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Diving down with an agility that was probably her only advantage over the whale, she hurtled toward a slim fissure in the rocks. She turned her spear so that it was point down and wouldn’t catch on the edges, and dove blindly into the gap.
She felt the rock scratch against her shoulders and winced, hoping it wasn’t enough to draw blood. A whale and a shark would be too much. As soon as she felt her fins follow her into the gap, she pulled up. Fortunately the space widened after the initial opening, and she was able to spin around. She poked her spear upward through the fissure, and waited, breathing hard. The whale had dived down with her, but it couldn’t follow her into the rock. It swam back and forth in agitation, flashes of black and white filling her vision. Merletta had no idea about the hunting habits of whales. Would it wait for her to come out, or lose interest and go in search of easier prey? Would its fellows come to aid it?
It showed no immediate sign of giving up. Minutes slid by, and still Merletta was trapped, her heart racing and her hands shaking on the handle of her spear. All at once, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a luminous white glow, coming toward her with a horribly familiar flowing motion.
The jellyfish, probably disturbed by her violent entrance into the chasm, floated toward her, moving in uneven billows that had a rhythm of their own. Merletta felt her body freeze, but she couldn’t afford to panic. The whale was still above, and while the sight of the jellyfish woke an illogical terror inside her, she could see at a glance that it wasn’t a dangerous one. She would have to stay where she was.
The jellyfish was almost on her, and she squeezed her eyes shut, focusing all her effort on holding in a scream. The space was confined, and she was certain she wouldn’t escape untouched. Sure enough, a moment later, she felt the soft brush of the jellyfish, followed instantly by the agonizing pain of its sting. It was significantly larger than the ones in the bloom Ileana had pushed her into, and therefore its sting was considerably more painful. Merletta thrust the end of her braid into her mouth and bit down hard on it to stop herself crying out. She didn’t want to excite the whale.
When she couldn’t take the blindness anymore, she forced her eyes open. The jellyfish was moving away from her, and she could no longer see black and white flashing above her. She waited, shaking violently from shock more than actual hurt. She had an angry red welt on her arm, but already the first pain of the sting was starting to recede. She poked her head cautiously out of the hole, and saw no sign of the whale. Pulling her head back in, she forced herself to count to two hundred, then checked again. The water was empty. Moving slowly, she emerged from her hiding place. Her arm was stinging, but she felt a curious sense of triumph. She had grappled with one of her deepest fears, and prevailed.
The elation of that thought soon faded as she realized just how unfamiliar her surroundings were. She swam up high, hoping to get her bearings, but she could see nothing she recognized in any direction. How could she have been so foolish as to follow that pod of dolphins in the middle of her test? Fighting panic, she picked a new landmark below her and began a methodical search, moving outward and back, outward and back, hoping desperately to see the luminescent coral she’d noted earlier.
It took her an hour to find it, and when she did, she shed actual tears of relief. So much for a strategic sacrifice of five minutes for a break from the pressure. She had begun to think she was lost in the middle of the ocean, with little hope of finding her way home, and no hope of passing her test.
Her lesson learned, she stuck close to the trail and moved quickly between each marker. She could only hope she was nearing her goal. Several minutes later, she saw with a rush of apprehension that a huge chasm opened up not far ahead. She couldn’t help hoping the trail would lead her in a different direction, but she was unsurprised to see the latest mark pointing directly over the yawning edge.
“I hate depth work,” she muttered to no one in particular.
But there was no time to hesitate, not since she’d wasted it frolicking with dolphins. Steeling herself, she dove down into the darkness. Her eyes adjusted quickly, as they always did, and she was able to find the next marker without too much trouble. Unfortunately, it led her even deeper.
As she descended into the drop off, she noticed fewer scores on the rocks. Clearly some of the former trainees had been anxious to get out of this dark hole, and hadn’t paused to add to every marker. She didn’t blame them, although she conscientiously scored each one with her spear. This chasm wasn’t a round hole, but a long deep trench on the ocean floor, along which the trail led her.
Her eyes played tricks on her in the dark, and the memory of the huge octopus from her practice test was unpleasantly vivid in her mind. She kept imagining that she saw tentacles reaching for her from crevices in the dark rocks.
Then suddenly, she realized what she was seeing was no trick of the mind. She recoiled at the sight of a long, thick tentacle emerging from a gap up ahead. It was orange on the top, and glowed a ghostly white on the underside. Merletta floated, frozen in horror, as more tentacles followed. She lost track after six, her eyes riveted instead on the bulbous eyes and long, tubular head that seemed to squelch out of an impossibly small hole in the trench wall.
The creature drew itself up, one eye fixed unblinkingly on Merletta. It was huge, five times as big as she was, and its body blocked the entire trench. Merletta’s spear trembled from the shaking of her hands, and she felt the certainty of death cutting its path toward her through the water, moving as swiftly and sleekly as a shark.
Then her eyes spotted something behind the creature’s softly swaying tentacles. A marker on the rock behind, this one showing a sharp turn rather than just a straight line. It had the fewest scores of any yet, but the sight still bolstered Merletta. Trainees who had come before had made it past the squid, many of them. Sage must have, and Emil. She followed the line of the marker with her eyes and saw it was pointing directly into a round, dark hole in the rock. The hole was smaller than the one the squid had emerged from, and it was on the opposite side of the trench.
Fighting every instinct that told her to flee toward light and warmth, Merletta dove suddenly downward. She swam with all her might, aware that the squid was moving after her, but not daring to check how close it was. She surged toward the black opening, hoping desperately that she’d understood the marker correctly, that the gap was too small for the squid to follow, that she’d make it in time.
She felt the end of a tentacle slide along her scales as she shot into the hole. It was pitch black in there, and the tunnel was so narrow that having entered with her arms at her sides, she couldn’t shift to extend them in front of her. She had to rely on her tail to propel her into the blackness. Her spear was laid flat against the underside of her arm, her hand twisted awkwardly to hold it at the right angle. She had no choice but to keep moving forward, and the tunnel felt endless. If the squid hadn’t been hard on her fins at the time, she thought venturing into the tunnel would have been the greatest test of all for her bravery. As it was, she hadn’t even hesitated.
The blackness seemed to press against her eyes, and her head was aching worse than ever from the depth. But still she kept moving forward, trusting in the trainees who’d gone before her, who’d emerged in one piece out the other side.
With foreboding, she heard a strange sound from up ahead of her, a churning, boiling kind of sound that grew louder as she moved forward. Then, all at once, the tunnel ended, and she popped out into open space.
But it wasn’t calm water, like she’d been swimming in before she entered the trench. The water here was violent, thrashing with an intensity that reminded her of the waves pounding the shore of the island the day Heath had almost died, the day she’d discovered her legs. As soon as she left the tunnel, the unpredictable current seized her and flung her against the rock wall from which the tunnel emerged. It was all she could do to hold on to her spear as her head cracked against the shelf.
The current pulled her out again, and sent her tumbling head over fins through the water, whisking her far from her point of entry. She could see no new markings. In fact, she couldn’t imagine how she was possibly to find markings in such a maelstrom of currents.
Maelstrom! The word brought sudden clarity to the swirling chaos, and she stopped fighting the water’s pull. When she allowed it to tug her along, resistless, she realized she was indeed moving in a spiral. She tucked her arms into her sides and used her tail to steer, trying to keep herself moving with the current, not flung outward by it. When she rushed past the hole she’d come out of, she realized she’d done an entire circuit.
It was hard to think with the churning water thrashing at every inch of her, but Merletta felt a growing certainty that this whirlpool was the destination she’d been heading for. Whatever the “stolen item” she was supposed to retrieve, it must be here. She glanced up and saw a place, a little way above her, where a huge tower of rock jutted across her vision, obviously stretching up from the ocean floor. She let herself be carried around for another circuit, wincing as she knocked against smaller rock towers that stood out at various angles. She was sure she was bleeding now, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t imagine any predators following her into this chaos.
When the whizzing water brought her back to the same place, she pushed up with her tail and seized the rock tower. Clinging on like a barnacle, she crawled along its underside, trying to make progress toward the center of the whirlpool.
To her amazement, in a short time, her head broke out into open space. Her throat opened immediately, and she gasped in air as if she’d been holding her breath like Heath did, instead of breathing water. Then, still clinging to the rock, she shook water from her eyes and peered around her. Below her, she could see the center of the maelstrom continuing all the way to the ocean floor, where a small patch of sandy rock was visible, exposed to the air. Above, the eye of the whirlpool grew ever wider, opening into a vast blue sky. The rock she was clinging to extended right into the open space, forming a ledge that she might be able to sit on, out of the water. With a supreme effort, she began to inch sideways up and around the edge of the nearly horizontal shelf. Her head was in air and the rest of her still in the water, although she was parallel to the ocean floor.
Arms burning from the strain, she managed it at last. For a moment she lay flat, face down on the rocky ledge with her spear trapped flat beneath her and her arms wrapped around the rock. Then she looked up.
At the end of the ledge, which hung into open space, was a rock. It was clearly treated by merperson hands, smoothed on one side into a large flat sign, and shaped around the edges to make it sit steadily on the shelf. It wasn’t far—by crawling forward, Merletta could reach it without more than her torso extending from the water.
She could make out names chiseled into the sign, and she remembered the fourth part of her instructions. Add my name. The name at the bottom of the half-filled space made her heart leap in excitement.
Sage.
