What Happens When a Mermaid Can’t Go Home? (Ocean's Song, Chapter 8)
Rescued from the sea, Amara finds herself exiled to an alien world of air, gravity, and strange human machines.
The sea held her—but wrong—no longer as a child swaddled in a mother's embrace, but as prey bound in a net.
The currents slid past without lifting her. She tried to flick her tail, to drive herself upward. But the motion broke halfway through, splitting into two uncoordinated kicks that dragged her sideways. Her body moved with an alien weight, limbs dragging in ways she couldn't control.
What's happening to me? Viral nanotech rewriting DNA. Cascading mutations.
She knew. As soon as the question entered her mind, the nanites from her crown answered. But her body did not know. A second swarm of nanites—crudely manufactured—had been forced on her by Kaelen's order. They were tugging bones into alien shapes, cleaving muscle memory like coral under a blade.
Her gills were not completely gone. But they were sealing shut, processing less water, capturing less oxygen than the last. She felt an involuntary urge to inhale, drawing water into lungs through her mouth, the salt stinging raw tissue, followed by convulsive choking. This must be what humans felt when they drowned.
Am I drowning? Why does it burn? Lungs converting for air. Must surface quickly.
The surface she had avoided her entire life was the only thing that could keep her alive. Every instinct screamed for the sweep of her tail. Every nerve fired for the flick that should have sent her surging toward light. Instead, her new limbs thrashed, clumsy and slow.
Why can't I swim? Legs. Alternating thrusts. Resist instincts. Surface. The crown's voice laid the rhythm, steady and certain.
The surface became her only focus, the light above dragging her up like a hook. She broke through choking, sky crashing overhead in a hollow roar of waves and wind. Sharp, biting wind. Too sharp. Sunlight drove spears into her skull. Too bright.
Something moved on the horizon—angles and metal breaking the horizon's clean line. The vessel closed in. Her instincts screamed threat, and she thrashed backward—wrong stroke, wrong muscles—submerging before she could stop herself.
She broke the surface again, gasping. She breached into the open air, the weight of the world slamming onto her with crushing gravity. Surface air burning her lungs with it’s warmth.
A voice boomed over the waves, syllables alien until the crown seized them, turned them into meaning, and set them in her mind: Hold still! I've got you!
She turned toward it, mouth opening to answer in the long, pure tones of her people. The sound shattered—air too thin to carry the resonance. She tried again, dolphin clicks, then low whale-song. Both fell flat, torn apart by the wind.
A long, narrow shape jabbed toward her. Weapon? Retrieval device. Non-lethal. Accept.
She ignored the crown's directions and kicked back—wrong, again—slipping under in a rush of bubbles. Her lungs burned. Instinct overrode defiance. She burst up. The pole hooked under her arm with sudden force, dragging her toward the hull. She seized the pole, and let herself be pulled in.
Air swarmed over her like a school of fish, nibbling heat from her skin as the sea slid away in thin, glittering streams, every droplet stolen by the greedy wind.
The human stood above her, all lines and angles, moving in jolts instead of the slow arcs of the deep. He smelled of oil, sun-warmed metal, and the faint death-rot of net-caught things.
Human. Surface-dweller. Air-breather. The crown's voice cut sharper this time: They are your people now. This is what you are becoming.
The surface crushed her in ways the ocean's depths never had. She felt the pull of gravity where she had only known the buoyancy of salt water. Her tail—no, her legs now—would not hold her weight and she crumpled to the deck, curling inward, drawing her legs tight, guarding what little moisture remained.
She coughed, trying to pull the sea back into her lungs, but it would not come. The air scraped inside her chest, rough and wrong, until the ache in her ribs forced another gasp.
It hurts to breathe. Lung conversion incomplete. Pain temporary.
The human moved closer. His voice struck her ears in sharp bursts; the crown shaped it into meaning. She answered in the long tones of her people. The air thinned and shattered them. She tried clicks. A low whale-note. The wind tore them away.
A new shape appeared in his hands—something like a net, but woven so finely you could not see through it. What is this? Cloth. Humans use it for protection from the sun and air.
She stared as he draped something around her shoulders. He began rubbing it along her back and arms. She flinched but did not pull away. It blocked the wind, held in a whisper of her own heat even as it stole the last drops of water from her.
Another cloth followed, and she tried to mimic him, rubbing it along her arms. That seemed right—until he crouched before her, guiding her limbs into it. The weight of the fabric pressed on her in strange ways, neither water nor air.
He layered another object across her chest—thicker, puffy, filled with something that made it rigid. Strange straps wound around her torso as he fastened it tight. She could feel her pulse hammering beneath the bulk, the old panic of nets and traps rising.
What is this for? Flotation device. Keeps humans from sinking.
The concept struck her as absurd. Humans feared their own element so much they needed artificial help to float in water? Her people moved through the depths as easily as thought itself, but these surface dwellers required clumsy aids to survive even at the surface. Then yet another layer sealed her from the wind entirely. Her skin began to warm, but each covering felt like another binding to this alien, air-choked world.
The human moved away, returning with a bright cylinder capped in metal. Steam curled from it, the scent strange but warm.
What is that? Liquid nourishment. Humans consume it for warmth and strength. You no longer have gills to filter nutrients from water. You must swallow solids and liquids.
Her throat tightened. The ocean had been mother, food, home. Now she was severed from it all.
He demonstrated, lifting the vessel to his lips, then held it toward her. The air above the liquid shimmered with heat, and she found herself leaning closer, feeling the warmth against her face.
She tilted it as he had. The first swallow shocked her—hot, thin, salted like a tide pool after the sun had burned away half the water. Not the deep's brine, but something closer than the dry air.
Heat spread through her chest, seeping into places the wind had stripped bare. She coughed, startled, and nearly spilled the vessel before he steadied her hand.
The second mouthful went down easier. The warmth burrowed deep, driving back the cold in her bones. She held the cylinder with both hands now, guarding it against the thieving wind.
Apparently satisfied with her condition, the surface dweller returned to his other tasks, working with the blunt focus of someone counting losses as he lifted strange mechanical devices from their storage crates. Metal struck metal as he set each unit on the deck for inspection—sharp, brittle sounds that made her flinch. In water, such collisions would have carried deep, rounded tones that traveled far. Here, every noise was knife-edged but died quickly in the thin air.
Her crown fragments stirred as she studied it. Design: aerial reconnaissance. Multi-spectrum imaging. Damage: catastrophic water intrusion, primary systems offline.
Flying watchers, she realized. Like Atlantis had, but crude, obvious. These human drones made no attempt at camouflage—all metal and sharp angles where her people's scouts mimicked fish and coral.
The nanites catalogued every failure, but also every possibility. She watched the human examine the second damaged unit—this one merely wounded rather than destroyed. Salt had crusted around the joints, and the main housing showed stress fractures, but the core systems were intact.
Amara watched from her makeshift seat. Most of the devices had survived the storm minor damage, more cosmetic than functional. But three showed serious damage—salt corrosion on the joints, cracked sensor housings, one with a wing bent at an impossible angle.
The man lifted the worst casualty, its frame scored deep, one rotor assembly completely shattered. The sensor dome had cracked open like a broken shell, exposing delicate circuitry to the elements. His shoulders tightened as he examined it, then he set it aside without attempting repair—abandoning it as worthless.
Is it truly beyond saving? she wondered.
Without conscious thought, she reached for the machine. The surface dweller looked up, startled, but didn't stop her as she turned it in her hands. The casing felt familiar despite its alien manufacture—the same logic of protection and access she knew from Atlantean devices.
Her fingers found the maintenance latches along the lower edge. A twist counterclockwise, a gentle press inward, and the housing separated with a soft click. Inside, the relay was clouded white with dried salt, the primary actuator jammed with crystalline deposits.
The components were crude—ten times larger than they needed to be, inefficiently arranged. But the logic was familiar. She selected a thin probe from his scattered tools and began working. Strip the fouled connections. Clear the accumulated debris. Bridge the relay directly to bypass the corroded junction. The motions came naturally, muscle memory from countless repairs to the crown's subsidiary systems.
Why do I know this? Atlantean technology shares common engineering principles. Pattern recognition, adaptive problem-solving.
But this is so... primitive.
Human technology has made significant advances in the past century. Approaching the sophistication of the pre-fall era when both species shared the city. They are... remembering.
The thought brought unexpected comfort. Here was something she could not only understand but improve. In this alien surface world, at least the machines spoke a language she knew—even if they spoke it clumsily.
The status light flickered once, twice, then held steady green. The sensor dome rotated smoothly through its full range, the whir of its movement clean and precise.
The man had stopped working entirely. He stared at her with new intensity—no longer the concerned rescuer, but someone calculating her worth with sharp attention. When she held the repaired drone toward him, his hands moved automatically to accept it, but his eyes never left her face.
“How did you...” he began, then stopped himself. He activated the drone's diagnostic sequence. Every system showed green.
She pulled the blanket higher over her legs and met his gaze without flinching. Whatever pity he'd felt for the strange creature he'd pulled from the sea was evolving into something more complex—and potentially more useful.
The boat's engine shifted pitch as they approached the harbor, its drone deepening like a whale's distant call. Towers of stone and glass rose from the water's edge like a coral reef built by mad creatures—all straight lines and sharp angles, nothing curved or living.
The harbor embraced them with floating docks that bobbed like massive kelp fronds broken free from their holdfasts. The human secured the boat with practiced efficiency. When he gestured for her to cross to the dock, her legs betrayed her immediately.
The first step sent her crashing to her knees. The wooden planks bit through the cloth, and shame burned hotter than the pain. The man caught her arm, his expression shifting to concern.
“Easy,” he said, the word meaningless until her crown translated. Slowly. Carefully. No rush.
She wanted to shake him off, to prove she wasn't helpless. Instead, she let him steady her as they walked the swaying dock toward the maze of buildings beyond. Each step was a negotiation between her mind and these alien limbs. The nanites coaching her with each step.
The surface dweller took her to a cave carved from dead materials—flat walls, sharp corners, air that tasted of dust and metal. The space felt compressed, suffocating after the ocean's infinite embrace, yet she found relief in being sheltered from that crushing open sky and hidden from the curious stares of other surface dwellers.
He guided her to a soft platform that swallowed her weight. She sank into it, appreciating the relief from the crushing pull of gravity that had tormented her since leaving the water's embrace. She drew her legs beneath the blanket to hide their pale, ungainly shape, reclining in a position that felt almost familiar, almost like floating at rest.
“Rest,” the human said, gesturing toward the soft platform where she sat. “I'll make dinner.”
The words came clearer now, meaning flowing more smoothly through her crown's fragments. The nanites were learning, adapting their translation protocols with each exchange.
Dinner? she wondered. One of the human nourishment cycles.
One? They require multiple intake sessions each day.
Multiple? Every day? The inefficiency staggered her. In the depths, her people fed when the currents brought nourishment, storing what they needed for long cycles. These surface dwellers seemed to spend half their existence consuming nourishment.
The man disappeared into another room. Sounds drifted through the walls—sharp metallic strikes like rocks colliding, then something else. His voice, but not speaking. Rising and falling in patterns that reminded her of whale song, yet completely different. The tones were thinner in the air, lacking the deep resonance that carried meaning through water.
What is he doing? Vocal expression. Cultural behavior.
The sounds were strangely hypnotic, even stripped of the rich harmonics she was used to. In the depths, every vocalization carried purpose—location, warning, greeting. But this seemed to serve no function except... pleasure? She listened, puzzled by the concept of sound made simply for its own sake.
When he returned, he carried a steaming bowl and a curved implement. The broth was thicker than before, studded with pale shapes that made her stomach clench with recognition.
Clams.
Her people used empty clam shells for tools, for shelter—taking only what the sea offered after its creatures had passed. They were builders, gardeners of the reef who lived in harmony with all thinking beings. But here she sat, transformed by Kaelen's betrayal into something that consumed the flesh of the living.
The first spoonful was an act of survival, not choice. The meat was soft, unfamiliar on her tongue. Her body craved the warmth, the sustenance, even as her mind recoiled.
Is this what I am now? she wondered. A predator in human skin?
The thought brought Kaelen's face swimming up from memory—the look of cold satisfaction as his crude nanites invaded her bloodstream. He had made her into this hybrid thing, neither fully Atlantean nor human. But why? What did he gain from her suffering?
The answer crystallized with bitter clarity. Kaelen had once been human himself—a surface dweller who chose transformation over drowning when his ship went down centuries ago. One of the last to be offered that choice before the Fifth Silence forbade contact with his former kind. He had spent three hundred years insisting she was too young, too naive to rule, that she needed his guidance to protect Atlantis from the surface world's influence.
And then she had broken the Fifth Silence herself, saving that man and the trapped woman he was trying to rescue. She had given Kaelen exactly the excuse he needed to prove her unfit—not just unfit to rule, but unfit to remain Atlantean at all.
Transform her into what she chose over her own people, she realized. Make her as much an outsider as he once was.
She set down the bowl and studied the man's face. He watched her with the same calculating attention he'd shown after she'd repaired his drone. She was valuable to him somehow—not just as a curiosity, but as something useful.
A fragment of memory surfaced: a trapped woman, crying out as the man was pulled to the surface. A word shouted with desperate hope—a call for rescue?
“Par-ker,” she said, her voice rough and unfamiliar.
The surface dweller's expression transformed. The careful control cracked, revealing raw urgency beneath. “What did you say?”
She repeated it, slower this time. “Par…ker.”
He was on his feet before she finished speaking, snatching keys from a hook by the door. “Stay here,” he commanded, already moving. “Don't go anywhere. I'll be back.”
The door slammed shut, leaving her alone with the jarring sounds of the city—voices, engines, footsteps above and through the walls, noise that even this shelter could not block.
Through the window, she watched the surface world in motion: more humans than she had ever imagined existed, moving with urgent purpose along the illuminated pathways. They carried strange objects, gathered in clusters, disappeared into towering structures only to emerge elsewhere. So many of them, busy at tasks she couldn't fathom, their movements as alien as schools of fish following currents she couldn't sense.
The sheer number was both terrifying and oddly comforting—surely among so many, her presence would go unnoticed.
She touched the fragments of her crown, feeling their diminished pulse. Had he understood her plea for help? His sudden urgency suggested he had, but where had he gone? Perhaps to gather supplies—medicine for her transformation, tools to remove the crude nanites poisoning her blood, some means to reverse what Kaelen had done.
The thought stirred something desperate in her chest. If the man could find a way to undo this change, to restore her gills and tail, she might yet return to the depths. She might reclaim her place among her people before Kaelen's betrayal became irreversible.
But even as she clung to that hope, her crown's fragments pulsed with cold logic. The surface world might be alien and harsh, but it was also beyond Kaelen's immediate reach. Here, she could heal. Here, she could learn. And here, perhaps, she could find the means to strike back.
