.

The squib in his mouth gushed red. The tonguebite was flawless; visible without gushing messily over them both. The Fella was slowing down though, almost too lost in admiration, and so the Bub slurred out (hand retreating to his mouth): “guh.”

The Fella took the cue, took the mug, and smashed it over the Bub’s face. He swore, spun, tripped over his own feet, and did a grasp-down kneecracker against the Fella’s chair.

The chair came up. The chair came down over his back. He went limp.

Good timing. Some slightly uncontrolled splinter spray from the chair’s legs, but that was the reason the Fella took the quiet-type seat: if you mishandled your setpiece, there wasn’t much else around you to suffer the consequences.

He held his breath. He released it.

“The moment is over,” said Doug.

The customer exhaled too, shakily. “God damn,” he said, blowing out his cheeks with the force of his sigh. He took off the cap and handed it back double-gripped to Doug, hands shaking just a little. “God DAMN. How do you do it? I know how, I’ve seen the interviews, but seeing it in action…”
“Practice,” said Doug, same as he’d said in every interview. And then, offhandedly, same as he’d said every time in-person: “and a metronome helps. Keep one in as much of your life as you can until you ignore it, then start paying attention. Timing is everything, and if you get that under control, the rest follows.”
“And maybe the red lights too,” the customer said – but a little sheepishly already, balking at the gulf that separated them. He paid in awe and left with a smile.

Doug stopped smiling when the man left, and wasn’t pleased with himself for it. Faking a good mood was for retail employees; his job was his art and his art was a pleasure, and expressing that pleasure was expected only insofar as he was doing this because he enjoyed it.

That had taken a while to figure out, when dad was going over the charts with him. Patiently, slowly, explaining every barstool, every step, every angle of approach, every usable tool and its substitutes.

“This is insane,” Doug had told him. “Half of these don’t do anything. Half of them are functional equivalents. All of them have two names each, and there’s six naming schemes that don’t agree with each other. Why make it so hard?”

“Dougie,” his father said – a little irritably, because dad had saved his patience for his craft – “Squabbling being hard is the whole reason I do it.”

It had taken him years to reason that out intellectually. But he’d had the time to think about it because he’d accepted it on a lower level a long time earlier, in the way his limbic system sang and his nerves fizzed.

(At the time. Familiarity didn’t breed contempt, it didn’t, it couldn’t, not this kind. But he was old now, and it was more humming and twitching)

Jenny had never gotten it. Maybe she would’ve, if she hadn’t been a little more like dad than Doug was, a little less willing to speak sharp.

***

The second person to walk into the Squabble studio was not a customer. They were a peer, and this was their sixth year visiting.

“Sorry for the weather,” they told Doug. “I know it’s not ideal for the plan.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, and he meant it. “I’ve done this knee-deep in plow backwash before. Hard on the knees, but what isn’t? The human body isn’t built very well.”
“You got that right,” said the peer, rubbing their back. And so they talked about aging as they walked outside, as they visited the shed and selected the bike (a fine middle-of-the-lane priced device, worn but adequately-if-erratically cared-for, the sort of thing he’d nod at and call good inside his own head as well as outside it), as they went out to the curb installation out back and swept back just enough slush to chain the bike to the post with a lock the peer had brought themselves.

“Buddy, I think,” they opined.

“Asshole,” he replied.

A brow raised, but only a little, and followed by a firm nod before they turned on their heel and marched back to the rear entrance. They were good enough to know just how good he was.

He didn’t make the count before he approached the bicycle in numbers. Nothing he counted in the studio happened in numbers anymore, or even biorhythms – heartbeats, breathes, the clench and unclench of muscle groups of any size. He just knew when to scuttle up to the bike, knew how long to fiddle at the padlock, knew when to pick it up and start smacking it against the post, knew the words a half-breath before they arrived.

“Hey asshole!”
He jerked his head upright, schooled the surprise on and off his features. “Who, me?”
They stamped over – the slush fountaining a bit with every angry step, no sign of slippage (good traction they’d worn for this weather). “See any other sticky-fingered shitheads out here with their hands. On. My. Bike?!”
“Buddy, I wasn’t touching your bike,” said the Asshole. “I was just looking at the lock.”
“Why the fuck you looking at my lock?”
“Some shithead’s broken it! Take a peek, see if I’m lying!”

Good mix of fury and bewilderment and curiosity, near-marred by a half-step short – a lunge would be tricky from this distance, ankle-deep in the drift.

But tricky wasn’t, so the Asshole not only cleared the drift but made it look natural – his legs felt longer, and acted the part, and the lock in his hand slapped into Buddy’s middrift with a sharp flat THWAK, distributed as evenly as anything while sounding like a cannonball being fired into a beef warehouse.

“Gwurk!” choked Buddy, doubled over, nose almost brushing their boots, and as the Asshole reared back and raised a doubled-fisted blow Buddy reached out, grasped the Asshole’s just-barely-shaky leg, and yanked.

“SHIT!” he shrieked on the way down, and as he fell he flailed, and as he flailed his grip shook loose, and so the lock and chain swung wildly, popping him one right in the eye and smeared a fat black bruise from the dye he’d palmed onto the mechanism’s base. He choked, flopped, rolled around clutching at his face, curled up around two boots to the midsection from the rallying, half-stooped form of Buddy, and then, one hand swinging wildly, he pulled in the bike by the spokes with his foot and ran it straight into Buddy’s backside.
Over went Buddy, a full two-twist somersault (a little showy, but why not shoot for your best?), and over went Asshole’s leg, and down the curb and the road he went, peddling hellbent until the moment was right and he was around the corner.

He held his breath. He released it.

“The moment is over,” said Doug. “And good work on the somersault.”

“Thanks,” said the peer, who’d come over to check the tires. “Sorry,” he said, “but my assplate shifted a bit when I dropped the first time and I want to be sure… yep. Nothing’s dented.” He patted the bike affectionately. “Apologies. Metal shrank in the cold.”
“If it takes a few knocks too many I can always shift the whole panoply down by one and get a new Brand New,” Doug said with a wave of his hand. “Not like I’m in the poorhouse just yet.”
“Yes, but the guilt.”
“You’ve told me twenty times you can’t feel that because you have no conscience.”
“Yes, but my husband does, and he’ll nag me ‘till past death’s door until I’ve bought you two bikes a bike shed and a snowblower.”
Doug laughed, and found himself startled by his own startlement at its genuineness. He accepted thanks, and he made promises, and he said goodbyes, and he still felt he was one step off. Just one piece of himself not quite there.

It had been like that, when Jenny left. If dad hadn’t skipped breakfast. If she’d not had a sleepless double-shift from the other mechanic running sick. If Doug had been a little firmer on asking them to back off.

Just one little thing off and nothing went right. And once it went wrong, it stayed wrong.

***

The third person to walk into the studio was a long-booker, someone with the patience to wait a full year for his schedule to settle and sift and solidify and another six months for their appointment to arrive.

She was also his niece.

For the first time in forty-three years, Doug wasn’t sure what expression he was making. “Ally,” he said instead. Like an idiot.

“Uncle Dougie,” she said. Like a smartass.

“You’ve gotten older.”
“Not as much as you have. You still doing this? Because I’m here for Look At My Fender, in case you’ve forgotten that.”

His brain snapped off his current course of action and onto one where it still knew what was going on. “Right. We can move it indoors, switch the fender to the shoe –”

“The hell we will. You going to let the weather tell you what to do?”
Nobody had spoken to Doug like that inside his studio in twenty years.

None of his family had spoken to Doug inside his studio in twenty years.

They went outside.

“I’ll bring my car around,” said Ally. And the problem with letting himself operate in professional mode was that it short-circuited the part of his brain that said things like “fucking hell are you insane?” so by the time he’d sorted his mouth from his ass she’d already turned on the – less-than-a-year-old, reasonably-nice, perfectly-undented sedan to the back of the building and parked it on the curb right next to where he’d shoveled the snow for the bicycle five milliseconds ago.

“Waiting,” she said, voice flat and humourless as dad’s pancakes. Doug shook himself off and let his gut pick his own car – went for the Clunker. Pulled on the coke-bottle-thick spectacles and the greasy wig, stopped to check and – oh god, she was already reaching to put the blinkers on.

He could stop and ask her questions she seemed to already have answers to. Or he could keep his timing.

So he fired up the engine, edged forwards, and – by reflex and feel – slammed bumper-first into the fender.

Which shrieked in a tone of metal that was NOT setpiece and went from one pole of his spine to another. Had she really-?

“What the FUCK!” screamed Ally, already outside his window. “Are you BLIND, you dense motherfucker?”
Those weren’t the words he’d expected. Not from whoever drove that car.

Dense Motherfucker peered out the window, goggling with entirely too-close-to-real bewilderment, and saw…

Downer. She was going full Downer. She must’ve had the outfit in the car and done a quickchange, because it was straight from halfway through the fall of the ‘90s, white shirt and tie, sweaty jacket, desperate and strung out and bug-eyed so you could almost see the cubicles reflected in the glaze in the back of her eyes.

“Say something, asshole!”

He smacked his lips and ran his tongue excessively and mumbled a string of syllables that would’ve made a kindergarten teacher disappointed.

“Speak WORDS!”

“Ididn’tseeanything,” he slurred out.

She yanked his door open.

Wait. That wasn’t Downer at all. That was Crazy.

A hand fisted his jacket, the other crunched into his nose. Red spurted extravagantly – she must’ve held at least two squibs and she’d squeezed them like a four-year-old with their first ketchup packet. It was warpaint as she screamed in his face about driving back home and coming back with her shotgun (crazy) and blowing his whole dense motherfucker (downer) family to hell and back (crazy).

And the outfit didn’t fit any of it, but it didn’t fit RIGHT. If she’d worn a good businesssuit or gone High Karen maybe it would’ve been laughable, it would’ve been parodic, but coming from her marooned-out-of-time Dilbert-on-my-wall Clinton-and-Bush burnout it was right, it was correct, and god above she’d braced her back and stabled her stance, legs wide.

That wasn’t Dense Motherfucker’s cue. It was from Fuckin’ Moron’s part.

It wasn’t called for, but it was correct. He took the groinshot – one knee, then the other. She hit a high C then took it higher still, pitched forwards, her skull dusted his gut and they went down in a mutual tangle, legs flailing, heads bouncing once at the very center of the asphalt pitch. His heel jerked. Her mouth gasped once. Stillness.

He’d held his breath. He released it.

“I’m retiring,” he said.

“What?” said Ally. She scrambled up on one elbow, genuinely appalled and concerned. “I go to all this time and effort to show up and make you take me seriously, and the second I do-”

“-you show me what I’m missing,” Doug finished. “Everything I can do I can do perfectly, the timing’s precise. Just now you showed me something I hadn’t done before, and I nearly screwed it up sixteen ways in sixteen seconds. I AM taking you seriously, and what that means is admitting I can’t show you anything you don’t already know.”

“I’m sorry I made you bust my fender for real,” said Ally miserably, retreating to less troubling ground. “It’s just, mom was sure you wouldn’t talk, and then when I was almost ready the first time grandpa was gone, and then I had that SHITTER of a year, and I wanted to be sure you’d get it, you’d really get it, and…”
“…and I got it,” said Doug. He patted her arm once, firmly. “But not the studio. You’re getting that.”

And everything was just where it had to be.

I had to check a couple times to make sure I was seeing right – this was the shoddiest dock in town, which meant it was a good, fine place for me to get day-drunk while looking at the water and imagining I was going to do real work – but no, I was right.

Eleven, maybe twelve years old. Kiddy lisps and mumbles all gone, voice still too high-pitched and squeaky, but talking in deadly grown-up earnest all the same.

“I want a ride,” she repeated, stone-faced. And that just made Angel laugh harder, hands on both knees now, dockmaster’s coat flapping from the wind of her joy.

“I’ll bet you do,” she said. “Oh I bet! Caught some minnows and now you want to go whale-hunting, huh? Get a vouch from someone that isn’t your mommy.”

“I’ll do it,” said the spirits, using my mouth. Damn, I’d had more than I thought. My impulse control wasn’t usually this bad.

“A vouch from someone that isn’t your mommy or halfway alcohol by volume,” said Angel.

“You’ve let me take Charlie-Jetty out when I can’t even talk, Angel,” I argued. “Go on, let the kid be. Worst that’ll happen is she can’t find anything.”
“Worst that’ll happen is she gets them both fed to a damn shark.”

I fumbled around in my jacket until I found the hooks in my pocket – had to fight them out, they’d gotten snarled in the weave – then flung them in the dockmaster’s direction. She took them up with a quickness and a grin that let me know she might have planned on this.

“G’wan then, shorty,” she said cheerfully. “Go catch your whales.”

“Thank you,” said the kid. Teeth not gritted, face still stony. This wasn’t the first time she’d been treated like this. How many docks do you visit before you go to the shoddiest one in town?

Maybe none, if the others aren’t dumb enough to rent out fins to prepubescent. And you’d be out of luck there too if a sentimental and contrary drunk wasn’t on hand to play scapegoat if the kid doesn’t come back.

Those were the cheerful thoughts that filled me as I watched the kid scud away into the early-morning mists atop the low-slung and scaleless back of Charlie-Jetty, short legs dangling from the croc’s flanks so her toes just touched the water’s surface.

“If she doesn’t come back,” Angel said, clicking my (her) hooks against each other thoughtfully, “I sure hope Charlie does.” A cheap ride, but a consistent one, and sensible. “There’ll be some sad old abalone hunters without him – he practically does their runs for them.”

“She’ll come back,” I said. An uninformed opinion, but a stubborn one, and hopeful. “She’ll come back.”

Then I dealt with my anxieties as best I knew how, which meant I wasn’t awake that evening when Charlie-Jetty came back to dock, rider included. But I knew he must have when I slept clear through ‘till morning, groggy and stiff.

Angel’s laugh always woke me up early. Too loud, too sharp, too pleased.

***

The kid was back soon after that, before I’d had time to think about breakfast. Walked right up to me, hand out, fistful of hooks.

“For yesterday,” she said. There was an uncomfortable amount of direct eye contact happening, and I realized I was feeling an old reflex to salute.

“Thanks,” I said. And took the hooks, and thought about other things I maybe should’ve said or asked while she walked to Angel’s post, rang the bell, argued her case.

Like “what were you doing?”

And “should you be doing it alone?”

And “why are you thanking me for letting you do it?”
Then Angel started laughing again and oh I didn’t want to hear that, not without breakfast. So I went down to the rocks and the little shack and bought a bottle of it, came back to sit by Charlie-Jetty’s berth and lie to myself that I’d be taking him out for baitfish in an hour, a few hours, the afternoon, tomorrow.

Angel came to keep me company and took the bottle from my hand, asking for neither. “You have an eye for talent, So’west!” she said cheerfully. Then she took a pull, then she made a face. “No goddamned taste though. Christ, you could clean the birdshit from the boards with this – if you didn’t mind turning the dock into a firetrap.”

“What’d she want?” I asked. I wasn’t going to ask for the bottle back. I wasn’t.

“Seems your old boy here didn’t hold her appeal.” Angel bucked her chin at Charlie-Jetty, sleeping like a (smooth) log in the way that sea-crocodiles do. “She wanted something bigger. A lot bigger. And well, I would’ve said no, but you gave me a bit of a turnaround yesterday, So’west. I’m a bigger woman now, with a generous, open heart.”
My hands shook a little faster. “Give me the bottle.”
“Huh?”

“Give me the bottle please.”

“Oh of course, no worries.”

I was trying to count the leads tied to the piers and swallow at the same time when she said “I reckon Bruce-Boy will do her fine,” gaze high and tight on the horizon, watching the sun climb out of its sullen grey bed.

I immediately failed at everything I was doing. It hurt worse than the last time, not least because while my throat burned and my heart wrenched my ears were full of Angel’s friendly, good-natured laughter.

***

I stayed up that time. Drank half my breakfast and put the other half in my pocket and took up a place at the lookout post, tucked in the corner where I could get a good view past the breakwater and pretend the young-and-bored postie wasn’t looking at me every five minutes and sharing the same opinion I’d developed of what he was seeing.

Young. He had to be twice the kid’s age.

And she was out there with the meanest near-reptile I’d ever met. Bruce-Boy had nearly six metres of neck and a mouthful of knives and if he was displeased with you he had a nasty habit of letting you know right away and everything from lack of food to early work to the sun in the sky to being ridden at all displeased him, displeased him greatly and thoroughly.

I had a few marks on my arms from Bruce-Boy’s displeasure, and if I’d been slower or had a bit more breakfast at the time I had no doubt I’d be missing fingers. That kid could lose a hand or worse.

The bottle was still in my pocket.

“Hey you want a drink?” I asked the postie.

“Not on watch.” And isn’t it nice to know you’re bringing out the best in people, Southwest? The barely-shaved watchman of the shoddiest dock in town can learn a bad idea when you show it to him.
“Good,” I said. Like that had been my plan. A good influence on all young people I am. This young man will go on to have a bright career thanks to my intervention, and that kid will probably go on to be a layer of gut flora in Bruce-Boy’s duodenum.

Moved by the spirits, I pulled the bottle out and dropped it over the side. It didn’t splash, and the first thought I had (the first EMOTION I had was blind regret and rage) was oh no, I hope I don’t get any of the fins drunk.

Then I thought of Charlie-Jetty drunk and swimming upside down at abalones and laughed. Messy, snorting, snot-dribbling, undignified, giggly and near-hysterical. The postie not-looked at me like I was the worst thing he’d ever seen.

It’d been a long time since I’d heard a laugh from someone that wasn’t Angel. It felt good.

Felt better when – just as the sky was turning red – in came Bruce-Boy, smooth as butter and worryingly traceless – all the froth and motion and force coming from a body only a little bigger than Charlie-Jetty’s, all the eye drawn to a neck twice that long with a malevolent little skull on it, leering at you from just above the waterline.

He looked happy. As far as that goes. And the kid, all things toothed and scaly be praised, looked unharmed. Tired, but unharmed. Well, unharmed by teeth – she had a sunburn fit to murder God and her posture looked more stiff than straight for once, but she had all her limbs and all those limbs looked unbandaged and unbleeding.

I was down from the lookout post before I had time to realize it, halfway through tying a hitch into Bruce-Boy’s lead before I remembered I’d forgotten how. Cinched it, tugged it, shrugged it off, offered a hand.

The kid ignored it – jumped up with a wince and a slap of the palms on the wood, shaky-armed – but nodded to me anyways. As was proper, if she’d been three times her age.

“Good day?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. And all she had to back that claim up was a foul-smelling fish-pack half her own size, but she said it without a pause or a stall or a thought, so I didn’t doubt her for a second.

“I’m Southwest,” I said.

“Cleat,” she said.

Then she left.

I looked at Bruce-Boy. He gave me the serene look of a cruel and temperamental beast with a full stomach.

“What’s she finding out there, eh?” I asked him.

He turned his back on me with more dignity than the postie had.

***

I skipped breakfast. My stomach rebelled and rejoiced all at once.

The air at the dock helped both. Dead fish and salt spray and the thick cool coating of a foggy day, inside and out. I could almost imagine I was a fish myself.

Angel was in a bad mood. She stared at the fog as if it had jimmied her brother then skipped town, the smoke of her pipe aggressively encroaching on its space.

“Unless you’re hunting harbour eels, no go,” she told me shortly. “Wait ‘till it burns off. Maybe a little noon traffic.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Might take Charlie-Jetty for a spin. Get my fins back on.”
“Didn’t know you had the means for a pleasure spin, So’west.” The bite was there, but the cheer was forced.

That mixed mood of my stomach spread to my tongue, and this time I couldn’t blame it on the spirits. “Well, Cleat paid me back. Reckon I’ll be set for a little.”

Muscle crawled on her jawbone like a lizard on a rock. The pipe twitched and I heard a little crunch.

“I’m going out,” said Cleat.

We both jumped. She wasn’t that quiet for a kid, but damn the fog ate noise.

“I’m going out,” she repeated. “And I need a big one.”

“Nothing doing,” snapped Angel. “Not in this fog.”
“I’m going out,” said Cleat. No change in tone; not impatient, not annoyed. All business. “The biggest one you can send.”
“Go hunt frogspawn in the crick.”
“I’m going out,” said Cleat. She held up both hands, opened them.

It’d been a while since I’d seen that many hooks. Some of them were doubles. I thought one might have been a triple.

“The biggest one you can send,” said Cleat.

Angel’s face moved through a few expressions, which was pretty funny if you didn’t see that her eyes didn’t change once. “Fine,” she said, as flat as Cleat had. “Let’s roll out Jenny-Regina.”

I choked on the fog and my own tongue. But Cleat didn’t say anything, just nodded, and I couldn’t put the words together right, not as they walked out to the security pier, not as they raised the gate and pulled the anchors loose, not as Angel held out the ammonite-shell chime that would hang from Cleat’s waist and remind Jenny-Regina that the tiny thing on her back existed, and the foul-smelling sack of nudibranchs that would dangle from Cleat’s neck and remind Jenny-Regina that the tiny thing on her back was not edible.

I couldn’t say a single word as Cleat leapt down – still a little stiff from yesterday if I wasn’t fooling myself – and seated herself on the saddle and smacked the goad against keeled scales and she was off.

Off atop Jenny-Regina. Fifteen metres of Meuse-lizard, finned and tailed and massively jawed. Indifferent to anything that didn’t threaten it, unthreatened by anything.

I couldn’t relate, especially when I found my tongue again after the two of them had passed beyond the breakwater, and all I could manage was “what the fuck, Angel?”
“Her hooks, her funeral,” said Angel. She sucked on one cheek and bit down. “Going to get early lunch. Go suck a bottle or kiss a harbour eel, I don’t care.”

A flip of the hand, a hook bounced off my forehead, and I was alone.

Then I was at the little shack by the rocks. Then I had a bottle.

But my stomach felt worse whenever it came out of my pocket, so I left it there and went back to the dock and tried not to think about why or what I was trying to do.

The fog was still so damned thick. Which is why I almost walked into Angel, and why she didn’t hear me do that (biting my tongue when I stumbled helped).

She was at the end of the dock, untethering something.

Then she was in the water. Barely a splash, head still level with the dock, and then moving off.

I ran to the end and caught the end of the tail.

Thomas-Clock. The old timeeater himself. The other end of the security dock. Short tail, long paddles, short body, long jaws. A mouth to rival Jenny-Regina’s.

I thought about what was going on, which was worryingly easy, and then about what I should do about it, which was a lot harder.

The good news was that while I was wasting my time thinking my body – uninfluenced by the spirits and feeling enthusiastic about that – ran down to Charlie-Jetty’s dock, stuffed fish in his mouth so quickly he almost bit me in surprise, and cast him off.

The water was up to my thighs. I hadn’t taken out fins in… god. A year? More.

But you couldn’t forget.

***

Following Tommy-Clock was easy. Charlie-Jetty’s nose was good and he knew his distant dockmate’s smell well. All I had to do was keep him pointed in the direction he was most uncomfortable.

Damn, I owed him more than a few fistfuls of bait.

We went out past the breakwater, swaddled hard in dead fog, and for a while we went straight out. Downcoast and out, towards where the shoals would be if the season were better. But a big fish-pack-full of plain food didn’t bring in a fistful of hooks and then some, and I wasn’t surprised when we took a sharp turn.

Near back to shore. Nearer. Nearer. A long way from town now, closer to the headland. Ragged and rocky. Charlie-Jetty slipped through with ease but steering Bruce-Boy would’ve been tricky and Jenny-Regina would be like pushing a cork back into a bottle.

The rocks were getting closer. One bad wave I couldn’t see coming and I’d be a bag of broken bones held together with meat glue. At least I’d give my fins his snack, assuming he didn’t end up worse…

… then a wave came – no, not a wave, a current – and slid us closer, and under, and THROUGH – oh, oh, there’s your secret.

Cleat had found a sea cave. Barely above the water, barely below it. I crouched low over Charlie-Jetty’s back and breathed between the cold wet slaps of the current against my face, and when the light came again – fogbound though it was – I blinked it away until things made sense.

The roof had collapsed long ago; I was inside a gigantic bowl, tall-walled, invisible inside the cliffs of the headland.

I was also next to a gigantic carcass, which explained why I vomited.

God, the smell – overwarm, overrotting.

Cleat HAD been whale-hunting. Or the sea had done it for her. The carcass alternated between dark barnacle-studded hide and pale half-rotted bloodless flesh, riddled with reeking decay. It was a wonder I wasn’t up to my armpits in sharks.

A splash. Violent. The water ahead of me moved against the current – then back again. A gigantic scaled flipper broke the surface and smacked it, sending up a sheet of water that could’ve soaked a house roof to floorboards.

Jenny-Regina.

No wonder she’d wanted a big set of fins. And from the lunge and the ripple and the sudden stone-still hesitance of Charlie-Jetty to proceed, Tommy-Clock was here too. But the riders were either off or dead; they wouldn’t let them dive in a fight, not both at once – too risky being a loose fleck of meat between two apex predators, even with the nudibranchs and the chimes, so-

“Back off!”

There they were. And that was the first time I heard Cleat’s voice raised. No wonder she kept herself monotone: level enough and you could forget her age, but when she yelled it came out shrill and made you think of refusing to go to bed or complaining about dessert.

Angel laughed because of that. Genuine in a way her face hadn’t been all morning.

“Why? It’s a free salvage. Else what? You threatening me, kid? That’s a crime, you know.”
“I’m not stupid!” and oh that was the wrong thing to say in that voice, it just made Angel laugh harder and that’d make Cleat angrier, and she’d feast on that like a warm dinner.

I took that sick heat of worry inside me and let it distract me from my gooseflesh as I slid off Charlie-Jetty. He was used to the abalone hunters; he wasn’t fussed.

“Sure, kid. Sure. You just thought you’d take advantage of my generosity because I run a poor dock at a good price and you’d use that to sneak twenty kilos of ambergris a day past me without so much as a thank-you, good-bye, or by-your-leave. You’re not stupid, kid. You’re an asshole. And a toll-dodger.”

“I paid double fare today!” Like fairness or facts would help. It wasn’t fair this was happening; and the fact was I was swimming like a drunk false-lizard, trying to paddle with my shoulders instead of my arms, splashing too much.

“And what was that compared to your take? Going to bring home two bags today? On my fins? Do you know how to do percentages yet?”

Do you know if that yank at your left foot is the current, the shearing force of a ten-metre-plus reptile shooting by, or a three-metre skull snipping your foot off at the knee?

“There is no cargo toll!”
“Not if you announce the cargo,” happy as a clam. Never as happy as when someone else is miserable. Always happy to see me. Had she ever paid me for that? “Without doing that it’s smuggling. Smuggling and threatening a dockmaster…” Sharp, clear, slow tisks. “And we’re on the water. So the justice is summary. But you’re young and I’m generous – tell you what, kid: give me back the dock’s property and you can swim home. You’re good at what you do, I’m sure ol’ Jenny’ll treat you like a fellow queen, chime or no. Deal?”

I had my hands on the corpse now. Spongy where it shouldn’t be and thick in ways it hadn’t been when alive. A bruise in the shape of a body, half septic.

Cleat wasn’t talking. Sensible. Saving her lungs. Mine ached with strain as I hauled myself clear of the water, face nearly buried in semisolid flesh. I clawed upwards through the consistency of sticky pudding.

“Deal,” agreed Angel with herself. A slight stir, metal and leather slapping on a palm. “Put the knife down or I take your doggypaddlers off before I throw you in.”

I’d love to say I planned to grab her leg right then. The truth is, I was blinded by some of the foulest-smelling glue I’d ever imagined, I was groping blind, and when my right hand gripped Angel’s ankle my first thought was it was a rib.

Then she yelled “What the FUCK,” kicked, slid and fell over – cling-cling went the chime at her belt, cling-cling! – catching herself with a hand that sank down to her elbow in melting blubber.

The arm with the axe wavered in midair, ready to come down but not sure of what her target was.

“So’west?” she half-said. I think she might have just mouthed it. My eyes weren’t any better, and her face was a lot closer to the corpse than it had been a second ago. Her mouth was twisted in a half-retch and I wasn’t sure if it was the whale or me.

Then I lost my footing, scrabbled at thin air, slid loose belly, chest, and arms, and down we went.

Cling-cling, cling-cling!

Splash!

Splash!

I went under first, Angel on top of me, between me and air. Feet and arms windmilling.

Hatchet just missing me, free hand shoving at the water. Cling-cling!

I ignored both of them, grabbed the bag at her waist, and tore as hard as I could. It slid free and I followed it, grabbing before it could sink out of sight into the dark, then turning for the surface.

Sharp pain in my shoulder. Cling, cling, cling-cling. I’ll give Angel this much: she kept that axe sharp. Even underwater it stung. I rolled around, leaving a little red trail between me and the light, between me and the blacked-out silhouette of Angel, hand groping for me, other arm rearing back for a second strike.

I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, it was still dark.

Cling-

I blinked again. Still dark.

Then the mass that had blotted out the surface moved on, propelled by a fluked tail taller than I was, and I could see all the way up to the surface and the sun.

I swam to it. Sore-shouldered, leaking a thin line of red.

Not the only red in the water now.

Cleat was watching when I broke surface.

“Hand up?” I gasped.

“By the tail,” she said, pointing with her chin. “It’s too steep here.”

“I noticed.”

She did her best, eleven-ish as she was, but getting me out took time. When I finally laid on my back, bloated whaleflesh beneath me, a just-clearing sun above me, I felt like I would never be dry again.

“Are you okay?” asked Cleat.

“Maybe,” I said. My shoulder hurt – and something was jabbing my side. I shook out my jacket and watched, neck craned, as broken glass slid its way onto the shark-bitten meat below. “I lost my bottle,” I observed.

“I’ll buy you a new one.”

“No thanks,” I said. I leaned back and thought about how we’d get two of the meanest sets of fins in the docks home without eating each other, how long it’d take before poor Charlie-Jetty found the courage to walk himself home. Last time he’d had to do that was when a shark took his abalone diver. “You’ve given me quite enough.”