The day is hot. This is unsurprising, however, because all of the days have been hot, thus far. Humid, too. Lots of flies, lots of biting things.

His head hurts. This, too, is unsurprising as his head has been hurting pretty much nonstop for as long as he can remember.

Which . . . isn’t much.

His mind is fuzzy, foggy. It’s hard to recall things that happened earlier in the day, and impossible to remember things that happened yesterday, and further back than that? There’s just . . . nothing.

Usually.

Sometimes, he gets . . . flashes. Not full memories, really, but more . . . fragments of images.

A hand: female, with candy-apple red nails, delicate purple-blue veins, a two-karat diamond solitaire ring with a platinum band on the ring finger; the hand slides down his chest, nails scraping, digging, trailing erotically down his stomach.

A sweep of short, ink black hair sprays across a pillow.

Vivid blue eyes, potent, fierce and wild.

A sailboat, a catamaran, slicing down a steep wave, the sky behind it angry, black, pregnant with a vicious storm.

Waves all around, being spun in circles and twisted and tossed like a marble in a washing machine.

A grave, a rectangle dug six feet into the soil. A tiny casket being lowered. Sunshine and black veils and tears.

Flashes of the past, but too little to cling to, each one fraught with violent emotion.

When the flashes wash through him, they paralyze him. He goes utterly still, seized by the images, squeezed by the emotions woven into the images like ivy wrapped around a tree.

He’s desperate to remember.

But the harder he tries, the less he remembers. The flashes come randomly, sometimes a dozen a day, sometimes new ones, sometimes the same image repeated over and over again.

He is outside, most of the time. Sitting in an ancient, rickety wheelchair in the shade of a huge, ancient, spreading tree, and even in the shade it is oppressively hot. Gulls and terns and other shore birds make occasional appearances overhead, which means he’s near the ocean.

The people around him do not speak English, and he doesn’t speak their languages, one of which he’s relatively certain is French. The other languages he hears are . . . well, he’s not sure. African dialects, maybe? The speakers are black, most of them are medical workers, and they all seem to use their languages and dialects interchangeably. Either way, he can’t make out a word, and they don’t understand him, even when he can summon the ability to speak at all. There are perhaps a dozen people that come and go around him, and they see that he eats, sleeps, uses a toilet, and they regularly check his various injuries, of which there are many.

His left arm is in a cast from shoulder to fingertips, and his left leg from hip to ankle. His ribs scream in raw, excruciating agony with every breath, each movement. His right arm is in a cast, as well, but only from elbow to wrist, leaving him some use of his right hand. His head is bandaged, and it is his head they check most frequently. They shine flashlights in his eyes, hold up fingers and he knows he’s supposed to tell them how many fingers there are by holding up the same number of fingers. They ask him questions, but of course he can’t understand him nor they him, so the whole process seems somewhat futile to him, but they persist and he cooperates, simply because he doesn’t know what else he would do.

There is one phrase that they repeat to him over and over and over again: “Comment vous appelez-vous?”

He knows this one: “What is your name?”

He doesn’t know the answer, though.

There is so little he knows, so much he doesn’t know.

The flashes of memory, the fragments of images, they are all he has of himself, of whatever his life was before he arrived in this place, wherever it is, whatever it is, however he got here.

Some days he feels like—it’s so hard to put to words—he feels as if he’s on a precipice, teetering on the edge, and if he just falls over he’ll remember everything. Like having to sneeze, but not being able to. It’s all there, but he can’t quite reach it.

He’s unsure how long he has been here. The days have blurred together, one day the same as the last, broken up only by the faces of the people taking care of him.

He is bored.

His skin itches underneath the casts.

His head hurts.

He wants to remember.

He NEEDS to remember.

He just . . . can’t.

Then one day, a day exactly like all the others, there is a new face. A black man, middle aged, wearing a suit like a Western businessman, with kind brown eyes and straight white teeth, and large, gentle hands.

“I am James. I am a doctor. Do you understand me?” This is in thickly accented but fluent English.

“Yes, I understand you.”

“Do you know what is your name?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Do you remember anything? How it is you came here? Where you came from? You remember anything?”

A shake of his head. “No. I have . . . pictures, images of things, but . . . nothing about who I am or where I came from.”

A grave nod. “I see, I see.”

“I feel like . . . I feel like I COULD remember, if I try hard enough, but . . . I just can’t.”

“No, no. That is not the way.” James crouches, gently checks his arm, leg, and then his head, and then does the thing with the flashlight and his finger. “You suffered very much. Your head . . . this especially was badly hurt. I think your memories, they will return, but we must help them. To try too hard, this will not work. You must help the remembering, but gently.”

“How?”

James rises from his crouch and walks away without a word, but with purpose in his stride, and returns a few moments later with a spiral-bound notebook and a ballpoint pen. “The pictures in your head, write them down. Tell yourself a story about the pictures. A real story, a fake story, it does not matter. Just make the little pictures into bigger ones. Tell stories about yourself. They will feel like stories, or maybe, if you are lucky, some will feel true. This is to help your memory learn to work once more. In your brain, in your head, things were hurt. We must help them heal and give them time.”

“What if I never remember?”

James tsks his tongue, shakes his head. “No, no. You must not think this way. If you have the pictures, you have the memories. You will remember.”

“Where am I?”

“Africa. Near Conraky, in Guinea.”

“Oh.” This doesn’t mean much to him. “How long have I been here?”

“Over one month. Four weeks and some days.”

“Where did I come from?”

“Fishermen found you in the sea. Many injuries, no identification.” He pauses. “One of the fishermen who found you, I saw him just the other day. He asked about you. He told me you said only one thing, over and over again: Ava, Ava, Ava.” James watches the effects of his words very closely.

Ava.

Ava.

Ava.

Three letters, and with them a whirlwind of images.

The hand, candy-apple nails and delicate purple-blue veins. The sweep of ink black hair on a crisp white pillow. Vivid, virulently blue eyes.

His throat seizes and his muscles contract. His jaw clenches and the blue sky seems darker, and a sense of longing slams through him, a need, a desperation.

“Ava.” He whispers the name, the three letters.

Well, only two letters, really: an A, a V, and another A. Two syllables. A breath, his teeth closing on his lower lip, and another breath.

What does it mean? This name, the hair and the nails and the eyes, who is she?

She is . . . everything.

What does that mean, though? He can’t comprehend it all.

“This means something to you, this name?” James asks.

A heavy, slow nod. “Yes.”

“What does it mean?”

A shrug of his shoulder. “I . . . I don’t know.”

“Ava . . . what does she mean to you?”

“Everything!” he shouts, sudden and loud. “She means EVERYTHING!”

James is unperturbed. “Good, very good. You have a name, an important one. Write a story about her. She is in you, somewhere. Find her.”

Find her.

Find her.

James is still speaking, but the words do not register.

Eventually, he is alone once more, in the wheelchair under the shade of a tree. The notebook is on his lap, open to the first page, the pen held awkwardly in his right hand.

The white space and blue lines of the page . . . it feels familiar. Like an invitation.

He sits for a very long time, staring at the page, holding the pen, letting images and fragments of memory roll through him, letting strings of words coagulate and cohere like clumps of driftwood collecting in the lee of a tree downed in a river’s current.

Sunlight drowses into evening, and the mosquitos come out and the tsetse flies and the blackflies and the other biting things, and he is wheeled back into a long, low, narrow room dimly lit by a pair of naked bulbs, with rows of cots, most of them empty, except for two still thin forms: a sick, dying man, and a woman with missing limbs and vacant, haunted eyes.

The nurses help him into his cot, and he sits with the notebook balanced on his right thigh. Stars twinkle through the window, filtered through the mosquito netting. Insects chirrup and bats flit and he even thinks perhaps he can hear a distant SSSHHHHH . . . SSSSHHHHH . . . SSSSSHHHH of waves on the shore.

It is cooler now that it is night, but it is still hot, and the air is heavy and moist with humidity, so sweat dots his forehead and upper lip all the time, and sweat trickles down his spine, and his skin itches under his casts.

Eventually, the swirling stew of images and sentences in his mind glugs sluggishly down to his fingertips and into the pen.

He grips the warm blue thin plastic tube between his forefinger, middle finger, and thumb, and touches the ballpoint tip to the first line of the first page.

In fits and starts at first, and then with increasing fervor, he begins to write.

Petrichor is heavy on the air, the thick scent of rain. Bread baking, somewhere. A dog barks. Voices chatter, a low, meaningless murmur of dissonance. Wind blows past the window, whispering and whistling; rain clatters and patters and hisses. A bell dongs rings in a church steeple, and a ship’s bell answers with a jangle and clang.

Calum is restless. A wildness fills his blood, a sense of urgency rousing him to pace across his room, back and forth, back and forth, the hitch in his step and the thunk of his false leg on the wooden floor creating a rhythm: shuffle-thud . . . shuffle-thud . . . shuffle-thud.

His door creaks open, and Da appears. “Cease that infernal pacing, would you, Calum? It’s enough to drive a man mad, the endless pacing.”

“They should be back by now, Da.” His voice is a permanent hoarse rasp.

“They will be at the dock any day now, Calum. Tis a bit of a blow, nothin’ t’worry on.”

“It’s been a bit of a blow for a week now, and not a word from them.”

“What would you have them do, Calum, fly? They’re coming.” More gently, now. “She’ll be here, son. You’ll see.”

Calum pauses at the window, staring out through heavy leaded glass into the snarling storm. He shakes his head, thick, unkempt red locks falling in his face. “I have an ill foreboding, Da. It’s like a stone in my gut.”

“Are y’a witch, now, Calum, with the second sight to see the future?” His mockery is sharp, but well meant. “There’s no blood of Niall in your veins, son. It’s the storm, is all, making you restless. Come sit by the fire with me and have a glass, aye? You’ll do no one any good wearing yourself out with the pacing, not to mention the poor floor. You’ve worn a path in the planks by now.”

Calum sighs. “How I can sit and fill my belly with drink when my wife is out there, lost in the storm?”

“She’s not lost, Calum, you daft fool. She’s on a sturdy, well-built ship captained by a competent man with a lifetime of experience at sea. You helped build the be-damned ship yourself, and you’ve known Cap’n Patrick your entire life.” Da grabs Calum by the arm and physically hauls him out of his bedroom and sits him in an armchair by the fire, then pours a dram. “Stop worrying.”

Calum takes a drink, then another. A third. But the whisky settles in his gut like acid, and he sets it aside with a growl. “I know, Da, but . . . I can’t shake the feeling.”

“This isn’t like you, son.” Da’s craggy features wrinkle with worry. “You’re no more a superstitious man than I, to be putting stock in ill feelings.”

“Exactly.”

“She’ll be here.”

Calum stands, shuffles to find his balance on the thick, gnarled wooden peg that functions as his left leg from the knee down. “I’m going to go down to the docks. I have to do something, Da.”

Da catches at the gray cable-knit sleeve of Calum’s sweater. “It’s pissing out, and its past midnight. There’s nothing to see and nothing to do but wait. I know it’s hard, but its all there is.”

Calum shrugs into a slicker, tugs the hood over his head. “I have to go.” He pulls a folded square of paper from his pocket, the last letter he got from her, two months ago, holds it up for Da to see.

Da sighs heavily. “Calum, what will you do?”

“Whatever I can do. Anything. Everything.” He stomps toward the door, a heavy boot step, and a thunk of his peg. “I have to do something.”

“You’re a one-legged shipwright, and you nearly puked yourself to death on the voyage over.” Da’s voice is hard, snapping out. “There’s nothing you can do, Calum. Sit, and wait.”

Calum wrenches the door open, admitting a howl of wind and a spray of rain, and stomps out into the gale. Despite the slicker, he’s soaked to the bone within steps, and gives up trying to keep the hood tugged over his head. He peers into the darkness, guiding himself to the docks. There’s nothing to see but the occasional glimpse of jagged-edge waves lit by flashes of lightning. The rain drives in sideways sheets, twisted and blown by the wind, each droplet a stinging pellet hammering at Calum’s face and pattering relentlessly off his slicker.

His heart is beating out of his chest, thudding wildly. Every instinct he has is screaming at him, telling him something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong.

But what can he do?

Nothing.

He’s a one-legged shipwright and hasn’t stepped foot on a deck sine he lost his leg. There’s no captain willing to brave a journey now, anyway, not in this damned monster of a storm.

But she’s out there, his sweet, precious wife. “Mary,” he whispers, “come back to me.”

He clings to a post as the wind attempts to fling him off the dock and into the bay.

He whispers a prayer to Mary, to Jesus, to every saint he can think of.

His teeth chatter as his blood turns to ice, but he remains on the dock, waiting, praying, and hoping.

At some point, he slips down to sit on the slick wooden planks, both arms wrapped around the dock post. “Come back, Mary,” he whispers, again and again. “Come back to me, my love.”

At last, with the storm finally beginning to blow itself out, his eyes close and he nods off.

When he wakes, the bay is fogged over, a thick pall of fog the color of sun-bleached bones obscuring everything, even the end of the dock, ten feet away, cannot be seen. He’s chilled to the bone, and a tight, thick fist has his lungs in its grip. He struggles to sit up, and a cough wracks him.

“Mary.” He wrestles himself upright, every bone aching, every muscle screaming, cough after hacking cough doubling him over.

Between coughs, he hears a telltale sound, the chuck of water against the side of boat. The air is utterly and completely still, as only it can be after a storm like the one that just blew out. Straining his ears, he listens.

There’s a creak of shifting wood.

The rattle of a spar clattering against a mast.

“Hello?” Calum shouts. “Hello!”

Silence.

“Mary!” Softer, with a sob: “Mary.”

The chucking and the creaking and the rattling continues, growing louder.

And then a tall, fat shape appears out of the fog. A ship. Listing heavily to port. Sail in tatters. Mast snapped off, mainsail gone. The deck is in ruin, and there is not a single sign of life.

The ship drifts slowly, as if set on course by an invisible hand, shoved from the open ocean toward the bay. It doesn’t slow as it scuds toward the dock, and shore. Calum realizes it isn’t going to stop, and he dances backward awkwardly as the wall of the ship’s side crunches into the dock, splintering planks, and grinds to a stop. It shifts further as it settles, listing harder.

The silence is complete.

“Mary?”

The name of the ship—HMS Victoria—is blazoned with white paint on the side. This is Mary’s ship.

“No. No.” He hobbles toward the ship, catches up against the slick wood of its belly.

A line dangles off the side and he snags it, tugs to test it, and then knots the line to the dock. The tide is high and, using the taut line, he is able to haul himself hand over hand up the side of the ship, his one good foot scrabbling at the side, his peg scratching and thumping.

With great effort, he heaves himself over the side, gasping, sweating, slamming onto the deck. He catches his breath, and then lunges to his feet. The top of the mast snapped off and crashed down into the deck, spearing through the planks to reveal the hold below. Peering into the gaping wound, Calum can see crates, bolts of cloth, barrels of foodstuffs, a boot, a dress, all bobbing in the dark water filling the hold.

Calum limps toward the nearest door, leading to the captain’s quarters. The room is vacant, books upside-down on the floor, a jar of ink smashed, pens scattered, the window shattered. The guest quarters on the opposite end of the ship are the same, the violence of the storm wreaked its havoc here, too.

“Mary!” He shouts her name, again and again, feeling in his gut the truth.

He slides on his buttocks down the ladder leading into the hold, until he’s calf-deep in water. A crate bumps against his knee, and a barrel of tobacco bobs past. A bolt of calico half-unrolled catches against his thigh. Hardtack and biscuits in a broken crate.

A corpse rolls to the surface, twisting and bobbing, bloated. Male, old—the cook. Fish have eaten his face, and Calum’s stomach twists.

“Mary!”

In the scant minutes of his presence in the hold, the water level has risen from mid-calf to past his knee—the ship is sinking.

“No . . . Mary . . . Mary.” He scrambles back up the ladder onto the deck, and has to haul himself onto the dock from the deck, climbing upward as the ship sinks around him.

He stands on the dock, watching, as the Victoria sinks.

Da appears out of the early morning mist and tries to pull Calum away. “It’s over, son. She’s gone. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, son, but it’s over, it’s done.”

“No, no. No. Mary. I have to find Mary.”

Da gestures angrily at the bit of mast poking up out of the water of the bay. “You found her, son. She’s there.”

“No!” Calum slams a fist into Da’s chest, knocking him backward. “She’s not. You don’t understand, Da!”

Down the quay, at another dock, a grizzled old man readies his small fishing boat. Calum spies the old man and the tiny boat, and hobbles with determination toward him. He reaches the dock, and grabs at the side of the fishing sloop.

“Are you going out?” he asks.

The old man nods. “Best fishing, just after a storm.”

“Take me with you.” Calum gestures at the Victoria. “My wife was on that ship, and I—I have to find her. Please, help me. Take me out.”

“The sea has her, lad. You won’t find her.”

“I have to try.”

A hard, rheumy stare. “You’ll sit where I say to sit, and you won’t touch nothin’. My ship, my rules.”

“Fine, agreed, thank you!” Calum straddles the side of the ship and slides down onto the deck, hopping and hobbling to the crate indicated by the old fisherman.

Da watches, hands in his graying hair, as the sloop vanishes into the fog.

A wind has picked up, shifting the fog into skirling eddies, and it is this wind that blows the sloop out of the bay. The fisherman guides his ship with the easy familiarity of a lifetime’s knowledge of the bay and the surrounding area. He listens, head cocked, and then when the clap of the gentle waves echo off the docks and the quay, and the warehouses fades and become a louder kind of silence, he unfurls the sail all the way, unhurriedly tying off lines until the sail bellies to catch the wind.

Calum sits on the crate, staring out into the fog and the waves.

“She was coming from the east,” the fisherman rasps. “So it’s east we’re heading. She’ll have left a trail behind her. Corpses and the like.”

“How did she make it into the bay? The sail was ruined and the air was still.”

“Happens, sometimes.” A shrug. “Chance, perhaps. Some say the mer-folk will sometimes return a ship to shore like that, give her a push.”

“Mer-folk?”

Another shrug. “Call it superstition if you like, believe it or don’t, I care little enough. I’ve seen ’em.”

“Mermaids?”

A nod. “Got blown out to sea, once, many years back, got all twisted around and lost, thought I was sailing for shore but was heading out to sea. Spent days out there, ran out of food and water, thought it was the end. Wind died, becalming me.” A long pause, eyes roving the waves. “Saw a face in the brine. A woman. Swam right up and stared at me. Seaweed in her hair, fish scales where her legs should have been. Barnacles growing on her skin. Teeth like knives and hungry eyes. Not a lovely thing, but a fearsome one. I had a full net from my catch aboard, so I tossed the whole rotting mess of fish overboard, and there was a big commotion under the surface. Guts and scales and fish eyes floated up to the surface and, soon enough, I felt my ship moving, being pushed, pulled, I don’t know. When we reached the surf-break they let me drift back in, just like the Victoria did.” A hard glare, daring Calum to laugh. “That’s the damned truth, like it or not.”

Calum shivers. “I believe you.”

“Don’t matter if you do. True is true, whether anyone believes or not.” He gestures at the waves. “If your woman is out there, the sea has her. The mer-folk have her. Won’t be nothin’ to find but sorrow, lad. You’ll see.”

“Then why are you taking me out?”

“When a man’s lost his woman, he’s lost his way. You want her to be out there, alive. She ain’t, and you know it, but you’re just mad enough to believe your own lies. I’ll show you the trail of the dead, and maybe you’ll find your senses. Or, you’ll bury yourself in the waves with your poor wife.”

Calum doesn’t know what to make of this. “Bury myself in the waves?”

“You’re grief-mad. It’s a better end to drown quickly out here, than slowly back ashore.” The old man thumps his chest. “Lost my wife in similar circumstances, years ago. Been drowning ever since, but I can’t bring myself to let the sea take me. Too stubborn, I guess. I’m doing you a favor. If you want to live, you’ll live. If you don’t, well . . . like I said, maybe it’s better to end it quickly.”

Calum’s stomach drops out. End it quickly? The thought hadn’t occurred to him. He just wants to find Mary, just wants to know she’s alive.

But if she isn’t?

The thought of seeing her corpse in the waves . . . eaten by fish, bloated . . . Calum loses what little is left in his stomach. If Mary is . . .

He can’t even think the word. He’s been clinging to the hope that she’s still alive.

If she’s not . . . Calum tries to imagine carrying on with his life back ashore. Building ships, going to the tavern, drinking whisky with Da . . . it all seems futile and empty and pointless without Mary. How could he continue living? What’s the point? Until now, Calum has been clutching desperately at the notion that Mary is out here, alive still, somehow.

If she isn’t?

If she’s . . . dead?

The idea of sinking peacefully beneath the waves doesn’t sound so bad. Better than going through life back ashore without Mary.

“She could still be alive,” he insists.

“The sea is full of mischief and trickery and surprises, lad.” The fisherman adjusts a line, knots it again. “Never know what’s possible, I suppose.”

A long silence, and then the fisherman leans far over the side of the sloop and scoops something out of the water—a woman’s bonnet. From the bottom of the boat, the fisherman lifts a long pole with a hook on the end and uses it to reach out into the water and pull something toward the boat; the hook is snagged onto the sleeve of a man’s coat. The corpse is facedown, but has clearly been in the water a day or two. Now that he’s looking, Calum becomes aware of what it is they’re sailing through: the wreckage and detritus swept off the deck of the Victoria. Another body, also male. Crates and barrels, chunks of broken wood, a bit of spar, clothing. Food. Another body.

Calum cries out, then—this body, the one twisting and bobbing in the waves, is a woman’s body. Her dress is splayed out in the water, bits of white petticoat showing. Dark hair floating like a spray of ink.

“Mary!” He leans over the side, reaching for her.

“Stay in the boat, lad,” the fisherman warns. “This ain’t the spot to be throwing yourself over. You won’t find the death you’re looking for. Not here.”

Calum ignores the fisherman. The woman’s body is just within reach, but he can’t stretch far enough, can’t quite reach . . .

His balance shifts, a wave sends the boat lurching, and Calum is weightless for a moment. Only for a moment, though. He smashes into the icy water, brine salting his lips and stinging his eyes and filling his mouth and lungs. Currents pull at him, and he kicks, thrashes. The sea is dark, so dark, here under the waves.

The woman’s body is just beside him, above him.

Her face isn’t Mary’s.

It’s not Mary.

Calum tries to swim, but his coat drags him down, and his peg leg is heavy, and his limbs are tired, and his lungs scream and the current is too strong, pulling him down, down, down.

Something tugs at his foot.

Brushes his shoulder.

He kicks at the current, but the sea has him.

He wants to scream, and the only word jangling through his brain is Mary, Mary, Mary, but he can’t scream, because his breath is running out.

Something tugs at his knee.

Bumps his back.

Tangles in his hair.

He twists in the current, catches a glimpse of movement in the shadows of the deep. The surface is far overhead. Too far.

Mary.

Mary.

He’s dizzy, and his lungs are on fire, and even his desperation is running out. He could take a breath, and it would be over. Why fight any more? The old fisherman was right—the sea has Mary, and now the sea has him.

He kicks for the surface once more, but the current is stronger, pulling him down.

Something colder than the water traces across his cheek, and something tickles his hand. Scrapes his chest. He blinks, salt stinging his eyes, shadows skirling and eddying, darkness deeper than midnight shadows are all around him, pressure crushing him.

Is . . .

Is that a face, there in the shadows? A pale slip of white flesh, just out of reach? A corpse, probably.

But no, it moves. Shifts, too quickly to be caught in the current.

So dizzy.

Fire in his chest.

Darkness in his mind, in his eyes, behind his eyes. Breath is gone, and he has to expel it. His lungs cannot remain contracted any longer.

He’s twisted, suddenly. Pulled, pushed.

A face, in front of him.

A woman.

Alive.

Eyes wide and oval, dark, blinking weirdly, inhuman pupils, irises too dark to be human. Too sharp cheekbones. Too high a forehead. Hair too long, too tangled, a wrong shade of brown, almost green, the shade of seaweed that sometimes washes ashore after a storm. She regards him steadily. Her expression, if a face like hers can be understood to express emotions he would comprehend, is that of someone watching a bug struggling to right itself.

Calum sees her and is sure he must be hallucinating as his lungs give out.

But then she reaches for him, and her palm touches his cheek, and her touch is colder than ice, and far too real. He catches at her wrists, and feels her bones in his hand, her cold flesh.

Calum coughs, then, and knows the end has come. Seawater fills his mouth.

He is sinking.

Drowning.

The woman watches, impassive.

Mary.

Mary?

Does she see the sorrow in him then, this woman of the sea? Does she see something she understands? She moves, a sinuous flicker, and she’s catching at him, strong fists clutching at his clothing. Tangling with him, her solid body against his, movement fluttering against his legs.

Her mouth is strange, pressed against his. Alien. Cold, so cold. But her lips feel like lips, and the breath she expels into his mouth tastes of brine and the deepest depths of the sea and other darker flavors, but it is a breath nonetheless, and it fills his lungs and gives him a reprieve from the darkness consuming him from within.

Upward.

She’s pulling him upward, swimming for the surface faster than belief. His head breaks the surface, and he gasps for air, coughing, vomiting seawater. The surface of the sea is empty, only waves in every direction. The sloop is gone, the fisherman is gone. There are no corpses, no crates, no barrels.

Calum coughs, kicking to stay afloat, but he’s too heavy, too weak, and he sinks beneath the surface, blinking brine, gasping for another lungful of air.

And there she is.

Her bare flesh isn’t quite white; is there a greenish tinge? A hint of the jade of the sea, coloring her flesh? She flashes past him, swimming around him.

Calum was a sailor once, before he lost his leg, before he met Mary. He knows the creatures of the sea, the shark, the dolphin, the swordfish, the whale . . .

Her tail is a shark’s tail, the fin running vertical, and when she swims, her tail flashes side to side.

Her breasts are bare, and heavy, and round, and now he notices this. Her spine is knobbed, almost ridged. Her shoulder blades are too prominent. There are slits in her skin, at the sides of her throat, which pulse open and closed—gills.

She twists, arching her spine and rolling over, and then a wicked flash of her tail sends her slicing through the sea toward him, and she’s there, up against him, catching at his waist. Her eyes cut over him and see his legs, one whole and complete, and the other ending at the knee, with a gnarled, twisted, polished length of wood where his calf should be.

She tangles a fist in his hair and presses her mouth to his, and once again her breath fills him, tasting stale somehow and briny and of old fish and new meat. He sucks at this breath greedily, out of instinct. His soul is heavy, his heart a vacant hole in his chest, his mind reeling and baffled and overwhelmed, but his body is betraying him, sucking at each lungful of breath he can get, clinging to each next moment of life.

A thousand questions sear through him, tangled and confused.

She wraps an arm around him, and she is so strong, too strong. She pulls him to the surface. She’s holding him with one arm, her tail wiggling under the surface, keeping them both afloat. She clings to him, his back pressed to her front, her breasts flattened against his shoulder blades, her hands clutching at his middle. Her tail doesn’t merely flick, but beats with staggering power, and they slice through the water together with unbelievable speed.

He can feel the movement of her tail, feel it writhing against his legs, back and forth, back and forth. Her hair streams behind her, like a skein of seaweed. His lungful of air is soon depleted, and he holds it in still, fighting the urge to breathe, to let go.

She angles upward, and rolls to her back with his weight resting on her, and he feels the air on his face and sucks in a breath, and no sooner he has done this than she is twisting once more, powering them beneath the waves.

Again and again, she brings him to the surface, lets him take a breath, and then continues onward. Minutes, hours? He doesn’t know, can’t track the passage of time except in terms of breaths, lungfuls sucked in and burned through.

The next time she surfaces, there is the sound of waves crashing against shore. Spray flings skyward as the surf smashes against a rock. It is into this violent, white-churned froth of currents and smashing waves that she takes him, to a slick bump of rock. She deposits him onto the rock, and then catches at it with her hands and pulls herself onto it beside him.

“Can you breathe, out of the water?” he asks.

“For a small time.” The slits in her throat, the gills, he supposes they are, are opening-closing faster than ever, pulsing rapidly, and he realizes she is winded, exhausted.

“Why does the sea not want me?”

A shrug of her shoulder. “The sea keeps her secrets. I only know she does not want you.”

“Mary.” Calum points back the way they came. “She was on that boat. With those dead people, where you found me.”

A shrug. “The sea keeps her secrets.”

“Were you there, when they went overboard?”

Her eyes meet his, and her gaze is alien, utterly foreign. “What is a Mary?”

Calum touches his fist to his heart. “My wife. My mate.”

“Oh.”

“Did . . . can you find her? My Mary?”

“I know not of your Mary.”

The surf is violent, crashing, smashing, deafening, white frothing spray dappling the air: an angry sea.

“I have to know. I have to find her.”

“The sea keeps her secrets.”

“Then ask the sea! Or show me how to ask!” It’s craziness, madness, what he’s saying, but Mary was his saving grace, his all, his everything.

She does not answer, which is as much an answer as he’ll get.

A few moments of silence between them, leavened only by the crashing surf.

“Are there others like you?” he asks, eventually.

“Are there others like you?” she parrots, but it’s not a repetition, rather the question returned, the question answered.

She scoops a handful of the surf and splashes herself with it, wetting her face, her throat, her gills, and her lungs expand briefly, her gills pulsing.

“How do you speak my language?” he asks, rather than answering her question out loud.

“Men have known we swim beneath the waves. A man was in the little boat, the little boat that comes out of the larger boat. He was far from any after-sea, lost in the sea. She wanted him and was waiting until it was his time. I tried to help him, but the sea kept him, her currents kept him. So I stayed with him, and learned his words. You men interest me. I like to speak to you. To see you. Your legs are strange.”

“How do I find Mary?”

“If the sea has taken her, you cannot.”

“I have to find her. I have to find Mary.” He meets her eyes, pleading. “The sea can have me, if I can find Mary. She’s . . . I have to find Mary.”

A shake of her head. “I can help you forget Mary. The sea has her, and the sea does not give up her secrets.” She slides across the rock, shimmying closer to Calum. “I can take you down into the waves, and I can help you forget.”

“I can’t forget.”

She touches his wooden leg then the flesh of his thigh above it. “I watch the after-sea, sometimes. From the waves. I watch men and women like me. You mate, like we do.”

Calum just stares at her. Seeing her differently. Seeing her as a female. Where her legs would be, where human becomes sea creature, there is a dappling, shadows, rippling, folds, secret flesh, feminine flesh. Breasts. Hands. Lips. Curves and softness where a woman is curved and soft.

She shifts closer to him. Are they closer to the waves, now? Is the surf churning higher around him? Are the waves closer to reclaiming him? He smells her, feels her. She touches him, his legs, his stomach . . . his mind is spinning, dizzy, and a sense of strangeness is flowering in his mind, an otherness, a part of his deepest instincts responding to something in her voice, in the gleam of her eye, in the searing coldness of her touch.

“I watch your men mating with your women. And I think to myself, what would it be like, to mate with a man? To join as we join, but on the after-sea, rather than—”

“But . . . Mary . . .” It’s Calum’s only coherent thought.

He feels her, this mer-woman, her hands on him, the cold sea air on his bare flesh, her touch so cold it burns, her breath, her too sharp teeth nipping sharply here and there, teasing rather than tearing, her body is familiar and alien at once, her lips firm and her tongue slithery, her breasts heavy and pliable and weighted perfectly in his hands, her flesh like ice, colder than ice, a cold so fierce it becomes fire.

“So warm. Your warmth is strange.”

“Cold.”

He’s not Calum any longer, just a man. Response, reaction. Her touch leeches his warmth, but her touch also incites heat and need.

“Mary.”

He hears a hiss, her sound of frustration. “The sea has your Mary.”

“The sea . . .” He’s trying to wade through the fog, the haze, the dizziness, the darkness, the strangely urgent desire, trying to remember what was so important. “Then give me the sea.”

“I can give you the sea,” she says, in a shuddering vibrato that sings in the darkest nooks of his mind. “I can give you the deeps, where there are a thousand Marys to find. The sea can give you the breath of the deeps.”

“Only one Mary. My Mary.” He has her face in his mind, her delicate black strands of hair, the vivid blue of her eyes, the gentle curve of her hips, the slightness of her tender breasts, the quiet murmur of her voice, the strength of her peace, the peace she always gave him so freely, so easily, his Mary was his peace, all she had to do was simply be, simply sit beside him and hold his hand and read to him, and he could find his peace in her.

My Mary.

That vibrato sings inside him again. Her touch is so cold, at his temples now, over his heart. The cold filters through him, crackles like ice in his veins. She is all around him, the cold of the depths in her touch, on her lips grazing his skin.

She is inside him, in his dreams, in his memories. The breath from her lungs pulses through him, he’s breathing her breath and the sea is around him, but he isn’t cold and doesn’t need to breathe the sky, he’s breathing her, breathing the sea, she’s around him and her touch is warmth.

But still, Mary is all there is. The beat of his heart—Mary . . . Mary . . . Mary . . . Mary. He aches, his bones ache, his groin aches. His cock throbs and his balls ache. His heart is fit to burst, pounding in his chest.

Mary.

A day of white: white flowers and white silk, his Navy uniform pressed and creased and pinned at the knee, no veil for Mary, just white flowers in her black hair and the sea behind them, rippling silver and green and blue in the sun. A day of promises, her promise to always be his peace, and his promise to always be her strength, her protector, to shield her from the ugliness of the world, so she can be his innocence, his peace, his whiteness in a blood-red world.

MaryMaryMaryaryMaryMaryMaryMary

The sea whispers around him:

. . . Calum?. . .

Dreams, darkness, memory, death, life—it’s all a weirding, twisting tangle. The white of her dress, her lips on his as they kiss for the first time, the white of her skin in the gentle yellow-orange of the firelight, in their cabin by the sea, near the shipyards where he builds ships he’ll never set foot on again—it’s not seasickness that makes him ill on a ship, but the blood-sickness of memory. The white of her teeth as she laughs at him, teasing, loving. The white of her breasts as she moves above him in the candlelight, such slight, small breasts, so lovely, so pale and delicate and perfect. The white of her thighs around his waist.

White.

Blue, darkness, shadows, purple-black around him. Depths around him like a vise. Hands, teeth, hair that isn’t black as raven’s wings, as ink, but dark and almost green like seaweed on a storm-wet shore, skin that isn’t white, but tinged palest jade, the jade of deepest ocean. Breath that isn’t sweet from tea with milk, but sour and salty from devouring strange things scuttling in the sea-deep shadows.

. . . Calum?. . .

Calum. He is Calum.

Mary.

Mary?

He’s twisting in darkness, filled with brine-sour shadows. Wrapped up in seaweed and strong arms, lit by some strange unearthly blue-green glow.

He tastes her, the woman from the sea, the mer-woman. Tastes her breath in his mouth, on his lips, feels it in his lungs.

Mary.

There’s a hiss. Serpentine, almost. Frustration, anger.

I can give you the sea. She will take you, now. No more longing. No more Mary. No more sorrow.

No, no.

Mary.

Where there is your Mary, there are dreams of your wars, memories of dying in the belly of your ship. I cannot breathe for you a third time. The sea wants you; I am the sea, and I want you.

Mary.

He’s drowning in shadows. There is no memory, no susurrus of the past across his mind, only shadows.

Their darkness is broken, incomplete, however. In the shadows, flitting and swimming and seeking, is a flash of white.

White skin

Pale, slight breasts

Ink black hair darker than shadows

A soul that billows lightness and white and warmth

Movement, in the depths.

Warmer sea.

Lighter shadows.

Grayer, rather than fullest black.

One Mary. My Mary.

He fights the darkness. Remembers his promise, on the day of white, the day of vows. Love, protect, honor . . . and always, always, always be her Calum, only her Calum.

Fight the darkness.

Be her Calum.

He can almost hear her, in the twisting currents of the deeps.

. . . Calum?. . .

Another hiss of anger.

Movement, a tail beating in the currents, flicking powerfully, driving upward. Currents against his face. Cold, once again.

Sounds: gulls crying raucously in keening shrill overlapping shrieks, the surf on a shore, a bell jangling as a mast dips side to side in the waves. A seal barking.

Sensation: sand skritching under him, water flowing over him, sucking down past him, coldness deep inside him.

Calum coughs, and blinks brine from his eyes. The sky above him is heavy gray, wind blows, rain patters and prattles in a gentle drizzle. He’s on a shore, half in the water.

He’s not alone.

“You owe me two deaths, Calum.” Her voice is a shuddering vibrato, that quavering song in his head, in his soul, a voice that tolls with the power of the tides.

“I only want Mary. I’m her Calum.”

She’s there, in the sand beside him. Skin and hair tinged green, gills at her throat pulsing. Her teeth are a little too sharp, and a little too many. “I gave you my breath, twice. And now I’m returning you from the sea. The sea wants you, Calum.”

The sea wants you; I am the sea, and I want you—he remembers the sound of those words echoing inside him, shuddering in the bone of his skull and the cage of his ribs.

“The sea can have me, but give me Mary.”

She glances past Calum, at something down the shore.

A shape. A body, thin and frail and feminine, crumpled in the sand, half in the sea just like Calum.

“Your Mary.” That awful, powerful, unearthly vibrato again.

He claws through the sucking surf, his peg digging in the sand, grit under his nails, brine on his lips. He is still caught in the sea, and her currents are sucking him back in.

“No! Mary . . . Mary!” His hoarse rasp grates in his throat. “Mary . . . please, Mary.”

She’s coughing, belching and vomiting seawater. Rising up on shaky hands, ink black hair stringy and dripping. Her dress is torn, showing her white skin in places.

“MARY!” He claws at the sand and the surf, screaming.

She hears him, sees him, struggles like he struggles, but the sea has them, and refuses to release them.

“Please!” Mary’s voice is as he remembers, quiet, but cutting through noise with its gentility. “Calum . . . please, give me Calum back.”

The sea refuses to release them.

Beside him, the mer-woman watches, that impassive, alien expression on her face. “Two deaths. Two lives.”

Calum ceases his struggles and twists to regard her. “What? What do you mean?”

“It is the way of the sea. A life for a life. To receive, you must give.”

“Give what?”

She glances at his foot, his flesh-and-bone foot, now bare, his boot lost at some point: seaweed is tangled around his ankle, twisted and coiled like a tendril, like a tentacle.

“Your life.” She glances at Mary. “Her life.”

“What? What do you mean, our lives?”

“When the after-sea has finished with you, you will be called back to us. When the after-sea gives you up, when you feel the breath of your sky fleeing your lungs, you will return to us.”

The tendril of seaweed coils around Calum, snaking up his body as if alive, growing around him. Around his wrist. His ankle. His throat. Loops of seaweed, tangled and coiled around him. Squeezing.

“A life for a life, a life for a life.” She gestures at Mary, and Calum sees that another tendril of seaweed is snaking around her body as well: throat, ankle, and wrist.

“We have to return to the sea before we die?” He glances at Mary, desperate to go to her, and then at the mer-woman, the creature of the sea.

“Yes.” She fingers the seaweed. “This will be your reminder, all of your days walking upon the after-sea.”

“But we’ll have each other? The sea will give us back to each other?”

“Until you return to her, yes.”

“Why?”

A shrug. “Even the sea cannot unknot the strands of fate, Calum.” She glances at Mary and then at Calum. “Some loves are fated, and cannot be broken, even by death, even by the sea.”

“Anything. As long as I have Mary. She’s all that matters.”

“She must agree, as well.”

“God, Calum—Calum.” Her voice shakes in his ear.

“Mary! I’m here, Mary. I’ve got you.”

“You borrow the breath of the sky. You borrow your years on the after-sea,” the mer-woman says, in that quavering vibrato, the shuddering voice that rolls and tolls in the secret places of their souls.

The seaweed tightens around Calum’s throat, around his ankle and wrists, and he hears Mary choking as well, and the sucking grabbing currents pulls them away from shore, back into the hungry brine.

Their eyes meet, Calum’s and Mary’s, and their hands tangle, fingers twining.

“Yes,” Calum gasps.

“Yes,” Mary hisses.

The strangling pressure fades, and the currents weaken.

A long moment of silence then, except for the slap of the surf and the cry of the gulls.

Somehow Calum and Mary are tangled together in the sucking surf, currents pulling at their ankles and thighs, and her lips are on his, cold but swiftly warming, and her hands are on his, and her hands do not burn with the coldness of the deep.

“Calum?” Mary’s voice, quiet, shaky, tentative.

He rolls toward her, levers himself onto his elbow, and she’s there, in his arms, he’s breathing her warmth and her pale skin is real, and her whimpering cries are real, and the salt on his cheeks is from tears rather than brine.

“Oh, Mary, Mary.” He looks her over, touches her everywhere. “You’re real. You’re real!”

She clings to his neck. “I think I died, Calum. I drowned.” She shivers. “But I heard you. I . . . I saw you, I felt you. You were fighting. A woman . . . that woman . . . thing, she had you all wrapped up in her arms and she was going to . . . I don’t know.”

“You sank, your ship sank,” Calum says, “and I thought . . .”

She kisses him, clings to him. “Was it a dream, Calum?”

He feels the seaweed still and pulls away from Mary. Lifts his wrist, showing a thin strand wrapped tight around his wrist and another around Mary’s. “I don’t think it was.”

She shakes and clings to him once more. “You went to sea for me, Calum? You . . . you went back out, went down beneath the waves? After everything you’ve been through?”

“You were out there, Mary. I had to find you. I’m your Calum.”

Mary clings to him fiercely, kissing him everywhere. “We’ll go down to the sea together, then. When that day comes, we’ll go down together.”

He kisses her back, and then, for a moment, he feels an echo of icy skin, a touch so cold his flesh burns, tastes brine-sour breath, and he shudders, pulls away, staring down at Mary to make sure she’s real.

“What is it, Calum?”

“She . . . she tried to . . . she wanted me.” He shakes his head, unwilling to put to words the dark, twisted images in his mind. “Erase it from me, Mary.”

She brushes a stray lock of his damp red hair away from his eye. “How, Calum?”

But her eyes, so blue, so loving, they tell him she knows exactly how.

They crawl out of the surf, away from the reaching tide, and Mary erases that icy touch with her own, with her warmth, her peace. In the sand, beneath the sky, with the gulls crying and the sea churning, they move together.

Perhaps someone watches from the waves.

Calum doesn’t care. His Mary is wrapped up in his arms, the sun warming their bare skin.

Let her watch; their years on the after-sea will be long and full of love. And, after all, as she said . . . some loves are fated, and cannot be broken, even by death, even by the sea.

Some loves are fated, and cannot be broken, even by death . . .

Even by the sea.

Even by the sea.

He sets the pen down, closes the notebook.

His eyelids slide closed, and his breath hitches in his lungs.

“Ava?”

He sees her now, in his mind’s eye. Slender, with small, pale breasts. Ink black hair. Vivid blue eyes.

“Ava.”

He whispers her name, as if saying her name can summon her, like an ifrit or djinn.

He doesn’t remember anything but her face, her name, her body.

Perhaps he can summon more of her, by telling another story.

He opens the notebook and begins to write again. He thinks of her, of Ava. Those blue eyes, that pale skin, her ink black hair, the way she loved him, the way he loved her.

And so he writes, to remember.