And so the two shot off into the waters, in the direction of the North Sea, where the Swilkie spun itself atop the surface, a great white froth. Syrena pushed through the ocean with her muscular tail, her head bowed down, her arms forming a knife that cleaved the waters.
Beside her, Sophie worked the sea, not so much with her body as her mind. With great focus she commanded the waves and they carried her with a swiftness that rivaled the mermaid herself. Syrena tilted her head at her charge, smirking through the net of hair webbed in her face.
“You think you so smart now, huh? You think you faster than mermaid?” Her tail thundered behind her and she moved through the waters like pure sound.
“Ha!” Sophie spat. “You think you’re faster than water itself?” And the current surged violently, propelling Sophie forward and knocking Syrena off course with the strength of its waves.
“Okay, okay!” the mermaid tumbled, waving her arms. She looked like Sophie once had, twisting dumbly in the waters. The girl felt a pang at the sight, to see such a noble, capable creature fumbling in her element. She stilled the current, feeling it treading beneath her, alive and waiting direction.
“I’m sorry!” Sophie hollered. Syrena had collected herself, smoothing her tangles against her temples and tucking the locks behind her ears. Her pride appeared to have a dent in it.
“Is okay,” the mermaid grumbled. “I ask for it. I just happy you swimming, okay? Why do I care if you faster than me?”
It appeared to Sophie that the mermaid did care, but she politely pretended not to notice. “Syrena, were you really going to leave me out here? Or send me back to Chelsea on a dolphin or whatever?”
“If you not real magic girl, ya.” She nodded. “If you not real magic, the plan not to work. You just get hurt, I get hurt, all the mermaids, everyone. You best be home, then. But”—her smile twinkled, the glow of her talisman flashing her canines—“I know you be magic girl. I always know. I just need to make you fight sometimes.”
A feeling of longing swept over Sophie—she wanted to hug Syrena, but she knew the mermaid would never allow it. How she missed some tenderness! Her mother, Angel, the flutter of soft pigeon wings against her cheek. This work was hard. How she’d love something gentle to offset the struggle. But Syrena would not give that to her. It wasn’t the mermaid’s way. Sophie knew Syrena cared about her—she’d brought her to the middle of the Atlantic on her own back, fed her from the tangles of her hair. Syrena believed in her. But she wasn’t going to give her a hug. Sophie pushed the need away and did her best to emulate the mermaid—proud, tough, cool. Syrena was cool, Sophie realized. Like, probably the coolest person Sophie’d ever met. Well, not “person,” exactly, but still.
“Know what would be nice thing?” Syrena asked. “You make current a little wider, you tell water to come over to me too, ya? We both get there much faster. You do this?”
“I don’t know if I can,” Sophie said.
“Stop with that,” the mermaid said. “You Odmieńce, you do anything. You must remember, never doubt. Doubting make you human. Knowing make you Odmieńce. Doing make you Odmieńce. Okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” Sophie said, embarrassed at how quickly she turned back into a dumb, thirteen-year-old human. All it took was one challenge for her to dissolve into insecurity. Forget learning how to wall off her thoughts, or how to command the waters. What Sophie needed to learn was confidence.
So she did not ask, she told the waters to spread out around her, to catch Syrena in their current. And the water did her bidding.
As the two were carried toward the North Sea, Syrena slowed her motions and Sophie became entranced, watching the hypnotic roll of the creature’s torso and tail as she coasted along the waters. Cruise control, Sophie thought, and giggled. Her mother had been so excited when she’d gotten a car with cruise control. The feature had broken on the thirdhand car not too long after she’d bought it, but Sophie still remembered her mother’s delight. Something about not having to work so hard. About getting to relax while the vehicle picked up the slack. When Sophie was done with all this she’d teach her mother to talk to the air, she’d show her how to fly. Or at the very least, she’d get her a new car.
SOMETHING THE MERMAID had said was haunting Sophie, something about her time on the land. What had she said? Was very terrible. She wanted to ask the creature to elaborate, but felt sheepish. Even though it felt like a magical fairy tale Syrena was spinning, it wasn’t. It was her life. Just like the talking pigeons of Chelsea weren’t myths at all but part of Sophie’s own half-human life. Just like the story of her grandfather, turned into a dog. Not a story at all. Real. Sophie realized she had much more in common with Syrena—with a mermaid—than she would ever have thought.
As if the mermaid was in her mind, reading her thoughts, Syrena turned to Sophie. “Where I leave off?” she mumbled. “Oh, yes. The mermaids leaving their eggs to the waters. The foam that came up in their mouths. It taste so bad to eat the foam!” the mermaid cried. “Some mermaids try just to spit it out, but the foam, it will find the eggs, and protect them. Is what foam meant to do. Then you have half-protected eggs, growing, only to be killed when bigger. Much sadder. Much, much sadder.”
Syrena’s thoughts filled with the memory of the nest of mermaid eggs that had managed to survive on the edge of the village. Patched with just enough foam, they had gestated in a hole in the coral that had been abandoned by an eel. They grew to a hopeful size, and it was then, just as they were making their way into the village, that the sunfish attacked them. The sunfish is all head, all terrible, gobbling head, and it took the baby mermaids into its beak and tore at them. They looked like moons in the water, terrible moons sucking the baby mermaids back into their jaws and again spitting them out, doing this over and over until they were small enough for the fish to swallow.
The grown mermaids huddled and screamed. Some flung spears at the wide, round fish, but their spears sunk harmlessly into the water. The elder mermaids had stayed the hands of the ones who’d tried to kill the fish. “They weren’t supposed to live,” one said, sad and stern. “Don’t make it harder.”
Young Syrena had huddled beside her sister. Before that day, how Syrena had loved the goofy sunfish, with its one giant fin on the top of its head and another beneath. Before Syrena had ever seen the sun, this beast was its golden image. But now it was nothing more than a monster to her. Syrena cried, hiding her face in her sister’s greenish-golden tangles.
“Now, now,” the mermaid who cared for Syrena tried to calm her at night, wrapping her in a blanket woven from mermaid hair and seaweed, then tucking her into a clamshell. “The sunfish can’t hurt you, you’re much too big!”
“They’re horrible!” the young mermaid wailed. “I hate them!”
“They’re just living, as we all are. Think of how the fish must hate us for eating them. Think of the clams and the crabs and the lobsters.”
Eventually, Syrena fell into a sleep thick with nightmares, dreaming of giant heads with tiny, vicious mouths, floating toward her. She would always hate the sunfish.
THOUGH THE ELDER mermaids thought Syrena and her sister spoiled, they couldn’t stop the village from indulging them. It would be too cruel. Many of the mermaids doted upon the pair, teaching them mermaid ways—how to sing their songs and tend to their tails, where to find food and which bones and shells to collect for necessary things, like tools and weapons, but also for beauty, to decorate and ornament. They taught Syrena and her sister how and where to hide, from sharks, from ships, from humans, and, for Syrena, from the sunfish that still terrified her.
It was in Syrena and Griet’s fiftieth year—when they were no longer babies but not quite full grown—that the Great War came to their waters. The mermaids who kept watch at the furthest ends of the village saw the ships approaching, and the low cries they sounded to alert the others grew as they twined together, surging into a wail that froze each mermaid in her task. This wasn’t a common warning from just one corner, alerting of a passing ship. This was a siren coming from every edge of the village, raising the alarm. Could ships really be coming in from so many directions?
They were. The ships came swiftly, dropping anchor in the middle of the mermaids’ village. Syrena and Griet clutched each other’s hands, their eyes cast to the water’s surface, where the giant curves of metal and their lengths of clattering chain crashed through. Mermaids darted away from the plummeting objects, but the anchors smashed through the intricate seashell roofs of their homes and gathering places.
Before the mermaids could begin to register the destruction, the humans in the ships began their fight. The ceiling of the mermaids’ world, the watery surface that rolled with waves, refracting beams of sunlight, that hazy, shifting blue, was torn in a blast of thunder. Cannon shot pierced their sky and sunk into the village, crumbling more homes. The humans seemed committed to killing not only one another but whatever got in the way of their warring, be it mermaids or whales or gulls or dolphins. The waters became clouded with blooms of red, calling scavenging sharks to join the carnage.
Swiftly the mermaids tied protective shells around their bodies and took up rocks as shields. “To the trenches!” one mermaid hollered, and the villagers beat their tails toward the protective hollows they had dug when they first settled the bank. Debris rained all around them—chunks of wood from the prows of boats, dislodged guns, the sinking bodies of dead sailors. The mermaids swam furiously, dodging the flotsam and jetsam, dodging the cannon fire that seemed never to cease, not for a moment. From above the waves they could hear the men’s gruff screams and the creaking of ships being torn apart.
Syrena held her sister’s hand and darted quickly toward the trenches, daring to look back at her village only once as she swam. Where the intricate and elegant dwellings of shells and bones and loops of rope once stood was now home to a sunken ship, alive with the struggles of drowning humans, a swirl of earthly objects spinning in the wet chaos. She faced forward to see a new ship cutting the waters right before her, and with a gasp she let go of her sister, pushing away from the ship’s violent passage.
“Griet!” Syrena called to her sister, but the ship was already between them. “Griet!” she shouted, paddling her tail frantically so as to not be sucked beneath the vessel. The ships were more beastly than the most gobbling sea creature; they were not like animals that could be battled on their own terms but something else, a whole world crashing into the mermaids’ world, a planet bringing its own weather down into the waters.
SYRENA DID NOT even know she was crying for her sister until she arrived at the trenches and found little Griet huddled in a corner by a pile of fishing nets, sucking on the arm of a starfish. “Griet!” she cried as she pushed toward her through the waters. She swept her sister up with her tail and buried her face in her hair, golden-green to Syrena’s blue-black but equally as tangled. The starfish in Griet’s grasp detached the arm the mermaid chewed upon, and she handed the rest of the creature to her sister. The two little mermaids sat in the dense mud, nervously nibbling while they clasped each other’s hands feverishly.
Around them, the trench was crammed with claustrophobic mermaids hugging their tails to their chests to make room for one another. The ocean around them was alive with new currents, not born of the moon and her tugging but of the terrible boats cutting up the waters that were once the mermaids’ home. Their place of safety was quickly filling up with ships en route to the fighting, their prows jammed into the thick mud, and the sailors above them howled with fury, cursing the sea devils who’d caught their mighty vessels. Some of the mermaids swam upward to try to free the boats, but their heaving was for nothing. They were great as islands, impossible to move.
“We cannot stay here!” cried an elder mermaid. “The ships are everywhere, and though they be not for us, they will show no mercy to any living creature!”
“Scatter!” hollered the toughest mermaid, the one whose tail scars were so numerous they formed a new pattern on her body. “We haven’t the time for a plan! Swim for your lives, sisters, and return when the waters are clear.” And as new cannon shot punctured the waters above them, the mermaids swam off in every direction, many of them into the very heart of the fighting, fewer of them into the unknown blue of the deep, the warrior yelling after them, “Remember your home. Do not forget!”
SO, SYRENA HAD set off alone with her sister. Griet: the word meant pearl, and Sophie could not help but imagine Griet as opalescent, a shinier, sweeter Syrena, her curls bouncy, like a mermaid in a book.
“Was she lovely?” Sophie asked the mermaid. They had hunkered down for a rest at the northernmost edge of the Atlantic.
“We are so close to the Swilkie,” Syrena mused, ignoring her question, “the whirlpool the ogresses make with their mill. If you are very, very still you can feel the water churning.” She paused. “And taste.” The mermaid swished the water around inside her mouth and swallowed. “Very more salt. Good for you, ya? Ogresses have been milling salt on giant mill since they were very little girls. Wicked king take them, think they full-grown women, ya? Because they so big! He make them work and work, and then they grow up and king like, ‘Uh-oh, giant ladies!’ They get rid of him, but they know the sea need the salt. The whole planet do. So they keep the mill going. Very good of them, ogresses very good people. The churning of the mill make a giant whirpool in the sea, the Swilkie. That how we get to the ogresses. We swim the Swilkie.”
“Syrena,” Sophie nagged. Even the story of the giantesses couldn’t shake the tale of the mermaid’s sister from her mind. “Please, tell me about Griet. Was she beautiful?”
“Oh, ya, so beautiful,” Syrena answered. “The fishes swim up and kiss her pretty cheeks and seahorses comb her long hair with their tails. She wear necklace of diamond and pearl and dolphin always clean her so never the sea mud make her dirty.”
Sophie listened, waiting for the mermaid to continue with the enchanting story. Instead, laughter bubbles rolled from Syrena’s mouth like a school of jellyfish.
“Oh, you still such girl,” the mermaid said. “You think everything, what you call, fairy story!”
“Well, yeah!” Sophie snapped defensively. “I mean, that’s what fairy tales are. Mermaids and stuff. Pardon me for being a human.”
“Griet very pretty,” Syrena said, her tone slightly teasing. “All mermaid pretty. But also—she have fangs.”
“Fangs?”
“Ya, like these,” the mermaid opened her mouth and tapped her own long canines. “But more, longer than normal. They poke out, make her funny looking. Her hair, because so light, show more algae, look more like slime. Her tail very wonderful, sort of pink, but very hurt too, from war, and sharks.”
“Sharks?”
“Ya.” For the first time, the mermaid sounded tired. “When we swim away from our village, through the ships and the fighting, there be many sharks. Drawn to the fighting, all the blood. We fight them off, we dodge ships, we dodge cannons, even the dying sailors.” Syrena twisted her tail, bringing Sophie’s attention to a long, raised scar along its back. “This from anchor chain. The chain cracked, rough, and I become tangled. I thought I would stay forever. Griet help me. Like I help her with shark.”
“What did you do?”
“Kill shark,” Syrena smiled. “Kill shark and eat shark and swim good and healthy out from the sea and all the fighting.”
Sophie knew that Griet didn’t look like a Barbie princess mermaid doll any more than Syrena did, but she also knew that the mermaid must have been beautiful, just like the one in front of her. “And then what?” she asked. Syrena’s face grew dark at Sophie’s insistence, darker and suddenly older. Still beautiful, always beautiful, but it was a beauty that Sophie didn’t completely understand. A beauty that scared her a little.
“Time for sleep now,” Syrena said sternly. “No more ‘this-is-mermaid-life.’ Tomorrow we reach the Swilkie. Last time in Swilkie, almost lost fin!” The mermaid fingered the delicate scales of her hip fin gingerly. “Very athletic, Swilkie. Rest up.”
“I have a sister too,” Sophie surprised herself by saying. It was the first time she had spoken the truth out loud. I have a sister. “A twin.”
Syrena spun her head to gaze at the girl, her hair following slowly, rotating like a big, black cloud above her. “Oh, no,” she said. “You say there two of you?”
Sophie nodded.
“What her name?” Syrena asked. “Is she beautiful?” Sophie realized the mermaid was teasing her.
“She’s—she’s captured. Or something. By Kishka. She lives in Kishka’s trailer at the dump.”
“What ‘trailer’?”
“It’s like a really little space, on wheels. But it’s so weird. From the outside, the space is little, but then inside it’s big. Like, magic-big. And there’s a garden there, but there’s something wrong with it. Like the leaves are poison. When I went inside, it was like I couldn’t breathe, like the plants were stealing my breath. She’s trapped in there—she’s been living there, inside all the plants and trees. She’s so small. I think there’s something really wrong with her.” The memory of it made her feel sickened and sad. “It was supposed to be me in there. Kishka was tricked into taking her.”
“That good story,” Syrena said grimly. “That make me happy, that Kishka can be tricked.” Though as she said it the mermaid sounded anything but happy. She sounded like Sophie felt: like there was a rock where her heart should be.
“I don’t even know her name,” Sophie said. “And I don’t know if she’s beautiful. She looked sick. Her skin was green, like the leaves had rubbed off on her.”
Syrena swooped her long tail around Sophie and brought her close. They lay there, side by side but each far away with thoughts of their lost sisters.
