Page 61 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
A figure, swimming at your side.
For the moment, there is nothing else to do except hold on tight and hope this is a savior, not a predator. Clutch at the blurred body; it is ice-cold, reed-thin. Water swirls and suddenly, you are rushing up and up and up, ears popping and a sick feeling in your belly as the pressure changes too fast.
Light.Air.Break the surface with a gasping wail, spluttering and sobbing. The shore is devastatingly far, and getting gradually more distant; the currents are still fast-moving. You tread and float, exhausted but too terrified to stop, too terrified to sink again.
Pain in your eyes, head, and throat, and pain in your left thigh where it was dashed against the barnacle-clad rocks. Bleeding into open water. That can’t begood. Sharks come out here sometimes, and they can smell blood from a mile away.
A fresh wash of anxiety fills you. Help, you need help—
The one who rescued you. The thin form, the long nails and the dark streaming hair. Where have they gone?
And
then
you
look
down.
20… JIAOREN?
Thirty-three years ago…
A woman lurks beneath the ocean surface.
Skin the color of palest jade, delicate as a paper lantern. Eyes that are solid white and glistening. Clouds of black hair unspool around her head. She sweeps away errant, floating strands with hands that are long as your foot, the bones strangely elongated. Each finger is tipped with claw-like nails. In her mouth is the hardness of teeth, too many for a human and jagged as a shark’s. Her feet are long and flat like a pair of fins, with webbed toes.
Far from land, nearly drowned, bleeding still; inches away from a monster. You should be screaming. You should be a gibbering mess. Instead, you are only amazed.
Even… awestruck.
For she is beautiful, in a twisted way, and something about her sorrowful, ferocious expression moves you to a mix of pity and wonder.
“Jiaoren,” you manage to croak out, dumbstruck and overwhelmed. “Jiaoren!”
What else could she be but one of the so-called flood dragon people—the magical women and men of ancient legend, who live beneath the waves in their own undersea kingdoms? Whose tears become pearls, whose love is legendary, and whose vengeance is relentless?
Everything makes sense. The decrepit signs in the fields, the ocean your mother is nervous of, the temple built for sea-dwelling people. The aura of beauty around this place. Even the strange storm, an act of supernatural influence. This woman—no, this jiaoren—is at the heart of it all.
On an island full of faded, chittering ghosts, her monstrous nature is bright and fierce and full of verve. Like a vibrant bird, flying above a field of dry bones.
It’s then that you realize how cold and weak you are, strength sapped by fighting the tides, shivering in the water despite the warm sun above. The burst of adrenaline is gone and with its passing, your legs slow, ceasing to tread; you slip once more beneath the surface.
One of her hands darts through the green and grabs a fistful of camisole, her nails slicing inadvertently through fabric. She holds you tight, face-to-face with her in the waves.
Those shark teeth. Those pearlescent eyes. You’re spellbound and dazed. A glimpse of her form, ravaged and unpleasantly starved beneath the rags she wears—doesn’t she eat? Surely one like her is a predator—with all her bones on display, ribs protruding and hips like axe blades. Nothing about her is soft, or safe.
Time stretches as you hang in the water and she reaches out, so gently, to touch the tip of your nose with her other hand. One nail traces a cheek and, despite the lack of verbal communication, you sense her shock.
Hold on, she says, or at least, youthinkshe is speaking. Her lips move and you understand what she means, which is almost the same thing.
Abruptly, she wraps both arms around you and launches into a swim. Starved or not, she’s strong as a horse. No, a dolphin. You clutch at her wrists, hanging tight as she torpedoes through the waves.
It’s exhilarating. Fear melts like spring frost as water parts around you both. Glimpses of fish, something that might haveactuallybeen a shark, sand and rocks, liquid emerald everywhere.
Dip and dive through glassy water, disrupting schools of fish, skirting typhoon-hit wrecks, dart through waving seagrass and clustered coral. Urchins roll like spiky balls, shunted by the force of your passage. She lets you surface to catch your breath before diving again, and keeps you safe as she glides through unknowable waters.
