Deeper Read Free Page B

salmon pink pebbles she’d grown into the skin of her upper arm.
    “ Part of a leg, I think.  I didn’t want to touch it.  It was white and puffed up and smelled bad.”
    “Humans smell like rotten fish,” Azura went back to polishing.
    “Everything smells ro tten when it’s dead.  Even you,” I said.  “That’s no reason to have jelly-trembles.”
    Gentle Casih laid the law down.
    “Humans aren’t safe.  That’s just how it is.  You wouldn’t go to sleep with a pack of old bull sharks, would you?” 
    She stood in place of Mother, and had to be obeyed, when Father wasn’t near.  But she didn’t have the heart for authority, really.
    “ Oh but Melur loves humans. She wants to swim right up to one and say ‘Eat me, oh please eat me, beautiful pink human! I’d make SUCH a delicious dinner for you! Really I would!”
    Azura sniggered, and took another bite of blue fin meat, because Casih wasn’t looking, but feeding her pup instead, while she waved away a gull in search of easy food.  Then she slid back into the sea to chew it, the inlay of her long pale arms throwing back the light of the last sun as she dived.
    I stared after her. 
    “I do not.”
    I hated my sisters, all of them.  Stuck up, vain, ignorant know nothings!
    I decided then and there that I’d see a human up close one day, even if they did skin me.  Though that was probably just one of Grandmother’s stories. They might frighten little pups but they wouldn’t frighten fast, clever, badass Melur.
     

Chapter 3
    Still, t he first time I saw a real human, up close, it was dying.
    Che and I were trolling. It’s a game human teenagers play too, so you told me.  This is how it goes.
    You pick a target. Someone minding their own business.  Maybe a lazy, heavy adult sleeping on the swell, or someone intent on something which needs lots of quiet concentration – picking out lice, for instance, or stalking a shoal.  You creep up behind them, hardly shifting the current.  At just the right time, you pick up speed and barrel past, tipping them face first, turning the water into a storm of sand and bubbles.  Then you shoot off as quick as you can, laughing and hoping they’re too flustered to follow you.
    That’s what we were doing, that afternoon, months ago.  It was a hot day, the top layer of the water in the lagoon was warm as pee.  We’d swum out from the channels, where we’d flipped a biter onto some cousin of Che’s who’d been sleeping in a tide pool.  Then we’d had to make a run for it – but he was fat and sleepy and hadn’t bothered to swim after us far – but just went back to his pool to snore.  Now we were bored with ourselves and the world.  We were floating in the mid depths of the lagoon, watching the motes eddy by, when Che said,
    “Guess what. Y our sister makes out with Rilshe.  They’re fucking down in the Squid Cave.”
    Che was – is - my very best friend.  It’s Che I shared my thoughts with, not my dull, beach bound sisters. Che had a pod of his own, sisters and brothers and cousins and little ones, and their territory was on the westward side of the lagoon.  But we’d been friends since I beat his elder brother up for teasing him and left claw marks on his back that took months to fade. I went round for weeks puffed up with the victory – over a mer boy, at that! 
    “ What sister?” I asked, not very interested.  Mating’s not a big thing with us, you see adults doing it all the time, on the sand, in the mid-depths, sometimes on the surface if they can stay in place long enough. They don’t hide it.  Why should they?
    “The one with the ray on her back.”
    “ You mean Dawii.”
    Che had nothing much to do with my sisters.  I was secretly pleased when he couldn’t tell one from the other.  Or pretended that he couldn’t.  Mer boys who wanted to hunt with the men didn’t hang around with the women – but I was an exception, and so was Che.
    He narrowed his green eyes