Girls Day Out: A Syrena Legacy Story (2 page)

Rayna stops and my chin slams into one of her shoulder blades. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, when they throw something overboard, have you ever thought of throwing it back just to freak them out?”

This elicits an evil grin from her. “I can’t believe I’ve never thought of that. You’re going to be useful after all.”

Rayna is the queen of underhanded compliments.

We skirt the belly of the ship, changing sides often. “It’s slowing down now,” Rayna says. “We’re probably coming close to port.”

“Port? The
Bahamas
?” How long have we been gone? Does riding the current really give you that much more speed? I’m used to traveling faster with Galen, of course—sometimes his speed forces me to close my eyes against the momentum—but Rayna is no turtle either, apparently.

She doesn’t answer me, but slows her pace. We fall slightly behind the ship. “Sometimes people toss things off the back—” And that’s when something hits the surface. At first, it whirpools in place, tossed about by the ship’s wake. Then it floats at the top, pale and listless. When it absorbs more of the ocean and it starts to sink, that’s when I figure out what it is.

A rag doll. When we get closer to it, we discover fire-red yarn hair, big brown embroidered eyes, and a yellow floral dress complete with a little ruffled white apron.

“Wow,” Rayna breathes. “No one’s ever tossed one of these.” She snatches it out of its churning descent to the bottom. She turns it over and over in her hands as if she’s never seen a doll before. As if her bed at Galen’s house isn’t lined with dolls just like this one. Prettier ones, though.

“Can I see it?” I say, grabbing it from her. She fully intends on keeping it, I can tell. But we can’t. “This wasn’t thrown overboard on purpose,” I tell her. “I’m betting this was dropped accidentally.”

She shrugs, snatching it back. “Finders keepers.”

I snatch it back, and quickly pull up the dress. There is a hand-sewn inscription on it. “See?” I say. “It says ‘To Caroline, From Mommy.’”

“Mommy?”

“That’s what some human children call their mothers.”

Rayna is irate. “So her mother gave this to her? And she
lost
it?”

“If she’s carrying a doll like this around, she’s probably very young. She probably didn’t know better. She was probably showing her doll the waves or something.”

“Dolls aren’t alive.”

“I’m sure she was playing pretend, you know?” I can see that she doesn’t know. Rayna understands what’s real and tangible, not what’s imaginary and whimsical. She doesn’t even play with her own dolls; she simply views them as things to be collected. She was never told fairy tales growing up. She was taught the laws and the ways of the Syrena, and any stories that were told to her were true ones passed down through the faithful memory of the Archives. Of all the things she has as a Royal, an imagination isn’t among them.

“She was pretending that it could see, I’m sure, and she dropped it overboard. On accident.”

Rayna looks really disgusted with Caroline right now. At least, that’s what it looks like, until she says, “We have to give it back to her.”

“Um. Huh?”
Say what?

She nods. “We have to find her and give it back to her. You shouldn’t lose things your mother gives you. What if her mother—what if she doesn’t have her mother anymore? We have to give it back to her.”

Understanding pulls on my heartstrings. Rayna’s mother died when she was younger. Galen told me Rayna used to go to the Cave of Memories where her mother is entombed every day for a long time after she died. He says she sometimes still cries about it when it’s just him and her alone.

I swallow the lump in my throat. “How do you propose we do that?”

“We’ll wait until they port, then sneak on.”

“You have to have a passport to board the ship.”

“A what? Did you hear me? I said we’ll sneak.”

Oh, geez. I think I agree with Rayna: This promises to suck. But how can I say no?

*   *   *

So we come ashore with the freaking doll and make our way barefoot to the long dock where
The Enchantment
is anchored. The passengers are just now disembarking, so our first shot at finding Caroline is a stab in the dark with a proverbial spork.

“Excuse me, are you Caroline?” I say, pulling a family aside and showing them the doll. They shake their heads and look at me like I’m cray-cray. I try to ignore the concerned glances of passersby as Rayna yanks on someone’s arm and says, “You Caroline?”

I smile apologetically at the assaulted elderly passengers and steer Rayna away from them. “Humans say things like ‘Excuse me’ and ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you.’ And why are you stopping old people? Remember, Caroline is probably a little girl.”

“I was just trying to get everyone I could.” I see by her expression Rayna is sincerely trying to help, not aggravate.

“Look, try to find little girls. But don’t be all creepy about it. Approach the adult with the group, not the kid. People don’t like strangers getting chit-chatty with their kids.”

“Chit-chatty?” Her eyes light up, which means she likes the sound of that phrase. We don’t have time to practice new phrases though.

“Here comes a family with a little girl. Go see if that’s Caroline.”

After about an hour, the dock is sparse and the few people left are the ones giving us the stink eye. I mean, in their defense, we are in our swimsuits carrying around a soaking-wet rag doll who has seen better days, like, yesterday. And so far we have no Caroline.

“We’ll have to board the ship,” Rayna says, as if she’s talking about eating a sandwich or taking a walk on the beach.

“We can’t just board the ship. Like I said, we need passports.”

“I’ve been thinking about it and I have a plan. We’ll wait until everyone comes back from their excursions, then we’ll just get lost in the crowd.”

“I’ve been on a cruise before. They put you in a single-file line and check everyone’s passport before you can come back on the ship.”

“We’ll walk backwards then. They’ll think we’re going instead of coming.”

“Ohmysweetgoodness.” Is she for freaking real?

She laughs at my exasperation. “I’m only kidding. We’ll just have to climb up the anchor.”

I’m sure my eyes are nearly popping out of their sockets. “Be serious.”

She grabs my elbow and turns me to face the ship. “Look,” she whispers. “The line to the anchor goes halfway up the ship. See that rope with the float thingies on it? We’ll use that to climb the rest of the way onboard.”

“You’ve done this before?”

Her brow knits. “We’ll have to go one at a time.”

“You think?”

“I’ll go first. Then you can follow my lead.” And with that, the lunatic starts heading back toward the beach. “We’ll need a distraction,” she calls over her shoulder.

Oh. My. God. Galen is going to strangle the life from my body. “Keep your voice down,” I hiss, catching up to her.

“You’ll need to use your Gift to create a distraction on the other side of the ship. That way, everyone will be focused away from the anchor side.”

My mouth drops open. This could actually work.

We ease into the tide, casually making our way to deeper water. We have to dive before we reach the anchor, because there are two security boats making their rounds in between and past the three big cruise ships docked here. If they spot us too close to the foreign vessel, they’ll definitely intervene.

Beneath the surface, about forty feet down, Rayna tugs on the anchor. When it doesn’t budge—did she really expect it to?—she reaches out for the rag doll in my hands. I give it to her. “Now, go to the other side and call all the fish you can find,” she says. “Tell them to start jumping out of the water or something.”

Or something. Maybe they could perform ballet. Or something. I swim to the other side, wary of the fact that I’m swimming under a hefty, five-ton ship in shallow-ish water. I start calling fish though, like I’m told. “Come here to me, fish,” I sing. Not that I have to sing. I could just talk, but that always makes me feel like a weirdo. So singing it is.

“Fish, all of you come here to me.” A small gathering of small fish builds into a large gathering of medium fish, and then a huge gathering of all sorts of fish. After about five minutes, I’ve got myself enough participants to put on a Broadway show. That’s when I take the time to appreciate that I’m in the Bahamas, and that I have a rainbow of fish swimming around me, waiting for my next instructions. They come in all colors, shapes, and sizes, though they seem to share the same mechanical expression: eyes open, pouty mouth. Set against the soothing blue of the water, it’s an amazing sight.

“All of you start jumping up out of the water,” I say. “Jump, jump, jump!” The way Dr. Milligan, Galen’s marine biologist friend, explained my Gift is like this: The communication is not in the actual words, but in the one-size-fits-all frequency of my voice underwater. I mean, it’s not like these fish speak English. But they understand my commands by the inflection in my voice. At least, that’s Dr. Milligan’s theory. And so far, he’s right. I’ve spoken to fish in French before, and they understood and obeyed. I’ve even spoken to them in gibberish, envisioning a command, and they listen. It’s all in the voice. Wild, but true.

So all the fish line up and start jumping. It raises such a ruckus that there is no smoothness left to the surface at all; it’s all rippled to pieces as one after another fish jump over each other. Striped fish, spotted fish, neon green and yellow fish, sailfish, swordfish, vividly colored eels. Fish that look like Vincent van Gogh decorated them himself. There are even a couple of reef sharks lurking and waiting their turn to jump—or waiting their turn to dine, once the mini festival is over here.

“Keep jumping. I’ll be right back,” I instruct. But chances are, I won’t be right back. This mission has catastrophe written all over it.

I leave the underwater circus and swim back to the anchor where Rayna waits for me. “I’m going to shimmy up, then you follow me,” she says. “Just do what I do.”

Rayna has the classic Syrena build, lean and muscular. The girl has a six-pack, for God’s sake. With a diet high in fish protein and little else, and the physical activity of just swimming around all day, I wouldn’t expect anything less. Me, though? I eat things like cheesecake and bacon. I drive my car to get where I’m going. I’m soft. Pliable. Galen calls it curvy. Either way, I’m pretty sure my soft, curvy arms are going to have a rough time scaling this soft, curvy body up a giant chain.

I’m about to explain this to Rayna, but as soon as I open my mouth, she disappears up the chain like a fish-monkey, the doll tucked safely in her mouth. Ohmysweetgoodness.

Also,
crap
.

I scramble to follow. To my surprise—and relief—the chain is more firm than the rope we have to climb in gym class. It’s as thick as my leg and hardly moves with my weight. I can easily position my feet on each of the links and use my hands to pull myself up to the next one. Keeping my eyes trained on Rayna above me, I make progress upward, secretly impressed with myself.

That’s when I remember about the ropes we’ll have to inch across in order to reach an accessible deck of the ship and that somehow, when this insanity is over, we’ll have to get ourselves back into the safety of the ocean. And so, I look down. Like an idiot.

I stop climbing and latch onto the chain as if we’re dangling over hot lava. Above me, Rayna huffs. “Toraf said you jumped out of a helicraptor from way higher than this,” she says with disdain.

This is true. But that was when I didn’t feel I had a choice, and a lot more was at stake than just Caroline’s rag doll. And the goal now is
not
falling, which is, for some reason, a lot more difficult to manage than impulsively pitching yourself from a hovering helicopter over a giant school of sharks with your eyes closed and hoping for the best. This takes more thought, more concentration, more time to think about how it will hurt to give the water a high five with your face.

With a fragile resolve, I start climbing again. Slapping the water with my forehead should be the least of my worries, after all. Because if we get caught, we’re going to prison. And I’m pretty sure they don’t serve cheesecake or bacon in prison.

When I reach the top, I tighten my thighs on the chain and reach one hand, then both hands to grasp the rope. It’s sturdy too, pulled tight enough to feel like a steel cable in my hands. With a deep breath, I release my legs from the chain and swing away from it. I’ve really got to work on my upper-body strength. I glance at Rayna, who’s already straddling the deck railing. She shakes her head at me.

Still, she’s decent enough to wait for me as I inch across the rope, my hands cramping and my armpits stretched to their limits. Rayna reaches down and grabs one of my hands and, for one terrifying moment, I think of all the mean things I’ve ever said to Rayna—and that I shared a kiss with her mate—and that she just might have talked me up here in order to drop me.

But she doesn’t. “Hurry up,” she hisses. “You’re slower than an urchin.”

She hoists me over the rail without ceremony and, as soon as my feet are planted, starts walking down the deck. She has definitely done this before.

We make our way to the interior of
The Enchantment
, through the casino, past the elevators, and across one of the restaurants. Slipping out the door on the opposite side, we squeeze between the people leaning over the rails watching the water below them. It seems everyone is sufficiently enraptured by my handiwork; oohs and aahs resonate down the line of passengers, coinciding with the sound of heavy splashing below.

Rayna gets to work immediately, grabbing the shoulder of the first girl she sees and jerking her backward. “Hey, are you Caroline?” The little girl shakes her head, eyes wide, and her mother puts a protective arm around her.

“We found this doll,” I tell her quickly. “We’re just looking for who lost it.”

The mother breaks into a smile. “Oh. Well, sorry we couldn’t help.”