The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea

A MOMENT BEFORE BREAKING ^{A. C. WISE}

The wave gathers itself, grows, and waits to fall.

Ana stays close to her mother as they crowd onto the boat. Water slaps the pier. Everything smells of salt, fish, and rotting weeds. When they’re herded below deck, the smell becomes too many bodies, too much breath. Everyone talks at once. Ana’s mother obsessively checks the bag held tight against her body, the one with their paperwork and refugee visas.

Ana wants to go home. She misses her room, and her cousins, but her mama says they’re going to a better life. America is the land of opportunity. Her mama will get a new job, and Ana will go to a new school. Ana is afraid she’ll have to do the fourth grade over again even though her auntie has been teaching them English.

They’re shown to a cabin with two other families. There’s a boy, no more than three years old, who cries and clings to his father’s hand. Later, there is strange food in a room with long tables. The engines grind, and the ship chugs through the water. Everyone is nervous, excited, afraid.

After the meal, Ana returns with her mother to the cabin and they climb into one of the lower bunks. Her mother lies down with her back pressed against the wall, and Ana tucks herself against her mother. She doesn’t expect to sleep, but Ana wakes to the scream of metal. It is the sound of the world being torn apart. The deck shudders, and a klaxon blares, accompanied by a flashing red light. A crackling voice comes over the loudspeaker, but Ana can’t hear over the general panic.

Then, for a moment, everything goes still. Underneath the human chaos, there’s a noise like a song, a rising chant making her stomach feel like it’s dropping to her toes, but it also sounds like a hurricane, a storm.

The deck shudders again. The groan of metal, worse than before, and her mother pulls her toward the door.

“Mama, what is—” But her mother doesn’t hear her.

The ship lurches violently, rolls. Ana smashes into a wall that is now a floor, losing her grip on her mother’s hand. She tastes blood. Everything is black and red, black and red. The alarm wails, but the chanting threads through it, growing louder. Ana’s heart pounds, her fear turning it into a beacon to call the song, then falling to its rhythm. She wills it to slow, to change, but it refuses to obey.

So instead, she curls as small as she can. She doesn’t want the singing people to find her. She makes herself into a ball, her face covered in snot and tears, but her traitor heart keeps on screaming Here! Here! I’m here!

Once upon a time…

Ana’s eyelids are sticky, crusted closed. She can’t open them, and everything hurts.

Once… The voice falters. Stops.

Mama? Her lips shape the words, but no sound emerges. It isn’t her mother’s voice. It’s coming from inside; she hears it in the space between her ribs, and echoing in her head. Her throat is dry, her mouth swollen. Someone is crying, but it isn’t her. It’s coming from inside, too.

Panic. She tries to thrash away from the sound and waves of pain rip through her body. She chokes on a soundless scream, breath wheezing. Her skin has been peeled away, everything scraped raw. She remembers a sound like bees, buzzing and buzzing. Needles, going in and out of her skin.

Once upon a time…

The voice again. It comes in fragments, stutters. It is a cold voice, coming from very far away, but also very close, and it isn’t human.

Where is her mama? The question comes full of aching need, but Ana already knows the answer. If her mama could come for her, she would. That means she isn’t here. Ana is alone, scared, but the voice sounds frightened, too.

Once upon a time, the King Under the Waves did not sleep as he sleeps now. He ruled at the beginning of time, and he will rule at the end. He is a wave, waiting to fall, and his crown is dead men’s bones. He was ancient when the world began.

Ana doesn’t like the story, but it isn’t quite as scary as being alone. Knowing someone else is in the dark with her is comforting.

Now the King Under the Waves sleeps in his court, which is lost, but he will wake in time.

Before the King slept, his court magician brought him whispers. She said his people no longer believed in him. They thought him weak, old, tired.

The magician was a liar.

She challenged him to make something new, something never seen under the waves before to prove his power, baring rows of ghost-pale teeth as she did.

So the King rose up in veins of lightning and became a storm. He screamed rain down on a ship, smashed it to splinters and took its wheel. Upon the wheel he hung the bones of drowned men, and the flesh of creatures born in the lightless deep. In his vanity and pride, the King made a creature caught between land and sea. He made a child, a prince, an heir. He made me.

Weird purple-blue light seeps beneath her lids, thick like the blood inside a bruise. Her lids are still sticky, but this time, Ana can open her eyes. She’s lying on her back, her arms and legs strapped down. She turns her head as much as she can. Everywhere she’s able to look there are glass tanks lining the walls, glowing softly in the dark.

She remembers a voice in the dark, telling her stories. Ana blinks. The motion makes her eyes sting. Why isn’t her mama here? Where is she?

Her skin still feels raw, worse than the worst sunburn. To distract herself, she focuses on the tank at the foot of her bed, taking up nearly the whole wall. Something sloshes within the cloudy, blue-lit water. She can’t make sense of the shape, then it gets worse, a tangled knot of darkness unfolding too many limbs.

A memory, like a blade driven through her skull. Underwater, she lived underwater, and there were things like the thing in the tank, things with needle teeth, hissing at her, hurting her. There are too many people inside her skin. A sob, bigger than a tidal wave, threatens to overwhelm her. Her entire body shakes—a cage, rattled from within.

Ana wakes for the third time. Calloused fingers press against her wrist. Her first instinct is to jerk away, but the voice, the one inside her head, whispers, Be still. Hide. Don’t let them find you. Fear tastes like brine at the back of her throat, and she fights not to gag, not to do anything that will let them know she’s awake.

“Her pulse is normal.”

A man’s voice. He runs a finger over her forearm, and her skin crackles like static electricity. The voice inside her flinches, an almost physical shape she can feel moving inside her. The man lowers her arm and replaces the restraint.

“The ritual worked. The prince is contained. Let’s dump the others.”

Footsteps move around the room, then retreat. When she’s certain she’s alone, Ana opens her eyes. She turns her head to look at her restraints, and her breath catches. Her skin shines, and it isn’t just an echo of the tanks’ blue-purple light. Her cousin showed her a video on the internet once of bioluminescent jellyfish, the tide lit up at night with thousands of tendrils. It looks just like that, whorls and swooping lines needle-marked onto her skin. When she tries to make sense of the pattern, her head hurts. There are plants and underwater animals, but it’s also a language that tastes like wrong-colored stars and brine and the black depths of the ocean.

A hot, stinging pressure builds behind her eyes. She has to get out. She has to find her mother.

Her wrists are small, and the cuff the man reattached isn’t as tight as it should be. She twists her arm. The leather chafes, breaking already raw skin. The tattoos glow brighter, and she swears one of them moves.

Her wrist slips free, smeared in blood. With shaking fingers, she fumbles the other cuffs open. Cloudy water sloshes in the tanks, and she catches a glimpse of something impossibly large pressed against the glass. She scrambles up, ignoring the pain, and runs to the door.

Footsteps from the far end of the hall, the men returning. Ana bolts in the opposite direction. The papery gown covering her newly glowing flesh crinkles and rustles. She ducks through an open door, flattening herself against the wall.

She scans the room, searching for another way out. It’s like the one she left, lined with tanks, dimly seen things moving within. And on three cots, three blanket-draped bodies, which makes Ana think of the crying boy on the ship.

The light flicks on. Ana freezes. The men enter the room, heading straight for the cots, and not looking to where she hides.

“You grab that one, I’ll take this one, and we’ll come back for the third.”

The thing inside her coils and uncoils, a pulsing knot of tension. Hatred seethes through her like molasses, thick and dark. The thing inside her hates these men. The men who hurt her. Who held her down. Who marked her skin. Ana hates them, too.

She launches herself forward. Startled, the man closest to her drops the blanket he’s carrying and the body slips free. It’s not the boy from the cabin, but still. His skin is partially tattooed, angry-looking and red. Whatever they did to her, they tried to do to him, too. Now he’s dead.

Ana latches onto the man’s arm, biting down.

“Son of a bitch!” He kicks her, and Ana folds.

She tastes blood on her teeth, and licks it clean. The second man speaks a word in a language she doesn’t understand. It crawls, twisting through her, making the marks on her skin shudder. Ana gasps. She can’t breathe. She’s drowning in the air. The word isn’t for her, it’s for the thing inside of her. They’re hurting it, hurting her.

“No,” Ana says, but the sound that comes out is something else entirely. It is ships torn asunder and the tide thundering against the shore.

The glass tanks shatter. The things inside surge forth in a rush of foul-smelling water, weak and half dead. As they do, Ana changes. Dark limbs snatch up the men. She is no longer a girl made of skin and bone. She is cartilage and rage and teeth in rows and her body is so much bigger than it should be, filling the room. She tears and tears, not just the men, but the things from the tanks as well.

She bites and swallows and chews. When she is done, chunks of flesh, human and not, and splinters of bone cover the floor. Ana is shaking. She is soaking wet. She is alone. The room stinks of seawater. She looks at her hands and they are hands again. Her stomach roils. What did she bite? What did she swallow? The tattoos pulse. Sated, the thing inside of her rolls over to sleep.

Ana runs.

Rain pounds the overhang, just deep enough to keep her dry. The alleyway smells like garbage. Ana wedges her back against the wall, a stack of jumbled crates hiding her. Yesterday, she stole clothes from a Laundromat. They mostly fit. This morning, she watched the back door of a bakery until a man emerged with a bulging plastic sack of trash, then gorged herself on three-day-old bread and pastries, thick and crusty and sugary sweet.

She has no idea where she is, how far the boat sailed, or where she was taken afterward. She doesn’t know how much time has passed. She doesn’t know anything.

She’s heard people around her speaking English, and other languages, too. She can read some of the signs from what her auntie taught her. The thought that she made it to America, without her mother, makes her heart ache.

She needs a plan. Somewhere to live. She cannot survive on old bread alone. Her mama is gone. Her mama’s bag with the papers saying she belongs here is gone. She can’t ask anyone for help: she killed two people. Or the thing inside her did, but she wanted them dead, too. She draws her knees up and wraps her arms around them.

“Tell me a story?” Ana’s teeth chatter, her stolen clothes inadequate against the cold.

The thing inside her turns over, waking up, unfurling like the things in the tank. Maybe it’s a monster, but maybe she is, too. And all they have is each other.

Once upon a time…

“What are you?” Ana asks softly.

Once… Something about the voice makes her think of whales singing to each other, a resonating sound she feels in her breastbone. The same cousin who showed her the video of the jellyfish played a clip of whale songs for her once. Tony. He wanted to be a marine biologist. Ana suddenly misses him fiercely.

Once upon a time, there was a weakling prince.

There is sorrow in the voice, shame.

While the King Under the Waves slept, the court magician gathered followers. She called the prince a traitor, a creature half-made for the land and so unable to fully love the sea. Her words passed among her followers, from needle-toothed mouth to needle-toothed mouth.

The King has abandoned us, she said. While he slumbers, we must take matters into our own hands.

So the King’s courtiers, with their strong limbs and rending beaks, bright lures and endless hunger, sought out the prince. They hunted him. They threatened him and beat him, hissed traitor at every turn, and drove him from the palace until he couldn’t find his way home.

The magician rose out of the waves and caught a man fishing alone. She coiled her body around him, and held her dripping face over his. Her words were sibilant, water gurgling through ancient channels cut in stone. With her teeth inches from his flesh, she poured instructions into his ears.

She told the man where to find the prince, and taught him secret ways to bind the prince in human flesh. She swore him to be her priest, to pass her word onto the next generation, and the next. When the prince’s human body failed, rotting and dying around him, the priest’s descendants would find another body, and another. She promised her priest power, a weapon—the immortal prince driven mad by dying over and over again with each fragile human body he inhabited.

She promised that when the time came, the priest and his followers would turn the prince against his father and take the kingdom under the waves for their own.

She lied.

Though the man who would be her priest suspected she would kill those who served her once the kingdom was in her hands, it would be a problem for his children, or his children’s children in days to come. By the time the magician’s plan came to fruition, he would be long dead, but if he did not agree to serve her now, he would not even live to see another day.

“This is less than half what you promised to pay.” Ana bristles.

The man is a head taller than her, and almost twice as wide. She isn’t a child anymore, but she’s a collection of scrawny twig-limbs compared to his solid bulk. He grins, showing glints of gold among the ivory.

“I changed my mind. Take it or leave it. You wanna be stuck with a handful of stolen goods when those new ICE agents come sniffing around?”

“Why would they—” She stops, every bone of her spine going rigid. The man’s grin widens.

Underneath her clothing, her tattoos squirm. The prince remembers bared teeth, not glinting gold, but translucent-pale like fish bones. He remembers hisses of traitor and being told he doesn’t belong. He wants to burst through her skin at the man, and she fights him down.

“I don’t want any trouble,” Ana mumbles.

It’s a lie. She wants to demand the money she’s owed. She wants to rip this man apart. A thick finger goes under her chin, tilting it up. The man leans close; his breath stinks of beer and garlic.

“You’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you.”

There’s a knife in her pocket, a small blade she could open with a flick of her wrist. It would be kinder than letting the creature inside her unfold. She imagines driving it into the man’s gut, the side of his neck, his eye. Sometimes she remembers the prince’s other deaths, the bodies he inhabited before hers. The memory of dying over and over makes it hard to care about the small life in front of her. Ana’s hand creeps toward her pocket.

“Hey!” The man grabs her wrist, and she lets out a yelp.

She stomps on his foot as he tries to pin her against the wall. Doesn’t he understand she’s being kind? She’s sparing him? She uses his momentum to pull him off balance, making a run for it when he stumbles. He’s surprisingly fast, bouncing off the wall and catching her by the collar, yanking her off her feet.

A shadow falls over her as Ana wheezes, the air driven from her lungs. Her skin burns, the prince pushing at her from inside. Hungry, hungry, hungry.

“There you are, cuz. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

A young man grins down at her. He can’t be much older than her, but he carries himself like he knows a hundred times more about the ways of the world. He holds out a hand; Ana is so stunned she lets him help her up. The coiled knot inside her calms. The young man turns his attention to the big man with garlic breath.

“This here is my cousin,” he says. “I’ve been looking all over for her. I hope there isn’t any trouble.”

Ana has never seen the young man before, and he’s certainly not her cousin, but she keeps her mouth shut. He wears an easy smile. His stance is loose, but there’s a threat implied, only this time, the threat isn’t directed at her. A white man with buzz-cut hair and tattoos covering half his face stands behind the man calling himself her cousin. He cracks his knuckles and watches the man with garlic breath.

“No trouble.” The man with garlic breath holds his hands up, eyes on the tattooed giant.

“I’m Theo.” The young man turns his attention back to Ana. “This is Antonin. You’re with us now.”

“That man owes me money,” Ana says, jerking her chin at the man scuttling away.

Theo and Antonin exchange a look, and Antonin turns to follow the man. Ana feels a moment of guilt, but whatever Antonin has in mind is still kinder than what she would have done. Theo throws an arm around Ana’s shoulders, not possessive, not threatening. She can’t say why, but something about him feels like family, like home, like they really could be cousins. If Ana squints, she can almost see the resemblance.

“You like pizza?” he asks. “I’m starving.”

Once upon a time, the King Under the Waves dreamed a box into existence. The box was also a map, and a city, and a palace. A way to find what is lost. A way for the prince to find his way home.

The alarm beeps and Ana snakes an arm out from beneath the covers. A chalky after-taste coats her tongue, like she’s been devouring powdered bones in her sleep. She takes a moment to remind herself she is no longer the child in the room with the tanks. No longer the stick-thin girl on the streets.

She pushes the covers back, listening to the slosh of the water outside and feeling the world bob up and down. Ana sits, stretching her arms until her muscles loosen and her joints pop. Her tattoos glow, luminescent against her brown skin. Sometimes the prince forgets himself and her skin becomes a wave-born undulation of seaweed fronds and coils of limbs, spirals, and nautilus chambers, infinitely unfolding and keeping him caged. It’s been happening more frequently lately, the prince suffering nightmares Ana only remembers in fragments on waking.

She wonders if it means the magician’s cult is hunting her again. Or if the King Under the Waves is waking. Or both.

Ana pulls on the wetsuit hanging in the miniscule shower. The neoprene smothers the faint light so she can almost forget about her tattoos. At the door to her cabin, she pauses, touching the twenty-year-old framed newspaper page hanging there.

The grainy photograph shows the prow of a ship, jutting from the water, rescue crews surrounding it. The story underneath relates how the ship ran into an unexpected reef, tearing open its hull. How all sixty-seven passengers—mostly refugees—were killed, along with the crew. The story doesn’t mention the way the metal sounded, screaming, or the chanting she’d heard that had summoned the reef from the depths. It doesn’t mention the children that were stolen. It doesn’t say anything about Ana, or her mother.

Ana emerges onto the deck, where the wind picks strands from her hastily gathered ponytail. Theo turns from the rail with a grin.

“What’s the word, cuz?”

Ana manages a wave, feeling the weight of her uneasy sleep.

“The word is good, cuz. The wreck is right where you said it would be.”

Ana peers over Theo’s shoulder at the image on his tablet showing the ocean floor in bright blots of thermal color.

“Private vessel. Probably scuttled for the insurance payout. How did you know? Is it the, you know…”

Theo wiggles his fingers and makes a woooo sound.

“Shut up.” She snaps the words out harder than she means to, then shakes her head. They’ve been through so much together, from the streets to this boat, to saving each other’s lives more than once. It’s been years since she was a stick-thin teenager and Theo threw his arm around her shoulders. They’re not family by blood, but they might as well be.

Theo’s grin is back a moment later. That’s the way it’s always been between them—Ana, surly and afraid of herself, Theo smiling, words sliding right off him.

“It’ll be a good haul,” Ana offers by way of apology, putting up a fist for Theo to bump.

Theo knows more about her than anyone else, other than the prince. More than she wishes he knew, and less than he thinks. She hates keeping secrets, but it’s for his own protection. Which is why he doesn’t know about the thing waiting in the wreck beneath them. The one useful scrap she’s been able to glean from the prince’s restless nightmares—a box, dreamed into existence by the King Under the Waves, worked like sand inside an oyster shell to make a pearl.

The man who bought it at auction had no idea what it was. Now that man is dead.

That’s another thing Theo doesn’t know. How Ana drifted in the waves and let the prince unfurl from inside her. How surprisingly easy it was with the prince’s help to convince the man with the yacht to sink his boat for the insurance money. Sink the boat, and himself, and the box, which had been giving him nightmares about things without eyes, without bones, all mouths, crawling dripping out of the sea. Things that flopped and squelched across the deck. Dead and rotted things rising out of the deep.

Overhead, the sky blushes a muddy color between brown, purple, and gray. Ana checks her gear, and Theo hands her the dive computer, which she straps to her wrist.

“I’ve got it all programmed,” Theo says. “Time, depth, everything. You won’t even have to think about it.”

“Thanks.” She manages a smile, pulling up the hood of her dive suit.

“Antonin promised us sixty-forty this time.”

Which means Ana will get fifteen to Theo’s twenty-five—it’s his boat—but she doesn’t care. The box is all she cares about.

Theo’s expression changes, and it’s like watching storm clouds roll in. His eyes, which are normally a color like rich, polished cherry wood, go almost as dark as black coffee. He squeezes her shoulder.

“Be careful down there.”

“I always am.” She tries to sound reassuring.

He knows what she is, knows she could dive without her suit, if she chose. Maybe that’s what worries him. The clouds lift, and Theo flashes brilliant white teeth again.

“Bring back the goods, cuz.”

Ana tugs her mask into place, gives Theo a thumbs up, and tips backward into the water. The visibility is low, the world muted greens and browns. She switches on the light clipped to her shoulder, and the ghostly outline of the downed yacht appears below. The designs on her skin shiver with restless hope.

If this works, maybe she can bring the prince home. She can finally be alone inside her skin. The idea thrills and terrifies her.

She’s only “seen” the prince once. When she first began dreaming of the box, she started diving before the sun rose, staying down longer and longer each time. Unnerved by the dreams, the prince had been silent, sullen. The time when he would tell her fairy tales had long since passed, so it was Ana who reached for him, screaming inside her own mind while her lungs burned and ached for breath, demanding an explanation and a way to make the dreams stop.

And he’d appeared. A skull, furred with algae and barnacles. It looked something like a goat’s skull, and something like an ichthyosaur, rolling loosely atop a body that made no sense. A ribcage, an impossible coil of blue-gray limbs unfurling and unfolding in constant restless motion. A voice like crashed ships, and eyes burning blue flame even underwater. Her prince.

WE ARE ::::

It was the first time she’d heard him speak aloud. She hadn’t understood the word, but she’d known it for a name, grinding against her like splintered bone. She didn’t understand how he could be inside and outside her body at the same time, but he was.

WE ARE :::: OUR FATHER IS :::: WE ARE LOST.

Ana had wanted to laugh and weep all at once. Part of her still does as she kicks her way to the wreck. If she stops for just a moment to think about her life—the ship, her mother, the thing inside her, the marks on her skin—she will start screaming and never stop.

She pulls herself through the yacht’s open hatchway. A startled fish darts away as she enters the main cabin. There’s a bed built into the floor, cabinets above it, drawers beneath it, and a desk built into the wall. Ana starts with the desk. The prince is awake, shivering, and his movements make her clumsy. The bottom drawer is the only one that’s locked. Ana unsnaps the dive knife from her belt and wedges the point into the gap between drawers. She wiggles the blade as deep as it will go, then smacks the hilt. The lock pops open.

Whorls and twists and coils move across her skin as she lifts the box free. The outside is carved with intricate designs both achingly familiar and utterly strange. Home. Ana flips the lid open. Inside the box is a labyrinth, not carved, but grown. It glows faintly, the same sick-bright shade of blue-green as the marks on her skin.

Home. Home. Home.

Ana sits cross-legged on her narrow bed. Outside, waves slap the hull. Theo is off with Antonin. She is alone with the prince, and the water, and the box. She traces the raised pattern on the lid, following coiled ways doubling back on themselves. The box is a map. Beneath her skin, the prince twitches a multitude of limbs.

“Do you want to go home?”

A jumble of longing and fear answers her; the words traitor, weakling, and flaw hammer at her from the inside. Snatches of fairy tales, the story of a prince driven from his home, imprisoned within a human body; the story of a girl, torn from her mother, made into a cage for a monster.

Unmake me.

The words echo inside her skull. Whatever the prince wants, it’s not this half existence. Ana opens the box. In the dim room, it no longer glows, but draws light into itself. A maze within a maze, haunted by tiny flickers of motion.

The tattoos on her arms and legs lash, uncoiling across her belly and down her spine. Limbs and teeth and a skull and eyes like blue fire. Ana grips the box tight. She feels the suffocating weight of flesh, rotting around her. Around him. The thunder of blood not his own, constantly pounding in his ears.

It’s too hot. Sweat prickles beneath her armpits. She has to get out. Clutching the box, Ana staggers onto the deck. She’s at the rail without even thinking about it, then up and over, into the water.

The shock of cold slaps her awake. Salt water surges up her nose, she tastes it at the back of her throat. Light from her tattoos seeps into the water. It occurs to her she isn’t wearing her dive suit, her mask, her regulator. She shouldn’t be able to see so clearly. Her lungs should be screaming for air.

Something tickles the side of her neck. Before she can slap it away, it becomes a burning pain, like a knife slit across her skin. She chokes on a scream, thrashing. She wants to drop the box but she can’t; it’s seared to her hands. The skin at her neck parts, and she’s breathing through gills.

Her pulse jack-rabbits. She is a child in a room filled with tanks. She is a teenager on the streets, and a man with garlic-scented breath is threatening her. There is other skin beneath her own, slick and smoke-colored and drowned; her muscled limbs could tear a man apart, have torn men apart. Her teeth, needle sharp, have tasted blood.

There was a woman named Zarah, once, with burnt-wood skin, who smelled like oranges and dark chocolate and cloves. They drank, and danced, and Zarah called the marks on Ana’s skin beautiful. She traced them with the tip of her tongue, and Ana could almost pretend she was human. Until she woke to the sound of Zarah screaming and the bed drenched in seawater. When Ana tried to reach after Zarah as she fled, the arms that reached were slick-black like oil, and she fell in a squirming mass on the floor, seeing the angry, puckered marks on Zarah’s legs and back and arms.

What is she? A monster who will hurt those around her if she lets her guard down. Zarah. Theo. Even her mother, the first person the monster took from her. Rage floods her, and when the tide of it recedes, it leaves Ana hollow and cold. She’s still clutching the box, and she flips it open under the waves.

A voice booms; the words are thunder and bells tolling on drowned ships and ancient stones cracking under battering waves. They roll through her like lightning, writing directions on her bones. Corridors unwind around her. Massive statues loom at her from niches, larger than the pharaohs and even less human. The walls are stone, emitting light the color of a star, but they are also made of the body of a vast creature long-since decayed. Ribs arching, a nautilus, spiraling endlessly down, the echo chamber of a skull.

At its heart lies her father and a choice, and Ana wants to back away, but she hasn’t even moved. She’s still hanging motionless, her throat slit with gills, breathing underwater while the prince cowers inside her.

A shadow darts at the corner of her eye. Ana turns and it surges toward her, gray arms unfurling. Squid. Octopus. Shark. None of the words fit. The face is almost human, but the skull slants sharply upward, the eyes are flat back, and when the near-lipless mouth opens, it reveals rows of needled teeth.

Traitor.

Ana shoots upward, her head breaking the waves. She hauls in a gasping breath, and for a moment, she chokes on air as the gills fight her and her heart stutters and threatens to stop. She claws for the boat’s ladder, expecting webbed hands to close on her ankles at any moment.

Shaking, she collapses on the deck. Her skin seals itself, the flesh smooth as though it never opened. She’s no longer holding the box, but the word continues to pound inside her like waves against the shore. Home. Home. Home.

She can’t help but obey, but if she does…

Traitor.

Ana hugs her knees to her chest. In the space between her ribs, between her skin and bones, the creature sharing her body curls small as well. Together. Afraid.

“Once upon a time, a child sailed upon the waves.” Ana lies on her side under a pile of blankets.

Theo found her on the deck when he returned. He put her to bed, made her hot tea, fussed over her until she insisted all she needed was sleep. But sleep is the farthest thing from her mind. Her whole body is wired. The prince keens inside her.

When she was alone, when she was afraid as a child, the prince told her stories.

“Once upon a time,” she says, “there was also child under the waves who was very ill.”

Of course, she wasn’t there the first time the prince was placed inside a human body, but she tries to imagine it, and make it into a better story. A happier one. She makes it into a fairy tale, like the ones he used to tell her. Inside, the prince calms, listens.

“And there was a wicked magician who tricked the King Under the Waves into thinking a human body would cure his son.”

Ana’s muscles relax and un-cramp. She’s able to roll onto her back, but she doesn’t stop talking.

“The child who sailed upon the waves had always been in love with the ocean. He dreamt of it every night, as though his blood was half seawater and his heart a many-chambered shell. This heart called out to the King Under the Waves, its every beat a siren-song, a beacon.

“So the King became a storm. He found the ship where the child sailed, and fell upon the deck, shattering the mast. He tore the ship in two, ignoring the screams and the prayers of those on board. He found the heartbeat, scooped up the child, and drew him under the waves, but he did not drown.”

The story is prettier than the truth, even with the drowned sailors and the ruined ship. There are no needles, no blood, no pain, no terror. But right now, this is the story both she and the prince need to hear. Her tattoos still.

“There was a child under the waves, and a child above them. One loved the sea, and one loved the land. One sank, and the other rose, and after that moment, neither was alone again.”

“Here.” Ana slides the tablet showing a map and the coordinates for where she needs to go across the small table in the cramped galley. Theo turns it, frowning.

“That’s open ocean. There’s nothing for miles around.”

“Ships wreck in the open ocean all the time.” Ana shrugs, looking away.

Of course it’s not a ship she’s looking for, it’s a palace, a lost kingdom, but how can she explain it to Theo? How can she tell him a box in a dream and a voice inside her head are calling her home to a place she’s never lived, and she doesn’t know what she’ll find when she gets there?

“Hey.” Theo’s voice is soft. She looks up even though she doesn’t want to. “Tell me what’s going on with you?”

His voice is gentle, and there’s that concern in his eyes again. He peers at her to see beneath the hard edges. They’ve never really talked about it, but Ana knows Theo lost people, too. Why else would he have thrown his arm around her on the street that day? If sometimes she looks at him and sees home, then he must see it when he looks at her, too.

“I…” Ana falters. “I need to go there, and I’m not sure I’ll be coming back.”

It’s as close to the truth as she can get. The voice tolling through the waves, calling her home, is not a kind voice. She doesn’t know exactly what’s waiting for her, but she knows she can’t go on like this, afraid of herself, afraid for the prince, afraid of what she might do to someone who gets too close. If she ever hurt Theo…

“Then don’t go,” Theo says.

“It’s not up to me anymore.” A note of desperation breaks her voice, and Ana hates it, trying to push it back down.

Even now, she can feel it, a tug at the center of her belly, pulling at a part that both is and isn’t her. Two lost children, one sailing on the waves and one alone and frightened under them. Maybe they’re not all that different. Maybe, by now, they’re one and the same.

“If you’re in trouble, and I could help, you’d tell me?” It’s only half a question.

The way Theo asks it makes him seem like the younger one between them. For the life he’s lived, Theo has remarkable faith in the world. He has faith in her, in them together. Ana shakes her head, tears frosting her lashes, but not falling.

“Promise,” she says, and it isn’t entirely a lie. He can’t help her. This time, she’s on her own.

Theo watches her for a moment longer, like she’s a puzzle he’s trying to figure out. Finally, he rises, leaving her alone in the galley. Ana cradles a mug of coffee between her hands. Heat seeps through the ceramic, but her skin remains cold.

The wave builds, and holds, waiting a moment before breaking.

Ana watches the horizon. The sea and the sky are almost the same color, a pale, washed-out slate. The wind tugs at her hair and her jacket, the nylon making a snapping sound like a sail.

The engine’s growl drops to a purr, then a hum as Theo eases back on the throttle. There’s a splash as the anchor hits, followed by the long sound of the chain unwinding. Theo cuts the engine altogether.

“This is it,” Theo says.

Ana looks at him, really looks at him, as she hasn’t in a long time. He squints, deepening the lines at the corners of his eyes. There are a few early strands of gray in his hair, though he isn’t even thirty-five.

There’s a sudden image in her mind, Theo, older, with his arm around a woman’s shoulders; she’s nearly a head shorter than him, thick at the waist, hair blowing in the wind as they watch a pair of children run.

“If I don’t come back…” She looks away. It’s easier when she does. “Go somewhere far away from the sea,” she says. “Go inland. Find someone to love. Live a good life.”

She makes herself look at him then, and smiles, a crooked thing. Her tattoos sway, restless.

“Name one of your children after me, okay, cuz?”

She flashes a grin at his confusion, and before he has time to answer her, she unzips the windbreaker and lets it fall to the deck like shed skin.

“Aren’t you—” Theo starts, but the rest is lost as Ana launches herself off the bench and over the rail—no tank, no fins, no dive computer—just the air burning in her lungs.

The water is dark, but she follows instinct. The pain when the skin at her neck slits itself open is barely noticeable this time. She remembers holding her mama’s hand as they crowded onto the ship. She carries that pain with her as she goes deeper. She carries the pain of an ill-made child, too, a pawn in a power struggle, despised and afraid. She winds them both around her like armor, and she doesn’t feel the cold.

A warning spike of fear makes her jerk to the side. A spear tears her dive suit, just missing her skin. Cold water rushes in, and she whips around, faster than human limbs should allow. The spear is polished bone; the creature that wields it is nothing human. The torso is like a man’s, the cheekbones angled hard, eyes flat black, sloping skull giving way to thrashing tendrils like a nest of snakes. Needle teeth part with the familiar hiss, traitor.

She grabs the knife from her dive belt, and when the creature lunges again, she slashes its forearm. A shriek of pain, then an elbow driven in her face. Her nose gives with a sickening crunch. Blood clouds the water and pain blooms behind her eyes. Her fingers open, losing the knife. Through the haze, another figure appears. She is snake-long, and there are symbols cut into her blue-gray skin. The magician.

Ana feels the bruises, the cuts her father—the prince’s father—never saw. Hears the taunts and the threats and they blend with her own memories of the terrible sound of the ship being torn apart, and the magician’s priests chanting, and the needle going in and out of her skin.

No.

Ana becomes inky blackness, unfolding. She opens an infinity of mouths. Ill-made as she is, she’s more like her father than anyone knows. She is liquid smoke poured through the water; she is pain, and she is hunger.

Blue-flame eyes meet the magician’s. Then a dozen, dozen, dozen more open all over her body, every shape, every color, every size. And they see. Together, her rage and the prince’s fear are stronger than the magician’s tattoos and spells. The magician’s flat black gaze goes from triumph to fear. She tries to turn away, but Ana is faster. She thinks of the men on the boat, and the man in the alleyway, and even Zarah. She lashes out in every direction at once, catching the magician, and this time, she doesn’t hold back. She gives the prince free rein; together, they bite and rip and tear.

Ana is alone. Shreds of her dive suit drift around her, but not even scraps of her attackers remain. She should be cold, but she’s not. She should be afraid, but she’s not. Ana swims.

Figures pace her, keeping their distance. They’ve seen what she is, not the frightened, whipped princeling anymore. She is her father’s son, come home, and so much more. It is time to wake the King from his slumber.

She passes carved statues whose blind eyes are taller than her body. There are bones, the carcasses of sea creatures from the beginning of time. She feels the beating heart of the kingdom, its sluggish black pulse. Her father. Home. She holds the word like a stone on her tongue. She passes through a carved archway so wide she can’t see its edges. Home.

She opens her mouth. The voice that emerges is and is not hers. It has a thousand tongues, all of them belonging to dead men, save her own. She uses all of them to push out words like drowned coastlines and the shifting of tectonic plates.

WE ARE :::: WE ARE HOME.

Something stirs in the dark. It is not one thing, it is everything. It is every drowned ship since the beginning of time, shattered boards, torn sails, rotting corpses. It is the hungry maw of ocean trenches, every lightless abyss, every dead spot on the map where things disappear. It is lighthouse eyes, and foghorn voice, and the crash of the tide.

CHILD.

A word for her and for the thing inside of her. Eyes open, so many of them, surrounding her. She is seen, utterly and completely, then they blink closed.

Everything leaves her in a rush, a single thread of her pain and the prince’s, braided as one. It is pulled from her, and she gives it willingly, every cut, every blow, the needle tattooing her skin, the tanks, her mama, the rage.

And when she’s hollow, the King Under the Waves holds her without holding her, considers her with eyes sealed closed, even as he still dreams. In the stillness around her, there is a question.

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

She know the prince’s answer—unmake me.

But what does she want? The magician is destroyed, but her cult is still out there. Even now, they are searching for her, thinking they can control her, make her into the weapon the magician promised long ago. The prince may want unmaking, but Ana wants to live.

And just like that, the thought is plucked from her mind. All around her, the King Under the Waves unfolds. She feels the prince pulled from her, an ache like a lost tooth, part of her ripped away, but in the absence, she is remade.

The wave curls, and at its peak, it waits.

Ana is in the wave, and she is under the waves with the King, and she is on a boat, a frightened child, long ago. Time folds and unfolds around her, and she sees what is and what was and what could be.

In a time that isn’t now, a field of golden wheat turns bloody under the light of the setting sun. Theo stands on the porch of a house, surrounded by people Ana doesn’t recognize, except for one woman she maybe saw once in a dream. The wind howls, flattening stalks, and Theo shelters his eyes. The first drop of rain hits, and the people huddled beneath the edge of the roof look to the horizon, glad they are far from the ocean, and watch the storm rise.

Ana is that storm.

On a beach that isn’t now, but sometime soon, the magician’s priests and priestesses chant to call her from the sea. The tide hisses over wet stones, pulling back impossibly far. The sound is tumbled bones. The men and women sway. Their voices rise. They don’t notice the tide curling into a wave high enough to block the moon.

Ana unfolds and she is limbs and teeth and dead men’s bones. She is the wave curled above the beach, full of broken ships, splinter-sharp. She is a monster. She is a little girl clutching her mother’s hand. She is the heir to the King Under the Waves. Ana smiles.

Above the beach, the wave finally decides where it will fall. The sky is dark, darker, darkest, drowning the moon. By the time the cultists finally think to scream, it is too late. The wave crashes over, into them, through them. And the wave is full of terrible things.

Once upon a time, a child went under the waves and did not drown. Once upon a time, a child rose, a dripping, monstrous thing, climbing up from the waves again.