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Salt stings my nose and mouth. This isn’t the smothering, chemical tang of filtered tanks—this water is clean and cold and full of a depth that presses against my teeth.
It tastes like old maps and ship hulls and the under-singing of a tide you hear before a storm.
The whirlpool pulls.
It wants me.
My lungs burn as the current tugs at my legs. Gravity feels as if someone is rewiring it.
I plant my feet, and it rips them out, anyway.
The water is a hand with teeth, and it drags.
The edge of the tank feels slick beneath my palms. Algae fuzzes the rim, and my nails scrape for purchase.
I have to ask. I have to know why my life just fell apart into someone else’s hands.
“Why?” I force out.
He tilts his head. In that small motion he looks more alien than any documentary creature, like a predator shaped in old myths rather than in any human anatomy.
When he speaks, the words wrap around me in a way that pins my ribs.
“Because my homeland is drowning, Telya, and we need you.”
“Why me?” I ask again, the question ripping from me as the water climbs, licking at my collarbone, then my hairline.
I hang on to him the way a person clutches a rope in a storm—because the world is tilting and there is nothing else to hold.
He considers, and when he answers it isn’t what my small, terrified brain expects.
“The sea has chosen.”
Something in that phrase—ancient and absolute—catches under my sternum.
It rings through me like a bell. For one thin, electric moment my mind splinters into a hundred half-thoughts.
Quiet dinners I never had, a hand to hold that didn’t leave.
Cousins who might remember my name at Christmas.
Degrees and debt and the boyfriend who left like a season that never turned.
Aggie’s eyes, the circle of concrete she swims in day after day.
All the small, worn disappointments that have stacked into the life I keep pretending to love.
Is any of it worth begging for?
The question evaporates just as suddenly as it appeared because the world peels away, becoming just a memory.
Spectators flatten into shapes of light.
Jersey—salt-streaked boardwalk, chipper vendors, the scrim of rain—folds back like a curtain.
The roar of applause and the smell of popcorn dissolve as if someone blows them out with a hand.
His fingers close over mine—solid, warm, frighteningly human—and every small animal fear I own spikes and then steadies against that touch.
