Girl at the Bottom of the Sea (13 page)

“What about now?” Sophie asked. “Now that I'm in the ocean all this time? Now that I can control the water?”

“Well, ya,” Syrena nodded. “Probably not kill you. Probably just make you like seaweed for rest of your life. You know, you just lie there forever, nothing.”

“Ugh, that's even worse!”

“Ya, ya. No worry, Sophie. We are going to make you strong as narwhal horn! Look.”

In the distance before them was a white column. It even resembled the horn the mermaid had talked about, a giant, ivory spiral. But as they crept closer, Sophie slowing the waters, she saw it was more like a tornado. An underwater tornado, spinning, frothing, sucking water from the surface in a controlled frenzy.

“The Swilkie,” Sophie said.

“Ya, ya, the Swilkie,” Syrena nodded. “So powerful. We will swim inside.”

Sophie opened her mouth to speak. “
Swim inside?
” she was going to say. “What are you talking about,
swim inside
!” The twisting tower looked violent as a swarm of sharks. But she bit her tongue. She had fought Kishka and won. Every day the ocean made her stronger, without her even knowing about it. The very waters responded to her, doing her bidding as if she were their queen. And maybe she was! Maybe she was Sophie Swankowski, Queen of the Waters. Then it was time for her to act like it. She was about to meet the Ogresses, the giant women who had dug for her the best chunk of salt the sea had to offer,
a giant cube of salt that had melted down to a beautiful pearl and had saved Sophie when she was so sick. She would not act like a child. Not to them, and not to Syrena.

“How do we do it?” she asked the mermaid. Her voice was steady, and her eyes were stuck on the Swilkie. How majestic it was. Sophie wished she could linger by the storm of it and watch it twirl. Like a terrible ballet, elegant but brutal, too. Sophie did not understand how she could swim into such a thing without being torn apart. But she didn't understand how she had made herself into a shark, either. Not understanding didn't mean anything anymore. It only mattered that she was ready to learn.

“I think you make easy for us,” Syrena said, “if you tell water to help. Normal, we just swim into it. And it bang us around like this and that, oh! You think periwinkles hurt your stomach! You stay caught in Swilkie for a couple days, your whole body feel like one bad stomach!”

“A couple
days
?” Sophie asked in exactly the frightened, whiny tone she was trying to avoid. She cleared her throat, hoping she could clear away some panic in the process. “I mean—so, we'll spin in the Swilkie for how long? How many days?”

“Long as take to reach center. Center of Swilkie calm, like long, calm tunnel. We swim right down to Ogresses. Very easy. But not easy to swim into center, because water push and pull you very hard, like trying to eat you.”

“Huh.” Sophie looked at the spinning Swilkie. Twisting, twisting, twisting, they both could feel its power, its pull. Sophie knew that all
they had to do was swim a little bit closer and then the Swilkie would do the work, sucking them right in.

“But I think you maybe just ask the water to open for us,” Syrena suggested. “Like, make path right to center? You try, ya?”

“How?” Sophie asked, and the mermaid gave her a look. “Okay, give me a second.” Sophie focused on the water. It felt, in some strange way, like doing a math puzzle. There were patterns at work and Sophie could manipulate them. Part of it was that the water was alive, and her asking did the work. But the water was also information, streams and streams of it, and Sophie could change what it was saying, rewrite it. Her tinkering was also her asking.

If Sophie paused to think about it too clearly, she knew it wouldn't work. With her mind and with something else, her intuition perhaps, Sophie dug into the structure of the water and she divided it with a plea. In just a breath she felt what she had done. Her talisman allowed her to breathe beneath the water, but it wasn't the same. Sophie had created a pocket of oxygen. The sudden breath of it shot straight to her head, making her giddy.

“Syrena, look!” she cried. Before them was a tunnel, a strange space that cut through the water—but Sophie could see, too, that it seemed to be killing everything in its path. Sophie smacked her hand to her mouth as she watched a small school of silvery fish twitch and then, en masse, flutter to the ground like torn paper. On either side of the oxygen tunnel, swaying strips of sea grass grew brittle and brown, then crumbled. But still, they needed to make it through the Swilkie.

“Sophie, what are you doing?” Syrena cried.

Whatever it was, Sophie did it harder. She pried and unlocked the water all the way up to the Swilkie's wild column, and a gap appeared in its side.

“It's oxygen!” Sophie cried.

“You're killing the creatures!” the mermaid hollered back, as a pair of cod swam haplessly into the airy space and began to gasp, seizing and falling. Some that had lagged behind seemed to explode in a burst of silvery rain.

“Quickly, quickly, go, so I can stop it!” She pushed the mermaid in the direction of the space in the Swilkie, and the mermaid, entering the oxygen chamber, fumbled.

“I can't swim!” she cried. “There is nothing to swim in!” Like the sea creatures before her, she fumbled and flailed. She took deep breaths of oxygen and stumbled forward, Sophie pushing from behind, keeping the gate open. They were swimming clumsily upon air, Sophie holding the whole unnatural situation together with her mind, and it was exhausting.
Go, go go go go
, she thought, pushing herself forward, willing the mermaid through the portal in the Swilkie's rushing waters. All around them, the living ocean died as it encountered a combustible cloud of oxygen where seawater once flowed.

Syrena pushed into the hole in the Swilkie, and Sophie reached out and grabbed her tail, pulling herself in. The sound of the water roaring around them was deafening, like being trapped in a waterfall. As Syrena curved her body into the eye of the Swilkie, Sophie relaxed
her grip on the water—and felt the Swilkie's churning wall crash down on her.

Sophie saw Syrena's face as the mermaid turned inside the serenity of the eye; watched her expression morph from relief to horror. Sophie had let go of the water too soon. She had seen the mermaid enter the eye and thought they had both arrived. She was wrong.

It was as if the sea had taken its muscular arm and wrangled the girl into a headlock, then proceeded to whip her around in a circle at a velocity she could barely comprehend. Probably she was tumbling, but it happened so fast she could not even register it. Her body felt beyond her, held in the many fists of the Swilkie. She spun and spun until her brain felt scrambled, until space and time were pounded away.

But eventually Sophie began to relax. She hadn't even known she was struggling; the wild motion of the Swilkie caught everything in its grip, making it one, and it was impossible to tell where her body ended and the waters began. But now, with her breath growing calm, Sophie began to enjoy the spinning. Its motions even seemed to slow, though Sophie knew this was impossible. She thought about how the rotations of the earth were undetectable. Had the Swilkie become her home? Would she eventually grow to not feel the whirlpool at all? Would she be stuck here forever?

The swirling water made intricate patterns around her face. Whether her eyes were open or closed, she felt their ever-shifting lace imprinted on her vision. Even the constant rush of the waters became inaudible after a time, and she spun in a dreamy quiet, acclimated to
the roar completely.
Or
, a part of Sophie's mind piped up,
maybe it's made you deaf.

It became so that Sophie could not tell when her eyes were open and when they were shut. After a few hours of this—
or maybe a year
, Sophie couldn't help but think—a movement somewhere beyond the Swilkie's froth roused her from the water's trance. It was as if something was beating against the sea in short, sharp raps. Smacking at it. A tail. Had the Swilkie sucked in a whale? Would Sophie soon be doing this endless waltz with a whale, twirling and suspended, timeless, motionless?

“
Sophieeeeeeeeeeeee!
” It was like hearing her name through panes of glass, through ears stuffed with cotton.

“
Sophieeeeeeeeeeee!
” It was like her name was being howled by a ghost.

On the other side of the wall of water, the girl saw another flick of a tail. She saw the scratch of claws, claws that glowed like pearls. Pearls. Griet. Syrena. Syrena, her mermaid! And it was as if Sophie was waking up from something, a slumber or a fever, something that had addled her, made her dull, nearly made her forget who she was and where she was going.

“Syrena!” she screamed, and the water filled her mouth like a punch. She coughed and spit it out and it splashed back against her face, confusing her. But she couldn't afford to be confused. She tried to relax, letting the Swilkie spin her. She looked and listened, and again saw the dark motion of a tail beyond the water.

“Swim to me, Sophieeeeeeeeeee!” The mermaid called as if from another dimension. And Sophie let her strength gather, and then
called it throughout her body. With a controlled zawolanie, she rocketed herself through the wall of water, which battered at her viciously as she broke through its prison. She landed in Syrena's arms.

“Oh, I think the Swilkie keep you forever!” the mermaid cried, petting the girl's wild hair. Her hand struck a bump upon Sophie's scalp, and she pushed away a tangle to reveal the baby octopus. “You still here?” she asked the creature. Its tentacles were twined into the roots of Sophie's hair, and it too seemed rattled from the Swilkie. Sophie's shirt was torn from the power of the water, and her already ragged cutoffs were shredded.

Sophie looked up at the mermaid's face, her grayish-blue skin and wide, blue eyes that glowed like talismans. Sophie had never been to an art museum, but it seemed like the mermaid would be something you'd find in such a place. Chiseled and majestic, both beautiful and tragic. Sophie would have liked to stare at the mermaid forever, but she cast her eyes downward. Syrena didn't like being stared at, and Sophie was enjoying the mermaid's embrace too much to risk being spat out of her arms.

“How long was I in there?” she murmured into Syrena.

“Oh. A week, I think. Too long. Was so worried about you was not even bored!” the mermaid laughed her harsh laugh. “You imagine, stuck in this place? Look around you.”

Sophie brought her head up and surveyed the space as she was told. It was nothing, a void. Around them the waters rushed, eternal, heedless of the creatures caught inside.

“All week I do nothing but stare at water, look for you. Stare so long, I start to see things. Stare so long, my eyes so tired, still, I stare even more, to find you.”

Sophie squeezed the mermaid. She couldn't imagine what would have happened without her. She'd be there forever, spinning and spinning. Forgetting she even existed, entranced by the water. “It messed my brain up,” Sophie tried to explain. “Being in there. I almost forgot you were here!”

“I very sure,” the mermaid said. “Why don't you ride on my back? I take us to the Ogresses.”

Gratefully, Sophie slung her arms around Syrena's neck, burying her face in the mermaid's pile of hair. Upon her own head, the baby octopus began to lessen its grip, pulling itself free of her tangles. It felt like a head massage, and Sophie almost cried, she was so happy. To go from the center of a storm to lying upon a mermaid like a hammock while a baby octopus gave you a head rub—Sophie felt in that moment that if her life was not charmed then there was no such thing as charm.

As the mermaid began to swim them through the eye of the Swilkie, Sophie struggled to keep her eyes open. A week ago she had had no idea what a Swilkie even was, and here she was in the heart of it. She should pay more attention. She would likely never be in such a place again. But with the rushing of the waters all around her, the girl was lulled to sleep.

Chapter 12

S
ophie woke with a start, and then a scream. An eyeball as big as her face was peering at her, wide and golden and unblinking. The scream that left her mouth was hoarse but piercing, and Syrena was swiftly at her side, delivering a smack to her shoulder.

“Respect!” she barked. “And some gratitude, if you please!”

So much for the cozy, cuddling mermaid who'd saved her life and cradled her through the eye of the storm. Syrena was back to her old self, the cranky mermaid of the city of Warsaw who had for so long protected the city's river with little more than her bad attitude.

“I'm sorry,” Sophie mumbled, rubbing her shoulder and looking down at her bedding. She was not quite awake enough to peer into the giant eye of an Ogress again. “I just—I was having a nightmare.”

“It seems as if time has been one long nightmare lately, hasn't it?” asked the Ogress in a voice both booming and smooth. Sophie could
tell that the creature was attempting to whisper, for her sake. Sophie took a deep breath and looked into her eye.

Well, it was a very pretty eye. Brown and gold flickering together like a light show. The Ogress pulled back a bit and Sophie could see her other eye, both of them set into a massive face. The nose was bold and the lips full and curved. Her long hair fell in a plait down her back, and Sophie was suddenly aware of her own wild snarls. She touched her hair anxiously, and her hand bumped something scratchy. Livia's feather. Her hair had wound around it so densely Sophie would have to cut it out if she ever wanted to remove it—which she never, ever would.