Escaping the Siren Prince

By the time Cora Langley reached the little Croatian island, she had been traveling for eleven months, three weeks, and four days, which was long enough to have developed a healthy skepticism toward advice given to tourists. Over the course of the year, she had been warned against overnight trains, unmarked taxis, roadside food stalls, cheap hostels, expensive hostels, men who offered directions without being asked, women who offered bracelets without being asked, swimming after eating, eating before swimming, renting scooters, riding motorcycles, hiking alone, hiking with strangers, drinking tap water, drinking anything that arrived without a sealed cap, and, on one particularly memorable afternoon in Indonesia, touching a blue-ringed octopus because it was “very small and actually quite pretty.” That last piece of advice had been warranted. Most of the rest had proven situational. So when the elderly man behind the counter of a tiny harbor shop fixed her with a grave expression and told her, in heavily accented English, “Do not swim after the sun goes down,” Cora’s first instinct was not fear. It was curiosity. She shifted the strap of her canvas bag higher onto her shoulder and glanced through the shop’s open doorway toward the harbor beyond it. The Adriatic stretched away from the island in a dazzling sheet of blue, so intensely colored beneath the late-morning sun that it looked almost artificial. Near the shore, the water was clear enough to reveal the pale limestone bottom and the wavering shadows of small fish moving between the rocks. Farther out, the sea deepened from turquoise to sapphire before finally meeting the horizon in one seamless band of blue. It was, Cora thought, an exceptionally unconvincing setting for a warning. “Because of the currents?” she asked. The old man’s expression barely changed, although one thick gray eyebrow lifted slightly. “No.” Cora looked back at the water, reconsidering. “Jellyfish?” “No.” “Boat traffic?” This time he simply stared at her. She pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. “Drunk tourists?” Nothing. Apparently, sarcasm had not made it across the cultural divide. The shop itself was barely large enough for both of them. Shelves had been built directly into old limestone walls and stocked with bottled water, sunscreen, postcards, batteries, cheap sunglasses, packets of crackers, cigarettes, and an impressive number of souvenirs bearing the red-and-white Croatian checkerboard. A small fan rotated lazily behind the counter, accomplishing very little beyond pushing warm air from one side of the room to the other. The man leaned forward and rested both weathered hands against the wooden counter. “No swimming after sunset,” he repeated. There was nothing uncertain in the way he said it. He wasn't offering travel advice or making conversation with the American girl who had wandered into his shop for water. He was giving her a rule. Cora tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, although the sea breeze sweeping through the doorway immediately pulled it loose again. After nearly a year of sun and saltwater, her hair had become impossible to control. The deep red fell halfway down her back in waves that seemed to expand every time she came within twenty feet of humidity, which, considering the places she'd spent the last several months, was most of the time. “Okay,” she said. The old man studied her face. His gaze lingered on her eyes for half a second longer than politeness required. People did that sometimes. Cora's green eyes had been a source of commentary for most of her life, particularly when paired with hair that made strangers ask whether she was Irish before they bothered asking her name. She had long ago learned to ignore the second look. The old man, however, seemed less interested in their color than in determining whether she meant what she'd said. “You say okay,” he finally replied. “I did.” “But you do not listen.” That caught her off guard enough to make her laugh. “You got all of that from one conversation?” “Young people come here every summer.” He gestured through the doorway toward the harbor. “They hear warnings. They laugh. They think old stories are for old people.” “I don't think that.” His eyebrow lifted again. Cora hesitated. “All right. Maybe a little.” The man made a sound that suggested this confession had surprised neither of them. He reached for the bottle of water she'd placed on the counter, but instead of handing it over, he kept one hand wrapped around it. “Daytime, you swim. You dive. You take boat. You go wherever you like.” His gaze hardened. “When sun touches sea, you come out.” Something in his phrasing made Cora's smile fade. Not when it became dark. Not when the beach closed or when the currents changed. When the sun touched the sea. She glanced outside again. The harbor was alive with the ordinary rhythm of late summer. Two boys were jumping from the end of the stone pier while an older woman shouted at them from a balcony above the waterfront. A fisherman in a faded blue shirt sat repairing a net beside his boat. White laundry fluttered between two buildings farther up the hill, and somewhere nearby, garlic and olive oil were hitting a hot pan, filling the narrow street with a smell strong enough to make Cora realize she had skipped breakfast. Nothing about the island looked dangerous. If anything, it was exactly what she had hoped to find. She had arrived two days earlier on a ferry so small she had initially assumed it was taking passengers to a larger boat. Instead, it had carried her away from the busy Croatian coast and across a widening stretch of Adriatic until the mainland had faded into blue haze. The island had appeared slowly. First came a dark rise of rock on the horizon. Then green slopes covered in pine and scrub. Finally, as the ferry rounded the southern point, the village revealed itself inside a sheltered crescent of land: pale limestone houses stacked along the hillside, terracotta roofs glowing beneath the afternoon sun, narrow streets winding between them toward a harbor crowded with fishing boats. It was tiny. Cora had spent several days on Korčula before coming here, and even after asking three different people for directions, she'd nearly boarded the wrong ferry because the village shared a name with the much better-known Vela Luka there. This Vela Luka was smaller, older, and apparently of so little interest to the rest of the tourism industry that half the travel sites she'd searched hadn't mentioned it at all. That was exactly why she'd come. A Croatian marine engineer named Marko had recommended it after a conference in Split when Cora complained that every beautiful place she'd visited lately seemed to contain more tourists than residents. “If you actually want to see the Adriatic,” he'd told her over coffee, “stop going where i********: tells you.” Cora had laughed. Then she'd changed her itinerary that night. Changing plans had become one of her favorite parts of the past year. For most of her life, Cora had been very good at having a plan. She had gone to Coastal Carolina University to study Marine Science because, after growing up with an almost embarrassing fascination with the ocean, she couldn't imagine spending four years somewhere she couldn't reach saltwater without getting on an airplane. She loved the fieldwork, the research vessels, the endless lab hours, even the classes that made half her classmates question every decision that had led them there. The ocean made sense to her in a way very few things did, not because it was simple, but because it wasn't. Chemistry, physics, geology, and biology collided beneath the surface on a scale that still fascinated her: currents crossed hemispheres, entire ecosystems survived without sunlight, and life adapted to depths where the human body couldn't. The more Cora learned, the more obsessed she became with how little of it humans had actually seen. That obsession eventually led her to underwater robotics. During her junior year, she joined a research project using remotely operated vehicles to survey a submerged habitat off the Carolina coast. The first time she watched an ROV descend beyond the reach of daylight, she'd forgotten about the coffee cooling beside her and the professor standing over her shoulder. The camera showed almost nothing at first as blue water darkened to gray and eventually black. Then the vehicle's lights switched on, illuminating rock, marine life, and tiny particles drifting through the beam like snow. Cora was captivated. There was something almost miraculous about sending a machine somewhere the human body couldn't safely go and having it return with a glimpse of a world otherwise hidden beneath the surface. After that, she took every robotics, programming, engineering, and marine technology elective she could reasonably fit around her degree. By graduation, she knew the direction she wanted her life to take: underwater robotics, autonomous vehicles, deep-sea research. She wanted to help build technology capable of going deeper, staying longer, and seeing more of the world humans had barely begun to understand. The problem was that she didn't know where. And at twenty-two, with graduation approaching and professors beginning to ask about job applications, Cora had become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that she was supposed to select a company, a city, and a career trajectory before she'd seen much of the world outside the southeastern United States. So she did something that made perfect sense to her and absolutely no sense to her grandmother. She decided not to get a job. Not immediately, anyway. Instead, Cora worked two jobs during her final semester, saved nearly everything she earned, sold most of the furniture in her apartment, packed what remained into boxes in her grandmother's garage, and bought a one-way ticket to Lisbon. The original plan was one year. Travel while she had nothing tying her down, but make the trip useful. She would visit countries where marine technology was advancing, attend conferences whenever she could afford them, research international companies, talk to engineers and scientists, and figure out where she might actually want to begin her career. The plan had been responsible enough to reassure her grandmother and reckless enough to excite Cora. Eleven months later, she had toured research facilities in Norway, attended conferences in Portugal and Singapore, talked her way into visiting a marine robotics startup in Sydney, volunteered with a reef-monitoring project in Indonesia, and accumulated a spreadsheet of potential employers that had become alarmingly complicated. She had also gotten food poisoning in Thailand, missed a flight in Tokyo, lost one shoe in Amsterdam, slept on the floor of a train station in Vienna, accidentally attended what she believed was a birthday party in Greece without ever discovering whose birthday it was, and learned that anyone claiming they could pack for a year in one forty-liter backpack was either lying or didn't care about clean underwear. It had been chaotic. It had been expensive. Occasionally lonely. And unquestionably the best year of her life. Which was precisely why Cora was having such a difficult time accepting that it was almost over. Three weeks from now, she would fly home. After that would come applications, interviews, apartments, direct deposits, 401Ks, and all the other markers of adulthood that had seemed comfortably distant when she boarded that first flight. Vela Luka was supposed to be a pause before all of that. Five days somewhere quiet. Five days without conferences or company tours or networking over coffee. Five days where the only thing Cora intended to research was how long she could lie in the sun without burning. The old man finally released her water. “You remember what I tell you.” Cora picked up the bottle. “No swimming after sunset.” His expression didn't soften. “Not only swimming.” Her fingers tightened around the cool plastic. “What does that mean?” “Stay away from water.” A strange little chill traced the backs of her arms despite the heat pouring through the doorway. Before Cora could ask another question, someone called from a room behind the shop. The old man answered in rapid Croatian, sounding irritated by the interruption. Then he looked back at her. “The sea is different here.” Cora waited for him to elaborate. He didn't. “All right,” she said eventually. “I'll keep that in mind.” His face suggested he didn't believe her. She stepped outside into the brightness of the harbor, blinking as sunlight flashed against the water. Behind her, the old man muttered something under his breath. Cora's Croatian was terrible. She could manage greetings, thank you, please, numbers, and enough restaurant vocabulary to keep herself fed. Most of what he said disappeared into meaningless syllables. One word didn't. Sirene. Cora slowed. She looked over her shoulder. The old man had already disappeared into the back room.