Marina wakes, drowsy and disoriented, near the ocean floor. A phantom tremor pulses beneath her skin. As she’s about to scream, a rhythmic sensation caresses her body as it expands and contracts… thrum-thrum. She has gills. A frisson of suspense leaves her mind blank until she feels involuntary movements of her arms, all eight of them—each a semi-autonomous mini-brain. Each a superpower, self-contained and ready to use.
Superpower No. 1: Camouflage. She remembers using it at her dad’s funeral. She’s ten—face expressionless, beset by woe, dusk in her red-rimmed eyes; her monochrome outfit woven into the greyness of the worst of winter days.
Superpower No. 2: Blanch-Ink-Jet Manoeuvre—the master of manoeuvres. She remembers mimicking her surroundings, like her favourite sea creature, using its false-body ability to evade the flood of well-intentioned hugs from distant relatives and people she’d never met, their peering eyes and closed-mouth smiles.
Superpower No. 3: Shape-Shifting. This one takes time and is fluid, like her name, meaning ‘of the sea’, like waking up in the ocean, all gills and arms and blobs of ink. One moment she’s a flounder, another a lionfish, then a venomous sea snake; caught in a centrifuge of waves, transforming her into someone else, anyone but her—holding her pain as she curls inwards.
Superpower No. 4: Siphoning with jet propulsion. She moves like a rocket. She’s unstoppable—bathing in shallow coastal tide pools, diving along rocky shorelines, resting on seagrass beds masked by uncharted wrecks at the bottom of pitch-black abyssal zones. She’s all the shadows and ghosts, a faint outline of someone she no longer recognises, but she isn’t afraid. It’s peaceful there, and she has her dad’s fortitude.
Superpower No. 5: Sensory Perception. The suckers’ powerful grip on her memories, hundreds and hundreds of them clinging to her like the build-up of fried chicken, glazed doughnuts and energy drinks in her dad’s arteries. She feels her thudding heart—thump-thump-thump—and her skin pulling too tight. Many years in the future, she’ll echo through this memory while wearing an airtight latex suit to an aquatic-themed costume party, arms dangling, all eight of them, floppy and un-superpower-like, and she’ll remind herself to breathe—she has gills.
Superpower No. 6: Puzzle-Solving. The useless one, because Death is the one problem she can’t solve, no matter her abilities. The one she needs is Mindless Bliss—not part of the package.
Superpower No. 7: Soft Spots. Through the haze, she’ll remember Dad’s bedtime yarns about her favourite sea creature and its ability to contort itself. Yet despite its squishy structure, it’s another useless skill, for she can never disappear entirely.
Superpower No. 8: Regeneration Ability—meant for rare occasions, like when someone breaks your heart, like how her dad did. Another useless skill she can’t use because she doesn’t want to forget. She’ll never want to forget. And she’ll never expect to use it. But she will—as time passes, when she grows a new heart to let others in.
