Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~~

Sonali slowed to a stop, pulling off the road into the weedy forecourt of a small saltbox general store, leaning her bike against the one old bowl-topped petrol pump. Slowly, she pulled up on the chain, teasing the amulet out from under her t-shirt, holding it up to the soft cloud-filtered sunlight. There had been a light inside the stone then, a sense of the being that had been in the fossil before it turned to rock, down there in the cave – if she hadn't been completely hallucinating it. Haud on for a second. Think – react to the new information, like when the opponent's formation shifts and you have to decide, understand, right-right-then, who to pick up and what spaces to guard and where the ball's going to come from, where the gaps are going to be to press them back. The sealskin turned to a blazer, the splashing away: the shortest explanation was that she wasn't hallucinating, that it had actually happened. That when you wanted to account for how things came to be, you had to let in magic – or "magic" – the things you observed, as you observed them, that you couldn't directly explain.

If a woman could trade her school clothes for a sealskin, and navigate a way on the land and the water such that no one could know, wasn't it not impossible that there was something here, in this stone that had come to her, that had survived for untold millions of years and a transubstantiation from animal to mineral and wanted to come here, to her, to the coast of Aberdeenshire? She wasn't the only person in the world with agency, that was painfully obvious all the time – she was barely even the main character in her own life. It wasn't impossible – and if it was true, then maybe none of this was an accident: that she was who she was and where she was, with the experience and ability and bloody inventory items she had for a reason, that she, and she alone, was going to be the one who was going to bring this all to its conclusion.

Sonali turned the stone over in her hand, tracing the lines of the ancient carapace with her finger. That was good and well, to decide that you had something you had to do, that it was going to be with and through this thing that you did it, but if the who and what and where were settled, the why was hanging out in space still, out beyond her vision, and the how was a complete loss. She had the definite feeling there was more to this amulet than it had let on so far, but as for finding that out, she didn't have the foggiest of where to even start. Out on the road, there was the insistent skirr of oncoming tires, and the Doppler-shifted howl of a siren knifed through the empty air as the ambulance flew past, the scream dying as it dove down the road ahead south.

The stone fairly throbbed in Sonali's hand – she looked down, then up at the ambulance, the lights already ducking down through a hollow in the road. No how, no why, but it was clear as day that she had to get going, now, and follow it on to the next point, the next piece. Zipping up her jacket, she stowed the amulet and mounted up on her bike again, leaning over the handlebars, pushing as hard as she could to keep up with the drone of the fading siren.

It was only when she spotted them turned out on the top of a ridge that Sonali even registered the stabbing pains in her thighs, the stress and strain on her muscles screaming that she'd pushed herself well over her limits, far beyond where she should have come. She stopped, looking wildly around, and saw that the ambulance was empty, doors at the rear hanging open, with no sight of the paramedics. She shouldered her bike over into the turnout, and looked back to the other side, down to a long sand beach at the foot of a cliff, the knot of people down on the shingle. That was when she saw the police car, drawn up on the southern side, and then, below, the stretcher that the cops and the medics were bending over.

Sonali dropped her bike with a clatter and limped across the road as fast as she could, half-falling into the old, weathered wooden rails still standing, in places, at the sides of the rough path down the raw cliff to the beach below. She reached the bottom just as the paramedics were coming over to come up, carrying the stretcher; a cop blocked her out of the way, but not before she saw the boy's face, swaddled up in a crash blanket and deadly-pale, almost blue from the chill of the water, and made a terrible connection that had been right below the surface, needing just a little evidence to pull it through the whole time.