But nonetheless, she’ll still surface—we all will, because we are the same thing. My hair floats around my body like a cloak, then trails along behind me as I kick off the ground, dodge the caved-in bits of the ship. I follow Key, faster, faster; I can feel the others behind me as the Glasgow fades from sight. The water cradles us from every direction until we break the surface, and I feel so, so…
Exposed. Like I’m falling into the sky. The air hurts my skin, and I close my eyes to the pain. Around me, I hear the gentle splash of the others breaking the surface, winces or gasps as they remember what the shore looks like. I brace myself and open my eyes.
Light, so much light—from the moon, from the tiny pinprick stars, but mostly from the pier and the city beyond. It glows; it’s beautiful in a way that nothing beneath the water is. I inhale even though it burns, brush a few strands of dark hair from my face.
The new girl—Molly, her name is Molly, I think—has tears running down her cheeks—they’re somehow so different from the ocean water, so unusual that I notice them immediately.
“You won’t miss it as much, eventually,” Key reassures her. It’s true—I don’t miss my old life at all. I don’t remember it, of course, but even if I did, I’m happy here. I have my sisters, the ocean….
“I don’t want to stop missing it,” the girl says. The words were clearly supposed to be sharp, but they’re softened by her crying.
“Well,” someone else says, “find your mortal boy, then.”
A few girls chuckle, but inside we all feel the same twinge of pity for her hope. It’s the cruelest thing, hope, the way it strings you along, the way it makes you believe. Only the old ones have ever seen a mortal’s soul stolen, and they can barely remember it to tell us the story. They say she walked, though—she walked right out of the sea; her skin was pink again, her lungs made for air instead of water.
It’s hard to believe sometimes, but hope never lets you truly stop believing. Our souls fade slowly, just like our human memories—I imagine mine is gone entirely now, though to be honest, I’m not sure. What does having a soul feel like, exactly? I still believe that drowning a human would get me a new soul, but it’s not something I care to pursue anymore, and I’m somewhat relieved to feel that way, especially when I look at the tortured, desperate look on Molly’s face. She must still feel her soul, feel it bleeding out of her. That’s the only explanation for the pain in her eyes.
Music, we hear music bouncing across the water and audible only in the seconds between waves lapping at our shoulders. A light and airy song, and then beyond that, the buzz of a crowd. How many people are there that we can hear them from this far away?
I look at Key, at the others. They stare, either at the moon, the pier, or the tiny little houses on the shore. Do people still live in them? They look different than when I saw them last, more chipped and faded, like the ocean has punished them. I wonder where the people who lived there went. Someplace far away from the water?
I don’t even know what that sort of place would look like, I think, shivering a little.
There’s a bang somewhere ahead, a shout. It’s coming from the pier—we stare as a dark form falls over its railing, into the water. There’s a horrible slapping sound when the thing hits, splashing, screams from those above.
We are silent. We don’t move, staring, like one creature with dozens of heads, dozens of eyes watching curiously. We see a thousand times better than we did as humans, but the waves block our line of sight. Then, in one motion, we dive forward, slipping through the water toward the pier.
It’s splashing—he’s splashing desperately. The waves are unusually harsh tonight, and his clothes weigh him down.
We watch. Oldest in the back, apathetic, here only because the rest of us are. Youngest closest to him, intrigued, wondering how long before he’ll slip under the water and die. Me, somewhere between the two groups. It’s so strange to watch the boy struggle, fight against something that’s so natural for us.
But the new girl is watching with a different sort of intensity than the rest of us. She inhales, draws closer to him. She’s shaking; he’s thrashing, trying to swim, but every time he gets his head up, a wave knocks him down again. There’s something strapped around his shoulders that’s pulling him beneath. The new girl turns back to look at us as the boy’s flails slow; he begins to go under more often….
“How do I make him love me?” the new girl asks.
“That’s the tricky part,” Key says, eyes flickering like this is a brilliant game—most things are to her. “It’s hard to make someone love you when they’re dying.”
Key’s words seem to both scare and embolden the new girl. She presses her lips together hard, sinks under the water, and emerges beside the boy. He grabs hold of her arm to try to keep his head up. It works; he stops fighting the waves, but when he breathes, I can hear the water in his lungs.
“My name is Molly,” the new girl says. He doesn’t hear her, but her voice is delicate, rainlike. The boy turns his shaky eyes toward her, but I don’t think he really sees her face—he looks unfocused, dazed.
“Yes, there, see,” Molly says, grinning so wide the moonlight glints off her teeth. His eyes begin to drift shut. She shakes him awake, says her name again, tries to talk to him. When it doesn’t work, she begins to sing. Her voice is pure, lovely, just enough humanity in it to remind me how she was a human girl less than a year ago. The song is one of ours, but it seems foreign on her tongue.
I look away from her, toward the pier the boy came from. People stare in our direction, but they can’t see us in the darkness. But then there’s a rustle from the shore, and something comes down the road by the beaten-looking buildings, bright flashing red lights that bounce across the water.
“They’re coming for him,” one of the girls says. Molly stops singing, looks up.
“Leave him,” another girl tells Molly. “There’s no time. And no point.”
“There’s time—there has to be time,” Molly says, voice rough and dangerous. She positions herself in front of the boy’s face, water dripping off her eyelashes. His eyes drift shut. “No, look at me. Look at me. Do you love me?”
“It’s too fast,” I tell her, grimacing as a breeze touches my shoulders. I lean back so they’re wet again.