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Snippet.
I'm not going to get this done in time.
Nrrrgh.
He’s a born again psychic firefighter with the Second Sight. She’s a diamond-loving mermaid living in the Minneapolis sewers. They fight crime!
She glitters as she undulates through the deepest layer of sewers, pipes put down before Saint Paul and Minneapolis became kissing cousins, pipes with brick walls and baked clay fittings. It’s dark as ashes down there, the only lighting the tawny bioluminescent patches on her fins and fingers.
Reflected light flashes in a hundred tiny points from her piercings, diamond studs that swirl curved lines down her fins, her webbing, along the upswept points of her ears. It’s amazing what falls in toilets, swirls past the S-curves of sinks.
Amazing, and it all finds its way to her eventually. Condoms and diamonds and pills and razor blades for etching so-pretty patterns down her tail to complement the designs the diamonds make, embedded in her flesh.
Dark she doesn’t mind; the current pulls her along, out toward the River. Something jostles her, bumping lazily into her tail in a cloud of watery char, and she swats at it with a taloned hindfoot, adding velocity as she speeds toward the River. She’s got a date that she’s late for.
Out she tumbles, through the rusted-out grille that used to cover the pipe, onto the rocky berm by the old mill ruins. Before her gills dry out and her book-lungs open up, she’s diving into the water again, and to hell with what the Parks and Rec board signs say about turbulent current and staying 500 feet from the river’s edge.
It’s cleaner in the River, harder to breathe without the effluvia of several hundred thousand souls: their urine, their feces, their wastewater, their sweat and blood, all diluted through the sewer system, smelling like the souls that shed them.
The River doesn’t have a smell. It doesn’t pretend to have a soul.
She kicks against an undertow, nearly tangling her fins in an uprooted tree, roots stirring hair-fine like jellyfish tentacles. It’s not far to the other side, to Boom Island. Five dizzying steps before her lungs open up and her gill-slits dribble water down smooth pale skin, two more to the tree that stands by the old railroad bridge. Her hindclaws act like pitons; she swarms up the tree easily, tail swinging loose and heavy behind her, deadweight out of the water.
That’s how she feels too: heavy and bereft, surrounded by the sound of water but not the taste of it, too close to dry concrete and even drier metal. His voice assaults her ears, a cacophony of sound.
“You’re late.” The man on the bridge is short, squat, blue eyes narrowed to a squint and four-day stubble making desert sand sounds against his canvas jacket. Talking to himself again, or at least that’s the way it would look to anyone without the Sight. Just another lunatic, out admiring the Mississipi Mile by moonlight.
She shrugs, unapologetic, refusing to sully her mouth with surface talk. She’s a Queen, not a tailless larva who has to ape their ways to survive.
“Two more buildings gone, up Saint Anthony way.” He scratches his beard, looks at the metrodome, lit and pale from the inside like a giant moon come to earth. He tries not to hear her thoughts, but they’re so strong. He can’t wall them out like he used to, before she went underground, went away, left him…
“That was your fault.” Now she does speak, goaded into working tongue and lips to form the harsh syllables, draping herself in the tree like a serpent in the Garden of Eden. One webbed hand comes up, traces a spiral of moisture around a nipple-less breast. “If you hadn’t taken up *religion*…”
She shudders, and he presses the advantage, a flicker of annoyance, goaded by the presence of all the diamonds he never bought her, winking from her skin in the streetlights. “…if I hadn’t given my life to Jesus, I’d be burning in Hell for eternity. Like you will.”
Old ties— a shared bed only months cold, love between a starving college student and something soulless that wanted so much to be human—those make her bare needle-like teeth and tolerate a Name that would send other Queens screaming. “Salamander?”
“Salamander,” he confirms. It’s his turn to shudder at the keening sound she makes, a declaration of war. God wouldn’t ask him to chop vegetables with his eyes closed; God wouldn’t want him to ignore the help she can give. That’s what he tells himself, as his heart shrivels by inches under a weight of old memories.
She narrows slit-pupilled eyes, considers, combing absently through inch-long hair with webbed fingers. “I thought I felt a trace of it in the water.”
“Eight fires in four days, each one further from the river,” he tells her, folding his arms across his chest like it’s all her fault.
She taps her teeth with a fingernail. “It’s getting ready to cross over from Larva to King.”
“Not in my city, it won’t.”
“Not in our city, you mean. Not ever.”
It’s the God that won’t share, not her. Selfish, selfish God, but that’s the way of males, all males, human or Salamander King. He winces as the thought laps over into a corner of his brain, all regretful tenterhooks and images of pretty, pretty razors. “Stay out of my—“
She looks up, finishes the thought for him. “—head, dammit.”
Nrrrgh.
He’s a born again psychic firefighter with the Second Sight. She’s a diamond-loving mermaid living in the Minneapolis sewers. They fight crime!
She glitters as she undulates through the deepest layer of sewers, pipes put down before Saint Paul and Minneapolis became kissing cousins, pipes with brick walls and baked clay fittings. It’s dark as ashes down there, the only lighting the tawny bioluminescent patches on her fins and fingers.
Reflected light flashes in a hundred tiny points from her piercings, diamond studs that swirl curved lines down her fins, her webbing, along the upswept points of her ears. It’s amazing what falls in toilets, swirls past the S-curves of sinks.
Amazing, and it all finds its way to her eventually. Condoms and diamonds and pills and razor blades for etching so-pretty patterns down her tail to complement the designs the diamonds make, embedded in her flesh.
Dark she doesn’t mind; the current pulls her along, out toward the River. Something jostles her, bumping lazily into her tail in a cloud of watery char, and she swats at it with a taloned hindfoot, adding velocity as she speeds toward the River. She’s got a date that she’s late for.
Out she tumbles, through the rusted-out grille that used to cover the pipe, onto the rocky berm by the old mill ruins. Before her gills dry out and her book-lungs open up, she’s diving into the water again, and to hell with what the Parks and Rec board signs say about turbulent current and staying 500 feet from the river’s edge.
It’s cleaner in the River, harder to breathe without the effluvia of several hundred thousand souls: their urine, their feces, their wastewater, their sweat and blood, all diluted through the sewer system, smelling like the souls that shed them.
The River doesn’t have a smell. It doesn’t pretend to have a soul.
She kicks against an undertow, nearly tangling her fins in an uprooted tree, roots stirring hair-fine like jellyfish tentacles. It’s not far to the other side, to Boom Island. Five dizzying steps before her lungs open up and her gill-slits dribble water down smooth pale skin, two more to the tree that stands by the old railroad bridge. Her hindclaws act like pitons; she swarms up the tree easily, tail swinging loose and heavy behind her, deadweight out of the water.
That’s how she feels too: heavy and bereft, surrounded by the sound of water but not the taste of it, too close to dry concrete and even drier metal. His voice assaults her ears, a cacophony of sound.
“You’re late.” The man on the bridge is short, squat, blue eyes narrowed to a squint and four-day stubble making desert sand sounds against his canvas jacket. Talking to himself again, or at least that’s the way it would look to anyone without the Sight. Just another lunatic, out admiring the Mississipi Mile by moonlight.
She shrugs, unapologetic, refusing to sully her mouth with surface talk. She’s a Queen, not a tailless larva who has to ape their ways to survive.
“Two more buildings gone, up Saint Anthony way.” He scratches his beard, looks at the metrodome, lit and pale from the inside like a giant moon come to earth. He tries not to hear her thoughts, but they’re so strong. He can’t wall them out like he used to, before she went underground, went away, left him…
“That was your fault.” Now she does speak, goaded into working tongue and lips to form the harsh syllables, draping herself in the tree like a serpent in the Garden of Eden. One webbed hand comes up, traces a spiral of moisture around a nipple-less breast. “If you hadn’t taken up *religion*…”
She shudders, and he presses the advantage, a flicker of annoyance, goaded by the presence of all the diamonds he never bought her, winking from her skin in the streetlights. “…if I hadn’t given my life to Jesus, I’d be burning in Hell for eternity. Like you will.”
Old ties— a shared bed only months cold, love between a starving college student and something soulless that wanted so much to be human—those make her bare needle-like teeth and tolerate a Name that would send other Queens screaming. “Salamander?”
“Salamander,” he confirms. It’s his turn to shudder at the keening sound she makes, a declaration of war. God wouldn’t ask him to chop vegetables with his eyes closed; God wouldn’t want him to ignore the help she can give. That’s what he tells himself, as his heart shrivels by inches under a weight of old memories.
She narrows slit-pupilled eyes, considers, combing absently through inch-long hair with webbed fingers. “I thought I felt a trace of it in the water.”
“Eight fires in four days, each one further from the river,” he tells her, folding his arms across his chest like it’s all her fault.
She taps her teeth with a fingernail. “It’s getting ready to cross over from Larva to King.”
“Not in my city, it won’t.”
“Not in our city, you mean. Not ever.”
It’s the God that won’t share, not her. Selfish, selfish God, but that’s the way of males, all males, human or Salamander King. He winces as the thought laps over into a corner of his brain, all regretful tenterhooks and images of pretty, pretty razors. “Stay out of my—“
She looks up, finishes the thought for him. “—head, dammit.”