Surface

I had been watching the wolf for two hundred and forty-three nights.

He didn't know about me. None of them did, the land-walkers who came to the shore with their strange coverings and stranger machines. But this one was different. This one came alone, always at the same time, when the moon hung heavy over the water.

He would stand where the waves touched his feet. Just stand. Staring at the sea like he was waiting for something to rise from it.

I understood waiting. The deep teaches patience. The slow drift of currents, the gradual shift of seasons marked by temperature rather than light. I had learned to be still for hours, watching the surface world through the shimmering ceiling that separated our realms.My uncle's advisor, the ancient one called Nereus after the old sea-god, said the surface had nothing for us. But even he sometimes fell quiet when the eldest of our pod whispered about land-walkers who once came to the shore in peace. Wolves, she called them. Bound to the moon the way we were bound to the tide.

But I had never wanted to break through it. Not until him.

---

Tonight the water was calm. Glass-smooth, the kind of night that made surfacing dangerous. Any ripple would be visible. Any movement would catch the eye.

I swam closer anyway.

The kelp forest thinned as the seafloor rose toward shore. This was the warning zone--the place where my kind turned back. Too shallow. Too exposed. The pod's laws were clear: stay deep, stay hidden, stay alive.

My mother had broken those laws. I knew how that ended.

But knowing and stopping are different things. The curiosity that consumed her lived in me too, a hunger that the deep couldn't satisfy. And every night, when I saw him standing at the edge of his world, the hunger grew sharper.

What makes a land-dweller stare at water?

What is he looking for?

Does he know we're here?

---

I surfaced slowly. Just my eyes and the crown of my head, the way we were taught to check for threats. The air hit my face first--that strange, thin substance that never held me the way water did. It burned faintly in my nose, carried scents I couldn't name.

Salt and stone. That I knew.

But underneath, something green and living. Something warm and wild.

Him.

He stood thirty lengths from me, close enough that I could see the silver threading through his dark hair. The moon painted him in pale light, shadowing the angles of his face. He was large, larger than most land-walkers I'd observed, with shoulders that seemed built for carrying weight.

His eyes were fixed on the horizon. Searching.

I watched him watch the water, and I wondered what it felt like to stand on legs. To breathe without thinking about it. To exist in a world of air and light, where everything was visible, nothing hidden by the comforting dark of the deep.

You look sad, I thought. Are land-walkers always sad?

He shifted his weight. The water splashed faintly around his ankles.

And then he turned his head.

---

I should have sunk. Any night before this one, I would have slipped beneath the surface without a ripple and swum for the deep.

But his eyes caught mine.

Green. Like the kelp at summer's peak, when light filtered down just far enough to make everything glow. Not the cold blue of deep water, or the gray of storm-churned shallows. Green like something that breathed and burned.

He went very still.

I went still too.

The space between us, thirty lengths of dark water, felt suddenly thin. Like if either of us moved wrong, it would tear.

He didn't scream. Land-walkers screamed when they saw us; I'd heard it from the depths, the high sharp sounds that carried through water like breaking shells. He didn't run, either, though his body tensed in a way that said he wanted to.

He just... looked at me.

Like I was something impossible. Like I was something wondrous.

No one had ever looked at me like that.

---

My mother used to tell me stories about the surface. About land-walkers with their fire and their voices, their strange vertical lives. They're dangerous, she would say, running her fingers through my hair as we drifted in the shallows. They don't understand us. They fear what they don't understand.

Then why do you keep going up? I asked once.

She smiled. That sad, hungry smile I would later recognize in my own reflection.

Because the unknown calls to some of us, she said. And answering is not a choice. It is what we are.

---

The land-walker took a step forward.

The water rose past his ankles, darkening the fabric wrapped around his legs. He was walking toward me. Toward me, not away.

Blood roared through me so fiercely I felt it in my gills.

Swim, I told myself. Dive. Go deep. Don't be stupid.

He took another step. The water reached his knees now, and I could see the effort it took--land-walkers moved through water like they were fighting it, graceless and heavy.

But he didn't stop.

He was trying to reach me.

Why?

The question burned brighter than my fear. Brighter than my mother's warnings, brighter than the pod's laws, brighter than every instinct screaming at me to flee.

Why would a land-walker walk into the sea for a glimpse of something he doesn't understand?

---

I let myself rise a little higher.

Just enough to show my face. My shoulders. The silver-blue glint of scales at my collarbones, where skin became something else.

He stopped moving.

His mouth shaped a word. I couldn't hear it--sound traveled differently through air, thinner and sharper--but I saw the movement. Saw his chest heave with quick breath. Saw his hands curl at his sides like he was holding himself back from reaching.

You're real, his lips seemed to say. You're actually real.

I didn't know how to respond. My voice would work above water--we could make the sounds, even if we couldn't always shape them into their words--but what would I say?

I've been watching you for two hundred and forty-three nights.

You're the most interesting thing I've ever seen.

Please don't run.

Instead, I did something foolish. Something my mother would have wept over.

I smiled at him.

---

He made a sound then. Even through the air, I heard it--a sharp exhale, almost like pain. His whole body swayed forward, water surging against his thighs as he fought the urge to wade deeper.

The moonlight caught his eyes again.

I saw grief there. Old grief, the kind that had roots deep enough to hold a body to the seafloor. I had seen it before, in the elders who remembered the time before isolation. In my uncle's face when he spoke of my mother.

This land-walker had lost something to the sea.

That was why he came every night. Why he stared at the water like it might give back what it had taken.

Oh, I thought. You're not looking for something to rise.

You're looking for something that already sank.

---

The understanding changed something. Made him less strange, less other. Made him feel, for just a moment, like someone I recognized.

I lifted my hand from the water.

Slowly, the way you approach a skittish creature. Palm up, fingers spread, droplets sliding off silver-scaled skin. I didn't know what the gesture meant to land-walkers. I only knew what it meant to me.

I see you. I see your sadness. I will not flee.

He raised his hand too.

Trembling slightly, just visible in the moonlight. He held it out toward me like an offering, like a question.

Twenty lengths between us. Still too far to touch. But closer than I had ever been to a land-walker.

Closer than anyone from my pod had been in a generation.

---

A cloud drifted over the moon.

The light shifted, shadows rippling across the water, and some animal instinct in me screamed now. Screamed dive, hide, this is wrong.

I sank before I could stop myself.

The water closed over my head--cool, safe, familiar--and I shot toward the deep with a thrust of my tail that left a trail of silver bubbles in my wake.

When I finally looked back, the surface was a distant shimmer. The land-walker was a dark shape far above, still standing in the shallows.

Still waiting.

---

I should have been relieved. I had escaped without being caught, without being followed, without bringing the kind of danger my mother had brought.

But as I swam back to the kelp forest, as my racing heart finally slowed, I found I couldn't stop thinking about his eyes.

Green like growing things.

Sad like the deep.

And looking at me--for just a moment, before I fled--like I was the answer to a question he didn't know how to ask.

---

I would go back tomorrow.

I knew it even as I told myself I wouldn't. Even as I repeated the pod's laws like a chant: stay deep, stay hidden, stay alive.

The unknown called to me.

And I couldn't help but answer.