Chapter 21: The Sea

Stellan's POV

I have lived in a steel tank for three years.

In that time I have seen the sky through one skylight, grey, the size of a hand.

The inspector had asked for Selene at dusk.

I asked for her until then.

She looked at me, and did not ask why.

She went to the wire-scarred beast at the broken gate and put her hand on its head.

It lowered itself onto its belly.

I had never ridden anything in my life.

I do not remember the plain.

I remember her back against my chest and her cropped hair against my chin.

I remember the ridge, and then the wind changing, and the smell.

Salt.

The beast stopped at the top of a black dune, and I slid down off it onto my knees.

The sea lay below us, grey and enormous, and moving.

Nobody had ever told me it would move like that.

I took off my tunic.

"Stellan," Selene said behind me.

"Wait."

I walked down the dune and into the water to my knees.

It was cold.

It was the first cold I had felt in years that was not a wall of glass.

My legs changed in the third wave.

I felt it begin at the hips, the long silver-blue pull of it.

Then I was in the shallows, held up on the strong curved sweep of my tail.

The whole sea ran up my skin.

I turned around.

She stood on the sand with her boots in her hand, watching me.

Not as the Warden had watched me.

Not as the guards had.

She looked at me, and she was afraid to touch me only because she wanted to.

"You hate being watched," she said.

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