Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~~~

Sonali closed her eyes and tried to concentrate, holding the trilobite amulet up with both hands, elbows resting on her desk. How she was supposed to use it, what it could even do, was utterly beyond her, but if it was magic and conscious, everything in pop culture or wherever wanted it to be that you would just relax, and concentrate, and try to like reach out with the Force or whatever and establish a connection. Let it connect to you, maybe. If school had been in session, she might have dropped something in conversation to try to get suggestions from Shauna; Shauna was interested in natural magic and that Secret stuff, but just texting her out of the blue about it would look weird. At this rate, though, she might have to, because whatever this fossil might be able to do on its own, or if you poked it just right, it wasn't doing any of it right now, here in Sonali's room when she really needed it to work.

There was noise from downstairs; someone watching telly or playing Playstation. Sonali opened her eyes, and all the other distractions of home piled in around her: the noise, the smell of her mum mixing up the batter for tomorrow, the flash of the monitor light on her phone letting her know she still hadn't opened that text from Jordyn about their summer homework plans. If she could only clear all of this out, maybe she would be able to get closer, but it was late already, a full shift and nearly half an hour gone burning up her battery right behind work to get a better sense of how many kids exactly had disappeared this spring and summer so far, and there wasn't light enough now to go ride over to the beach, even if she somehow could have gotten out of the house without baba tumbling to it, or back in afterwards without getting grounded for the whole of next term. On the beach, just her and the sand and the sky and the stone and the sea, she'd be able to concentrate; maybe there, she'd be able to see what she was supposed to, but that just wasn't an option tonight.

No, not maybe. Thinking on it for a second, stretched back and staring up at the ceiling, Sonali remembered how this had started: that long curve of sand just south of the river, the low slope of the road running along the head of the cliffs; the deep dark and the fingers of light from the falling sun behind her running out over the waves, and the pull, the heart-aching pull of the stone out to sea. The sea, and the sea folk in it, and those touched by the deep; the trilobite in the rock, the bug in it dead like half a billion years, had been in the sea and of the sea before it had gotten buried and pressed and mineralized, folded over and slid around to end up in the way of a drilling head on the verge of another sea. If she could concentrate on that – think about the water, the smell of salt – and fill her mind up with it, then maybe she could get closer to the life in the rock without necessarily getting in the water right now her own self.

Think about how the tide comes in – the chill of the wet sand, how it sinks and shifts to your touch. The rush of the water pulling over you, the hiss of the foam and then that strange feel like you're receding into the land as the waves rush back, ready to break again. Look up – the clear sky, the air running on the currents out in the water, high clouds tossed by the breeze. This is the sea – not the sea you see from a deckchair, but the sea you discover, invent, for yourself, down in the breakers, with the sting of the water evaporating away from you – ahead of you the long, long view into nothing, shadows and mirages dancing on the whitecaps at the distant horizon, the haze at the edge where the world falls away and the uncertainty of a cloud line: the water reflected in the air, or maybe and it took some watching, the first signs of a bundling-up storm. Sonali breathed out, eyes closed, the fossil in her fingers again, and kept her mind on the scene. How did it feel – what was the whole of the place she was trying to reach, the smells of seaweed in the tidal pools and the sounds of the water popping over the rocks, the flash of the sun reflected in the turning of a wave, the rush and chill in and on and through your skin as you sunk into the water, as the sea flexed through you like you were a part of it, like you weren't even there – and it felt, more than just an image in her mind, more than a hallucination from stress and lack of sleep, like it really had.