Page 4 of Prima (After the End #8)

Chapter Two

Ten years ago

The girl lurks below the surface.

Given the curvature of the earth, on the open sea, the horizon is only five kilometers away in any given direction—the limit of visibility.

But in the water her senses cover a much greater radius.

In the water she “sees” the pod of dolphins twenty klicks away and the school of mackerel they are chasing.

She “hears” the sway and dance of a kelp forest even farther out.

And she feels the soft repose of the great orca that is never more than three kilometers away from the tri-hull almost directly above her.

The boat has not tried to approach her raft—it has not even come close. It only trails her just beyond the horizon.

But she doesn’t want a tail, not even a polite and seemingly considerate one.

The Grand Tour requirement exists because New Ryukyu wants its leaders to prove themselves resourceful and adaptable—and to have seen and experienced something of the wider world.

The successful completion of a Grand Tour, however, relies in no small part on the vagaries of fortune.

Which might be something else her realm is looking for, leaders who have that element of luck on their side.

Her luck has held so far. All the way to Lion City, the furthest point on her itinerary, her trip was practically incident-free.

Subsequently, she did lose her boat off the coast of the Southern Continent—her raft was the emergency escape vehicle—but it was a worthy sacrifice: She rescued the grandson of General Duval, leader of the Offshore Coalition and a staunch ally to New Ryukyu, from a passel of warlords.

To evade retaliation by the warlords, however, she was forced to sail much farther east than she would have liked. To return home on time, she had to cut through a corner of Risshva, and now the same with Dawan.

She’s so close. Two more days and Dragon Gate will be in sight.

Can she get rid of her tail with a bribe or will she need to incapacitate the vessel?

It has lowered its sails and drifts with the currents—possibly to keep pace with her raft, which drifts a few klicks ahead.

If she wants to, she can sink it without warning—but a vengeful orca, if the orca is bonded to those in the boat, might prove inconvenient.

No need to create an enemy when a problem can be solved by a transaction.

She is still pondering her options as she breaks the surface.

A crescent moon hangs low, so dim it’s barely visible.

The stars, however, are legion, bright enough to cast shadows.

The air is warm—the air is always warm in the tropics—the sea flat and even.

The tri-hull looks a bit flimsy, but from the way water flows past its main keel, she suspects that it’s of a hydrofoil design and able to achieve sailing speeds that greatly exceed its apparent hull speed.

A figure emerges on deck—that’s fast. She’s sure that she hasn’t made any sounds that could be heard above the sea nudging the boat along. The figure, that of a shirtless young man, ambles a few steps toward the stern, a harpoon in hand, his gaze already locked upon her.

He is beautiful, coolly, austerely so, his tumble of shoulder-length hair frosted with starlight. She forgets to breathe. Ah, what lovely asphyxiation, this sweet agony in her chest.

She smiles at him. Her smiles rarely fail to have an effect on boys; even boys who don’t like girls that way smile back and want to be her friends.

The boy looming above her, however, only frowns.

Is his night vision not as good as hers, or does she make for a less-than-ravishing sight, with just her head above water, her hair plastered to her face?

She floats higher, so that her shoulders and the rise of her breasts are exposed, draws a strand of hair across her lips, and bats her eyelashes. “Sir, I—I may be lost. Do you think you can help me?”

His lips part slightly—she hears the breath he lets out. His gaze sweeps lower before it comes to rest on her face again. “Mermaids are not allowed in these parts.”

She laughs at his unexpected response. Alas, the cataclysmic changes that destroyed the world that once was produced only a few individuals with Sea Sense and not a single siren. “I’m not a mermaid.”

He takes another step toward the stern. The ridged musculature of his midsection, the way his loose-fitting trousers hang dangerously low across his narrow hips—she’s never thought of herself as particularly lascivious but she is suddenly keen to run her fingertips along his waistband.

“If you’re not a mermaid,” he says with deadpan severity, “then you’re an unauthorized trespasser in Dawani waters.”

She gathers her hair to twist it into a knot atop her head. “Now I am, maybe. But when you started following me we were more than twenty klicks south of Dawan, in Risshva.”

His boat didn’t figure into the shadowing until they were inside Dawani waters. Which indicates that the boy is either a Risshvai agent with backers inside Dawan, or a Dawani agent up to no good in Risshva who picked up her trail and decided to see what she was up to.

He glances down again—her arms, in elevating to restyle her hair, have also lifted her breasts until her nipples are barely concealed.

“I have not followed you; I’m on my patrol route.”

She glances at the multihull craft, which is unlike any patrol boats she’s ever seen—with its sails down, it resembles a dragonfly, its two much smaller stabilizing floats attached to the central hull by winglike beams. But the confidence he exudes—she’s beginning to think that he must be Dawani and that he might, in fact, have some connection to Dawan’s naval forces, or at least its coastal watch.

Which is unfortunate: It would be easier for her to negotiate with a Risshvai agent, a fellow trespasser, than someone who could have her arrested.

At least the way he looks at her is not that of a man with the law on his mind.

She smiles again. “Will you hand me to the authorities if I board your vessel?”

“Of course,” he says. “There are usually bounties on fugitives.”

“I’m not a fugitive, either.”

“In which case you must be a madwoman. Madwomen are also not allowed in Dawani territorial waters.”

She bursts out laughing.

He points the harpoon’s deadly end blade directly at her. “This is your official warning to depart Dawan.”

She is not alarmed: That isn’t how one launches a harpoon. But the gesture does emphasize the perfectly cut muscles of his arm. She rubs a thumb across her lower lip. “What’s your name, o conscientious guardian of the integrity of Dawani territorial waters?”

He switches his handhold on the shaft of the harpoon and pulls it back—that is how one launches a harpoon.

Instantly she dives under and does not stop until she reaches a depth of twenty-five meters.

The next time she surfaces, she’s more than a kilometer away.

She glances back toward the patrol boat, laughs again, and shakes her head, a strange but pleasurable unrest in her heart.

* * *

The next night, the moon is an even fainter sliver. The stars burn from horizon to horizon.

The girl gazes up. She’s not one to be nostalgic for life before the End, except in one respect: The greater universe is more out of reach than ever.

Had people back then managed to accelerate a gram-scale probe to 1% of the speed of light, that tiny spacecraft would have reached Proxima Centauri hundreds of years ago.

Yet Earthlings know little more of the cosmos now than they did at the dawn of the millennium, and what new insights they did gain were thanks to the space telescopes in stable orbits at L4 and L5 that lasted miraculous centuries, instead of the decades they were originally designed to serve.

But it is not the saddest thing not to reach the stars. If she can live a worthy life, if she—

She groans and turns over onto her stomach. It’s so hot.

Objectively, it’s been growing cooler as she heads away from the equator. But tonight she is unable to sleep, meditate, or even remain still for long.

She yanks off her dress. She shouldn’t have fallen for the boy’s feint. Not that it was wrong to be cautious, but she should have stayed where she was to see what he’d do next when his upgraded threat still failed to remove her.

Today all day they played the same game: He remained invisible; she leaped into the water an absurd number of times to make sure that he was still there, just beyond the horizon.

After sunset she was tempted nearly beyond endurance to swim up to his boat again.

Only her desire not to appear too predictable restrained her in the end.

So here she is, suffering from the lack of stimulation that resulted from her stupidly sensible decision.

She drops a hand overboard—immersing her whole body makes it easier to detect underwater movements, but any contact is better than nothing. A moment later she jerks upright. Two creatures are coming toward her, one much more sizable than the other. The boy and his orca?

She needs to get in the water right away to be sure.

But if it is him, and he senses her motion and realizes that she knows he’s coming, how will she be able to pretend, when he gets here, that she’s asleep and has no idea that she has a gentleman caller?

She agonizes for a full five seconds before she slips off the raft. Safety first. And if he has half a brain, he’ll pretend that he doesn’t know she’s pretending.

It is him. Or rather, the larger creature is his companion orca, whose motion she now recognizes easily.

This is the first time she’s had the chance to observe the boy underwater.

He is a blazingly fast swimmer. She luxuriates in the elegance and power of his movement, until she must clamber back onto her raft or risk being caught in the water, waiting for him.

She resumes her naked, prone position at the edge of the raft, one hand in the water. The boy has come all this way; he should get an eyeful.

But after a moment, she drags over the dress she tossed aside earlier and covers her bottom—no need for him to see everything.

But more importantly, she needs the dress to conceal a weapon close at hand.

The boy is beautiful and keeps his distance, but Dawan is not a good place for women.

Husbands are assigned, rather than chosen.

Financial independence scarcely exists. And women can only derive power from fathers, husbands, and sons, rather than make their own way in the world.

If the boy should dare to take anything that is not freely offered, she will not hesitate to mar or even destroy all that beauty.

Her body vibrates with both anticipation and tension. She relaxes a little when the orca splits off a klick out and comes no nearer. She and her raft can take on the orca too, but it would be more troublesome. The boy she can handle on her own.

She sensed no ill will in him the night before. Her mother, however, has always warned her not to be overly reliant on this ability. Circumstances change, minds change, and someone who simply passed you by the previous day might harm you in untold ways twenty-four hours later.

That said, does she look alluring? Does she look draped and sexy or is she a tangle of strained limbs, an ungainly marionette?

He surfaces fifty meters away. She relaxes a little more at the obvious splash—at least he’s not trying to sneak up on her.

Then, a silence so deep and sustained she can almost hear the nuclear rumble of the stars overhead. Her nostrils fill with the earthy smell of the damp coir rope that binds together the logs of the raft. Her fingers under the dress tighten over her hidden weapon.

The possibility of sex and the possibility of fatality mix uneasily, yet fervidly. Her breaths echo sharply in her ears. Can he hear her? Does he feel the same whiplash of danger and arousal?

A rippling sound—he approaches her in start-and-stop stages.

And now he is close enough to “see” in her mind’s eye.

Ill will shows up as colors in the warmer spectrum, from a barely visible fuzz of beige for a pickpocket to the glowing red she experienced for the first time on this trip, in the war zone. She clenches her hand, waiting for the boy to render a verdict on himself.

The backs of her eyelids remain resolutely dark. No ill will on his part.

No readable ill will, as her mother would remind her.

Now he’s only ten meters out. If she opened her eyes, she’d be able to count his eyelashes. Does he see her as clearly?

Water ripples again. Seismic waves of agitation propagate through her—he should not come any closer.

Not without an invitation.

And he doesn’t. He makes a slow circle around her, then halts on her right side, a little beyond her shoulder. A well-chosen spot: Her weapon is near her right hand but her head is turned to her left and it will take her a fraction of a second longer to shoot someone at her two o’clock.

Stillness. No movement except the current on which her raft gently bobs. He watches her. Patiently? Warily? Hungrily? She wishes she weren’t pretending to be asleep. But then again, if she didn’t have her eyes closed, would he come this close?

Her breaths echo again. No, not just her breaths, his too. The rapid intakes; the unsteady exhalations. Heat pulses in her. Her heart pounds. Her skin, caressed by night breeze, becomes all too sensitive.

She wants to exist forever in this razor-edged delirium. She can’t stand another second of it. Something must happen.

Water churns. But, no, he is not coming closer. He is leaving.

Relief tumbles through her—relief, and a disappointment as jagged as broken glass. She turns onto her back and opens her eyes to a galaxy of cold, indifferent stars. Slowly, very slowly, she sits up.

He, already a hundred meters away, turns around. They stare at each other across the midnight sea. Then he dives under and disappears.