Chapter 11
Jack
For hours, the world has been nothing but a cacophony of the screaming wind, hammering rain, splintering of wood, and wet, tearing sounds of violence.
But now, the volume has been cut. The wind has dropped from a howl to a breathless gasp.
The rain has thinned to a drizzle that taps hesitantly against the remaining glass.
I am standing in the ruin of my kitchen. The island is cracked in half. There is a corpse, a massive, gray thing that smells of low tide and copper, heaped in the corner like a pile of discarded wet laundry.
But I’m not looking at the monster. I’m looking at the light.
Through the shattered sliding glass door, the sky is bruising purple and gray, but a tear rips through the clouds.
A single, sharp shaft of sunlight pierces through, hitting the muddy floodwaters below the house.
It’s a cruel light that illuminates the wreckage.
It shows me the mud slicked across the floorboards, the blood spray on the walls, and Nerida collapsing in my arms.
She is incredibly heavy.
Just minutes ago, she was a force of nature, a creature of torque and muscle that could snap bones like dry twigs. Now, she is dead weight, her long tail dragging limply against the ruined floor.
“I’ve got you,” I say, my voice raspy. I scoop her up, straining under the dense, awkward mass of her lower half. I carry her toward the sofa, which is miraculously still upright, though soaked. “Just rest. I’ve got you.”
I lower her onto the cushions, her massive tail spilling over the edge and resting heavily on the floorboards.
I see the tremor immediately. It starts in her hands and ripples up her arms, shaking her shoulders and traveling down the length of her tail.
It isn’t the shivering of cold but the vibration of a machine running out of fuel.
Her skin, usually a lustrous, pearlescent wonder, looks dull. The vibrant blue bioluminescence that traces her ribs is flickering out, pulsing weakly like a dying bulb. The scales along her tail that had hardened into armor during the fight are flaking, turning ash-gray and brittle.
She looks small. Terrifyingly small.
I grab the towel, the one I used to wipe the blood from her face, and try to wrap it around her shoulders, but she hisses. It’s a sound of pain, not aggression.
“It burns,” she whispers. Her voice is a dry rattle. “The air… it’s too dry. It scrapes.”
“I’ll get water,” I say, panic flaring in my chest. “I can fill the tub again. The pipes might be broken, but I have bottled water. I can…”
“Jack.” She reaches out and grips my wrist. Her hand is cold. Not the cool, refreshing temperature of the sea, but the clammy cold of meat left on a counter, and her grip is weak. “Stop,” she says.
“I can fix this,” I insist, though I know I’m lying. I’m looking at the blood under her fingernails and the gray pallor of her cheeks. “We just need to get you hydrated. You used too much energy fighting them. You need to rest.”
“If I stay…” she says, looking up at me with eyes that are slowly losing their silver-mirror shine, returning to a dark, human brown, “… I rot.”
The word hits me like a physical blow. Rot.
“Don’t say that.”
“It is the truth,” she says. She pulls her hand away and looks at it.
The webbing between her fingers is cracking.
“My body… it was made for the pressure and the cold. I pushed the change too far for too long. The land is rejecting me, Jack. And I am rejecting it.” She takes a shallow, wheezing breath.
“And the scent,” she adds. “The pheromones. They are still here. If I stay… more will come. Stronger ones. I cannot fight them again, not like this. And you…” She looks at the shotgun lying on the floor, then back to me. “You cannot fight them alone.”
I want to argue. I want to tell her that I’ll board up the windows, buy a thousand pounds of sea salt and turn the bathroom into an ocean, and I’ll buy a bigger gun.
I want to scream that it isn’t fair, we just found each other, the storm was supposed to be the hard part, and the morning was supposed to be the reward.
But I look at her, really look at her, and the argument dies in my throat.
She is drying out.
She is dying.
Keeping her here is an act of murder.
“You have to go back,” I say. The words taste like ash.
She nods, a single, jerky motion. “Now, before the tide turns completely.”
“Okay.” I swallow the lump in my throat. “Okay. Let’s get you to the water.”
I don’t ask if she can move. I just bend down and gather her into my arms again.
She wraps her arms around my neck, her heavy tail hanging limply over my arm as I heave her up.
I stagger toward the door, carrying her over the debris of my life, the shattered lamp, the overturned books, the dead intruder.
We step out onto the deck. The air is thick and humid, smelling of ozone and wet earth. The storm has passed, but it has left the world raw.
The stairs down to the ground level are slick with rain and slime.
I take them one by one, moving sideways, terrified of slipping under her weight.
Step. Pause. Step. Pause. I can feel the heat of her body fading against my chest, the heavy fluke of her tail dragging over the wet wooden steps behind us.
Beneath the house, the ground is a slurry of mud and churned-up grass.
The floodwaters are receding, pulling back toward the creek that leads to the bay, and eventually, the open ocean.
The water is brown and churning, carrying branches and trash, but to Nerida, I know it looks like a highway. It looks like home.
We reach the water’s edge. The mud sucks at my boots. I lower her gently, letting her slide from my arms until her tail rests in the shallow, churning muck.
She uses her arms to push herself up slightly, her tail shifting in the mud as she props herself against the slick bank. She looks at the murky water, and I see a visible wave of relief wash over her. Her gills, faint slits on her neck now, flutter in anticipation of the liquid.
She turns to face me, the water lapping at her waist.
This is it.
The beat where the movie ends, and the music swells. But there is no music, just the dripping of water from the trees and the distant caw of a gull returning to the coast.
“Nerida,” I start, but I don’t know how to finish the sentence. Stay? Take me with you? I love you? All of them feel inadequate.
She steps closer, closing the small gap between us. She reaches up and places her hands on my face. Her palms are rough now, like fine sandpaper, but I lean into them.
“Do not wait for me,” she says fiercely.
“I will,” I say immediately.
“No,” she corrects. “Do not expect me. The ocean is… vast. The politics of the deep are shifting. I killed a scout. There will be consequences. I may have to go deep, Jack. Deeper than I have ever gone. I may not be able to come back to the surface for a long time.”
“I don’t care,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m fixing the house. I’m staying right here.”
She studies my face, searching for something. “You are stubborn like a barnacle.”
“I prefer ‘loyal limpet.’ ”
The hard line of her mouth softens. “Jack.”
“Yeah?”
“I cannot promise you I will return.”
“I know.”
“And I cannot ask you to wait.”
“You’re not asking,” I tell her. “I’m volunteering.”
She lets out a soft sound, something between a laugh and a sob. She leans her forehead against mine. I close my eyes, breathing in her scent of salt, rain, and that underlying, electric ozone smell that is uniquely hers.
“Then take this,” she whispers. “So you aren't alone in the silence.”
She kisses me.
It isn’t like the ones before—hot, desperate, full of teeth and need. The second her lips meet mine, a shockwave rips through my body. My mouth floods with the taste of raw brine, so thick I almost gag. A freezing pressure blooms in my chest, expanding against my ribs until it aches.
My ears pop.
The silence shatters. I can hear everything.
Water rushes over the rocks in the creek bed, but it’s not just noise anymore.
I can hear the individual currents, the friction of silt against stone.
I can hear the heartbeat of a crab buried three feet down in the mud.
I can hear the distant, rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum of the ocean miles away, crashing against the shore.
It’s a roar in my head, a constant, low-frequency hum that vibrates in my teeth.
She pulls back.
I gasp, staggering slightly, clutching my chest. The world looks sharper. The water at our feet doesn’t look brown anymore, and I can sense the life teeming inside it.
“What…” I wheeze. “What did you do?”
“A tether,” she says, her voice sounding distant now, as if she is already moving away. “A drop of the deep. You will hear the tides now, Jack. You will know when the storm comes. And you will know if I am near.”
She steps back. The water laps at her ankles.
“Go,” I say, because if she stays one second longer, I will grab her and never let go, and we will both die for it. “Go.”
Her eyes are fully silver when she looks at me, mirroring the fractured sky. Without a word, she turns and simply falls forward, letting the muddy floodwater swallow her.
I catch a glimpse of her beneath the surface, a blur of motion, a sudden, violent displacement of the current. Then a massive, scaled tail breaks the surface, slapping the water with a sound like a gunshot before she disappears.
Then, she is gone.
The ripples spread out, fighting against the current before being washed away.
I stand there.
The sun widens its breach in the clouds, pouring more light onto the mud. The humidity rises. The insects begin to sing again, a rising buzz that tries to compete with the new sound in my head.
The thrum. The heartbeat of the ocean.
I can feel her moving through it. It’s a faint sensation, like a tug on a loose fishing line.
I sense her speed, her steep descent, the way the water welcomes her home.
She’s shooting toward the bay, diving for the deeps where the crushing pressure will knit her skin and the freezing dark will soothe her burns.
I need to go back to the house. There's blood to scrub off the floorboards. I have to figure out what to do with the dead monster in my kitchen which really just means finding a shovel and burying the damn thing myself.
But I don’t move.
I just stand there, boots sinking deeper into the creek mud. My wet clothes cling to my skin. The last of the adrenaline finally burns away, leaving me shivering, hollowed out, and aching in the cold.
Ten minutes pass. Twenty.
The tug on the line gets fainter. She is miles away now.
An hour passes.
The sun is fully out, steaming the moisture off the land. The floodwaters have dropped another foot. The creek is returning to its banks.
I am still standing here.
I close my eyes and listen. The roar of the ocean is still there, inside me. It’s lonely, vast, and terrifying, but it’s her.
“I’m here,” I whisper to the muddy water. “I’m right here.”
I pull my boots out of the muck with a wet, sucking sound and turn back toward the broken house. I have a lot of work to do. I have to be ready for when the tide comes back in.