Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~~~

The water reached up high down the flow from the stream, and it was rising higher, but the stone patch in the upper cave was still dry; a long and hard climb through and around and over the edges of heavy, shifting rocks, and nothing that smelled like it was good to eat, so the logic of taking this walk was kind of lost on the one doing it. Sonali was not quite sure how to explain the situation to something that, if she remembered correctly, used the same wad of tissue for its brains and its liver, and just kept climbing without trying to give a reason.

Up there, just ahead – those piles of fabric, the stones poking up above; she was practically there. Unfortunately, the clothes were on the other side of the stream, and plunging into the narrow trace of fresh water was cold, and was pure uncomfortable, and it was a while just to get her bearings again, washed almost all the way down to the tidal flow, before Sonali could even start climbing again. On this side, the stones weren't quite so shifty, though, so if it didn't actually take any less time to come up again on the cairns, it was a lot less stressful.

Slowly – well, as quickly as she could manage, this was a crab bare as wide as her hand that was doing the checking, and it didn't have much for hands to work with – but carefully, Sonali checked through each of the piles in turn. There were more now than there had been, two of them with glasses folded up on top between the rocks, but no sealskin; it was late, and if she'd been out today she'd be back home by now, her land clothes folded up and weighted down. And just as before, there it was: a curl of crimson braid standing out from a black blazer in the utter dark, the fading light of the crab's glowing shell.

This was the tricky part; Sonali wasn't quite sure it was going to work, but as long as she was here, she might as well try. The crab picked its way along the lapel of the blazer, pushing in under, shifting one of the rocks, to try to get to an inner pocket. Maybe a name label, maybe an old detention slip, maybe something here; if this was who Sonali was already half-suspecting it to be, she didn't seem to be the type who'd let her mum sew name labels into her school clothes, but it was better than nothing. No, better still; inside the soft and slippy fabric of the jacket liner, the crab bumped into something hard and plastic. Sonali wiggled her pincers to try and grab it, then tried to figure out how to do "backwards" in this situation. It wasn't easy, and she dropped it several times, but eventually, she managed to get the heavy school ID out of the blazer pocket and out from under the fold, to somewhere she could take a better look at it.

The card was upside-down, nothing visible but the same old school boilerplate on the back, too small to read in the dark even if it had been interesting. Sonali scrabbled around and picked at the edge with a claw, trying to lift it up and turn it over on the long edge. It turned, and she turned herself to get a better look at the picture, the name on the badge below it.

Sonali leaned back in her chair again, breathing out hard, barely bothering to tell the crab to shove the card back inside the fold of the blazer. So it was her after all. A lot of things now made sense, like seeing something with the light from a different angle, so that all the angles and curves showed up in sharp relief. Thinking back, she maybe should have realized sooner – but the part where a woman can change her skin in the first place, where that is someone who can exist, that was the critical piece, and without that, she was just a little strange in a lot of ways, not a lot strange in one specific way that tied everything together and gave everything its purpose.

The crab scuttled off, heading back down the skittering rocks towards the tidal flow, where at least there would be some food washing in, the connection trailing off to a half-point at the very edge of Sonali's vision. Heavily, she pushed herself up and lay down on her bed. So. It was well enough knowing there was a selkie connected in with the disappeared children, and that the selkie was someone she knew, someone she should be able to talk to. The problem, then, was what on earth she was going to be able to say to her – how she was going to have to try and convince her to relent. This wasn't a crab that she could just lamp an elbow into the ribs of its brain and make it do what she wanted to: this was a woman, even if she wasn't a whole human woman necessarily, with her own brain and her own reasons, and Sonali was going to have to understand those reasons if she wanted to come up with a reason why they wouldn't work, why the kids would have to come home. Sonali closed her eyes, trying to calm herself now, to stop thinking and just sink down, down into the dark ocean of night.