Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~~

Sonali leaned against the corner of the bus shelter, trying to keep the wind out of the microphone but not have her voice echo against the plastered walls, and coughed again. "Honest, Sarah, I"m well bustit," she said, as weakly as she could make herself. "I'm sorry, but I'll no be able to come in the day. I'll –" she coughed again, this one maybe not fake "– I'll change with whoever you can get to cover, if they want to trade, but I'm in no state to come in to work."

"It's all right, honey, it's all right," Sarah said from the other end of the line, either completely snowed or imagining something completely wrong about why a girl like Sonali would suddenly fake a sickie that she could cheer her on about. "You're a good girl, and a good worker; if you're too sick to come in, you got to stay home and get better. Be sure you rest up, go see a doctor if you get worse, and take your time getting better."

Sonali nodded, and coughed again. "Yeah, I will. I'll try to get some sleep the now, see the doctor if I'm no better tomorrow, and give you or Gerry a call if I've got something and can't come in. If not, I'll see you Tuesday then." She coughed again – was she really coming down with one of those summer colds? – and rang off as Sarah finished saying goodbye.

In a way, it was true: Sonali was not in much of a state to come in to work, and if she tried to work like this, she'd break something, hurt someone, or hack off a customer bad enough to get written up about it. But it wasn't anything physical: this thing with the sea and the selkies and the skin in the cave, the piles of clothes by it and the children, more children going missing, that Tam who hadn't surrendered in that pick-up thrashing days back turned into Tom Craigan, missing with his details under a school photograph shared across everybody's Facebook, under the fold in the Press and Journal in the stacks at the door of the shop; this was all mental, and Sonali was going to go mental from it if she didn't get her head cleared out, couldn't find some way to untie this knot and hand it off to someone, anyone else: someone who would believe her and know what to do.

Sonali took a deep breath, and picked up her bike, rolling it out of the shelter. Just staying here wasn't going to help; with the bike and the long empty coast roads, she had all kinds of air and distance to clear her head out, and with her shift begged off, this close to the solstice and the end of the term, she wasn't going to have any lack of time. Looking around to make sure a bus wasn't coming, she stepped over the bike and pushed down on the pedals, not really thinking about where she was going, or why, or how to get there. Just out, away, away, as long and as far as it was going to take.

Along the cliffs, following the smooth, even flow of the land up and down along the crests, right before it fell away into the water, the world seemed to flatten and even out: the sky, and the sea drifting into the rocks on her left hand, the shadows and margins of towns and barns or quarries crawling closer to the road, the hum and skitter of a car going past, or overtaking her from behind. If she kept on like this, she could get to Stonehaven in another hour, maybe; if she rode all day, maybe she could get as far as Dundee. Even without the sea, the world was open: all you had to do was have the time to go where you needed to, and the will to take that first step. Sonali shook her head, tossing her hair out of her eyes where the wind had caught it. No. That wasn't it, not quite.

This mess she was plugged in to, she hadn't stepped out into this. No, it had sort of risen around her like the tide – if she'd been sitting in just a little different place in the library, she might have gone to a different cart to put her books away on, and she wouldn't know what that thing had been in the cave. If the twins hadn't been talking about Pokemons at breakfast, she wouldn't've known about the cave, and if baba hadn't taken her off the team, she wouldn't've gone to the library that first night, nor come home that way, nor felt that from the sea nor seen that first poster. And that feeling, that connection – none of this would have happened without that trilobite around her neck. When Naresh had been back, he said it had been pumped up in a pulse of shale, one fossil in a bunch of other fossils; the guys took the ones and pieces they liked best, and had a jeweler or a lapidary or something in Baku polish them up into presentable souvenirs. It was only dumb luck that Naresh had picked this one, with whatever strange secrets it had, and that it ended up with her rather than on someone's desk in a mobile trailer somewhere on a drilling site, forgotten in a madam's jewelry box in Almaty or Astana, or arranged in someone's nephew's science-fair display in Colorado, hundreds of miles from the sea. It was luck, just dumb luck – or was it?