You can do this, clicked Mica, straight into my brain. Slow and low. He said the syllables silently, emphasizing all the proper points for inflection. With this info from Mica, I realized that Stony hadn’t repeated it perfectly. Somehow Mica had known which ones to listen to.
I repeated it silently; spoke it as loudly as possible. While my voice lacked volume, I filled it with as much energy as I could to capture the attention of the dolphins. Vibrations swirled through my bones, down into the rocks, entering the water to reach the dolphins below the surface.
The reaction was instantaneous. The dolphins repeated me sound for sound and were quickly on the move.
“Again!” Stoney said, emphatically.
So I did. I repeated myself five more times until the dolphins came right by us in the bay. The mood shifted with the dolphins’ arrival. When I opened my eyes and saw them in front of me I allowed myself a wide grin. There, right in front of us, was a huge pod playing in the waves. They flipped, jumped and twisted in the air—showing off with glee.
“Well done,” Stony said, looking proud of is all. “Now, join our brothers and sisters in the sea, as is tradition, for a swim.”
I took only a second to watch their silvery grey bodies moving through the water before I dove off the rocks, getting in first. While everyone in The Guard would swim, only those of us pledging for the first time had anything to prove. Mica counted the dolphins silently, stopping when he reached fifty. This pod is larger than we’ve seen in years! he clicked to me, sounding louder than usual in liquid.
The inky-black water surrounded me and I could barely see the many silvery bodies darting around. They brushed against me, skin like neoprene, swimming in front, behind, and all around, churning the water so that they actually moved me along. I stayed underwater as long as I could, so as not to give up my spot in the middle of the large group. When I finally surfaced, a dolphin with skin brighter than the others stopped in the water, raised her head and stared. It felt like she recognized me.
She dove back under the water, and though I didn’t get quite enough air, I followed. Underwater she nudged me forward, and as I picked up speed she came alongside me. Her smooth movement created a slipstream, a pocket in the liquid that let me stay alongside her. I focused on staying with her as we moved front of the crowd and lost track all the other dolphins and the people too.
Underwater, time passed differently. I didn’t realize that I had forgotten to breathe ‘til I landed next to the dolphin on some jagged rocks, gasping for air. And I couldn’t move my body, no matter what I tried.
A sharp fragment of rock dug into that soft indented space behind my ear. Blood—the dolphin's and mine—mixed in the water between us, and she looked so pale I got worried. She flopped her tail a few times, unable to get off of the rock. When I moaned in pain, she stopped doing that and looked right at me with one eye. In order to do that, she had to turn her head to the side. I blinked for a second, breaking the stare when I felt her pulse. I knew it was there. It came through my skin and into my bones, right to the spot that hurt the worst. At once, the blood clotted and the pain stopped. But I was still stranded too far away for anyone near the beach bonfire to see.
Then Blake sprang from the ocean like a dolphin with wings, or at least that’s what it looked like to me. I tried to smile but my lips wouldn’t move and since my eyes weren’t all the way open, he set up for mouth-to-mouth. If the situation were reversed, I would have too.
Gently he began to push on my chest, counting to thirty. Like the dolphin’s pulse, his touch went right through me. Once I could move again, I didn’t want to. Blake went forward with his plan, adjusting my throat carefully before touching his mouth on mine. At that moment, my attraction shifted from neutral to positive.
A magnetic reversal had reset my internal compass on a molecular level and I needed to kiss him for my very existence to make sense. I felt his shock, and then his interest as he shifted gears from rescue to romance, kissing me back until we heard Mica’s panicked yell and froze in place.
“Mica, stop, I’m fine. It’s a scratch,” I said, struggling to sit up on the rocks. I showed him the roughened skin on my shoulder that was nothing worse than a surfing thrash. Looking right into his identical silver eyes, I clicked to convince him that I wasn’t the one who needed help.
The dolphin wriggled on the rocks next to me, chirping, clicking and whistling in a very stressed-sounding tone. The dolphins who answered her calls had followed her out of the water and on to the beach. Everyone who had completed the swim, as well as those waiting on land for the party, worked furiously to get them off the black sand which was made of tiny pieces of lava and very scratchy.