Prologue

They fear the water almost as much as they fear you.

You are a child. You sit on a towel several yards away from the ocean, avoiding the waves as a group of classmates run up and down the shore, avoiding you. Boys venture to the shoreline while a gathering of girls watches. They dare each other closer as though they play with an open fire. An open sea is just as deadly. You know this in your blood. 

“Touch it!” a boy yells. “I bet you can’t touch the water for two whole seconds!”

“I bet I could put a foot in for five seconds,” another boy shouts back. This boy fears you the most. He shows you his fear in the hateful way he curls his lip when he calls you ‘droplet,’ or ‘starfish’ or ‘scum line.’ You learned from Grandfather that hate and fear are not terribly different. That was lesson one. 

“Don’t!” A girl calls. She is loud, her voice echoes in your mind, but her face is a blur, a memory you can’t place. “You’ll get one of those Neridian diseases!”

The group of them scoff and giggle and you notice one of them is looking at you. A blonde girl with an open face eyes you warily for a reaction, but you give none. Her face looks kind, but something in her eyes seems hungry. You can’t remember her name. You’ve stopped learning the names of the other children. 

“Oh shit!” A boy yells. “He touched it! He touched a wave!”

“Gross!” A girl squeals as the boy reaches out, his fingers glistening with sea foam. “Don’t touch me with that hand!”

They draw back toward the shore with grins of conquest on their faces. Then, one boy notices you. It’s your fault: you shouldn’t have watched them for so long. He stares, and you shrink, and for a moment, you are frozen, locked in his gaze. But then, you pull your eyes away. You focus on a gull idly picking at a crab on the shore. But it is not enough to save you. 

“Hey!” the boy calls, his chest puffed, and his head cocked back as he gains the attention of the group. “Do you want to touch the water?”

The seagull you watch flies away and with a painful twist in your chest, you wish you could too.

“No thank you,” you answer politely. Grandfather says it is important to always be polite, especially when you’re being threatened.

The boy gestures to the others with a sharp jerk of his head, and they begin across the sand toward you. “Why don’t you want to touch the water? Isn’t that where you’re from?”

Their shapes draw longer, larger as they approach, until their forms block out the sun, swallowing you in their shadows.

“I’m from Mardona,” you reply. “My grandfather is William Scoria.” You speak your grandfather’s name like the shield it has often been, but several from the group laugh as one boy in the back whispers “whale shit.”

“Come on, water-breather, we know where you belong,” a girl taunts as she yanks at the edge of your towel, throwing you backward. You brace yourself with your forearms in the stinging hot sand.

“Stop it,” the blonde girl says. “You know she’s a Nevalt.” She looks at you sorrowfully, her round face pink and sun-kissed with golden waves of hair past her hips. She steps between you and the boy. You wish you could remember her name.

“There’s no such thing as a Nevalt!” the boy insists, shoving her aside. “Those half-hatches made that up so we’d feel sorry for them and let them live on the isle. My dad told me all about it.” He stares down the end of his acne-riddled nose at you. “Isn’t that right starfish? Nevalts aren’t real?”

You are certain this is not accurate. You know what you are, have been taught your limits and shortcomings since birth, but you pause for a moment, hoping. What if you are a myth? What if you are not so different? What if you could painlessly sink your skin into the cool waters of the Neridian Sea with no threat of pain or death? You have always been so afraid, but what if there was nothing to fear? Driven by that curiosity, that hope, you find yourself rising from the sand and looking into the eyes of your peers.

“Ready to prove it?” the boy sneers as he grabs you by the arm. You allow him to take hold of you, wondering if it could it be true. Could you be the same as everyone else? You hear the others laughing behind you as you walk toward the shore.

Heart pounding and legs growing weak, you feel a strange detachment from your body as your arms grow light and useless. What are you doing? Why are you walking into water? Do you really think everyone has lied to you and you are just as normal as the rest of them? This is a mistake but you are running with them now and the momentum of what you started, what you allowed to happen, feels unstoppable. You think about screaming but your throat is closed and no sound escapes. You stop your feet, drop yourself backward and pull hard on the boy’s grasp, but his grip only tightens as he forces you toward the lapping waterline.

“Stop it! She changed her mind!” the blonde girl protests, but her voice is drowned out by cheering and laughing and the awful, awful pounding of blood through your ears. “This isn’t funny!” you hear her scream just as the soles of your feet connect with the wet ocean sands.

A current shoots through your bones. It is a strange and shocking thrill, like expecting to step on solid ground but finding nothing there. A wave of ankle-deep water slides over your feet and your stomach lurches. You stand frozen, unable to breathe in or let breath out. Your feet are rooted to the wet sand, held like magnets to the foaming waves as your heart pounds. Something in you begins to burn. It spreads through your chest, your belly, fills your head.

And then, pain.

A dull ache at first, easily ignored, but it grows into a wrenching throb as all the bones in your feet stretch and flay away from one another. You look down at your toes beneath the waves and gasp in horror as the throb intensifies and each digit begins to lengthen, webbing forming like ice crystals between them and bones melting into pliable lines of cartilage. The skin of your feet begins to darken, a deep purple cast spreading like a wine stain across your flesh as the jutting nub of a calf fin pushes through the skin at your ankle like a dull blade, the unfurling wings of a butterfly fresh from cocoon. 

When a primal shriek finally escapes your lungs, the boy holding you lets go, terror on his face as he watches you writhe. 

Then someone grabs you, pulls you out.

But the girl who comes out of the water is no longer you.