Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(2) Deeper Water

By morning, I'm stiff, shaky, and feeling decidedly petty that my village seems to have abandoned me. Just for that, I spend the day camped on the underwater hilltop, rooting through the mud for shellfish and actually finding some. I don't have any means to cook them, but Luasa don't and I've no reason to consider myself different, so I eat them raw. Maybe I'm just that hungry, but they taste a lot better than something cold, sandy, and approximately the texture of congealed gum-tree sap rightfully should.

I would have expected the ocean to be swarming with Luasa and sharks and other dangerous species, but I'm unpleasantly surprised to find none of the stories bearing fruit now that I'm actually here. Unpleasantly because I've started to wonder if I might be able to trick a Luasa into giving me directions, and because a shark attack would give me a suitably tragic ending that ought to make my village mourn me like they should. Not that I actually want to be attacked by a shark, but there's a dramatic flair to the thought that appeals to my current sentiments towards my people.

Around midday, a single, small fish darts in from the surrounding water and huddles in my shadow. Rashi be blessed, there is life in this part of the ocean after all. The fish twitches like it's trying to keep every direction in sight at once, and its gills pump nervously. My hunger urge snaps at me to catch it, but it looks so lost, I stall by watching it instead. There's something unsettlingly familiar about it, though I can't for the life of me say what. The fish sees my hand shift and dives for cover in the bend of my tail. It's not even smart enough to deduce that the two are connected. The uneasy feeling intensifies, though, and as the fish turns again, I suddenly realize.

It's the same colour as me.

Not my top half, obviously. But the fish's whole body is a brilliant, mirrored silver that reflects my silver and renders its twitchy self nearly invisible against my scales. It has a forked tail with rounded ends, a sail-like fin beneath, and a sharply triangular fin on its back. It rear-ends me and startles itself, and two glossy patches under its eyes flash blue.

I surreptitiously turn my hands over. The glossy patches on me and the ones on the fish match. Can I make that light, too? I don't know how to begin to try. Or if I even want to. The beauty of my new silver scales has been trampled by the fact that I seem to be a Luasa copy of the ocean equivalent of a songbird. Pretty at first glance, but hopelessly neurotic and ultimately destined to be food for everything else. If this isn't Andalua's idea of a sick joke, I don't know what would be.

"Thanks," I sign to the surrounding water, startling the fish again. "So I'm bait, is that it?"

Nothing answers. I should really be more scared of the possibility. Maybe it's because I'm about a hundred times larger than this puny creature—it's the length of my hand if I'm being generous—or maybe the other young adults in my village are right, and I was born with a deficiency in my ability to feel fear. I get scared, certainly, but I was also the one who got bitten by a racer snake at age three because I thought it would be fun to catch one.

The fish backs into me again, startles again—not a creature burdened with a great deal of intelligence—then abandons cover and shoots downslope like I pinched its little tail with fire-sticks. It's shockingly fast. An arm-span away, it stops short and hovers over the seafloor, fins flicking and gills puffing anxiously. When it has confirmed the lack of danger, it shoots off again. It's going down. I'm struck by the same instinct that slapped me royally when I first woke up, and it occurs to me that it might not be Andalua's summons at all. If this little fish and I have something in common, it might lead me to the reason I feel this way.

That, or it is Andalua's summons, and she sent me this fish to speed things along. Those options balance briefly in my head, but I'm feeling a lot better than yesterday, and I'm nearly in control of my body again. I'm also more than a little salty about the whole rescue thing, so the thought of doing something so flagrantly contrary to the First Rule has a certain shine to it. I dive after the fish like I've been swimming my whole life. I nearly rear-end it as it halts again. It jinks off in a wild zigzag that would probably lose a predator, and certainly loses me. It's gone into the gloomy water before I could shake a stick at it, if I had a stick to shake.