Chapter Text
It was a quiet, decent morning in the reef. After the excitement of the night’s storm, all but the scrappiest locals were still tucked away in their hiding places, hesitant to be the first to poke their heads out in the still waters.
Taylor was one such scrappy local. For most inhabitants of the reef, a storm was trouble, but for her, it was an opportunity. Fish often dove deeper to escape the surging waves on the surface, which meant they gathered in her domain, the reef’s dim and rocky underbelly. Unaccustomed to the cooler water and low visibility, they made for easy prey, and Taylor took full advantage.
Where most Folk were of a piscine aspect, Taylor’s lower half was distinctly crustacean, long-tailed with spindly legs and swimmerets along her underside. Just below her torso, a pair of raptorial forelimbs were tucked, which she often used to grip and hold things while her hands were occupied. Her forelimbs had another, very specific use, but she preferred to avoid it because it put the whole reef on high alert, which was so embarrassing.
She could swim, though not quickly, and so spent most of her time at the bottom of the reef or in the tidal flats, with the crabs and urchins. This didn’t earn her many friends among the Folk, but she got along alright with her fellow bottom feeders.
Taylor was taking a break to munch on a fish she’d ambushed in the depths when a squad of shrimp approached. As with all their kind, they communicated in chorus, a stream of collective consciousness:
queen.
queen?
feed. help queen?
feed. scary. hard.
help. hard feed. scary thing.
queen scary. help.
“You want help with some food you found?” It wasn’t an uncommon request. The crustaceans often scouted larger catches or juicier prey for her, knowing they’d be able to nibble on the scraps while she ate. It was usually something dead that hadn’t sunk to the bottom yet, or a cluster of mollusks or urchins they wanted her to crack open. As for the ‘scary thing’, shrimps thought everything was scary. It was probably a seal or octopus or something.
Taylor extended a hand, and the shrimps took turns inspecting it with their mouthparts. The cheekier of their number snuck tiny bites from the fish in her other hand, which Taylor didn’t care enough about to shoo them away.
hand? help.
feed… queen? follow.
feed. scary. help. follow.
Taylor followed the shrimps up the reef’s slope into rocky shallows. The sunrise cast dappled golden light over the vibrant corals and anemones that covered every inch of available rock. This part of the reef was crowded and perilous for most Folk to navigate, since the only way through was via narrow, sandy-bottomed corridors between the colorful outcroppings, but Taylor was well suited to climb right over.
It made for a handy escape route from Emma and her cronies whenever Taylor caught them in a cruel mood. Sophia, with her agile tendrils and jet propulsion, was sometimes bold enough to chase Taylor over the ridge, but the others weren’t so motivated these days. As they approached adulthood, they had more important things to do than harass the outcast.
Taylor sighed. It was a nice morning and she had a job to do, no point in dwelling on unpleasant thoughts.
Between the reef and the beach was a longshore trough, where the water grew deeper again but had a plain, sandy bottom. A sizable bull shark drifted into view, spooking the shrimps for a moment, who hid in Taylor’s hair. He affixed a black eye on her as he roved close.
Little sister, he spoke, in the tongue of the sea. There’s meat ashore. Drag it in the water and we will feed together.
“Maybe,” Taylor replied. She tried to remember Lisa’s lessons on negotiation, instead of just helping for its own sake, which she said was for ‘suckers’. Taylor still didn’t understand what Lisa had against suckers, since they helped keep the reef clean. “What would you have to trade if I did?”
I’ll give you my teeth. As many as you can hold in one claw.
It was a tempting offer. Taylor broke her knife two moons ago, and hadn’t yet foraged enough shark teeth to make a new one. “I’ll think about it,” she decided. The only reply she got from him was a flaring of his gills as he continued patrolling his section of shoreline. Sharks weren’t the chatty type.
She breached the surface of the water and adjusted to breathing air. The shrimp couldn’t follow her up, but she felt them excitedly dart around her legs as she loped through the surf. The shrimp started hopping out of the water like porpoising little fish, and she followed their directions around a high outcropping of rock.
Sprawled out on the shore of a small cove sheltered by cliffs, she found the bottom feeders’ prize. A moment later, she saw the scary thing they warned of. Oh, it was scary.
Lisa needed to see this. Taylor dove into the water, leaving a cyclone of dizzy shrimp in her wake.
~~~
Lisa was lounging on a sun-warmed rock near the largest island when Taylor found her. The air in this part of the atoll was a constant din of squawking from gathered seabirds, which Lisa tolerated only because sometimes the squawking carried useful info.
“Seriously? You got nothing across the entire atoll?” Lisa lay on her belly, cheek propped in her hand. It was clear she’d spent all morning talking to her feathered informants, because empty clamshells littered the lower levels of her perch.
The gull burred and shrugged her wings in exasperation. ”Look, sister, I wasn’t interested in being out there longer than I had to. I did sweeps across the entire stretch. Nothing, no ships. They’ve been avoiding the islands ever since you-know-who moved in.”
“Ugh. I thought he’d give us more wrecks, not less.”
”Oh, he’s wrecking more ships alright. But word on the buoy is he drags ‘em to his lair somewhere way past the dropoff.”
“Yeah? Who told you that?”
”Eek.”
“Eek from the Greenwater pod?” Lisa scoffed. “I know her. Dolphins are full of shit. I bet she said she has a man pet she’s training to catch fish for her.”
”Maybe. So?”
“Well, if she tries to show him off, don’t waste your time. He’s just a fish-netter she steals from, like what every other dolphin does, but sometimes he feeds her from his hand. That makes her his pet, if anything.”
The gull was silent for a long moment. ”Can I get paid now?”
Lisa rolled her eyes and popped a scallop open with her knife. “Find a more reliable source on the lair rumor and I’ll get you roe.” The gull shrieked and feasted, keeping her wings spread to batter the other greedy birds if they got too close.
“Hey, Lisa? Could we talk in private?” Taylor scaled a lower section of the rock and propped her arms on the platform Lisa lay on.
Lisa perked up, and her tail curled behind her, fins flaring in greeting. “Oh, mother, I was hoping you’d save me from this. If I hear one more ‘I dunno, give me food now’ I’m gonna start wringing necks.”
The gulls, who heard every word of Lisa’s threat, continued bullying each other off the perch for the opportunity to be the next to talk to her. Greedy morons.
Taylor tilted her head toward the water, and they dove together. Lisa scooped up the basket of clams she was using as barter on her way down, to the deafening protests of the birds around them, but it was only a burst of noise before they were under the waves.
Taylor couldn’t help but envy the way Lisa’s scales shimmered in the diffuse sunlight. In warm seasons, her tail was a vibrant lavender color that terminated into shining black at her fins. Under cooler moons, her colors darkened, and her tail turned a stunning black with iridescent purple striping that marked her as an outlier among the reef Folk, just like Taylor was.
By comparison, Taylor’s tail was nothing special. Her carapace was a mottled brown that would darken to full black as she got older, and her only pop of color was orangey-yellow frills that accented her swimmerets and forelimbs. If she wrapped her pale upper half in seaweed or other debris, she all but disappeared into the background of the sea floor. Totally plain and forgettable.
The girls found a familiar overhang among the coral, too exposed for most gossipy reef fish to be close enough to listen, but decently hidden from the prying eyes of other Folk. Taylor performed a sweep around the area anyway. Nerves tingled along her gills as she huddled in close.
“There’s a man on the island.”
Lisa tilted her head. Taylor had hoped she would look more impressed. “Did you get anything shiny off him?”
“No, I couldn’t get close. I think he’s alive. He moved a little, but it might have been the waves.”
“No way. You think, or you know? Why couldn’t you get closer?”
“There’s a monster on the shore with him. It looked like a cross between a seal and an otter, black hair, four legs. It was scaring off the scavengers that tried to get close. I think it wanted the carcass all to itself.”
“There’s four-legs on the island. It wasn’t one of those?”
“No, it’s nothing I’ve ever seen before. I’ll take you, you can see it for yourself.”
“Hold up. Before we go anywhere, where’d you find him? Is he close to a wreck, should I grab my tools?” Lisa had been going through a trinket drought over the past rainy season, and she’d been saying this storm was a promising one.
Taylor didn’t like to dash Lisa’s hopes. She fiddled with a tangle in her hair as it drifted on a current. “No wreck that I saw, sorry. He’s in a cove on the east side of the third island.”
“What the shell were you doing over there without backup? That’s enemy territory.”
Taylor crossed her arms and forelimbs at the same time. “Emma and Sophia don’t get to claim a whole side of an island.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “some shrimp asked for help. They led me over to him.”
“Babe, you’ve got to stop hanging out with the bottom feeders. Their weirdness is going to rub off on you.”
“They’re not weird. They’re simple-minded, but nice enough. They just don’t talk to you because you keep eating them after they molt.”
“It’s not my fault crabs are so delicious when they’re all soft and gooey. Don’t you eat them too?”
“Yeah, but just the babies. Everyone eats those.”
Lisa rubbed her temples and reclined back in the water. “You’re killing me, hon.” She gestured resignedly beyond the overhang. “Alright, let’s go see this freak.”
~~~
The freak was, as Taylor reported, a man. He hadn’t moved since she left.
Foamy waves lapped at the not-hands on the ends of his legs, and crabs and gulls were gathered across the beach, eager to feed. But none dared to be close to him, because the man was guarded by a beast. It galloped around him, barking and growling, sending the scavengers scattering only for them to gather elsewhere. If the beast hoped to keep them away, it faced a losing battle.
“See?” Taylor whispered. She and Lisa were huddled around the edge of an outcropping on the cove’s northern end.
Lisa stared between the beast and the man and nodded slowly to herself. “Okay, here’s the plan. Tell your little subjects to charge the four-legs. While it’s busy mauling a crab, we’ll drag the man underwater and take his stuff.”
Taylor nodded in time with Lisa. Sure, she liked the bottom feeders, but they got eaten all the time. One or two crabs lost for the prize of an intact man carcass seemed like a reasonable trade to her, right? “Okay. What if he’s still alive?”
“Look at him. He’s obviously dead. We have to do this before anything starts tearing into his pelt, I’ve never seen skin as intact as his before.”
Taylor evaluated the man. He was a bizarre creature to look at: mostly normal in the face, with a head of wild auburn hair, but his skin below the neck was strange and ill-fitting. His upper half was clad in a white, billowing pelt, and his lower half sported striped skin that ended in tattered frills halfway down his legs. He must have been halfway through a molt.
The man stirred a little and groaned, and the beast rasped ferociously at the man’s face, slobber dripping from its jaws. By the mother…it was eating him alive!
She dove. Lisa chased after her, hissing, “wait! Taylor!”, but it fell on deaf ears.
Taylor exploded out of the surf and surged onto shore. She was even slower on land than she was underwater, but compared to Folk like Lisa, who could do little except flop awkwardly back toward water, she may as well have been a charging barracuda.
The beast snarled at her, but she reared up on her back legs and splayed those at her abdomen in an instinctive threat display. The complex inner musculature of her carapacid lower half pulled taut, and her forelimbs drew back, poised to strike.
The beast tucked its tail and shimmied low to the ground in an arc around the man. It was too afraid to come within Taylor’s reach, but was also unwilling to leave the man’s side. A strange, stubborn thing. Was the man its pet, or vice versa, as Lisa mentioned with Eek?
The man stirred, and Taylor stooped in the sand to inspect him. It was as she suspected. He was halfway through a troublesome molt, or whatever the equivalent was for pelted things. Every unprotected patch of skin was reddened and flaky, and blood had soaked into his half-shed upper half, a sign he’d been battered against the reef on his way to the shore.
There was a split down the center of the man’s half-shed, exposing the undamaged, fresh skin of his chest. Taylor tilted her head and felt along the edge of it. It was odd that the shed layer had such a different texture from his new skin. Her mother had helped her with molts when she was younger, so maybe the man was a juvenile who still needed help.
“Taylor!” Lisa couldn’t come any closer without beaching herself. “Drag it into the water, the monster won’t stay back for long!”
“Just a second!” Taylor hurried to pull the shed skin off. It was so ready to be removed that she could reach her hands far under and touch fresh skin without any need for peeling. It was surreal to realize she was touching a human being when the most she ever saw before were skeletons. They were startlingly warm.
“Taylor!” Lisa’s call didn’t have the same bite of irritation as before. She was resigned to her fate. “Are we petting him or are we taking his stuff?”
“He looks like a different kind of human. Aren’t men supposed to be hairier?”
“He’s probably a young one. Does it matter?”
“I think we should help him!”
“And I think they should crown me queen of the reef and let me eat all the softshells I want! Any other fantasies you want to share?”
When Taylor’s hands brushed over the unexpected shape of the human’s chest, her eyebrows shot up.
She stared at the man’s chest, glanced down at her own, then looked back at Lisa. “He has boobs*! Is that normal?” *Add.: Nearest approximation as translated from reef Folk slang.
Lisa looked like a scallop in a tidal flat. “Huh?”
Taylor patently refused to pantomime for emphasis. She gestured vaguely at the man’s chest, lips drawn tight.
“It’s probably blubber. Is he fat?”
“Um. No.”
“Hon, I say this with love, but are you sure you don’t just have a skewed perspective on other people’s boobs? It must be muscle.”
Taylor rolled her eyes. “They’re bigger than yours! Is that normal or not?”
Lisa threw up her hands. “I don’t know! There’s--” She pressed her fingertips to her temples. “Okay, I met a parrot who was imprisoned by them for a few years. He said there’s men who look more like Folk, at least up top. The men called them…wife? Wives.”
“Are wives rare?”
“Of course not.” Lisa resigned herself to laying in the surf with her chin in her hands. Her tail slapped the water with a testy splash. “Obviously, humans are men when they’re young, and when they reach a certain age, they morph into a wife, who mates on land. We only see men on ships because the wives are at home, guarding the eggs.”
Taylor nodded. It made sense. This human must have begun the transition into a wife, which would explain how much she struggled to molt properly. “I’ll help her out of her skin and we can go. Just a few rolls of the tide.”
Lisa groaned, but she didn’t really have a choice except to wait.
The human’s salt-scoured eyes cracked open. Taylor jumped and slipped her hands out from under the human’s molt. “Oh! Hello. Are you okay? You seemed like you needed help.”
The human squinted blearily in the daylight, and Taylor braced her upper body over hers to provide some shade. The respite from the burning sun made the wife sigh, and she woke up a little more. She spoke in a halting, guttural tongue.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Taylor replied. She tapped two fingers to her lips, a commonly-accepted Folk greeting and invitation in one. Taylor shouldn’t have expected her to understand the gesture, and wasn’t sure if the human could see well besides, with all the salt and sunlight likely blurring her vision.
The wife coughed, and her voice was a parched croak. She repeated a two-note word a few times. Taylor copied the sound, and that produced a better reaction. The human bobbed her head feebly.
Taylor smiled. She’d braced herself for the human to be much more combative. She leaned down, and her dark hair formed a curtain around the wife’s face. She joined their lips together, soft and salt-tinged.
The human’s reaction was immediate. She shoved Taylor away and lurched upright, scrabbling backward in the sand. “What the fuck!”
Taylor held up her hands in a placating gesture. “It’s alright, we know one another’s tongue now! I didn’t think that would work.”
“Don’t kiss me!”
Taylor’s brow furrowed. She crossed her arms. “That wasn’t a kiss. It’s how shoals of Folk from different oceans share–”
The human wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her eyes flit downward, and when she saw Taylor’s legs and tail, her voice turned shrill. “What the fuck?!”
The birds and scavengers around them skittered off. Taylor reared up in alarm while the human scrambled back, looking angry and terrified in one. Taylor tried to calm her down. “I’m not trying to eat you!” She proclaimed, hands raised. “I just wanted to help peel your skin off!”
The wife--or woman, or perhaps girl, as Taylor’s new understanding of the men-tongue corrected--put her fingers to her lips and let out a shrill sound like a dolphin’s cry. “Sirius! Kill!” She barked this at the black-furred beast, who looked about as ready to attack as a newborn otter was to swim: reluctantly, and whining the whole way.
Before Taylor could be killed by the dubiously fearsome four-legs, she scuttled into the surf. Lisa, who’d been slowly pushed further onto the sand by waves, spat out a litany of curses as she heaved herself around and kicked off into deeper waters.
What the hell was her problem? Were all humans so unreasonable?
They regrouped behind the barnacle-encrusted rocks that formed the cove’s barrier. Lisa, stonefaced with arms crossed, drifted into Taylor's field of view. She fluttered her gills and fiddled with her hair. They stared at each other.
“I’m not mad,” Lisa began.
“She didn’t have anything shiny on her.”
“Okay--”
“And her pelt was old. There’ll be much fresher ones in the Leviathan’s lair, more than we’ll know what to do with.”
Lisa had been cradling her forehead in one hand like she had a headache, but her eyes darted up. Yeah, Taylor knew that would get her attention. “We have to find his lair first.”
“Exactly.” Taylor pointed to the surface. “This could be a lead.”
Lisa opened her mouth to rebut when realization struck. A familiar glint alighted in her eyes. “Leviathan almost always hunts during storms. So there’s a high chance the human came from a ship he attacked,” she mused. “And he’s an ambush predator, so if the human remembers where she went down…”
“It’ll be right above his lair,” Taylor finished.
Lisa summoned up a heap of bubbles with the force of her sigh. Because she was an expert at being smug and also playing the put-upon best friend, she managed an expression that conveyed both at once. “You just want a man pet like Eek, don’t you?”
Taylor tried to keep the pleased smile off her face, but her swimmerets did a little jog. “You’ll only need to keep an eye on her while I get food.”
“Babysitting a human, just how I wanted to spend my morning.”
“It beats strangling greedy seagulls.”
Lisa pushed a lock of hair out of her face with a phhbt from her lips. “I’ll give you ‘til halfsun. If it turns out that beast can swim, I’m leaving them for the crabs.”
“Deal.” Taylor whipped her tail up to catch Lisa in a playful upswell of water, and Lisa responded in kind. “I’ll be back soon.”
As Taylor hurried off in search of things that might win the human over, she recalled that two-note word the girl had been so insistent on saying to her. Wat-er. Water. Well, there’s plenty of that here.
What did humans like to eat? Fish? Kelp? Carrion? Taylor was a decent hunter, and Lisa gave her plenty of time. She decided to get a bit of everything.