Nothing born human can breathe beneath the waves, but I can, and so I don't know what I am. My tails are mechanical, heavy and burdensome on land, but powerful beneath the sea. I carry my fat comfortably, able to dive deeper than any human can, and there are whales who call me by name. Not the name I call myself, no, but they sing a sound to me and me alone, and laugh when I call it back to them in a voice more powerful than is natural. I breathe as humans do at the surface, and can hold my breath longer than a dolphin, but when breath gives out and evolution pressures me to inhale, gills split along my ribs with a terrible ache, and then I may stay in the depths as long as I desire.
Perhaps I am evolution, adapted to the rising seas and the algae blooms and the salinity changes. But evolution does not come overnight, and my mothers were not like me. Perhaps I am engineered to be as I am, and my oddities will not pass down to another generation. But that will not do, because to survive, my daughters must be like me, or better yet.
Perhaps I am rage incarnate, a single creature unable to lay waste to the fools who make me necessary.
In the story, she asks for feet. I have feet, and my voice is not enough.
~
I do in the waters what robots and waldos cannot; I untangle the caught with deft human hands that do not numb with cold in the way they should. I dig and pull and defend using tools and levers and weapons that no sea beast can command, although I have watched octopodes learn from me, and have had all manner of creatures come to ask for my help. I am more than content with this work: it fuels me, gives shape to my fury, and brings some peace to my nights. I watch, too, as more-human explorers come to visit this place that is mine, and am mostly glad to see them gone again.
There is one, though. A man, broad in shoulder and strong in leg, a good swimmer. He swims in the drowned city as if he is searching for something, and I have long since been cautious enough to know it is not me. I have even seen him beyond the city, encapsulated in a submarine suit that is almost--almost--as good as my gills and my tail. He cannot maneuver the way I can, though, and I have more strength than would be guessed at, and will never run out of air. The bubbles that follow wherever he goes prove that he will, and sometimes I follow them for amusement, as any curious sea creature might.
That is how I find him trapped in a wreck that I may have had something to do with. I cannot sink enough ships, no matter how hard I try. There are too many of them, and only one of me, and I dare not sink the oil tankers for fear of further despoiling the waters that are the very life of our planet. Still, I do try, and if I have a care for the human lives on those ships that I founder, it is only because the people who work on them are not those who own them.
Mostly they die along with their ships, though, and I shed no tears for that.
The man is exploring--salvaging--one of the massive transport ships, searching for the precious metals it carried. Even if a current did not press a door closed behind him and trap him in a container, he wouldn't find what he seeks: I have long since stripped this ship, and many others, of most of their valuable components. There are markets that will deal in anything, no questions asked, and I take what I need to live before redistributing the rest of my gains among those who need it most. I have heard myself called Little Joan, but that is not my name, or my tale.
The bubbles from his submarine suit come slower and farther between, and it occurs to me that if I wish to continue watching this man, I may have to save his life. I swim closer, looking for the problem, and find it: the pin has caught on the door, latching it shut. I pull it free, pull it open, and move back, waiting. In truth, I want to see his face when he exits the container to find a mermaid waiting for him. I have been careful to go unseen, which is not an easy task with drones and beachcombers and a seventy kilo tail, but as I have no desire to end up on someone's dissection table, it has seemed worth the effort. The delight of revealing myself to a half-suffocated diver who will never trust his memory seems worth the wait, as well.
But he does not emerge, and finally, aggrieved, I swim into the container to rescue him, and am forced to drag his semi-conscious form back to land.
~
I leave my tail in the sea; there are dozens hidden beneath the waves here and there, waiting for me to fetch them and speed my way beneath the waves when the need arises. Still, even with the tail safely out of sight, once I've wrenched his helmet off and the blue fades from his lips, his gaze is sharp with memory when he awakens.
"You're a mermaid," he says, and I shrug. His eyes widen and he blurts, "You have no voice!", which makes me laugh. Silently, because if he knows the story, I may as well play to it, although even on my worst day, there is nothing little about me. I am easily of a height with him, and considerably more padded with fat. Then his eyebrows furrow and he says, "Wait. Wait, she doesn't lose her voice until after the rescue. When she wants to gain legs, so she can walk on land." He struggles to sit up, his submarine suit as awkward on land as it is ponderously graceful in the water.
To help him, I lift one of my legs into his line of vision and say, "I have legs. And a voice."
"But no submarine suit," he murmurs, and now curiosity burns in his gaze.
"No," I say, "and no seashell bra, either."
He glances at my chest, because who could not after that, and finds that indeed, I have neither a seashell bra nor a swimsuit, as the one would scrape, and the other restrict my breathing. He is sun-brown, but pink scalds his jaw and he jerks his gaze away, then back again, like a teenager. After another try, he meets my eyes again, locks his gaze on them, and says, "How?"
I lean close, close enough to kiss, close enough to breathe beneath his ear and watch bumps rise on the skin there, and murmur, "Magic."
For a moment, he believes me, and that is the beginning of my undoing.
~
I do not give up the ocean; I couldn't, any more than any living thing can give up air. But for a glorious time, he shares his palace with me, and I, mine. He lives above the rising seas, in buildings fortified to remain standing, and in bed, overlooking the changing shoreline, he laughs and laments that modern concrete is not the stuff that our Roman forebearers made, able to grow stronger with salt water spray. He dreams of reclaiming the drowned streets, of staving off the encroaching waters with engineering and human ingenuity. It has to be done soon, he says, or the buildings will be too damaged.
"And your palace will come tumbling down," I say dryly, which he concedes is a palpable hit. But it is not, he says, about his palace; it is about finding comfort for the survivors in a breaking-down world. It is about resetting a wrecked system, redefining it for the future we can carve out. It's why he dives, he says: to salvage parts of the old world, so we don't destroy any more of the current one while building the new.
I can hardly fault him for that, as I survive the same way, albeit never before in a glass-walled penthouse above the glimmering sea. "You have wealth already," I say. "You had it before the Rising. What did you do then to stop the changes? Where did it come from, your money?" I ask, but I already know. It comes from the oil, the cotton, the glass, the sugar, the salt, as all of the wealthy's money does. It comes from the labor of others, to be enjoyed by the few.
"Where do you come from?"
I have no answer for that. My mothers were dead before I thought to ask, and I will not look for myself in medical records or tabloids, the better to remain unseen by the greedy.
"We didn't do enough, before," he tells me then. "All I can do now is try to be better."
A kernel of anger burns in my chest at that, although I know he is not wrong. But we should have been better before; we all should have been. The rich and the governments and the corporations most especially, but they were too much one and the same, and so those of us who were none of those things should have been better too. I do not remember the world Before; I was engineered for the world After, and neither, in fairness, does he remember those last days of burning ancient sunlight. But stories of the last days Before are still told, and through them, I know the power of the people when they band together. Governments cannot stand before them, if their will is strong enough. Revolution is not comfortable, nor do the comfortable often revolt, and I know too that that, above all, is what allowed the Rising to happen. The complacence of comfort, the reluctance to rock a boat--even one already overturning--and the fear of losing what little we had, all kept us from acting to save the enormity of what remained.
"Let me show you," I say, to cool my rage. "Let me show you what we might have done, if we had been wise, and what we might yet do."
~
The sea farms are among my favorite places on the eroding coast. They grow deep, not out, and the people who work them know me by sight, although we all pretend to have never seen one another. I have helped them harvest from time to time, or loosened a cage caught on some old bit of wreckage on the sea floor. They grow shellfish and seaweed in their three-dimensional farms, feeding their communities on renewable resources, altering their old carbon-burning vehicles to run on plant-based oils, turning remnants into natural fertilizers for fields now turned to hemp-growing and desalinating the rising tides to water the thirsty plants. These farms existed before the Rising, but the curse of the familiar lay upon people, and trading beef jerky for kelp seemed strange and uncomfortable.
"Marketing could have done it," he says, and neither of us touch on the other truth, that the wealthy, like him, felt it was more effort than it was worth. That to change might cut into the bottom line, even though to stay the course meant that the bottom line would burn, in time. But here, in this community, in the aftermath--maybe even in the Before; I wasn't here to see it, then--they've made changes. The only vehicles are communally owned, shared between tasks, or public transportation. The changing tides generate electricity for a kilometers of coast and that far again inland. Trains and buses run on that electricity here, and the very old chuckle at the sight of trucks lined up, all neatly plugged in for their next journey. "The city might not have drowned, if we'd done this," he says, and there is nothing I can say to that beyond a nod.
"Show me the rest of your world," he asks, and because I cannot give him gills, we swim together in the sea, me with my tail, him in his submarine suit. He nearly has jets on the suit, propelling him through the water at a ridiculous speed, and I make no effort to keep up with him. Dolphins at the surface do, though, and his face is full of boyish wonder as he watches them leap. Together we explore the ocean shelf, finding wreckage he never knew existed, finding plains that stretch undisturbed forever. He stands on the edge of one of those, gazing at it as if it is life, and then turns that same look on me. My heart, which I have always considered cushioned by the sea, twists, and I think, as I often do with him, of the story. Ours has been so much more gentle, so much more satisfying. There have been no sea witches, no knives, no interloping lovers.
"How can you bear it?" he asks when we return to the surface. "How can you bear to leave the peace down there and come back to the noise and chaos above?"
"I've been more part of your world--" We both stop, myself with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and him with his eyes as large and round as they were when he first spoke to me. Then we are laughing, whooping, wiping our eyes and wheezing, and every time I try to finish that sentence, we are set off again, until the waves roll over us and slap into our faces as if to calm us down. "You," I finally say, still laughing. "I can leave it because of you."
"I hate to ask that of you," he murmurs.
I shrug. "You haven't. I've chosen it for myself."
"Still," he says, and together we swim for the shore.
~
His life is an easy one, even after the Rising, and when I am with him, mine is too. He eats beef, which I have never even tasted, and laughs when I refuse to try it; I tease him when he will not eat sea cucumbers. He leaves on business, which offers me the opportunity to attend to mine, and if he doesn't notice that more ships sink when I swim than not, then perhaps it is a failure of imagination on his part; I will certainly not point it out to him. He returns, more often than not, with new mechanical equipment in his wake, materials for building under water, for pumping water out of the spaces filled by the Rising, and tests them all over the city. He says others are doing the same elsewhere, but this particular city holds a special place in the story of Before, and reclaiming it is a powerful dream of his.
We dive in the drowned city, where others might see us, and to keep up appearances I use diving equipment, which is cumbersome and annoying. Less so than being dissected, though, so I wear it and work beneath the flooded city's surface, learning the ways of building with resins that harden with and are not damaged by salt water. Finally, triumphantly, we clear a single room of the risen water, and, laughing with pride, collapse on a concrete floor which has long since relinquished its carpets to the sea and its creatures. "How much easier would this be for you without the SCUBA suit?" he wonders, and my laugh is sharp and loud enough to make dust of drying concrete.
"So much easier."
He murmurs, "If only we were all so perfect as you," and though cold cement is no fit bed, we found a way, and complained, cheerfully, of bruised knees and hips, later. We reclaim another room, and another, and in the midst of it I refuse his one tentative suggestion that we run my genome and learn how I work. It nags at me, though, until one day we surface and I pull off the ungainly face mask and the idiotic breather and demand, "Why? Why would you want my genome?"
A blush curdles his jaw, the way it did the first day he saw my naked breasts, and he looks away as he did then, shy and guilty. "I hoped--I wondered--if we were compatible."
I can't help the smirk that sails across my face. "I think that's pretty clear already." But before I'm finished speaking, I understand what he means, and the last words stutter. "You mean--genetically. You wonder if I'm human enough to breed."
He blushes still, but now meets my gaze, evidently appalled. "Breed? I mean--yes, but--no! Not--breed! But yes, I... wondered if we could have children." He hesitates. "If you would want to."
All at once I cannot meet his eyes. "I don't know. I don't know if I can, or if I want to. My children--I want them to be more than I am."
Now he darkens with offense. "And I'm only human?"
"What?" We might have been a sporting match, with our gazes bouncing back and forth from one another. "No, that's not--" But it is, and that is a thing I must reckon with. He sees me take on the thought, and emotion shutters from his expression. He leaves me, swims to a dock that was once a third-story veranda, and I follow him slowly, wrestling with the thought he has put in my head. He goes up to his penthouse, to his easy life, and I remain on the concrete shore, watching light fall red and gold over the horizon, and wondering what it is that I am, and what I dream of for my children.
~
"They must have the ocean," I say when I come to him, days later. "Whatever it is that makes me me, they must have that."
He nods. "I wouldn't want to take it from them. But unless you were born this way, they'll need engineering. And the only way to know if you were born like this..."
"If I am engineered, could it have been...coded so deep into me that I'll pass it on naturally?"
"I don't know." We both stand at his windows, looking now at sunlight shining so brilliantly on the water that tears stand in my eyes and threaten to fall. Thick tears, thicker than human. He looks at me, then smiles uncertainly and takes my hand. "What I do know is some of the best geneticists in the world, and what I have is money to buy discretion."
"You know there's no such thing, with someone like me," I whisper. "I pass, so long as no one sees me swimming free. But I'm not--I can't be--human, not at the genetic level. There is no one on this earth who would not want to take me apart to see how I'm put together, given the chance."
"Someone did," he points out gently. "Your mothers, or your makers, or whom-or-however you came into this world, it was done with such discretion that you do exist, and pass, and only you and I know better."
"Let me look into my mothers, then," I say hoarsely. "Before we do anything else."
He nods, and releases my hand, and I go into my home, the ocean, because I know in the depths of my heart that there is a sea witch, after all.
~
The Sea Witch is a ship, drowned before I was born. My mothers mentioned it to me before they died, told me of its passing with all hands aboard. They spoke so often of lost ships--of the graveyards I would come to know--that I thought nothing of it then, nor for many years later. I came upon a story of it in my teenage years, after I had learned to hide myself from most of the world, and learned then it was a research vessel. It had never been found, and I thought nothing of it again, until adulthood, when a flurry of excited reports claimed it had been found. The stories came to nothing, but I went looking for it then, using notes I found in my mothers' files.
It had not been lost in a storm, or if it had, the storm had borne very precise, missile-like projectiles that could be shot through a ship's hull in the four places that it could not possibly recover from. It had not broken in half, but dropped straight into a shocking current that pushed its weight under a tremendous overhanging ledge on the sea floor, and there it had lodged, upright, undamaged save for the four gaping holes below its waterline. I had remained outside the wreck, holding myself against the current and staring at the ship, until finally choosing to rise toward the surface, and put the damaged vessel out of my mind. That was years ago. I have never returned. Its presence on the sea floor meant too much, made me consider too many things I don't want to, and now, today, must.
There had only ever been two choices, really. One was that my mothers were inconceivably wealthy, able to buy genetic manipulation and pay for its silence at whatever cost necessary. The other was that they were thieves, that I was a stolen child. Since no one has ever come looking for me, since there had never been any stories of a missing child like me, I have come to understand that the former is more likely.
Whichever it is, born of wealth or stolen from it, it is very difficult to find a way around the Sea Witch's demise that does not implicate my mothers in its sinking. Either they were wealthy and had it sunk to protect me, or they had been researchers aboard that very vessel, and somehow had found the resources to sink it, either to protect or to use me.
I dive, and for the first time, enter the Sea Witch.
The story sings in my mind as I swim through its narrow corridors. The voiceless mermaid, dancing on knives for her prince. The woman he marries instead, breaking the mermaid's heart. Her death in the sea foam, an ending which I had loathed as long as I could remember.
Where was I to find myself in that story? I could sing still, more loudly than any human, for I could talk to whales. Walking did not pain me, nor had it ever, and my prince had no other woman whom he loved more than me. I wondered if my mothers, had they lived, had intended more parallels between my life and the mermaid's, or if I had latched onto it as a story of a girl who was--and was not--like me.
Nearly every door in the Sea Witch stood open, or opened easily under my touch, and the one that did not had once required a hand print. The ship had been submerged for decades; the electronics clearly no longer worked, and for a moment I floated there in the narrow hallway, stymied. My tail scraped the wall and I flicked it, watching water surge, then thought myself a fool and spun to slash the door with the tail's great weight, and my own strength behind it. It scarred, then scored, then sliced, pieces of sea-corrupted metal falling away, until I could slip through into a room I hoped would hold answers.
Within seconds, I found more than I wanted to. Sealed boxes with my name on them, crushing any hope I might have held that my mothers were not a part of the Sea Witch's death. I took them and surfaced, returning not to my prince's tower in the sky, but to my own more ragged and humble home, where I unplugged or locked into a Faraday cage every networked appliance I owned. I took my data terminal offline, uninstalled the data software entirely, and only then did I dare open the boxes and examine the files.
Many were hand-written, keeping data on me as secure as humanly possible. Only the genetic code, too complex and bulky for writing longhand, was kept on data tabs, and those had to be unlocked with a thumbprint: my own. Information cascaded across my screen as I pressed it, information I lacked the background to understand. The notes, though, were clear enough, in their way, and answered the question I most wanted to know.
My daughters would be as much as I, and more. We would never be mermaids, not like the stories, not without further profound alteration, and my mothers had felt that was a choice best left to those who could live in two worlds. They had sabotaged my code to keep me from being born with a tail instead of legs, and showed no remorse in their plans to sink the Sea Witch with everyone who knew of the successful experiment on board.
What they did not say was why I had been made, and, gazing at the paperwork, I think perhaps it doesn't matter. It is almost certain that any answer I find will be terrible; better to imagine that my mothers simply wanted a daughter so badly that they made one to survive in the strangest world they could dream of. And now I know that my daughters will too, and with a breath, I decide that that is enough.
~
I do not return to the glass tower immediately. When I do it's to find frantic notes, piles of them, wondering where I am. I never bothered to remove my comms from their cages, didn't dare turn my data terminal's network access back on, and have never before had someone to care whether I am prompt in coming home or not. He has gone to look for me, the notes say, but I have never shown him my home. Not the one I live in on the surface, at least; it is too small and grimy for a man who lives among the clouds. Or perhaps it's simply a part of my life I don't wish to share, as if I fear that in the end I will choose to not ever, quite, be part of his world after all. Perhaps I am creating a space for myself to retreat to.
Perhaps I do not like that he is interested in my genome, although I concede it's a reasonable interest for a man who would like to have children with me. Still, I've spent too long hiding, or living quietly, to be quite comfortable with anyone seeking that knowledge. I know that I'm unique, and I know what the world does to the unusual, after all.
The odd thing is that, despite the notes, despite the worry he expresses in them, despite it all, he does not respond, either, when I finally try to make contact. There are very few places that the networks can't reach, and most of them, I realize, are beneath the waves. Perhaps he has gone to find me there, since I would not answer him before. Worry swirls in my heart: if I do not return from a sojourn under the sea, it means little. If he does not, it is far more likely to mean disaster. In fact, I am already far, far too late, if disaster has overtaken him, but with the thought I am running, racing to the flooded lower levels where--for once--I forgo the wiser course, and fling myself into the water without the gear that allows me to pass for human beneath the surface. My tail is not there; I do not keep any of them where they can be found, any more than I keep myself where I can be found. I swim deep through the city streets, ten meters of sunlit water above me and new coral growing just below me, thriving on those vehicles, signs, and light poles that have not been salvaged. There is a terrible beauty to the drowned world, one that I am at home with, just as I am comfortable with the skeletons of wrecked ships and the empty sea plains where swift currents have swept all evidence of humankind away.
I fetch one of my tails, sleeker than others, faster, from one of those long-dead ships, one that lies too deep for ordinary divers to explore casually, and is too well-picked-over for any of the collectors to come looking at, anymore. Then I speed toward our favorite places, clicking and calling to those sea creatures who call me by name. They understand urgency, if not my language, and even without one such as I, who swims in their waters, have been known to rescue those in need. If they know he is caught below somewhere, if they know him as my mate, I think they will bring me to him. I call, and call again, pulling air deep into my specialized lungs, and ejecting it as sound that carries farther than a human voice ever could. I would use words if I could, but instead I trust that shrieking nonsense into the endless ocean will garner some attention, in the same way that cats clearly recognize their humans are trying to communicate, even if they're incomprehensible.
What I do not expect is that the dolphins who come to me--dolphins I know, dolphins to whom I have given human names, as they have given me a dolphin one--might be agitated themselves. They are the pod who swam with us, the pod who turned his gaze to childish wonder, and they urge me faster and faster through the sea, but far away from the places he and I most like to haunt.
A ship sits anchored some distance from where the dolphins leave me. I cannot blame them: its engines make my own spine tingle with discomfort, and they are more sensitive to sound than I am, by far. They flee and I watch from the distance; I am in the sunlight zone here, some seventy or eighty meters in depth, and my eyes are as sharp here as they are on land. Cages lower and rise on chains that fall from the ship to the ocean floor. They carry weighty materials on their way down, sinking rapidly, and rise as swiftly as they're emptied. I see only waldos doing the work; humans can't easily dive this deep to the ocean floor, and submarine suits are both expensive and fragile. The machines work swiftly on the plains, taking material from the cages, building with efficient motions that I recognize. I have built in just that way, in the drowned city, helping to reclaim lost real estate. Their work indicates a dome in the making; a dome from which water can be pumped.
There is a disturbance in the water: sound and unnatural currents. I twitch toward it, prepared to flee, and see his submarine suit plunging toward me in the liminal light. A smile of relief stretches his features, but the illumination within his helmet turns the expression macabre, a clown gone mad. Still, it amuses me that he tries to hug me, his bulky awkward suit scraping and so very human against my skin. I return the embrace, then, shivering at a pin-prick of cold that rarely bothers me at any depth, gesture to the work being done below us. It is a question, and he answers with an expansive wave of his hands that brings to life schematics I never even dreamed his suit could project. The technology is common on the surface, of course, but to work beneath the sea, reflecting on water that is whole with itself, not beaded, is marvelous enough that for a few long moment I hardly see what he is proposing, only that he is magically showing me anything at all.
Then, little by little, I do see what he wants to do. A domed city beneath the sea, peopled with humans, while others--people like me--swim between the city and the surface, carrying goods and even pods that clearly hold unaltered humans. Shuttling them to and from their home, an ever-expanding civilization on the ocean floor. He swipes, showing me more: advertisement pitches for a whole new world, a place to start over. A place verdant with sea farms, as if they are the answer to never-ending consumption that is shown, in his proposals, to carry on in this safe place under the waves. The cost is prohibitive, beyond all but the very wealthy; beyond all who are not like him. My gills, which I never notice save in the moment they open, flutter as if suddenly there is not enough oxygen in all the ocean to sustain me, and my heart, which beats as slowly and steadily as any sea mammal's does, rushes now as if I have been in, and lost, a race of great importance.
There is a taste in the salt water, new, fresh, wrong. I turn toward it, a half turn, no more; it is close, and so familiar I should know it before I see it. It is barely there, a trace of blood in the water, but it follows me as I turn, coming, as it does, from the pin-prick coldness near my spine.
He cannot move his hands quickly enough: I see the syringe when I turn back, and the terrible combination of guilt and greed in his eyes. I know my gaze betrays a hurt that goes deeper than the needle ever could. Somehow he dares smile hopefully, as if he might somehow convince me of the goodness within him. Rage flashes through me and I smash my hand through the water, hitting his. Bone breaks beneath the power of my blow, and I can see him scream within his submarine suit. I can almost hear it, through his thin cushion of air and the less forgiving pressure of water between us. The syringe is gone already, sinking into the depths, taking my genetic code to safety. He clutches his broken hand and stares at me with fury and fear, as if I have suddenly become a monster.
And perhaps I am. Perhaps I am rage incarnate, a single creature made to lay waste to the fools who make me necessary. Fools like him, whose affection--whose professed love for me--may have even been real, but was not, in the end, stronger than the siryn call of profit. He and his kind have destroyed the surface world already, rewritten the oceans until to survive they have altered profoundly, deeply, and in the most deadly of ways. Rewritten them until they have produced me, whether of their own accord or that of those few people prepared to do anything to secure a future for their children, their grandchildren, the future. I take his helmet in both my hands, drawing him close to me, until I can put my lips against the mask of his submarine suit.
I don't know if he can hear me, as I speak to him. I don't care. I whisper, "I have legs and a voice."
And then I sing. I sing as the whales have taught me, with bone-shattering intensity, and the mask of his suit disintegrates. I turn away as he dies, uninterested in the horror of swift decompression, and I swim, at speed, to the city he is building in my territory. I sing to it, too, with all the rage burning within me, and the machines fail, then fall. The bricks--bricks I helped him learn to make, bricks meant to withstand the pressure of the ocean--cannot withstand my keening cries, and the chains are no more than rust in the water when I am done. The ship sinks next, punctured by projectiles as sharp as those which sank the Sea Witch, and as it drowns, I wonder what storm brought that ship to the sea floor, all those years ago. I wonder if, as an infant, my cries were as piercing as these, the ones I have found as my true, adult power.
My mothers died bleeding from the ears, and I will never know.
In the story, she asks for feet. I will need mine, to walk among the wealthy. I will need mine to find my way through their mazes, to make wreckage of their plans for the ocean floor, for endless expansion, for a future that will burn, and burn, and burn the world that we must live in. Would that I had come Before, that I had been made in time to stop them then, but I will go now, with rage and power and forthright fury, for my voice has become enough.