Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~~

Sonali jumped and sidled back to her seat, conscious of the trilobite against her skin as she turned off her phone and hauled out her pencil case. The pieces were starting to come together, but the shape was unclear. It was one thing for kids to be taken by the selkies – it was quite another if they went gladly, if they ran away from their problems for a new life in the wide ocean, and actually found it. The what and why and how of that were still out in front of her, somewhere just outside her reach, and Sonali suspected that to lay hold of them, she'd have to take a leap – and how she was going to do that, and be sure she'd land somewhere secure, she wasn't remotely sure. But she had time, a little time; the term break was coming up, and without school to worry about, without anything else big going wrong – for the first time in her life without a preseason to prepare for – she was sure she would be able to figure it out before the new term, before she would be the one with the braid on her shoulders.

Sonali wiped off her brow with her handkerchief, and shook her head. She was getting soft – she was getting out of shape without training every day. There was no way she should be feeling this stressed just from bringing the carriages in from the car park – there weren't barely six of them in the rack this time, and even as summer went it wasn't that hot out. She was losing it – she had to do a better job keeping herself fit. Even if she was off the team, that was no reason not to keep waking up early to run a little, volley for a while, make sure her body could still move like it was supposed to, and do the things she needed it to do. From tomorrow – there wasn't really any way to start today. Sonali folded up her handkerchief and put it back in her pocket, turning to go back inside the store and see what else needed seeing to.

With anyone who could afford it away on their summer holidays, the store was quiet; change the promotion on the breakfast cereal aisle, shoo a couple of third-years away from the Buckie end of the bevvy shelf, back out to the car park to bring the next couple carriages in. Nobody throwing milk around, nothing like the rush of a weekend or a big final when everyone would be in loading up on booze and grilling supplies, just the normal day ticking over, one hour to the next, down to the end of her shift like there was nothing going on anywhere else in the world – like there wasn't a time bomb ticking away under her feet. It wasn't that Sonali was deliberately throwing herself into her work to avoid having to take that step off the edge of the planet and go confront someone about being a seal in disguise – no, it wasn't, or that was what she'd decided to tell herself. That was important, but this was important too, and in the case of the selkies, someone else would find some evidence and draw the right conclusions. You couldn't have kids missing for long in a coastal town, running away to live in the sea, and not search the tidal caves under those cliffs. If no one made that connection before the end of the summer break, she'd do what she had to, but for now, she had time.

Pushing the carriages back into the queue, Sonali had to steer them around an old gran standing by the bulletin board, trying to reach up at something. As far as she could tell, she'd never seen the woman before, but in a certain way all the grans around here looked the same: small and bent and fragile, tweed check coat and a kerchief even though it was summer, trailing a tartan-sided trolley with her shop in it. Our gran, your gran, a'body's gran. Sonali had time, and nothing inside the store was on fire, and it was always better to put on a good face for the community, so that it wasn't just fights at the till about not accepting coupons a week out of date.

Drawing herself up, a step or two back in case the woman didn't have good eyesight and might take fright if there was suddenly an Asian teenager right up on top of her, Sonali stepped around, almost in the doorway, trying to catch her eye, and raised a hand. "Excuse me, ma'am, d'you need a hand with that? I can help you if you like."

The woman started a little, fumbling at the piece of paper she was holding, but only a little. Slowly, she turned away from the wall, shuffling, and adjusted her glasses with a gnarled hand to look Sonali over. "Eh? Whit was't?"