Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~

< look I got to go an get some sleep
< u take care urself
< keep trainin, dont mess with this kid shite
< I shud have time 2mrw but send me a mail 1st

> ok np
> nite

Slowly, Sonali rolled up again, setting her phone back on the desk, not waiting in case Naresh was going to reply. He never said anything back when she signed off like this, and she had a whole host of other things running through her mind.

It wasn't a monster. There wasn't a spirit horse living off the beach, bewitching kids into the water and dragging them down to their doom. But every legend had a tiny little seed of truth in it, like the speck of sand at the center of a pearl. Phantoms in the water – optical illusions and riptides, the sworls and pulls of the stormy water against the hard and rugged crags of the shore, spinning around, pulling back, vortexes and whirlpools and undertows that dragged through caves and tunnels. There was a lot in the sea and on the shore that could kill you, and even if she wouldn't be able to solve anything and bring any kind of closure to this Liam's family, she could at least get her own mind calmed about this – she could at least convince herself there was a normal physical scientific explanation, that the weird feelings she'd had were nothing more than that, weird feelings.

Sonali undid the chain at the back of her neck; the trilobite was pulling down on her strange again, more strongly than it ought to. But it was a big lump of rock, near on the size of the last digit on her thumb, and it had been a long day and she'd been lying around on her back for the end of it and things always felt weird when it was raining this hard. It was nothing. It wasn't another part of something that wasn't coming together at the edges of her vision, like the borders of a jigsaw puzzle assembling piece by piece until it locked everything together. She pulled it up and poured the chain into the hollow of her hand around the fossil, laying it down on the desk. It was getting late, and no matter how much it reminded her of Naresh, there wasn't any need to wear it to bed. And tomorrow, when she would go to the library and grind out a day without training or work matching legends to tide charts until the buzzer rang again, she could leave it home if it was still going to feel this weird. Sonali shook her head again, and laid back down, head to the window, the rain striking the glass above her as the dark clouds pushed the last shadows of the sun down out of the sky.

Jordyn shook her head, her ginger ponytail flipping across the back of her blazer. "No, I wouldn't know – my mum and dad're from Dundee, just came up here for his work. And all I got is the normal legends from the telly and online, like anybody else." She guided her bike around a hole in the pavement, and Sonali held up a little so she didn't crowd her off the sidewalk. "I wish I could help you more, but even any of that stuff about the shore, I don't know. They never let me go across the big road, the one that goes by the industrial estates, so I didn't never go to the beach unless it was with them and that was always as well a bloody Butlins." She grimaced at just the memory. "Seriously, there were times when I did want Godzilla or something to come out and start eating the bathers, it would've been more interesting than just sitting wrapped up in a jumper on the beach because the water's too cold to go in."

Sonali steered her bike around, pushing it by the handlebars to avoid the hole in the sidewalk and guide it into the school courtyard. "Well, yeah, I can see that. But, you know, I don't really think anything's like actual eating these kids – I looked up on it, and he's not the only one missing. But if there was something that's like popular with weans the now, some kind of dare in a cave or something, then they might –" She stopped, pulling up almost too late, and threw her bike over trying to get out of the way of the fifth-year she'd nearly run over.

Gathering herself up, Sonali looked up, stammering an apology, and let it trail off as she looked up at the girl. Not just a little up, from where she was kneeling in the middle of the bike frame, but a long, long way up. If it wasn't for the fifth-year braid on her blazer, there was no way that Sonali wouldn't think of her as a leaving sixth-year – you'd think she'd've seen her somewhere on campus before, but she was a total stranger. Maybe more than that – utterly alien, with long straight silken black hair flowing down to the middle of her back, steel-grey eyes as cold as the winter sea ice that seemed to be looking down through Sonali like she wasn't even there, her face set still and firm. She kept looking down as Sonali raised herself up into a crouch, bracing herself on her bike, and something flickered in her eyes, a barest hint of disregard, as she looked away and set off walking again, past the entrance to the bike shed and into the school.