Child of a Hidden Sea Read Free

windstorms that dump you in the ocean? Has to be a delusion.
    Please, let me wake up in hospital. Is that a bedsheet?
    No such luck. She’d caught a thread of seaweed with her arm.
    She pulled free.
    Another tangled her feet.
    The weeds were moving.
    Up and down the glimmering path of winged bodies on the water’s surface, green-sheathed bubbles were rising, bean-shaped floats dotting a growing thicket of stems. Seaweed: it formed a carpet, highway-wide and blistered with the buoyant, air-filled pods. Bristly stems clung to Sophie, winding around her legs, around Aunt … Gale?
    The weeds raised both women, the camera case and all the fish who’d come up to feast on the moth migration. Water streamed out of Sophie’s hair and her dress and she shivered, suddenly chilled. Gale’s weight came off her arm. The pain in her shoulder ramped up a notch.
    The fish, lifted out of water, thrashed as they suffocated. A pelican landed on the cushion of weed and plucked one of them up.
    Brown pelican , Sophie thought, pelecanus occidentalus, perfectly ordinary. Maybe this is the Gulf of Mexico. But how?
    Entangled, afloat, apparently safe, Sophie stared at the tons of gasping fish as insects dropped in a twinkling rain around her and bats chittered above.
    A jerk—something was towing them.
    She kept her good arm locked around Gale, in case any of this was real. The way things were going so far, whoever was reeling them in would probably decide to throw them back.

CHAPTER 2
    The first thing their rescuers said to Sophie was the same thing as Aunt Gale: “Sezza Fleetspak?”
    They were out in small wooden sailboats, rickety eighteen- and twenty-footers with patched sails, whose crews were frantically hauling in the rising seaweed and its catch. A bucket brigade of adults sorted the thrashing fish; anything shorter than arm’s length went over the port side. The larger ones they clubbed to death and transferred below.
    Pre-adolescent kids clad in undyed, lumpy sweaters worked at stripping the moths’ wings, trimming off their glow-bulbs and dropping the bodies into vats that stank of hot vinegar. Guttering motes of chitin flickered at their feet, which were mostly bare. A third group sliced the seaweed into arm’s-length strips as they hauled it up, popping off the floats and storing them in crates. Nothing was wasted.
    No garbage, Sophie noticed. The dense mattress of vegetation should be full of plastic grocery bags, water bottles, and other refuse; the oceans were full of floating and submerged trash.
    â€œFleetspak? Sezza Fleetspak?”
    The grizzled woman directing these words at Sophie was already examining Gale’s wound, tearing her jacket and shirt aside to reveal the knife, embedded just under a rib.
    â€œEnglish,” Sophie replied. “Español? Français? Russki? Anyone?”
    Blank looks all around.
    â€œGuess we can’t communicate.” She crouched by Gale, taking her hand. The knife had a leather-wrapped handle, she noticed, and a familiar brand name.
    The woman—the ship’s skipper?—barked orders. One of the crew vanished below, reappearing a minute later with a threadbare blanket and a steaming cup. Sophie let him drape her—the wind was icy—and took a careful sip of what turned out to be hot fish broth, flavored with dill.
    By now, the skipper had improvised a pressure bandage for Gale’s wound. She picked through her pockets and found a small purse, made of reptilian-looking leather and worked with unfamiliar letters.
    At the discovery, the woman stiffened: whatever the thing was, it was bad news. She looked at Sophie before removing it—as if seeking permission? Sophie nodded, holding out a hand. The woman passed it over.
    â€œLooks like it might be watertight,” Sophie said. The pouch had a clamshell shape and pursed lips with interlocked zipper teeth. Sophie ran her finger over the closure, looking for a tab,