Girl at the Bottom of the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

with echoes. It engulfed Sophie as completely as the water, becoming one with the water and soaking into the girl, streaming into her ears, her nose, her mouth. Heaven , Sophie thought. This must be what heaven is. The sound moved into her bones and made them whole again, turned them to song. Sophie was the song, the song was she and she was everything. What a gift it was, the mermaid’s harmony. Sophie had thought that a mermaid’s song was something that washed over you; now she understood it was something you became . Sophie was Syrena’s song—and Sophie was healed.
    â€œOh!” Sophie cried when the last bit of echo had faded into the darkness. She flung her arms up around the mermaid’s neck, buried her face in her hair, the source of her sustenance. It was as if Syrena were the ocean itself, and everything it had to give.
    â€œOkay, okay, okay, now now,” Syrena peeled her charge off of her. “Not too fast, not too fast, okay? Your bones are whole, but they weak like baleen, okay?” The mermaid brought the brush back down across her teeth and flicked them with an opal fingernail. “They still weak. You will lie here and eat the minerals in the water, you will soak in the salt and I will sing and we will talk. Dobrze ?”
    â€œDobrze,” Sophie agreed, effortlessly translating and speaking the mermaid’s Polish. As she reclined upon the vent, Sophie became aware of the nutrients in the hot water, microscopic shrimps and algae, and it was as if she were lounging in a giant pot of stew. She drank from it sloppily, without baleen to strain the crunchy bits of cooled lava. Soon she began to enjoy the bite of the lava, the smash of glass and crystal beneath her teeth.
    â€œIs good for you, too,” the mermaid nodded approvingly. “You have the intuition. Your body tell you what it wants. Lava is good medicine—iron, calcium.” She plucked a porous black crumb from the earth beneath her and popped it in her mouth, sucking on it like a candy. The molten lava above them glowing like candlelight, the two fell into a soft and salty slumber.

Chapter 5
    T hough Syrena’s mother, whoever she might be—mermaids never knew what batch of eggs they’d hatched from, since they were raised and nurtured by the entire village—had had the run of the ocean for all her long life, Syrena was born into a world that was struggling with the idea of boundaries. Borders. For the first time there were places the mermaids could not go. Of course they’d learned to avoid the lairs of sharks and other unfriendly beasts, but this was different. As the humans above them carved out trade routes, highways that took them right into mermaid territory, so the mermaids’ landscape shrank, carved by the wake of the great boats streaming above them, strange waves that came not from the moon but from the cleaving of the waters by those terrible vessels.
    And terrible they were. With each passing season they had grown more majestic, their sails now big as clouds, their hulls built with the wood of a whole forest. No longer just a single cannon but arow of them edged each boat’s decks. With great caution the mermaids snuck above the waves and spied the great ships fearfully. By now they understood that the humans fought with one another frequently, and that the cannons were there for them to destroy each other, not the sea creatures. But the mermaids also knew that the humans would be as quick to fire at them, should any of them show their faces.
    As the ships sailed past the edge of the mermaid village, their captains would order themselves tied tightly to their post with lengths of rope, lest the mermaids begin singing and drive them mad. The rest of the crews lingered by the cannons, itching to fire. And fixed to the bows of these boats were statues carved of wood in the image of the most beautiful mermaids, hair streaming and breasts perky, a long fishtail of