Chapter Text
You've been there for three days when she finally loses her temper.
"Fine!" she snaps at you, roughly sawing through the collar of knotted rope she put around your neck. "Just - just FINE! Leeeeeeeeave. Go! You want your freedom so 8adly? Take it!"
Is it freedom you want? Was it freedom you wanted when you turned against the Circle? You can't remember. All you know is that where once there was a chorus in your head, a symphony in broodfester tongues, now there is a hollow, echoing silence that makes your head feel too light, like a bubble in bladderwrack, dragging you to the surface to drown in air.
It's a long way up to the light.
"It's not as if I neeeeeeeed you."
The rope scrapes the skin of your neck as your captor pulls it away, and you roll feebly on to your side to look at her. She's huge, one-eyed, scowling; her hair is a mane of artless dreadlocks, encrusted with salt. You know she thinks she's funny, and smart besides. She's neither. About all you can say for her is that she's strong. She carried you to the water line from where you were beached, towed you behind her little rowboat all the way around the headland. It must have been hard. You're so heavy.
You feel so heavy.
"You're just a dead w8," she hisses. "A dead w8 I carried for a while 8ecause I thought you might not 8e useless. Guess I thought wrong! Should've stuck to sea glass and jet and pir8 gold! That's one mistake I won't 8e making again!" As a form of punctuation she kicks you in the fleshy part of your side, and then again where your hips meld into your inhuman lower half.
You could reach out with a single tentacle and snare her about the waist, toss her into the water to be swept away by the current; it's strong here, where the river meets the sea. You could wrap her up in them and crush her. You could cover her mouth and nose and let her drown where she stands, ankle deep in the water.
But you do none of these things, because she's probably right.
Without the Circle, you're useless.
"DID I NOT JUST TELL YOU TO GO? GO AWAAAAAAAAY!"
Your silence seems only to have provoked her further. She's pulled her diving knife from its sheath on her thigh, and for a moment you think you'll just let her cut you into pieces - perhaps you'd make good calamari, if nothing else - but when the blade flashes across your upper arm, the jolt of pain feels like waking up. You gasp and squirm away, clutching the shallow cut as your tentacles writhe and curl, and finally you find purchase on a rock under the surface and pull yourself away from the river bank, away from the girl with the knife and her hut on stilts and her driftwood jetty and her shitty little boat, and the current carries you out to sea.
Down into the dark you go, down to the teeming depths, through waters so cold they should burn your human skin (but they don't, because even that isn't human any more, gone colour-of-midnight and dotted with phosphorescent purple-white), and only once the light has died above you do you think about the look in her eyes, and recognise it.
Hurt.
Poor, stupid land creature. She thinks you ought to love her for taking you back to the water. She thinks you owe her something.
Or maybe she's just as alone as you are.
An enterprising anglerfish sculls toward you, attracted by the glow of your eyes. You flash your ventral lights, a bold warning that you're larger than it anticipated. Watching it turn tail and flee is satisfying. You didn't want to eat it anyway; the damn things are all bone.
You are hungry, though.
You haven't felt hungry in days.
The cut on your arm is still seeping gently. The salt water is making it sting, but you don't want it to close just yet. You've had an idea. You'll need to be further up than this, though, so you head for the surface, worrying the cut with your fingers to make it bleed. With any luck, something big will smell it and come looking for easy prey.
Even without the Circle, you are not easy prey.
You don't know why you drag the shark (only a small shark, but a shark nonetheless) back to the jetty once you've got it. You could very well have fought off anything that tried to come and take a bite, and it's not as though you think you owe the girl with the shitty boat. She collared you. She cut you. All right, she also saved you, but you're still not sure if you wanted her to or not. Life without your masters seems dreadfully empty.
You think the boat girl reminds you of yourself, if only in that the both of you seem to have driven everyone else away.
When you surface she's sitting on the jetty, knife in hand, gutting an assortment of fish. She must've run the length of her nets while you were hunting; combing the shoreline for flotsam and jetsam is an unpredictable earner, so it pays to be able to catch something edible. There's a flounder, too, stuck on the end of a spear. She catches those in the shallows.
"Oh," she says, narrowing her one good eye at you. "It's youuuuuuuu. What do you want? I'm not giving you any more fish!"
You raise one snowy brow at her and raise a tentacle out of the water. The shark, only recently dead, dangles at the end of it. Her eye widens comically.
"Son of a 8itch..."
You think it might have been worth coming back just to see her make that face.
She guts the shark for you without being asked, takes a chunk of it for her pot without asking, feeds you spoonfuls of stew from her bowl, ties up your arm with a scrap of cloth while telling you that if you hadn't been so stupid and useless she wouldn't have had to cut you. You're not going to be stupid and useless again, aaaaaaaare you? she says, and the touch of insecurity in her tone is poorly hidden.
At sunrise she puts a string of shark teeth around your neck. There's a teardrop of blue sea-glass hanging from the centre, matching the colour of her eyes.
A new collar. A new master's mark of ownership.
You wear it like a lady's pendant.