TEGD Ch 7:

The next few weeks were a whirlwind of activity. Two more refugee boat rescues, though thankfully both were under ten people, so easy to have cetaceans help them to shore from under the surface and avoid being seen. These happened at night and the news of strange activity among the animals of the Sea of Cortez was mostly overlooked because of some political scandal.

Veronica arrived home the day before Maria was to join Mauricio and Annabella and I had some explaining to do to everyone on the research team. We were eating breakfast at our apartment before going to help pick up our new family member (for the research team was more a family than anything) when she snorted over her cup of coffee.

“What?”

“They’re calling you,” she snorted again, “they’re calling you Maria, Lady of Our Spiders of the Sea of Cortez!”

I snagged the paper from her then wanted to bang my head on the wall. People talked, of course they did, and a tabloid got enough readers on it for the local papers to pick it up. I was being called a mass delusion, which was good, but they had my green eyes down even though no one remembered anything else. I groaned, “This could be trouble, Veronica, the company might…”

“Not without an international incident and no one knows who you are here except us, Manny and Annabella.”

“And Maria,” I reminded her. I looked at the clock on the wall. “Come on, sweets, time to go.”

“Sure, Lady of Our Spiders,” she said in a voice dripping with fake hero worship. I rolled my eyes and walked outside to her battered VW Bug. It was cheap to run, easy to find parts for and the clutch was so finicky it was its own theft prevention. She loved it, spotted green and olive paint and all.

We met an anxious looking Mauricio and a steady Annabella at their house so the humans could carpool the three hours to the government facility Maria was being held at. A bag check there would expose my tendrils and none of us felt safe with me having to go there. So I would tidy up the house, not that it needed it, and enter my notes from the last week or so out on the water. I excluded anything noted from where the boats had sunk or along their path to shore. Being in the news papers made me nervous.

I was a Mexican citizen now, the company shouldn’t be able to just steal me and they were loathed here anyway but…

Always that trickle of fear in that one little word, “but.”

I shook away the thoughts and slide into the chair at the computer Mauricio had set up for me. Or rather, the last one I’d fixed, updated and optimized on the research team. Annabella was great at real world stuff but she was no tech expert.

I brought up the tracking data on our currently satellite tagged sharks on Veronica’s computer while bringing up the program we used for data integration. It let us enter location specific notes that could be cross referenced via calendar, seen on a map with pictures and videos added in as well. It was a beast of a program and ran on its own server that backed up to a data bank off site every six hours. The last part was at my insistence, given how important our research was.

Sharks are apex predators- if they’re doing well it means the rest of the food chain is as well. Kill too many sharks and the fish overpopulate and then start to die out. Take too many fish and sharks start to leave or die off. Water temperature, nutrient level and oxygenation level changes had moved various species into different sections of Baja and brought new ones in from further south. It was a huge ecosystem and by tracking shark movement, numbers and reproduction when possible, we were part of a larger group of researchers submitting data for government review.

International outrage had given the government cause to ban the use of gill nets but they hadn’t set a punishment yet. I personally though the suggested ten year prison time was too short given how cruel the nets were but Veronica reminded me most humans didn’t see the sea as I did.

I was lost in my notes when my phone buzzed on the counter beside me. I snatched it up, startled, and accepted Veronica’s call. “Hey, sweets.”

“Hiya Gwen,” she said. “We’re almost home. Annabella says to fire up the oven and pull the enchiladas she made out while they preheat.”

I was moving toward the kitchen, wanting the house to be welcoming and have good (amazing) food ready for Maria. She’d been through hell as far as I knew and I didn’t know much. I hit the bathroom to make sure my backpack was in place and I looked presentable.

I was wearing a black tank with a skirt the same peridot green as my eyes. Veronica had brought it back from San Diego for me and I loved how soft the material was. Skirts also let me move freely and that was even better. Well the ones I wore did. Veronica had other ones that were less about movement and more about showcasing that fine…

Oh, that was the horn, my brain burst in through my musings on Veronica’s assets. I darted for the kitchen, loaded the enchiladas into the now warm oven and then opened the door that ran from the garage to the kitchen. It was intended as a servant’s entry point but move of the team parked inside because it was a shorter walk than the formal garage. Which was honestly full of equipment anyway.

I was just in time as Mauricio had a hand out for the door but was looking behind him, answering a question with, “Yes, we live here.”

“It shocked me at first, too,” I added, knowing the obvious question. The house, or small mansion really, was on permanent loan from an older businessman with a love for shark diving. Veronica told me they took him out for a week or so once a year so he could dive in exclusive sites and he got better social media pictures than anyone else. It worked and a week of tour guide covered a lot of house for the other 51 weeks.

“It is you!”

I was slammed with a hug, thin arms tight around me as she began to cry and stutter in Guatemalan. I could follow the prayers and thanks she stuttered out but I wasn’t sure if anyone else could. There were significant differences between Guatemalan and Mexican variants of Spanish. I returned the hug with a soft smile. “Welcome home, Maria.”

She looked up at me, dark eyes streaming tears. “They said your name was Gwen.”

“Like Spiderwoman,” I said with a nod. At her lost look, I grinned. “Oh, we are going to have comics and movie night. We simply must not neglect your education.”

She stiffened and muttered something. Even with my acute hearing I had to make her repeat it twice to hear her say, “I can’t read.”

“Then I will teach you,” I told her. “Everyone else is always busy working on notes or planning our next research goals or logistics. I’m not really a biologist.”

“You’re an angel.”

“A wah?”

I’d managed to back us into the kitchen far enough for Veronica, Manny and Annabella to join us. Veronica laid a hand on Maria’s slim shoulder. “She’s not exactly an angel, but one of her parents is pretty darn old. But that’s not for tonight, Maria. Like I told you, Gwen’s just as human as we are, with some extra.”

Taking my cue from V, I stepped back and shrugged out of the backpack, letting my tendrils stretch out to the sides in the breakfast nook. “Angel’s have wings, which I clearly do not. I call them tendrils, it’s an English word.”

Annabella left us to the conversation and started throwing together Spanish rice and checked on the enchiladas. I almost want to capitalize that to show how good they were, like Enchiladas. I brought my tendrils back behind me, almost coiled against my back. Its hard to describe how their presence, because I use them as extra hands, arms, for defense, for multitasking like normal limbs but writing about them never seems to come out right.

I guess remembering them from a storm wasn’t much easier. Maria went pale as a sheet at the sight of me and her eyes were big as saucers. I held up my hands to show I meant no harm. “I am still the one who saved you from that exploding trash can pretending to be a boat. I was the one who held the storm back while you held me on the hours to the coast. I’m still me.”

“You look like a demon,” she whispered, obviously torn. “But you saved us all, even the tiny innocent babies and no demon would do that.”

“Never met any,” I said before I could catch myself. “I mean, if I’m real, who knows what else is, but I’ve never met an angel or a demon. I don’t know what they’d do, but I do believe they’re pretty damn ineffective at doing anything to punish evil.”

“You have a point,” she agreed, sounding older for a moment. We’d learned she was 16, but years of deprivation and cruelty had left her smaller than her peers. She looked between 12 and 14 in her donated jeans and loose t-shirt. She looked at me again. “I still think you’re a god with a little g. No one else would have heard my prayers that night and helped.”

While I agreed with her on the helping part, I was not a being to be prayed to. But how to prove a lack of divinity? I had no idea. So I dropped the topic and told her she should go wash up for dinner. Veronica went with her to show her the suite she’d be using here at the main house. All of the bedrooms had adjoining baths, walk in closets and lovely furniture straight out of a catalogue picture.

Dinner was full of conversational stops and starts with jumps to new topics to avoid painful ones. After losing her mother at a young age, Maria had been bounced from one relative to another before being sold. Slavery is illegal but that doesn’t stop men in power from doing it. Maria had managed to escape with another woman and her baby to join up with a caravan north. Thing had happened on the caravan, things that made Maria stare down at her plate and stop eating.

I laid a hand on hers from one side and Annabella wrapped an arm around her shoulders. The older woman’s voice was solid and sure. “No one will ever hurt you like that again.”

“If they do, I’ll rip them apart joint by joint as food for my sharks,” I added. There was no teasing in my tone. “There’s a martial arts dojo- capo something, near our apartment. Can we afford to sign her up?”

“From the money you make in net recycling, we can easily cover it,” Veronica said after glancing at Mauricio. “We’re going to have to teach her to dive as well.”

The conversation shifted to things to teach and show Maria and we all returned to our food. After we were done, Annabella and Veronica went to clean up while Mauricio took Maria’s bag upstairs. I motioned for the girl to follow me and led her out to the veranda.

The moon was full and ghostly white with a shimmering ring around it. I pointed up at the sky. “Beautiful, isn’t it.”

“Why did you tell me to come here?”

“I’m sorry?”

She shook her head. “No one helps anyone for no reason. Why?”

“Because I’m an orphan, too,” I admitted. We hadn’t told her my background, it wasn’t safe for her to know we’d decided. I was just some godling living with biologists. “I know what it is like to not have a family. Mauricio cannot have children, but he and Annabella will be amazing parents and they’ve adopted Veronica and me. We want you to be part of our family, Maria. No strings, you can leave if you want. I just want to give you a shot at home. We both got cheated out of that early on, but its here now. If you want it.”

I’d thought about this a lot over the last week. Why I’d told her to contact Mauricio. To claim she was his relative and be adopted by them. It was a permanent foster right now but after a year they’d be able to legally adopt the teenager. She was only a few years younger than I was and I felt oddly protective of her. Mauricio had told me that’s how siblings feel, so maybe I saw her as a little sister? Washed up from a shipwreck, just like the Little Mermaid.

“So, we’re like sisters?” Her voice was guarded, a bit scared.

“I never had a sister. I’d like to have one. I can teach you to read and kick ass and dive and introduce you to my pups. I will destroy anyone who hurts you outside a sparing ring.”

There was another one of those bombing hugs, her arms tight around me. I could smell the salty taste of tears as she clung to me. “I believe that, Gwen.”

We held each other under the stars until she regained her composure. I was willing to bet she hadn’t had any loving human contact since her mother died. What had been done to her didn’t count as loving. My thoughts ran red and black at that but I kept my body calm as I held my new sister.

The next two or three weeks weren’t easy, there were flash backs and doctors visits, a sobbing confession to a priest that had left her near speechless for two days after (Catholics bewilder me in their rituals sometimes but it did make her feel better.) She blew up at a boy in the market that touched her shoulder then burst into tears the moment he was out of sight.

Maria would have a long road to go to recover by she wouldn’t be alone.

My Veronica and I shared our nights in our apartment, spending the days at the house. In the chilly mornings, I worked with Maria on a home school program that Annabella set up for her. In the afternoons, she started to train with me when she wasn’t visiting the psychologist that Veronica insisted she see.  The psych help was partly for her past and partly to help her adapt to her life now. 

I knew how difficult it can be to go from a world of endless testing of one’s will to live to being suddenly free. My sister and I both had a lot to learn about the rest of the human world that our family would have to help us learn.