She sped up, stopped, then turned. She dove down into the dark, cool depths of the sea, then spiraled back up to its warm, sparkling surface. One with the shoal, she forgot everything and everyone. She forgot her losses and her grief. Forgot Mahdi and all that he wasn’t; Blu and all that he was. For a few precious moments, she forgot who she was.
The evening was soft and beautiful. The lengthening rays of the sun were playing over the water. Shad had moved up from the cool depths to feed on moon jellies floating on the warmer surface layers. Their movements exerted a powerful pull on Serafina—one that she, like most young mer, found hard to resist. It was magical, swimming with a shoal. It was wild and joyous, but dangerous, too. Predators followed shoals. A mermaid could be diving with thousands of sardines one minute only to find herself nose-to-nose with a shark the next. Mer parents repeatedly warned their children never to go shoaling.
But how could she resist? The shad called to her. Thousands of musical voices, like rain on water, beckoned. It was said that the goggs thought fish made no sound. Serafina wondered if it was because they listened only with their ears. She knew that those who truly loved the sea’s creatures listened to them with their hearts.
Sister, they called her. Seaswift. Come, coppertail. Come, beauty. Swim with us.
Serafina swam faster and faster, her sleek body arching and turning, cutting through the water like a knife. There was only the shoal. Only the sea. Nothing else.
And then, “Serafina!”
A voice from far away. Pulling at her. Dragging her back to a thousand questions she didn’t know how to answer. A thousand demands she couldn’t meet. Back to the fear and despair. To the broken voices asking her why, asking her for help, asking her to be something she could not.
“Serafina, come on!” It was Neela. She was close now.
“No,” she said, moving deeper into the shoal. “No, Neela. I can’t.”
A hand closed on her arm. It was Ling. “We’ve got to go! Now!” she said, alarm in her voice. Serafina shook her off.
“Sera!” Neela shouted. “There’s a fishing net! Get out of there! Hurry!”
Like a merl emerging from a trance, Serafina slowly stopped. She looked around and her eyes widened in terror. A web of filament surrounded her. It was being hauled up by a winch and cinched around the top like a sack. The shad were no longer laughing and calling. They were frantically yelling to one another to swim clear.
Serafina shot to the top of the net. With a snap of her tail, she tried to propel herself through what was left of the opening. She didn’t make it. The net closed around her hips and tightened painfully. She grasped the edges with her hands and pushed them down. At the same time, she thrashed her powerful tail with every bit of strength she had and managed to wriggle out just before the net broke the surface. Its edges had scraped off some of her scales. She was bleeding, but she was free.
“Neela!” she called out.
“Over here!” Neela shouted, swimming to her. “Where’s Ling?”
The net continued to rise through the water. The screams of the shad were deafening.
“I can’t see her!” Serafina shouted. “Ling! Ling!” she called, circling the net.
And then she saw it—a hand thrust through the net, reaching for her. A face pressed against the mesh, eyes wild with terror, mouth open in a scream.
It was Ling.
“NEELA, GRAB THE NET!” Serafina shouted.
The two mermaids hooked their fingers in the bottom of the heavy net as it broke the surface, hoping the weight of their bodies would pull it back down into the water. The winch made a grinding noise. It slowed, but didn’t stop. The net was out of the water and rising. The filament was cutting into their fingers, but still they hung on. It pulled them farther out of the water until only the tips of their tails were submerged.
“It’s no use! Let go!” Neela shouted.
“We have to help her!” Serafina cried.
“Sera, let go before they get us, too!” Neela shouted again.
Serafina shook her head, but the net rose even higher, toward the deck of the fishing ship, a small trawler named Bedrie?r. The shad gasped agonizingly for water. Ling’s screams ripped through the air.
“No!” Serafina shouted. But her fingers couldn’t hold her weight any longer. She dropped back into the water. Neela did too. The net rose even higher. Serafina and Neela stayed in its shadow, out of sight of the trawler’s crew.
“What’s going to happen to her?” Neela asked fearfully.
Serafina heard voices, the sound of goggs shouting to each other. There was a sudden silence, and then, “What the hell? Mr. Mfeme! Quick! Over here!”
“No. It can’t be,” Serafina said. She only knew a smattering of the gogg language called English, but she knew that name. She swam as close to the edge of the shadow as she dared and looked up.
A shirtless, sunburned man caught hold of the net with a grappling hook and pulled it toward the ship. Another man joined him. He wore jeans, a faded black T-shirt, a baseball cap, and sunglasses.
Serafina gasped. “Neela, that’s him,” she said. “The man who broke into the duca’s palazzo. The one who attacked us. He’s Rafe Mfeme!”
“Bring her aboard!” Mfeme shouted.