The Glimmering Sea

CHAPTER ONE

Fear quivered throughout the lagoon and twisted in Armida's mind. The water, with its new alien texture, slicked over her body, and the sting of a pungent warning scorched her tongue. The rippling turquoise scales at her waist strained to filter the sludge. Her tail writhed with her revulsion. Long strands of her silver hair tangled around her neck and arms as she bobbed in the current.

She wanted to believe she was mistaken and that the water was unchanged—that it was mere cloudiness from the sluggish flow of sediment in the shallows.

Armida wanted to believe. But she did not.

Grimewater seeped into the lagoon. The smell was wrong, unclean. The clams her father had requested were sparse.

Not so long ago she had played games in the lagoon while adults hunted shellfish and gathered reeds and grasses for baskets and hammocks. Its channels carved by the currents, la Laguna had a natural murkiness, but the soft squish of the mud floor, along with the salt marshes, cradled many of the delicacies Armida loved. Her memories glowed with the days her father brought home the eggs of crested grebes to serve with kelp. The tender saltiness and succulent earthiness captured the essence of the lagoon.

A knot of Terran boats cast flickering shadows across the sea floor. The Terrans were late today. They should have been at their southern fishing grounds hours ago. Armida stopped foraging and sank to the seabed. The black silhouettes above and the sound of the wooden hulls buffeting the surface sent the chunky silver bream and sleek spotted gobies into hiding. To move was to risk being seen.

Armida's anger would not settle as she faulted the Terrans for this harm to la Laguna. There could be no others to blame. They could not be trusted. Her parents had instructed her that she must be certain none ever saw her. She'd asked them why once, but her mother responded with a harsh reprimand for questioning her. Her father said, "Later. Another time." Armida never asked why again. There was no point.

She stilled herself with great difficulty. There was a fleeting darkness like a cloud had scudded in front of the sun—No, not a cloud after all.

As the weighted net landed, a plume of sediment rose, then fell, eventually covering the webbed rope after it rested on the bottom. Instinct replaced thought and Armida spun away with a powerful flip, her arms stretched outward, fingertips forming a vee. She sliced through the brown silt sifting from the broad mouth of the canal, past the swaying reeds, deeper still, beyond the tegnúe reef, leaving the lagoon behind.

Armida swam until exhaustion teased at every muscle. Only then did she shiver with the realization of how close she had been to being trapped like a tuna. She had not anticipated a trawl net. It was stupid and careless.

The time when she would be forgiven for mistakes was at an end, although she didn't know how that had come to be. Armida had never before challenged her obligations. Now she kept most things to herself; her mother's wrath had become unpredictable and unpleasant. Her father would be disappointed when she returned with the empty pouch, but maybe he would say nothing to her mother, who would be angry if she discovered Armida had not sabotaged the net.

Armida wanted someone else to know about the grimewater, as she did. If she told her mother, though, she would be cautioned that a child shouldn't concern herself with the business of adults. Her father would agree with her mother, but perhaps Uncle Torquato would listen. Or perhaps not.

At least her little brother Paolo would be happy to see her.

East of the Terran city of Venice—the one they also called la Serenissima—she tasted the sweetness of the saltwater, finally felt the soothing coolness, and received the oxygen sustaining her life. The Terran corruption had not reached this far. But it would. Unless something—or someone—stopped it.