Free Forgotten Sea by Virginia Kantra

shields.”
    “It’s the drugs.”
     “—danger with concussion,” the woman was saying.
    The doctor, he remembered. Marian? Miriam.
    “Appropriate dosage for a human.”
    “Well, he’s not human, is he?” snapped the first speaker.
    He was listening now, but the words had no more meaning than the tolling of a buoy.
    Not human .
    Not human ?
    “Tel me something I don’t know.”
    “Well,” the doctor said slowly, “his toes are webbed.”
    For an instant, he couldn’t breathe. Something flashed in his brain, stronger than recognition, more elusive than memory. And then the footsteps faded. The light behind his closed lids ebbed away.
    He lay with the sound of the sea’s long retreat echoing in his head, his thoughts raucous and meaningless as the cries of seabirds over something that has died.
    He wasn’t dead yet.
    But he might as well be. He felt like a diver plunged unexpectedly into the water, unable to distinguish up from down, past from present, dreams from reality.
    He needed answers. Help. A weapon. They’d taken his knife.
    Something hard—a loose slat, a broken coil—poked his shoulder blades.
    If they were going to lock him up, he thought with a sudden flash of clarity, they might at least have provided a comfortable mattress.
    The lump at his back gave him a focus. He could fashion a tool from wood or wire. A shank. It took several tries, but eventually he managed to roll onto his side. Panting, he jammed his hand between the frame and the mattress and touched . . .
    Not a slat. A knife. His knife, shaped to his palm.
    Lara. He felt her presence as keenly as the blade. Her touch, lingering on the handle. Her energy, vibrating through his fingertips. Her breath, in him. He saw her, her eyes large and gray beneath dark winged brows.
    He clung to her image like hope, like the spar, fighting to keep his head above water. He had his weapon. Now all he needed was answers.
    And a way out.
    * * *
    The whispers of her disgrace were up before she was.
    Lara heard the stutter of conversation when she entered the vaulted dining hall the next morning, a sudden drop in noise level followed by a rustle like wind through corn. She stood with her breakfast tray at the end of the serving line while the younger students craned to get a look at her and the other proctors carefully avoided her eyes.
    Her stomach sank.
    The teachers took the first two meals of the day in the faculty dining room, leaving the proctors to monitor the students. A few proctors patrolled the tables or ate with favorites from their floors, but most grabbed this chance to sit together. Lara carried her tray to join them at the round tables at the end of the hall. One or two people collected their trays and left without a word.
    Heat rushed to her cheeks.
    It didn’t mean anything, she told herself. Breakfast service was nearly over. She was late, that was all.
    She saw Gideon sitting with his girlfriend Ariel. The young Guardian looked heavy-eyed and grim, as if he hadn’t slept any better than she had.
    She offered him a quick, sympathetic smile. “Hi, Gideon.”
    He barely nodded in reply, his attention fixed on his plate.
    Ariel glared at her and whispered something to the girl on her other side.
    Lara’s smile faltered before she looked away.
    She found two members of her cohort, David and Jacob, sitting together at an otherwise empty table. They were deep in a discussion about restoration glass, but as she approached, Jacob thrust a booted foot under the table, pushing out a chair for her. Gratefully, she sat. David speared a piece of pineapple from her plate, waving it around on the end of his fork as he argued about ways to duplicate the color effects of arsenic.
    “Fluorspar doesn’t produce the same fire,” he insisted.
    “But it’s more consistent,” Jacob said. “Not to mention legal.”
    Buffered by their undemanding company, she began to relax. The buzz of conversation, the clatter of plates and glassware, mingled