Fathomless

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  TO MY MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS, FOR TAKING ME TO TAME BEACHES, AND MY PATERNAL GRANDPARENTS, FOR TAKING ME TO WILD ONES

  PROLOGUE

  There are lights at the surface.

  Lights so unlike the sun, that can’t reach down into the depths of the ocean. Lights we can see only when we look outside the water. She turned the thought over and over in her mind, imagining the lights as best she could until she had to ask her sisters for help again.

  “What about the carnival? Are the lights on the rides? What are the rides?” she asked one of the oldest, who just turned away—that sister rarely spoke anymore. Lo sighed, turning back to one of the younger ones, whose first trip to the surface was more recent. “Tell me, Ry?”

  “Lights. Lights everywhere, I think on the rides. I don’t know what the rides are called anymore,” Ry said, sounding irritated at the notion of lights. “And noise. Really, Lo, it’s nothing to be excited about. It’s not the way you remember it.”

  That was what they kept telling her—it wouldn’t be the way she remembered it. Because the last time she saw the human world, she was human.

  She walked on land and sat in the sun and sometimes went so far inland, she couldn’t even see the ocean. These were things she barely remembered, things that felt like dreams and grew fainter and fainter each day she spent underwater with her new sisters.

  The girls here weren’t her real sisters, but sometimes she convinced herself they were. When they streaked through the water, laughing, minds linked by some sort of electric current that skipped through the ocean, when they’d been under so long that they forgot a human world existed… then they were her real sisters, her real family, and this was her real home.

  But even as she forgot her old life—first the strongest memories, then the moments between, and then the smallest details of who she was—there was one thought, one memory that never left the recesses of her mind: She’d been happy as a human, happier than she was now underwater. And that tiny thought refused to let Lo fully embrace a lifetime under the waves. She had to at least look back to the human world.

  Once every deep tide—every fifteen months—the sisters surfaced together. Some to remember, most to remember why they forgot. Why the ocean took the memories of their old lives one grain at a time, the same way the tide pulled the shore out to sea. Why the ocean took their souls. Turned them from humans into… this.

  There are lights at the surface. I just need to see them, and I’ll never forget what they look like again, Lo told herself. She still felt it was better to remember, to know what she was missing. Most of her sisters had long decided that it was easier to forget.

  “Ready?” one of the oldest sisters asked. Her voice was bell-like, musical. All the old ones were beautiful, from their voices to the palms of their hands. They would grow more so every day, until the day they’d float away with the low tide, or maybe in a storm, and never be seen again. They became angels, according to the stories. Most of her sisters believed the angel tale, that old ones went to the surface and were greeted by beautiful men, beautiful women who welcomed them into the sky. Lo had her doubts—most of the girls her age still did, but as they grew old, their doubts faded until they believed steadfastly. She wondered how many days, months, tides this sister had left.

  “Is it time?” Lo asked.

  “As soon as you feel the tide coming in. Any moment now…”

  The old sister paused, waited for the tiniest shift in the ocean, in herself. Changes Lo hadn’t noticed when she first arrived, changes she suspected only creatures of the water could appreciate. Lo found the water more marvelous every day, found living in it to be more perfect, more wonderful….

  But she still wanted to remember.

  The ocean shifted; her sisters rose and slipped upward like a single creature. She followed, the old sister just behind her, waiting for them to call her back, to hold her down to the seafloor like they’d done when she first arrived and fought to break the water’s surface for weeks and weeks. But no, it was time. She was several months into her new life; she could be trusted to glimpse the old one. The weight of the water above them grew less and less until…

  Lo gasped, dry air filling her lungs. It hurt, but she grinned and forced her eyes open despite the wind. Wind—she remembered wind. Standing in a field near a tiny house, people behind her, her family. When she first arrived at the ocean, she would pick out the most beautiful shells from the ocean floor, send them away in the waves, and hope her family would find them. She would imagine they’d see them, know they were from her, know she was alive… and now, she couldn’t remember their faces. She couldn’t even remember how many family members she had.

  The lights. I need to see the lights, she thought firmly—maybe they’d remind her of her family. She looked up at the stars, the moon, and finally the shore. Two bright lights shone from a spot in the sand, moving along slowly, waving back and forth—

  Hands—they were handheld lights, grasped in the palms of humans walking side by side. Walking. I used to walk, she thought, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking how ungainly it looked compared with being in the water. She swam forward a little, silent, to get a better look.

  A boy and a girl, laughing, talking, the sounds barely audible over the crashing waves. Brilliant-colored lights in pinks, reds, greens, yellows, from the carnival beyond the pier, bounced off their faces—all that light, and yet the two of them somehow looked brighter in comparison. They looked warm. They shone. They looked happy.

  “Are you going to try?” one of the sisters asked.

  “Him?” Lo answered. “How would I get to him?” The two crossed in front of several houses, then a white building with glowing porch lights, making the couple appear in perfect silhouette.

  “You can sing. It works sometimes. And they think we’re beautiful. That helps.”

  “But he has her. He’s already in love.”

  “Maybe you can break it,” another sister suggested.

  “Don’t you want to?” Lo answered, looking back at them. This boy’s soul, why weren’t they fighting over it? They were all older than her, more beautiful, more practiced. Make him love you, kiss him, drown him. Earn his soul, and you get your humanity back—the escape from the ocean that the older girls told her about on her very first day. Yet they were letting her have him, if she wanted.

  “Go ahead, Lo,” Ry said.

  Lo swallowed. She loved her sisters, but she knew—they all knew—they weren’t originally meant for the sea. And she wanted to remember her former life completely, return to it, before she became old and beautiful and had forgotten her humanity entirely. It won’t be fair, what will happen to the boy, but it wasn’t fair what happened to me, either. That makes it all right, doesn’t it?

  She couldn’t remember what happened to her, what turned her into an ocean girl. It was the strongest memory, the first to go. All Lo remembered was standing at the shore of the ocean with a man whose face she couldn’t remember. Her body ached, and there was a jagged wound over her heart. The man sent her into the ocean, told her the other girls would find her. He was one of the angels, Ry told her when she arrived.

  Lo doubted that as well.

  She touched the scar on her ches
t, almost faded entirely. There was a voice in her head telling her to stop, to turn back, but she ignored it and swam closer, closer to where the waves crashed against the shore.

  Sing, a different voice said. A voice that longed to be human again, the voice of the girl she used to be.

  The sisters sang all the time, songs that melded together to form one voice that made the ocean thick with music. Lo opened her lips, let the notes emerge.

  The boy stopped first, then the girl. They looked at the ocean. Did they see her? The thought was exhilarating, dangerous. She sang louder; behind her, she heard her sisters join in, voices quiet, guiding her along in the song.

  The boy stooped to set his light down in the sand, pointing at the ocean, talking with the girl. He waved at Lo, big arms over his head. He saw her. He sees me; he’s coming for me—yes, he took tentative steps into the water. Come, where it’s deeper, please….

  The girl yelled, shouted, tried to pull him back, but he took another step, another, another. The song grew louder. Lo extended her hand in the moonlight. He had a handsome face, sharp features like a statue. His clothing, now soaked, clung to his body as he reached toward her.

  She took his hand. Don’t be scared. When he touched her, more memories of her old life slammed into her mind. Being held by her father, the scent of his cologne. The smell of things baking, the way fire leaped up from kindling. She swallowed hard, held on to each memory as long as possible before looking back to the boy’s eyes.

  “Hello,” the boy said. He sounded dazed and blinked furiously. Lo stopped singing, and her sisters’ song grew louder in response.

  “Do you love me?” Lo whispered.

  The boy looked surprised for a moment. Her sisters sang louder—he was having trouble fighting them. “I…” He looked back to the girl on the shore. “I love her. The girl by the church, I love her.”

  Lo’s jaw stiffened; her fingers on the boy’s hand tightened. “No, no, you love me.”

  The ocean shifted again, and some of her sisters stopped singing, started whispering. They were tired of the air touching their skin; they wanted to go back under—they wanted to leave. Lo bit her lip, ran her fingers along the boy’s shirtsleeves. Fabric hanging on a clothesline, laundry being folded, the way towels felt drying off her skin, more memories that proved even harder to hold on to. They skirted out of her mind like little fish, then darted back to the recesses they came from. Forgotten.

  By the next deep tide, I’ll have forgotten everything, just like them, she thought, glancing back at her sisters. That’s why they didn’t want the boy for themselves. They don’t care about their souls anymore. I won’t care in another fifteen months.

  Now. It has to be now. Be brave. It has to happen.

  She pulled the boy closer to her, so that his breath warmed her skin. “Love me.”

  “I…”

  There was no time. Maybe he loved her already, maybe that was good enough, maybe—the ocean changed again, and the oldest sisters ducked back underwater. Lo inhaled, grasped both edges of the boy’s shirt, pulled him against her lips, and kissed him, pleadingly, sorrowfully, desperately.

  Then she pulled the boy under.

  He hardly fought at first, still entranced with their song, confused, and she was so much more powerful than him in the water. It was easy to pull him into the deep, down to the ocean floor, so easy that for a minute, Lo was able to forget what she was doing to him. His eyes were growing wider; he began to fight for air, struggle against her. This is it. It’s happening. My soul, I’ll go back—

  His eyes rolled back in his head. Lo realized her sisters were everywhere, watching, waiting. She leaned over the boy and kissed him again as the last precious bit of oxygen left his lips and floated to the surface.

  And then he was dead.

  And nothing else had changed.

  Lo stared at her hands, at her feet, waiting for the pale blue color to turn back to shades of peach and pink. Waiting for the urge to surface, to gulp air happily, to swim to the shore and run on the sand.

  It didn’t come.

  “Everyone has to try it for herself,” Ry said gently, swimming closer. The boy’s body listed on the ocean floor like seaweed. Lo felt sick; she doubled over and hid her head. “We all did. But it never works. You can’t make them love you that fast.”

  “I don’t think it’s even real, that you can get your soul back,” an older girl added. “It’s a fairy story. Oh, Lo, don’t cry. You have us. You don’t need their world now. You don’t have to worry about remembering anymore. You can just be happy here. And one day, the angels will come back for you, and it’ll be beautiful, Lo. It’ll be perfect.”

  Lo turned and cried into her sisters’ arms, for her soul, for the boy, for the memories. Her sisters brushed out her hair and held her close. They pushed the boy’s body away so she couldn’t see it. They sang songs and began games to take her mind off what had happened.

  But when the night ended and her sisters went to sleep, Lo stared at the sun from deep beneath the waves, at the tiny threads of blue light that made their way through the water, down to where she was.

  Her soul was gone for good. The boy was dead, the girl left alone on the shore. And for nothing, nothing at all, other than a fairy tale and a few scattered memories of life on land. Let it go. Let it all go.

  And she allowed herself to forget.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Celia

  My sisters love this place.

  It smells like sand and cigarettes and cotton candy, like sunscreen and salt. The scent builds up all summer, and now, at the height of tourist season, it’s so thick that I think I could wave an empty bottle around and it would fill with liquid perfume.

  We cut through the Skee-Ball parlor and emerge on the main drag of the Pavilion, lights and sounds everywhere, crowds of people with terrible sunburns. My sisters giggle to each other, the two of them perfectly in step ahead of me. We are triplets, but they are the twins, a perfectly matched set with high eyebrows and pretty lips. To most people, we look identical; to one another, my features are a little different. A little off, a not-quite-right replica of Anne and Jane.

  “Let’s go to the coaster,” Anne says, tossing her hair over her shoulders as she looks back at me. “The arcade is dead.” The arcade looks anything but dead, lights and alarms and children weaving between adults’ legs, but that’s not what she means—she means no guys are there.

  We approach the roller coaster, a giant wooden monster that creaks and sways a little every time a car zips along the track. A car at the top of the starter hill pauses. The riders point ahead—the first hill sits snugly against the rickety pier’s steps and allows for a spectacular view of the ocean. The riders are watching the waves so intently, so wondrously, that they aren’t prepared for the drop. They scream.

  I know who my sisters are going to pick before they say it aloud. A group of guys, probably early college or so, leaning on the queue railings. They have tans and are wearing T-shirts that are new but distressed to look old. Jane goes first, brushes by them casually, just enough that her bare arm touches theirs. She smiles, apologizes, and looks to Anne, giving a hardly noticeable tilt of her head. That one.

  “Hi,” Anne says, smiling. She sidles up to the railing, leans over. “Where are you guys from?”

  “Raleigh,” the target answers, smiling back. “What about you?”

  “Here,” Anne answers. “We go to Milton’s. The boarding school? You pass it when you come in.”

  “Catholic schoolgirls?” one of the target’s friends jokes, making his voice sound fake-sexy, and the others laugh. The target is staring at Anne, though, then Jane, and even lets his eyes flit on me for a moment.

  “Not Catholic. Just schoolgirls,” Jane says in a way that makes the boys shut up yet entices them at the same time.

  “Do you want to get out of here?” Anne says to the target. She leans forward, drums his arm with her fingers. The boy glances at her manicured nails�
�he knows something is strange about this. But Anne knows exactly what to do. She leans forward, laughs in a way that’s less seductive and more girl-next-door.

  “Come on. Only the tourists ride this thing,” she says to him, teasing the other boys. The target seems to open up a little—he likes the way her voice sounds, you can tell. The way she’s pretty and casual and the way she smiles. He thinks she seems fun, interesting.

  He doesn’t realize they’re just using him. Not only for the money he’ll spend on us, the compliments he’ll throw our way—especially Anne’s way. He’s just, as Jane puts it, “practice.” How will we know what all we can do with these powers if we don’t practice?

  “I can’t leave them,” the boy says, motioning to his friends.

  “Sure you can,” Anne says, then, eyes glimmering, teasing, “And you will.”

  She’s right—she’s always right. You can’t hide your future from Anne.

  The powers are our greatest secret. The secret we never told anyone, not even our parents, not even our brothers.

  Jane’s skill developed first. People called her a perceptive child, but there was much more to it. Then Anne, who knew when I’d fall out of the tree house our brother Lucas made. Mine took longer. I thought maybe I didn’t have one, even, when I’d turned seven and still nothing had developed. Anne and Jane pushed me, assured me that mine would be the most impressive of the three of them.

  But then it wasn’t.

  Jane can know a person’s present. Anne can know their future. And I can know their past.

  Anyone can know a person’s past, though. All you have to do is ask them. Anne’s and Jane’s disappointment was almost palpable, but it was nothing compared with mine. I touch someone, I know what they ate for breakfast yesterday, or what their childhood pet was called—how long ago in the past it was doesn’t seem to matter. When I hugged my mother, I knew what she felt like right before her wedding, and that our youngest uncle was secretly her out-of-wedlock first son, yet sometimes I’d hold Anne’s hand and see the secret she told Jane twenty minutes before. If I could control what parts of their pasts I see, maybe my power would be useful, maybe I’d think playing with the minds of boys was fun, too—and honestly, I bet I could control it if I practiced the way Anne and Jane do. But I won’t risk seeing people’s darkest memories just to better play games with my power. It’s not worth it.