Girl at the Bottom of the Sea Read Online Free PDF

Sophie’s hands. “I am not buffet! This is me .” She shook the lock, cleaned of algae and the edible dust of the sea, at Sophie. “You pull my hair, it hurts.”
    â€œSorry,” Sophie burped.
    â€œHow is it you feel?” Syrena asked. “Still you can’t move?”
    Sophie nodded her head. “Only my head.” She paused, and then spoke out loud a thought that had been haunting her. “Syrena, is there something wrong… with my magic?” She swallowed nervously. “Shouldn’t I be able to fix myself?”
    â€œEven if you half Odmieńce, you can’t do everything. Nothing can. Everything need help, everyone. I will help you. And this place, it will help you.” Syrena scooped a palmful of mud from the ocean floor and gazed at it by the light of their talisman. It sparkled with phosphorescence like neon, and seemed to wriggle with the movement of things too small to see. Sophie watched in horror as the mermaid tossed the glob of mud into her mouth. A fringy bristle she had never before noticed hung like a broom over Syrena’s teeth, and she sucked at the mud, ingesting the plankton and minerals while the brush caught the sand. With a very unladylike noise, the mermaid blew the mud from the bristles, and then the bristles disappeared.
    Syrena smiled at the girl, her own teeth pearly as abalone shell.“What?” she demanded. “You never see retractable baleen before? You lie there with your mouth open, you will wish you had some too!”
    Indeed, Sophie’s mouth was a bit muddy from hanging open in shock. She tried to spit it out, but it crunched in her teeth. “Retractable baleen?”
    â€œLike whale,” Syrena shrugged. “But it comes and goes. See?” The mermaid opened her mouth wide, and above her teeth Sophie spied not gums but bits of brush. With a flex the baleen came down, a curtain that allowed the good stuff to pass into the mermaid’s mouth but filtered sand and grit. The baleen rose, and Syrena spoke.
    â€œQuite handy,” she said.
    â€œAre you part whale?” Sophie asked, and Syrena shrugged.
    â€œPerhaps. Like you are part monkey. But we are part human, too, so perhaps mermaids part monkey as well.”
    â€œAnd people are part whale?”
    Syrena scoffed, a bubble of air shooting out from her nose. “You wish.”
    â€œSyrena, where are we?”
    â€œMid-Atlantic Ridge, is called by you people. We stay here a bit.”
    Syrena gathered Sophie in her arms and let the muscle of her tail propel them up the side of the mountain. Like flying , Sophie thought, passing over fissures and valleys rising toward the lakes of lava that bubbled at the top. Sophie could see great molten globs of it crawling from the mountain’s lip and sliding down, cooling into rock. Baby earth.
    They settled into the soft earth of a high crevice below the range of the hottest lava. The ridge of rock was solid and the water there waswarm, strikingly so after the frigid depths of the Atlantic. Sophie felt a tingling as sensation returned to her skin. She hadn’t even realized she had been so cold.
    â€œOh this is so nice,” Sophie murmured, finding herself lying on a vent that bubbled soothing hot water all over her. “Like a spa.” Sophie had never been to a spa, but she had seen pictures in magazines of women looking impossibly relaxed, with mud on their faces and slices of cucumber on their eyes, soaking in a tub. And Sophie sure did have mud on her face—both she and Syrena were streaked with it.
    â€œAre you comfortable, Sophie?” Syrena asked.
    â€œMmmm-hmmmm,” the girl mumbled.
    â€œVery good. Then I will sing to you. Heal you, like my kind have done for generations.”
    Hovering over Sophie, with her talisman floating down until it bumped gently into Sophie’s own, Syrena began her song. It ricocheted off the mountain range, its power multiplying