The Current Between US

The Shore

*Chapter 9: The Shore*

The world bent, then broke.

Beatrice tumbled out of the fold like a fish thrown from a net. Cold air hit her face and stole her breath. Salt burned her eyes, but it wasn’t the sea’s salt. It was drier. Sharper.

She landed hard on something rough and gritty. Not stone. Not reef. Sand, but wrong — too coarse, too hot. It clung to her scales and then to her skin when the glow faded.

Her arms were still locked around Lily’s body.

Beatrice gasped, but the water didn’t come. Her gills didn’t flare. Her chest rose and fell on air. Air. She was breathing air. The thought didn’t register. None of it registered.

Her attention was all on her mom. Lily’s lifeless body lay across her lap, neck a dark ruin where the blade had fallen. The head rested a few tail-lengths away, half-buried in the strange sand. Eyes still open. Still filled with that last wash of tears and guilt. Still hers.

“No,” Beatrice whispered. The word scraped out dry. She pressed her forehead to Lily’s chest, rocking once, twice. “No, Mom. Wake up. Please. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

The shore was quiet. No current. No drift. No distant hum of the reef. Just the hush of small waves licking at the sand and a wind that moved through tall, thin plants that whispered like dying kelp. Above her, the sky stretched endless and pale. No water above. No ceiling of blue. Just air, and something bright that hurt to look at.

Beatrice cried. Great, heaving sobs that shook her shoulders. She didn’t notice the sand scraping her cheek. Didn’t notice how her arms, wrapped around Lily, were no longer webbed. Didn’t notice that the pressure in her ears was gone. The sea was gone.

She was still crying over her mom’s death when the first monster moved.

Shadows shifted near one of the squat, box-like structures behind her. A house, though mermaids had no word for it. The monsters with Legs called them homes. Glass caught the bright light and threw it back at her. A door opened with a sound like a gull’s cry.

Beatrice didn’t look up. She couldn’t. Her world had narrowed to Lily’s cooling scales and the blood that wouldn’t stop seeping into the sand. _Save her. Save her._ The pulse in her soul beat weaker now. Fainter. Hopeless.

The monsters with Legs would come. She knew the stories. They took. They caged. They cut. Her mother had warned her: _If you ever see the shore, swim back. If the monsters with Legs see you, hide._

But Beatrice didn’t hide. She didn’t even have the strength to lift her head. The glow was gone. The magic was gone. All that was left was grief and the weight of a body that would never breathe again.

A footstep crunched on sand. Then another.

Beatrice flinched, but her arms didn’t loosen. She pulled Lily closer, like her grief alone could shield her mother from the world above. Like she could dive back into the deep if she just held on tight enough.

The wind shifted. It carried voices now. Low, sharp, curious. The monsters with Legs. They were coming.

And only then did Beatrice feel it.

The wrongness. The absence.

She tried to curl her tail around Lily’s waist the way she always had when they slept curled together in the cave. But nothing answered. No muscle. No fin. No sweep of scales against sand.

Confused, she looked down.

Where her tail should have been, pale skin stretched to her hips. Two shapes, straight and still, ended in soft, pink things with ten small ridges each. Not fins. Not flukes.

Legs.

Her breath hitched. She wasn’t underwater. Water didn’t hold her up. Air did. The current didn’t cradle her. Sand did.

Beatrice stared at the legs. At the sand. At the sky.

She was on land. A mermaid, breathing on land, with legs instead of a tail.

The monsters with Legs were almost there.

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