“Are you coming, or not?” Anemone asked, flipping her fin in impatience. She wanted to get off the reef, where they had lived and spent their whole lives. Beyond short fishing and diving trips, Mony hadn’t been on any long journey in her whole life. There was always some excuse to be had whenever she asked to be let out without the entire school coming along. Not old enough, not a good enough swimmer, storms approaching, leviathan in the area, they had all been used. Of course, they couldn’t tell her she wasn’t old enough any longer, and she’d long since outgrown the poor swimmer excuse. She had beaten most of her school in the races the past two years.

Urchin was less enthusiastic about leaving the reef. Like the rest of the school and everyone else in the colony, he liked it here. There was plenty to do, and this was where his ancestors were. Of course, which ancestors were actually his didn’t matter, each mermaid was revered for their contributions and became a part of the reef to grow the colony when they could no longer swim. It was comforting to know he had been cradled by a mermaid as an egg, and sheltered from storms and predators by mermaids. He had more seedings than anyone else their age, and aspired to join the reef. He also knew that if he didn’t go, Anemone would go on her own and would be completely alone in the open ocean. For all that he worried about her, Urchin knew Anemone had zero concern for her own safety, or that of others when she got an idea in her head.

He grumbled his consent to go, and Anemone immediately high-tailed it out of the coral toward the surface. Urchin continued to grumble as he hurriedly stuffed a few items into his case and followed her bubbles, in no hurry to catch up.

Anemone had thought some things through, luckily. She had a knife and spear, both made from barbed teeth which were slung around her with seaweeds. The tip of the spear poked through the surface of the ocean along with her head as she treaded water and waited for her friend to join her. Once he had arrived, looking much less excited than his counterpart, she launched into her plan.

“The Shorites tried to come out into the sea again,” she prefaced, without detailing how she had the information. “The leviathan took offense to the sight of their floating thing and so there’s a whole new reef to explore!” her eyes lit up as she spoke of it. Urchin’s face fell. Unless hungry or provoked, leviathans tended to leave the mermaids alone, preferring to antagonize anything above the water. A jealous creature, it wanted things for itself. If there was a ship, and Urchin wasn’t sure there was, the beast would probably dislike anyone coming into his shiny new lair.

While there was prestige to be had for anyone who found a new reef, or anything that had to do with the Shorites that could be converted and used by the mermaids, Urchin didn’t care about any of that. Even Anemone didn’t care about the fame or honor it would bring. It was an added perk that still wasn’t enough to convince the boy that it was a wonderful idea of a journey. Anemone scowled at him and the lack of interest he was taking.

“Fine. Stay here then, Chin, here in the tropics meeting no one new and seeing nothing new or interesting and having all kinds of fun swimming in circles.” She shrugged and took off, diving and leaping to gain speed before torpedoing away from her home. Urchin stayed bobbing, frowning after her before diving back to the reef to alert the masters that Anemone had run off toward an assumed location of a leviathan.

Anemone wasn’t certain which direction she needed to be heading in to find the newly sunken ship, but figured she would find it eventually. Even as the seas began to get choppy and the currents swirled unsteadily around her, she powered on. The coral growing from her back and arms, although hydrodynamic enough when she swam forward, caught the cross currents and twisted violently. Knowing the air was less powerful than the water, Mony surfaced again, to a dense foam surf and black clouds in the sky. Icy rain pelted her, stinging where it hit. Already tired from swimming this far, she struggled to continue forward as waves crashed over her, sending her tumbling head over tail.

As a particularly powerful wave washed over her, Anemone felt herself caught in a rip current, being dragged toward a whirlpool that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Panic began to set in as she was dragged back below the surface despite her struggles. Although she could breathe under the water, as all mermaids could, there was something deeply ingrained in her that found it instinctually unsettling to be pulled under, and the air caught in her chest until the force stopped.

It then took a few moments for her heart rate to drop and her chest to realize she was safe enough to breathe again and open her eyes. In front of her was the largest and angriest looking, well she supposed it was something like a leviathan, swimming across her path. It took no notice of her, chasing what Anemone had to assume was some trinket it was after, but what it was swimming away from was far more curious than the leviathan. Never before had she ever seen a reef so oddly shaped, like a bunch of coral spires, but larger and uncolored and stone. It wasn’t a ship, but it was definitely worth investigating.

As she swam closer, Anemone noticed that there were mermaids around the reef, although each was on the floor of the ocean instead of swimming above it. And they had the most bizarre, useless looking fins she had ever seen, more like the stories of Shorites than of mermaids. Everything about the place was unfamiliar and alien and the mermaid was delighted. Overcome with intrigue, particularly with the membrane that surrounded the reef, she poked it with one finger and found that it was like surfacing from the water more than anything else. As she withdrew her hand in shock, water poured through the dividing line and the floor-bound mermaids began to shout, and point at her. Anemone dove to be closer to eye level with the strange people and watched them stop the flow of water.