Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~~

"NOMMM!" Jordyn pulled out her phone as they came to the first crossing past the shop, the light just turned, and took a selfie as she sank her jaws through her sandwich. "At – at's wull guud, urn't ut?" She closed her mouth to finish chewing, and turned the phone to show it off; Sonali was flipping through the paper. "Hen?"

Sonali barely reacted; she could barely hear her. "That – that's well beat all to feck. I didn't think they were so bad for column inches that they'd print something like this."

Jordyn took another bite of her sandwich and leaned over Sonali's shoulder. "Well, this is the paper that heard about weans daring each other to fry Mars bars down Stonehaven and made it a Whole Thing – I wouldn't put it past them to make up whatever. What is it? Let me see." She leaned over further, snugging her head into Sonali's arm.

"No – the light's changed, we've got to go. You can't read like that, you're eating, you'll walk into something or have it go down the wrong pipe and choke. I'll tell you what this thing is, you just keep on and try not to run your bike into nothing, aye?"

"YES MUM," Jordyn sighed, and shoved her bike out off the curb. "But if I did choke, then would you –"

"No. No happening. Goany no do that on purpose." Sonali folded up the paper, bracing it on her handlebars. "Mind that text I sent you Sunday late? About what I saw, and the wean the police and the paramedics were taking out of the sea? It was that Liam Conroy who was missing, and this here, it's him or someone from his family talking to a reporter, about what happened to him and where he was. And it's so well mental that I don't think it'd be in print – you couldn't fair put this on some blog and no have it called out for pish and wind." Sonali paused for a second, thinking about what was on the page, thinking about how she ought to put it for Jordyn so that she wouldn't think she'd gone mental as well.

"So he says, this kid here, that he's been away in the sea, living with the sea people, down under the water, breathing under there like it was air; he had friends and a family who took him in, and he's saying there are others like him – kids who ran off or disappeared all around here, all those flyers on lampposts – all down in the ocean doing sea people things. He was homesick so he came back, he says, but he'd never been so far without a guide, and he got lost." Sonali wasn't ready to try it out on Jordyn that if it was a problem to come back without a guide, a guide must have led the kid off or spirited him away, and that she had some bad, troubling ideas about who such a guide might be.

"I mean, normally, you think of a kid saying something like this, and he's bearing tales aye, but for whatever reason nobody at the paper thought so, cause they printed it, and for real how did this happen? So long he was gone, and from the suburbs by us aye, and they find him half froze to death washed in on a beach halfway to Stonehaven. So he was out in the water at least the bit at the end, and somehow he got down that far south – so what actually happened? I don't know, and it's been driving me spare since then, and this bit in the paper just makes it worse, because there isn't anything that's simpler than this story about sea people – and until and unless there is, that just makes it the most likely that's going to be true." Sonali shook her head, and unconsciously turned away from the blue light as they crossed a lane; there were a couple police cars up the close, no sirens out, but it still didn't pay to be too interested, especially if they were still looking for the Asian teen who'd showed up right when they took this kid and his sea story out of the water.

"Well, I mean, for starters, there isn't such a thing as sea people," Jordyn said, balling up her sandwich wrapper and throwing it vaguely in the direction of somebody's bin. "I mean, that was dolphins and such, right, that the old-time people saw in the water? You were born up here too, aye; you know Nessie's just for the tourists."