Free Fathom by Cherie Priest

ever a more awful name was assigned to a vessel.”
    “It’s
your
name.”
    “No. You only think it sounds that way. If you knew any Spanish, you’d hear it for the insult it is.”
    She shrugged. “They don’t mean it like that.”
    “It doesn’t matter how they mean it.”
    Bernice glared out over the inky water and squinted into the whitely dotted lanterns. She wanted to surprise him, and she did—but only a little. He could have predicted that she’d jump up and run, but the leap and the splash took him off guard in a way that charmed him.
    With a stumble and a hop, she lunged into the surf. She swept her arms like she was making a snow angel, and drew her body under until she was scarcely more than a fish-gray streak just below the surface.
    He watched her briefly, for a flickering jerk of a second. Then he followed her over the low stone wall and into water that was as black as the sky.
    On the one hand, he was disappointed. This was supposed to be walking time, feet-on-earth time. Mother wanted her new child to remember what it’s like to move with the land beneath her, because enough time had passed that Bernice was close to forgetting. The mind remembers, but when the body’s been cradled long enough, it loses the sensation of standing upright and lifting itself forward.
    On the other hand, it was a joy to watch her swim. Neither mermaid nor dolphin, not fish or ray, she tore through the water as if she were a shark freed quickly from a net. There was terror and power there, in the tight, squeezing kicks that started at her hips and the fierce tearing of her arms, shredding the sparkling wave tops into frothy nothing.
    The water was warm to him; it was bathwater and brine: tepid and tasting of sea rot.
    For one shattered second, he remembered falling into it before, and feeling rust and iron, and the weight of a chain around his neck. It was almost too much, the fear and the eyes that watchedhim underwater, and the grasp that took him by the throat, by the waist, and by the pelvis to pull him deeper, down into the arms of a creature strange and strong beyond time, beyond belief.
    He shook the reminiscence away and swam after her, the siren skimming faster than a skipped stone toward a ship with a name he would never have chosen himself.
    When he got closer, he could see it more clearly, and it was brushed with carnival colors too bright to be masculine and too pretty to intimidate. This was a party craft, made to shuttle rich people from event to event, from extravaganza to private soiree.
    He saw the corruption of his name painted clearly on the side in a script like a woman would write.
    Bernice reached the craft’s edge first. She grasped a decorative net and twisted it in her hands; she pulled herself out of the water, and the moonlight broke itself against her back.
    She took his breath away, even though he could see through her glamour now, when she was wet and illuminated. Under the glorious cover of the soaked dress, her skin was translucent and tinted with the runny blue and green in which she had marinated all this time. Her limbs were too slick to be human. Her hands were too finned for gloves, and her hair tangled into seaweed locks like the island Africans used to wear.
    The once-woman climbed up the ship’s side and slipped onto the deck.
    The once-pirate came, too, up and over. He stood up straight beside her. Some leftover habit, some fragment of a survivalist tick made him reach to his chest. But there were no guns slung there to grab, no triggers to squeeze. No one-or two-shot pistols strung together like fireworks.
    His fingers grazed his shirt and found nothing. He did not notice the gesture; he could not even remember what he reached for in the first place.
    But Bernice was already moving. He would watch her move, then, on planks if that was as close as he could bring her to solid ground. He was pleased to note that here, too, she crashed like a shark.
    There was a woman hanging over