Lake Silence

CHAPTER 76

Vicki

Watersday, Sumor 8

It didn’t matter if I wanted to go back to The Jumble’s beach or go on to Silence Lodge. I had reached the point of no return. I was done, exhausted—and hurt. My side felt strange, but I was too scared to touch it and find out why.

A wave caught me in the face, and I thought my side would rip as I coughed up the water I’d swallowed.

Then I saw the shapes coming toward me, saw a delicate dorsal fin, the flick of a tail. They surfaced all around me. If I hadn’t been so brutally tired, I would have been terrified.

Imagine a creature whose ancestors had been a giant piranha that had mated with a lake-dwelling species of human. They had a humanlike torso that ended in that kind of tail shown in sketches of mermaids. The backs of their bodies were a blue-black that changed to a silvery-gray front. Big fish eyes. And triangular, interlocking teeth that could tear flesh from bone, easily stripping a carcass in minutes.

Elders. The long-standing, or long-swimming, residents of Lake Silence.

They raised their heads above the water, bobbing to keep the gills in their necks wet.

“I can’t swim anymore,” I said. I didn’t know if I was asking for help or telling them that this prey didn’t have the strength to fight them.

Two of them bobbed under the water on either side of me. When they surfaced, my arms were around their narrow shoulders, holding me up. I wasn’t much help, but they maneuvered until we faced the shoreline near Silence Lodge.

An undulation of water lifted all of us, as if we were all riding on the back of something that had risen from deep in the lake to become a long, gentle swell. An arched back that rose and went back down. But the motion had brought all of us noticeably closer to the shore.

The third time that undulation occurred, I imagined I saw a giant head and shoulders right in front of me—a body that was never separate from the lake but still distinct.

We were in sight of the shore faster than I would have thought possible. Silence Lodge didn’t have my nice beach. Dark pebbles, maybe shale. Shale had sharp edges. Landing on it would hurt. Not that I had a choice. I wasn’t sure my companions understood human speech, and they weren’t likely to spend their time pondering the preferences of shoreline material.

My vision blurred. The Elders who had been holding me up dropped away. And I rode that last undulation to the shore alone.