29. Selena
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Selena
El Soldado led me in circles for a while, until my heart was like a jackhammer against my ribs and I didn’t feel like crying anymore. Every time I tried to stop, he’d swoop down and peck at my ankles.
After I physically couldn’t go any farther, I collapsed onto the sand. He landed beside me, hopping back and forth.
“Too exhausted to cry, you happy now?”
He ruffled his feathers and tugged on my shoelace.
“Puta madre, cabrón. Leave me be.”
He didn’t like that. He flapped his wings until sand stung my eyes and shrieked at an ear-shattering volume.
I scrambled up to grab him, and he easily flapped away, landing on a rock outcropping a few feet away.
I stared at him. He stared at me, then pecked a sea star that had gotten stuck outside its tide pool.
“Córtala!” I stumbled over to the rocks, and he once again flapped out of reach, leaving the sea star behind.
“Don’t I know you? Always stuck on something.”
It was wedged between two rocks, one arm curled the wrong way.
I prepared myself for the slow process of coaxing it back into the pool, but now magic hummed beneath my skin, ready to go.
I didn’t have to put my hands in the water and whisper to it and wait for the slow trickle that used to take me five minutes on a good day.
I just reached out, and the sea star reached back.
It was a small, bright pulse made of hundreds of tiny moving parts. It climbed onto my palm, and I set it in the deeper pool on the other side of the rocks. The whole thing took eleven seconds.
That rescue used to be my whole morning ritual. Now it was almost as easy as breathing, my magic full and soft, not erratic and chaotic.
El Soldado watched me from atop a rock.
“If this was some kind of point you were making—”
He shrieked again, and it felt more urgent. And not aimed at me.
I glanced around the small grouping of tide pools.
Everything looked as it normally did, but an uneasy feeling lingered, holding me back.
The sea star, which was fine now, had already suctioned to a rock just below the waterline, but its little pulse of life was different now.
Like it had dimmed and been filled with static.
I put my hand in the water, and this time I really listened.
The water was wrong. Not polluted exactly—I’d felt that before, the dull, greasy deadness of runoff after a storm.
This was different. This was the water fighting an invader like a disease.
I could feel it with my magic, a gritty buzz, even if the water appeared crystal clear. It was in the sand at the bottom of the pool. It was on the rocks. It was on the sea star I’d just moved. It was everywhere, now that I knew what to listen for.
I peered around the pool.
There, wedged under a lip of rock where the tide had shoved it, was half a bottle, pale green and half dissolved.
The label was mostly gone, but I could read the bottom half of the logo, the angular R and the holographic lightning bolt, and I didn’t need the rest.
RipTide.
Their new biodegradable bottles. The ones that were supposed to break down in ocean water in ten days. They’d been all over the beach these last few weeks, people thinking biodegradable meant it was just fine to skip taking them to the trash.
This one had broken down, all right. It had degraded into the water, into the sand, into the rocks, into every living thing in this tide pool.
But it had not disappeared. Instead, it had become something so much worse.
I pulled my hand out and the gritty buzz stayed on my skin.
I didn’t have an explanation for the feeling. But standing over that tide pool with the dead buzz on my fingers and half a green bottle staring up at me, I didn’t need one.
My magic knew.
The ocean knew.
Something was very, very wrong, and RipTide had put it there.
This was bigger than any competition or even a few turtle nests.
These bottles were about to go nationwide, where they would infect every beach—and then the ocean along with them.
I snatched the bottle out of the water and ran as fast as I could. I knew what I had to do.
It was as inevitable as the tide, and it would wash away everything just the same.