My eyes fall on Molly. She’s sitting on a jagged plank that juts out from the ship’s broken center and is staring at her feet. She looks different than yesterday. Her skin isn’t quite as pink, her hair not quite as red. She looks sad, beautifully sad, and I can’t help but realize that both of us, in one way or another, are alone right now. I rise and move toward her.
Molly looks up, and any sadness is replaced by bitterness. She’s glaring, eyes bright and sharp. I look down, turn away from her. I understand why she’s angry, especially now that I remember my old name, but I can’t help her. I ignore the feeling of her eyes searing into my back and rise to join the old ones. They’re sitting on the Glasgow’s deck, staring into the distance, as per usual.
“Lo,” one says quietly to me as I approach. She hasn’t been old for very long, but she’s already so beautiful. Her skin is the color of the ocean at winter and looks smooth, like glass that’s been worn down by the water. I used to know her name. Ry, I think, but I can’t really remember.
“Hello,” I answer. Before I can stop myself, I wonder what her human name was. If I could find out for her, would she want to know? No. Of course not. She’s happy here, growing old, growing beautiful. Each of us ages differently—plenty of girls who arrived after me have already grown old and joined those in the air. How much time does this girl have left among us?
“What do you see?” I ask the old one, looking in the direction of her gaze. She’s sitting on a raised portion of the deck, an area I’ve always found eerie because of the faces that stare at me from the remaining railings—every arm’s length, a cherub’s face is carved into the wood. Most are only half faces or blank faces now, but a few full sets of eyes watch as I sit down beside her.
She doesn’t answer at first, then turns to me. “Nothing,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”
The old ones often don’t make sense to the rest of us, but we know they do, in fact, make sense, if only to themselves. Key says they learn secrets from the water, secrets we can only learn with age—something we’re all envious of from time to time. I leave the old one, but I’m not sure she notices that I’ve left. I linger near the edge of the crowd of other girls, growing closer to the Glasgow. Surely they won’t notice I’m gone, if I go to the surface for a moment. It’ll be all right. I’ll take one breath of dry air—maybe that will help me remember more about Naida. Then I’ll come back, and Key and I will braid each other’s hair, and then we’ll race around and stop, fast, so that we keep drifting even though we aren’t moving. It’ll be just like normal.
This will only take a moment. One moment.
I jet off for the surface, swimming away from the rest of us and up at once. What will they do if they see me? They don’t follow the old ones. I can’t imagine them following me.
I hesitate at the surface. If I break it, if I breathe in, I can’t pretend it never happened.
If I don’t break it, I’ll always wonder about the name, the past, the girl on the shore.
I slowly lift my eyes out of the water. I squint, blink as my eyelashes clump together. I feel wrong, I feel terrible, I feel traitorous, even, as I look at the horizon and see the slight blue shape of the shore. I’ve come this far….
I swim forward just under the surface, emerging every so often to see the giant wooden pillars that support the pier becoming clearer. Before long, I’ve crossed over the sandbar and am exactly where I was last night—the ocean has changed, of course, and there are no markers, but I still know where I am. I suppose when you know a place as well as we know the ocean, you’re never lost, no matter how the water changes.
I lift my head out of the water again; hair clings to my face, drips a curtain of water in front of my eyes. I rise a little higher—can anyone see me? No, there’s no one here. The shore is empty, as is the pier. Farther inland, I can see the sun setting. It’s beautiful, a bright red-orange that’s just starting to vanish into the tree line, like it’s falling into the land. It burns—we never surface during the day, and it’s so much brighter than I remember. Still, I can’t look away. I stare at the sun until my eyes fill with water and my cheeks feel burned, like they’re drying up.
Remember, remember. I repeat Naida’s name to myself—no, my name to myself. It’s my name, and they’re my memories hidden deep below the surface. The same way my sisters are hidden beneath the waves right now. Hidden doesn’t mean gone.
Nothing comes. I duck down into the water and swim closer to the pier, going from pillar to pillar until I’m almost by the shore. I close my eyes and plant one foot onto the sand.
It doesn’t hurt, but then, I’m still in water up to my head. I take a step forward, another, another.
The feeling of a knife slicing into the soft part of my foot starts when the water is waist-deep. I look down, see the tendrils of blood spiraling up. Another step, another. The salt water burns the wound. I don’t want to put my foot down, but… another. There’s a halo of red water around me now, and for a moment the ground seems to get softer. But no, it isn’t the ground, it’s the torn-up skin on my feet. I think it’s shredding away.
I cry out when I take another step and can’t force myself to take any more. I tumble forward, pull myself the last little distance onto the shore with my hands. There’s a trail of blood behind me, a perfect line that the waves quickly destroy. I watch as my blood washes away, becomes just another part of the ocean.
And I still don’t remember anything. I exhale, cough—my lungs feel strangely light, empty of the water, the warm weight I’ve grown used to. Inhale a few deep breaths; it’s not comfortable—I can tell I won’t be able to breathe air like this for long, but I can bear it for the time being. I sigh, fall back in the shadow of the pier—I remember watching the boy with the gray eyes fall from here just last night, when everything was perfect and I was just a girl waiting to become an angel. This is stupid—why am I here? I’m not made to be on the shore. I can’t get my soul back, I can’t make a boy love me, and I can’t remember my past. How could someone without a soul remember what it felt like to have one? That’s like asking each drop in the ocean to remember its time as rain. It was a lifetime ago. It was a soul ago, a soul I’m perfectly happy without, if it’s indeed already gone. I inhale deep again, grimace at the dryness of my lungs, the pain in my feet. I’m not meant for this world.