The north stretch has the best camera angle. That’s the real reason they’re up there.
Me
I’ll fix it
Elliot
How?
Me
Don’t worry about it
Three dots appeared and disappeared twice, the closest Elliot got to protesting.
Elliot
Please don’t get arrested before the tournament. I can’t afford your bail before we get that tournament money.
Me
No promises
He sent back a turtle emoji and a thumbs-up, and I lay there, trying to formulate a new plan.
Two hundred feet. That was nothing. They could move the whole compound in an afternoon, and they wouldn’t, because the cameras liked the north light, and it would move their bottom line ever so slightly.
Even though it would cost the lives of innocent creatures.
But they didn’t care. Turtles don’t buy energy drinks.
Fine.
I’d make them move.
When people imagine an ocean witch,they picture my mother—and fair, that’s what an ocean witch looked like. Brimming with power, enough to control—or at least manipulate—a force so vast it was almost beyond comprehension. The whole heaving, depthless weight of it, hers to the horizon.
I got the beach.
The sand, the shore, the margin. The strip everyone walked over to get to the ocean.
I sometimes wondered if, when our family’s magic got divided up, my mother received the sea and I received the part the sea wiped clean twice a day. Even my weak magic had always resonated with every part, from the creatures who lived there, to the shells they left behind, but especially with the sand that was the foundation.
It still stung, but as I’d grown older—if not wiser—I tried to think of it as zoning: the water was hers, but every grain from the dunes to the tide line was mine, and RipTide had built their little branded city on top of it.
Well, unlike my mother, I wasn’t a very hospitable landlord.
And here’s what I knew about that little city, from observation and one very satisfying afternoon of bird-related vandalism: the whole thing ran on a fresh-water line they’d trenched up from the public hookup by the showers. They’d blocked off the public resource for their own purposes and sabotaging it there would be nearly impossible with the amount of staff around.
They wanted misters in the VIP tent and a foot rinse forinfluencers who didn’t like sand at the beach, and they had gotten them.
They’d buried their lines shallow, maybe two feet down, under thirty yards of sand.
My sand.
So, I asked the sand to give it back. I asked it to surface the line slowly, the way shells and sea glass and lost things all surfaced throughout the day. Then let the lines bake in the sun, get stepped on, get kinked, get expensive.
And while I was at it, why not a little more sabotage? Some sand drifting into the generators, sand in the misters, tent stakes that wouldn’t hold, and most importantly, cameras they couldn’t keep upright. Very expensive cameras that kept crashing to the ground.
