Prologue
You fear yourself now.
In this new beginning, you are water. Fluid, changing, crisp, and new. Your elements are simple and uncomplicated. This is your first planet assignment… your first time away from the Sovereign.
Your lover is rock. Steady, sure, ancient, and experienced. Merak has visited planets before, traveling with others and charged with the same task. He has deposited his seed in three galaxies, never once creating life… or at least, that is what he told you.
You come to Merak when he calls for you. It is what you were trained to do, your element responding through primal instincts. A pull and push, a lift and crash, you could not escape if you wanted to. Your waters grow heavy, running down his slopes and edges, slipping down his cliffs, the friction creating a new landscape. Each time he groans for you, your waters surge to his shores. And each time, you create something marvelous. A crusted barnacle. A glowing algae. A pulsing jellyfish. All tokens of your affection meant to inhabit this planet. Grow. Learn. Evolve.
You feel content in the knowledge that you have fulfilled your purpose. Life springs up all around you. The Sovereign is pleased.
You spend centuries playing like children with the components of this world. Sometimes, you wish you could go back to those days, before he showed you the truth. Before you let the void grow. Before you tore down the skies and ripped open canyons.
But then, you would not have met your greatest love.
You were warned not to interact with elements outside those assigned to you. You obey. The thought of doing otherwise does not enter your consciousness. You remain focused on your bond with water, the exquisite tension you feel with Merak. He is braver with the elements. Or perhaps, he is foolish.
He convinces you to explore outside your bond. Elemental manipulation is expected, he tells you. The warning is meant for lesser celü. It is your right to explore, your duty to understand and command all elements in time. He speaks of mastering the light itself.
“How else will we be able to sustain life on this planet? We’ve created it. We need to keep it.”
When he speaks to you like this, your deep waters tremble and ache for him. You feel weak with want and let yourself slip through his sands and take whatever shape his element molds you to.
So, against the warning of the Sovereign, you learn to command the wind.
It is unruly and difficult to wield: temperamental and driving. Once, you tear up a small plant and toss it across your lover’s rocks. It breaks you to see its fragile roots wrenched from the soil, separated from the waters that give it life.
You want to stop experimenting, but Merak won’t let you. He tells you to keep practicing while he focuses his attention on flame. Bursting, burning, and losing control. More than once, he destroys the life you created. More than once, you douse a hillside to save the green and breathing creatures of your love.
You do not notice that he makes no effort to help, no attempt at rescue. You have not been taught to notice such things.
You grow more confident over time, less concerned, less cautious. Soon, he spits flame and molten rock, and you pull the wind in such swift coils, it tears the trees straight from their roots. You don’t even mourn. You feel nothing but power. You are drunk with it. With each other.
One night, you send the wind to whistle through his peaks, tantalizing until he is mad with desire. You invoke the gusts to lift your element, to pound your waters against his cliffs, carving your name into him as he groans, echoing his pleasure in deep chambers, filling you with sound. You pull him in, swallowing him in currents until he burns for you, his rock melting into liquid heat under the pressure of your waters. A demand for release roars within you, becoming too powerful to control. When Merak erupts, his searing core turns your waters to mist. You float in a cloud through the wind… formless, transcendent.
You didn’t know what orchestrating so many elements at once would do, but you jumped. You chose. You acted. You transformed.
And then, she begins.
And now we are one.
We are new.
You fear the changes you have made to your body, to your spirit. Fear the future your choices have plunged you into, the channels dark and deep you must pass through. You fear what lies within your beating heart, the fleshy rawness of your vulnerability. But more, you fear the consistent certainty that, though you’ve changed so completely, you are not finished.
You have begun a new world. From your essence, you pull a new being into existence. She is clear and precious, her mind open and aware, curious and kind. Her fragility echoes through your blood, but so does her strength, her cunning. And you find within her the potential for danger, for destruction.
After all, you killed one girl to bring her into being. You cracked her open so that she could live. In this way, you are your mother.
The Mother.
Welcome to your future.
Chapter One – Waverly
Ondine was dead.
That was really the only plausible explanation for why she hadn’t come and pulled me out of this holding cell. I’d spent three days looking for her before I was arrested by Neridians with golden eyelids and sharp spears. But I don’t know how long I’d been held, kept in the dark.
Had it been a full week? A few days? Longer?
It didn’t matter. If Ondine were alive, she would have come by now. At the very least, she would have sent a message. My mind raced with the possibilities of what had happened to her, my grief crowded out only by the fear of my own precarious situation: alone in a cramped, dark cell… underwater.
I was fed through a tube in the wall. It took me a while to realize the green seaweed-flavored gel that was pushed through the steel spigot was meant to be food. I felt like a rodent drinking from it, like the rat Port had kept for a few weeks when we were children. There was a round hole in the floor where I squatted to relieve myself, a metal lid that slid over it to trap the smell. No one spoke to me or gave me any answers on how long I’d be detained. I’d never felt more degraded, more simplified to eating, sleeping, and shitting. Anxiety wracked through my body as though my nerve endings were raw and exposed.
Worst, they took my snail venom cartridge away.
In the sightless darkness, I found my other senses heightening. It felt as though my brain were trying to convince me I was still alive. Still here. My fingers found a dead lightbulb as I fingered along the cold, damp walls, which meant there was potential for a light in this cell, if anyone bothered to turn it on. I missed the light. I’d painted with deep blues and blacks before, but a dark like this – consuming, enfolding, erasing dark – I’d never experienced, never even imagined.
There were scents to draw my attention, but nothing anyone would want to inhale. Dampness and rot, along with aging fish and human excrement, mingled with the brackish air. There was also sound, but it brought no comfort. Clicks and groans and trills of animals in the water echoed off the walls around me. The symphony of creatures pulled at me, baiting my imagination into fear-filled nightmares that came whether I slept or stared open-eyed into the void around me.
Would they feed me to one of them? Leave me here to die? Is that what happened to Ondine? Did one of the animals that swam around my cell have her in their gut? Am I next?
I shuddered, squeezing my eyes shut as I rhythmically tapped my forehead against the stone wall. The repetitive motion grounded me, kept me sane.
I missed my venom.
Something moved, a groan of shifting gears.
Was the cell moving? Rising?
The floor tipped slightly one way, then the other as though I was inside a gently swinging pendulum. An electric hum. A whoosh of water near the cell door. Metal groaning and locks shifting and clicking, the noises echoing in the hollow of my chamber. A thunk like the suction of a toilet plunger resounded, and the door to my cell opened, letting in an overwhelming beam of light.
I closed my eyes and pulled back, scrambling to the far side of my cell.
“You’re not in any danger from me.”
I blinked rapidly, trying to force my eyes to adjust to the glaring light as I took in the Neridian male. He was slender and tall, with fins that sprayed from his neck like a lion-fish. He wore a snug, sleeveless shirt with pants that gathered around his waist, the fabric loosening on his legs as he shook the water from them. I had seen this Neridian before. He and the other, rougher male with the gold-painted face had captured me near the Mardonan water outlet.
“My name is Balderich,” he said, his hands clasped behind him. “I’m here to take you before the Assembly.”
The light behind him framed his body like some kind of aura, still so bright I couldn’t look directly at him.
“How long have I been down here?” I asked, my voice unfamiliar even to my own ears.
“Six days.”
I swallowed hard, dread knotting in my stomach. “And the woman I asked to speak to? Ondine. Does anyone know what happened to her?”
Balderich tipped his head, a tight expression lining his face. “I can’t disclose any information until the Assembly allows it. You are currently considered a threat to Neridian safety.”
I snorted. “I’m the least of your worries, believe me.”
He studied me a moment, then reached out, offering a wrapped energy bar and a bottle of fresh water. “I do.”
I accepted the food greedily, my mouth watering at the prospect of having something to bite and chew that didn’t taste like licking an algae-coated rock.
“What’s the Assembly?” I asked around a mouthful of vanilla-flavored protein bar.
Balderich straightened and spoke as though he were reciting a pledge.
“The Assembly is a committee of Neridian elders and community members who protect the common health and welfare of all Neridians.”
“Ah, so they’re like the Mardonan Consulate,” I said, taking a sip of the water.
Balderich made a guttural sound of disgust. “In no way is the Assembly like the Mardonan Consulate.”
It was only when his lip curled that I noticed his teeth were sharpened to a fine point. Those teeth and the rage in his eyes made me decide to keep my comments to a minimum.
“Why am I being brought before the Assembly?”
“You’ve been charged with trespassing, suspicion of espionage, and possible ill intent.”
“Ill intent?” I tipped my head. “I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone.”
Balderich made no response. I took another bite of the bar.
“This tastes terrible.”
“It’s Mardonan,” he shrugged. “We should get going.”
“Don’t I need my wicking suit?” I asked, shoving the last bite of the bar into my mouth and washing it down with the bottled water. “I don’t have your gills.”
“That was not your wicking suit.”
The bar knotted in my throat, synthetic vanilla flavor coating my tongue. “How do you know that?”
Balderich didn’t answer, just stared at me as though he felt sorry for me. It made me want to climb out of my skin.
“Fine,” I swallowed hard. “How am I supposed to follow you without a wicking suit, then?”
“A jump pod has been prepared for you.” He gestured toward the door.
A jump pod, I learned, was an egg-shaped container that was pressure-controlled, pumped with breathable air, but driven by someone on the outside. Had I wanted to make any attempt to escape, I would have had no way of directing my own propulsion. If I had any interest in drowning myself, I could have found some way to break the glass that framed the top of the pod, but I valued my life.
There was no doubt in my mind that a Mardonan had designed this pod; the technology was too familiar in its seamless design. Mardona devices always gave the impression of ease, no matter how complex the machine. An odd sense of calm fell over me as Balderich swam us through the sea. With no way to determine what would happen to me next, I found myself surrendering to the open, depthless ocean and the will of my Neridian captors.
I expected to encounter more sea life, but saw very little as we traveled through fluctuating shades of midnight sapphire ocean and toward an opening to a cavern that was nearly camouflaged by the seabed floor. The way the sand on the seafloor rolled in waves was mesmerizing. My fingers itched to reach for a brush, to paint with broad and sweeping strokes.
We descended into the cave, swallowed by soft silt as hazy blue lights blinked by. After a few moments, the channel began to widen, opening to an underwater chamber the size of my entire apartment complex back home. Voices filled my jump pod, echoing off the glass walls of my containment bubble. It surprised me at first, but then I saw the small speaker system built into the base, similar to the one in the wicking suit helmet, but on a larger scale.
A tense silence settled as Balderich directed my pod to the center of the chamber.
Thirteen rock pedestals of varying heights and shapes lined one side of the space. Behind each pedestal floated a Neridian. Neridian clothing was simple enough, a fact I’d already known from visits to the trade markets. Their fitted clothing often mimicked the tone of their skin, fins, and scales, which were fantastically diverse in color, shape, and size.
I’d never seen this many Neridians assembled in one place before. They leveled their assessing gazes at me as I floated past them, eyes boring into me with such intensity, my pulse began to race, and my palms grew slick. One Neridian, a larger male with teal and gold fins, his hair corded in silvering ropes, stared at me with open pity. Something in the way he was watching me, like I was being led to my own death, tightened my gut. I was very near panic as the words of the Counselor echoed in my mind.
“Let her go. Let her be the next body we pull from the Neridian sea.”
My heart pounded as Balderich guided me to the center of the chamber, attaching my jump pod to some sort of base with a loud clunk that rattled up my spine.
A male Neridian with an empty eye socket appraised me behind a sharp, hooked nose as he rose to full length behind his pedestal. I tried to focus on something other than the empty pocket in his face, the eyelids crudely sewn together, but found he had no other notable features. My eyes wandered over his gray fins, silver scales, and skin that held the papery thinness of age, though not wrinkled like that of Mardonans in age. I wondered absently if that was due to being constantly submerged in saline, the other half of my brain berating me for being distracted by something as petty as aging aesthetics.
“Assembly,” the one-eyed Neridian said in a forceful baritone that vibrated the waters. “We are gathered to assess the risk and determine the outcome for a Mardonan citizen who was captured earlier this week outside Mardonan limits.”
Eyes in varying shades of violet and gold bore into me, the leader pinning me with the force of his one strange eye.
“Please state your name and where you live,” he directed evenly.
I cleared my throat, straightening to give off an air of confidence, but realized my confidence may look to them like arrogance. I hadn’t been this uncomfortable in my own body since puberty.
“Waverly Wingate,” I replied, my voice shaking and nerves dancing wildly. “I live in the apartments on the east side of the Isle of Mardona, above that little bar they call The Barnacle? It’s unit twelve. I wanted unit thirteen, but I couldn’t afford it, and my dad wouldn’t lend me the money because he didn’t want me to move there anyway, and my brother was absolutely… ”
I stopped, realizing as my voice bounced back at me inside the pod that someone had muted me.
“Our time is valuable and limited, Ms. Wingate. Please restrain yourself to only the information requested.”
Swallowing back my embarrassment, I dropped my eyes to my palms. Contained, silenced, and stripped of all my dignity, I felt myself shrinking.
“Waverly,” an aged female voice came from the left side of the chamber.
I turned to see a woman I hadn’t noticed before. She was wearing a wicking suit mask, but not the suit in full. Her hair was a white sail that floated above her head, her eyes behind the mask a piercing shade of green. She wore rubber fins and kicked in a rhythmic pulse behind the pedestal. Were it not for the green of her eyes, I would have thought she was Mardonan. Nonetheless, my tension eased by the presence of someone who appeared more like me.
“I understand you came in search of a Neridian in our community?” she asked.
“Yes, I-I mean no, she’s not Neridian. Well, she was-” I stopped myself, taking a deep breath and starting again. “I came in search of my friend, Ondine Scoria. She used to live in Mardona, but she went missing. I thought she had escaped to Neridia.”
“Escaped?” The one-eyed leader creased his brow, the effect on his missing eye somewhat gut-churning. “Escaped what exactly?”
“Um, marriage to my brother, maybe? Or, just, like, the general stress of being a half-hatch in Mardona?”
Neridians around me made sounds of distaste at my use of the term “half-hatch,” and I remembered belatedly that they preferred another term. Eirenes. I was about to correct myself, but the one-eyed leader began to speak again.
“Do any of the Assembly know of a Neridian by this name?” he asked, scanning the Assembly.
I held my breath, hopefully.
“The name Scoria is not received positively in the deep,” someone said.
Not surprising that Neridians wouldn’t trust a Scoria, but, shit… even in death, Ondine’s grandfather ruins her life.
Then, the Neridian male with broad shoulders and roped silver hair rose above his pedestal.
“I am familiar with Ondine Scoria,” he said. “I will claim her for my shoala.”
The Assembly whispered amongst themselves with a sense of shock and confusion. I didn’t understand the significance, but whatever “claim her for my shoala” meant appeared to be scandalous.
The one-eyed Neridian turned to address him.
“Naoheim, are you stating before the Assembly that you have a relation to Ondine Scoria?”
Naoheim. NAO. Wasn’t he the headmaster from the school? This is good. If he’s vouching for Ondine, maybe he knows what happened to her?
“Yes,” Naoheim said, a slight tremor in his voice. “She is my daughter.”
Daughter? My stomach grew tight, pulsed quickening. Ondine had found her father? Her father was the headmaster of Regiatus? My thoughts began to spiral, but stopped as another detail caught my attention.
Is. He said Ondine is my daughter. Not was. Hope bloomed in my chest.
Murmurs rose in the water around me. After a few minutes, a Neridian woman with high cheekbones that shimmered with golden scales and fins that spread wide in a blush cantaloupe shade rose from her podium. I instantly wanted to paint her colors, the way they swirled from light orange to gold and shimmered at the tips.
“Nao,” she said, her voice calm and sure. “Is Ondine able to join our Assembly today? We have some questions.”
My pulse thrummed, and my hands shook as I waited for Nao’s reply.
“She has been summoned,” he said.
I gasped with relief. She’s not dead.
“However,” Nao continued, “I need to explain that– “
“She’s here,” a voice said from the back of the chamber.
I whirled in my jump pod to see a Neridian male enter with a Mardona, fully covered in a white wicking.
“Oni!” I shouted, pressing both hands to the glass of my jump pod.
She was in a wicking suit. She hadn’t Altered. She was perfectly safe. I could take her back to the isle. We could leave Mardonan together, maybe go inland. It wouldn’t be an easy life, but it would be ours. We could build it together.
Ondine lifted her head and looked at me. Her lips were pale, and there was pain in her eyes, but she smiled briefly. The smile didn’t reach her eyes. Then I noticed the Neridian next to her was propping her up, as though she was injured, and my head spun with questions as the room erupted into chaos.
“Why have you brought a suited Mardonan?” someone shouted.
Two large Neridian males with spears I hadn’t even seen swam from either side of the cave and flanked Ondine, holding their weapons to her chest. I had the urge to scream, but Naoheim swam past me so quickly that the jump pod rattled in its mount. He was between Ondine and the speared Neridians in a blink.
“She’s not dangerous!” he yelled. “She’s not even Mardonan! She’s Neridian!”
The two guards kicked back, an expression on their faces of confused compliance.
“Naoheim, we are due an explanation!” someone shouted from the pedestals.
“And you will have one,” Nao said. “Please give me a moment!”
Ondine turned away from Nao and whispered something to the Neridian next to her, too low for me to hear. Reading Oni’s body language was easy, even in the suit. Disgust and anger were etched into her face, her hunched shoulders, the way she curled herself away from Nao – her father – and toward the other male with her. Who was that guy?
The other male gave Nao a tight nod before leading Ondine to a smooth ledge of the cave and helping her recline atop it. I tried to catch her eye again, to communicate with her the way we always could, but she kept her eyes on the guy with her, breathing deep and slow as though trying to soothe an ache. What was wrong with her?
“As I was trying to explain,” Naoheim said with palpable frustration. “Ondine is a newly Altered Neridian.”
My stomach dropped, fingers tingling, vision soft and hazy. Oh, depths, no. She’d gone through Alteration. How had that happened? What had they done to her?
“She is my daughter by blood,” Nao continued as I struggled to breathe. “Born of a Mardonan woman named Bronwyn Scoria.”
“So she is related to William Scoria!” someone shouted. I jumped at the hatred in their tone.
“She is directly related to me!” Naoheim bellowed, the force of his voice a shock. “She may have been raised in Mardona under the Scoria name, but she is my shoala. My blood!”
More murmurs flitted through the waters, but I kept my eyes on Ondine. I remembered the sound of her screams when we were children, when she endured only a partial Alteration. At the time, I had thought it might be a relief for her to have simply lost both of her feet in the water, rather than have them stretched and torn open.
I looked at her, realizing that’s exactly what had happened, but to her whole body. Stretched. Torn. Bent. Broken. Made new. I felt sick. But why was she still wearing a wicking suit? And a white one that resembled the Mardonan militia suits, no less?
Nao continued. “Ondine’s injuries from her late Alteration are many. In her current state, she cannot tolerate the seawater for more than a few minutes and has not yet learned to exercise her gills. Since she is accustomed to a wicking suit from her months at Regiatus, we determined that was the safest option for her to meet the Assembly today.”
He quieted for a moment and then turned toward Ondine and added, “As you can see, even swimming to this meeting has strained her.”
“Then let her show herself fully for a moment,” a Neridian with spines that grew from his neck and cheeks said. “And once we have seen her and confirmed her Neridian blood, she can wear the suit.”
“No!” Nao said strongly. “Can’t you see she struggles? Look at her face through the mask. You can seek the scales that line her forehead. Teal, just like mine.”
Ondine winced behind her mask as members of the Assembly swam closer, peering ather and then nodding to the others in confirmation.
Since we were girls, Ondine had wondered about her father. Who and where he was. She’d been fed a story of a barbaric Neridian who took advantage of her mother and left her impregnated with Ondine, but this man was not that. Nao was a member of the Neridian Assembly, seemingly well respected, even revered. So, why did Ondine stare at him with open fury? What in the skies is going on?
“I believe him,” a member of the Assembly said as he turned from inspecting Ondine and pointed toward me. “But, Ondine, do you know this Mardonan?”
Ondine’s breath rattled behind her mask, the effort of pulling in air draining the color from her cheeks. “Yes. That is Waverly Wingate. She’s a… friend.”
I didn’t want to hear the slight hesitation before calling me a friend, but I did. And in that tremble of breath, I felt the question that had followed me down to the depths grip me tight and force the air from my lungs.
Has everything changed?