She opened her eyes. Green-black water curved around her in a giant wall, like an aquarium. It had closed over her head, smearing a transparent ripple between Livy and the free air. She drew in a breath to make sure she still could, and looked at her path. The blue glowing bottom-feeders rested in their two lines, some of them temporarily exposed to the air by her bubble. One of the sea stars lazily moved an arm, curling it out with extreme slowness as if searching for a clam to snack on while it was lying here.
She kept forward—or rather, downward, for the path sloped steeply. These fjords were carved deep, as she knew well from her studies of the local environment. Now she saw what no one except divers ever saw in person: the sea floor of Puget Sound, the deep sections never exposed by low tide. It was one mucky, slippery place.
The beach pebbles and rocks at the high end soon gave way to sticky mud that she sank into up to her ankles with each step. She learned to step on rocks or shells wherever possible to avoid getting mired down. But after descending for a couple of minutes, the path became a mess of seaweed, or sea grass, or algae, or kelp, or some mix of all of those. It came in various colors—hard to tell with only bioluminescent animals to light the way, but it seemed to be brown, red, purple, and off-white in addition to green. Slipping in the knee-deep layer of slime, Livy struggled to keep her balance with every step. The lightweight glowing sea stars and sand dollars rested easily on top of it, but her full-sized human weight kept sinking until she resigned herself to crawling this path too. Even on hands and knees, she slid as she progressed, and plunged to her chin often.
The steep pitch of the path wasn’t helping. She was still going down, so she couldn’t have even hit the halfway mark yet. The air in her bubble was dank and chilly, her breath making humid clouds. She worried she would use up all the oxygen before getting to the other side. The fae wouldn’t let that happen, would they?
Above and around her, through the magical aquarium wall, everything was black. She rarely spared a glance at her surroundings, finding it too scary to dwell on how she was crawling along the bottom of Puget Sound in the middle of the night. But a glimmer of something light-colored caught her eye, and she paused a moment to look aside at a bank of white sea anemones, hundreds of them covering a patch of the slope, their wispy tentacles waving in the current.
She could see them more clearly than she expected, and as she continued downward, she realized other glowing things dwelled here beyond just the creatures forming her path. Whether it was because she was in the fae domain or whether bioluminescence was common down here in the ordinary world too, she wasn’t sure, but she began to catch glimpses of more things emitting light. A squid darted past, no longer than her forearm, its whole body outlined in blue-white sparkles. A sea slug with long wide spikes like water-lily petals rested on the sea-floor and glowed softly in pink. A school of skinny fish zoomed around her bubble, separating into two groups as they passed and then reuniting, each fish wearing a glowing green-blue stripe down its belly. Something reddish-orange undulated next to her, which turned out to be a large octopus, lit up by the ping-pong-ball-sized glowing jellies drifting around it. Livy shuddered and hurried past. She remembered anecdotes about the wiliness of octopuses, and could too easily imagine it reaching a tentacle in to wrap around her ankle and tug her off the path into a quick drowning.
When something black and white and gigantic soared over her bubble with a rumbling swoosh, she yelped. The animal turned, a gleam of white in the murk, and glided past again, one eye upon her bubble.
Ordinarily she’d have been delighted to spot an orca. Orcas didn’t tend to attack humans, she knew, but they ate nearly everything else that swam, and she probably didn’t look like a typical human at the moment. Plus she had forgotten how utterly huge orcas were. This one looked to be the size of a bus, and surely weighed a few tons. If it decided to ram her bubble just for sport, could she count on magic to keep all her air from shattering into a million mini-bubbles and leaving her to drown, or die of the bends when trying to ascend?
With her attention on the orca, she didn’t heed the path closely enough. Her knee hit an especially slippery patch, and she went sprawling. The steep slope became a slide—she picked up speed, skidding on her front, and grabbed frantically at strands of kelp for something to hang onto. They tore free, or slurped through her gloves like escaping eels. She pulled up a knee to slow herself, making her body pivot. Her foot swung outward—and crossed the line of blue glowing sea stars.
Instantly water poured down upon her leg, icy cold, its weight slamming her foot into the seaweed floor. With a sob of terror, she yanked her foot back within the confines of the path. The flood stopped; the bubble calmly resealed its wall.
“Oh my God,” she said aloud with a whimper. She shook from head to soaked foot, and had to spend a moment cowering with her head on her knees until she regained the composure to continue.
Skye needed her. Grady needed her. Kit was counting on her, and he loved her. And the bottom of the Sound was no place to dawdle.
She unfolded herself and kept crawling.
Above, the orca circled and came back for another pass. “Hey, water fae,” Livy said to whoever might be listening. “You’re not going to let this guy hurt me, right?”
Something gurgled, low-pitched, from out in the depths—a laugh, or an answer. It didn’t sound like a whale, somehow. A moment later, something seal-sized swirled past, then circled back and bobbed upright next to her bubble. A harbor seal, she thought at first: silver with black speckles, and long whiskers on its dog-like face. As she sent it another glance, it gestured with one flipper in a greeting, exactly the way a person might wave.
Then it spoke. “She is only looking. She wants to tell her pod about you. You are safe on your path.”
The voice had the contours of a seal’s bark, and the message echoed and sounded muffled, like someone talking to you while your ears were underwater in the bath. Livy glanced in amazement at the creature, who followed alongside as she slid and slogged. “Thank you,” she said.
The orca kept gliding around overhead, showing up as an occasional flash of white.
“We don’t mind helping you,” the seal added. “You aren’t like some of the others, who fling their nastiness in our water. You take it out. You think of us.”
“I try.” Livy decided against telling it that until lately she’d had no idea the fae even existed. She supposed her consideration for regular seals, orcas, fish, and other sea life probably still counted for something. She remembered another strange moment, and glanced at the creature. “My kayak paddle. Did one of you send it back to me when I dropped it? I thought I saw your…hand. Or flipper. Um.”
The seal spread its flipper again to display it, and this time Livy noticed it was more like a human hand—albeit a long-fingered, shiny hand webbed between the digits. “My tribemate did. We were near you.”