Nothing too dramatic—or traceable. Just perfectly normal beach things, until the north stretch cost more than the camera angle was worth.
The seagulls had been fun, hilarious even, but the fastest way to hurt a corporation was on its bottom line.
I went at dusk, when the crew had thinned to two guys breaking down the demo stage and a security guard whose entire job was apparently surfing his phone. I sat in the soft sand above the trench line like a woman enjoying the sunset, El Soldado stationed on a piling as lookout, and I pushed my hands wrist-deep into the warm sand and said hello.
The sand said hello back.
It always did.
Whatever else was wrong with me, that had never gone quiet. I could feel the whole sleeping body of the beach under my palms—the dry top layer still warm from the afternoon and the packed dark weight beneath. And embedded in that, thirty yards out, a foreign, cold plastic thread tunneling through my beach.
Up,I asked.Give it back.
My magic flickered like a dying flashlight and went out.
I reached again, and there was nothing to reach for—a hollow wherethe current should be, scraped clean. The sand under my hands stayed still.
It spoke to me, but it did not obey me.
Somewhere behind me the LED wall flashed at an empty beach.
“No,” I told the beach. “We just did this. We got those goddamn seagulls to listen, and we know how they are.”
The beach did not care.
I tried again, slower—breath out, ask, don’t grab.
I asked.
I asked politely.
Nothing.
I asked significantly less politely with a slew of English and Spanish curse words, and I got one flicker, one pathetic hiccup of effort, and a single elbow of black pipe broke the surface.
Then the hollow feeling rang through me like a bell, achingly empty in my chest, and I sat down dizzy in the evening breeze.
El Soldado made a low noise, and I knew exactly what it meant.
“I’m fine.”
He sailed down, landed beside me, and fixed me with his one black eye, and the look said,You know what you have to do.
Two days ago I’d been a hurricane, rattling a van off its axles.
But that power hadn’t been mine, it was borrowed, and the source was six-foot-something of a smug, shark-shaped problem.
“Don’t,” I said.
He preened a wing feather, insufferably.
What was I even doing? I’d gotten one taste of power, and now I was sure that was the solution to all of this? I could go to City Hall tomorrow, make some more noise about the complaint. That was the right move. I could focus on relocating my tournament, although I knew we would get far fewer signups if we weren’t on the main beach. I could work at Shark Bites and smile at tourists and have all my small, beautiful things?—
I heard it in her voice, and my whole bodyflinched.
No.
I was going to make them move their compound. I was going to protect these nests with Elliot and get my tournament and raise money, and I wasn’t going to be small.
