Tidelands: I-Three (6)
Cold Showers.
Squirrel had been too young for her now to remember the crossing; too young, even, to remember her given name, as if these were all things that had been washed away, the price of passage across mythical waters. In fact, Lily’d said, she’d barely possessed any language at all, not even her native tongue (whatever that might once have been), just a tabula rasa, nameless, unknowing, unburdened by any possessions aside from the skin and rags she’d stood in. And bereft most of all of anyone to call family, living semi-feral among the tribe of tribeless illegals that, like a filter, received each periodic influx, picking and sifting through the human flotsam, discarding what its communal desperation could find no use for.
And it was there that they had found one another, two tropes in search of a happy ending: the parentless street urchin and the tart with a heart, Lily taking pity on – well, what must then have been not much more than toddler, really – though not the only one of those, of course. So why her, then, from among them all? And Lily deciding to bring her – with what, Squirrel now realises, must have been Lily’s own half-reluctance – to the Den, to a place where she might at least have food, a bed, and chance at some sort of life; though also too young yet for Squirrel to understand what the price of such dubious rescue would prove to be.
The boats had stopped coming some years ago. Which was good news, the Feeds said; proof, the Feeds said, that things were stabilising, that the Arcs were working.
“Or at least the sea drones are,” Fogler had quipped, earning one of Lily’s eviscerating looks (sensitive apparently, through some vague surrogate maternalism, to what she saw as his callousness regarding Squirrel’s “people”).
But he was probably right, and together with the sea walls, the weather shield, and the baffles’ increasing ability to muffle the tide’s insurrection, there are days when you would think – if the Feeds were all you saw – that all is actually well.
But for reasons other than climatic, today has not been such a day, and Squirrel lies unsleeping, scrying unfriendly faces in the wood-grained ceiling of her bunk, with more than her daily quota of nonspecific dread sloshing about the bilges of her stomach. Maybe a shower will help. She shins down the long ladder to the dorm floor, expecting to have the mildewed stall all to herself now the rest of the Denizens have called it a night. But not all have.
“Twitch,” a mock tip of an imaginary hat.
“Barnacle,” she nods back. “Up late, aren’t we? Hot date?”
“Big night,” Barnaby says, standing before the mottled bathroom mirror, fussing and flicking prissily at his still-damp hair.
“What?”
But he just smirks, tapping his nose.
She punches him hard, in the arm, with distended knuckle for added effect, but which elicits no more than an “Ow! Fuck off!”
“Well, well. If it isn’t Squirdgle.” Grocers emerges from the shower room. (“Like the grocer’s apostrophe, little Squirrel?” Fogler had explained, delighting in his overwrought allusion. “Never where he’s needed, always where he’s not.”). He stands towelling his hair, his right eye sloped down in a now-permanent leer from the fold of old scar tissue – a gift from Denton, messing him up for a job messed up. “I would have thought you was too delicate for the Bouts,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“Keeping you for something special, I heard.” His eyes roll back, mouth slack, tongue-tip encircling his parted lips, as his hands sweep up and down his baby-fat torso – like he is still in the shower – to the accompaniment of groans of simulated ecstasy, mocking her most feared fate. Then breaking into squeals and snorts of laughter, looking over at Barnaby complicitly, but finding only his confederate’s surly annoyance, who is still rubbing his arm, shaking his head at his now spilled secret. “What?”
“Good to see you’re in high spirits.” Denton lumbers around the corner, cold-showering away all malicious frivolity, and sending Grocers scampering off to attend to his wardrobe. “I hope this means the three of you are ready.”
“Three?” Barnaby frowns, “You mean her too?”
“Why not?” Denton says, his tongue probing a cheek in what passes for him as a thoughtful manner. “The more the merrier.”
Tidelands is a weekly sci-fi & fantasy serial that publishes every Friday, emailed straight to your inbox. Part 1 is free to read, but you can keep up with the story by signing up for exclusive access, or buying ebook or paperback editions of the collected instalments as they appear.