So let me say this first- I know I’m not normal. But I found this tablet on the beach after some humans left and it wasn’t locked and no one came looking for two days. So I adopted it, its mine, okay? That’s how you say it, right?

It had been open to some picture and text site that shared comics. I liked it but it wasn’t logged in so I couldn’t figure out who owned it. They taught me to use computers and tablets and even type with my tendrils at the place I, uh, grew up, so I figured this one out pretty easy. I reset it to factory settings and had it running on the free wi-fi of a hotel near the beach easy enough. I want to share my story- no one will believe me but I want to put it out there though I can’t stand to be ashore very long and the solar charger is very slow. But maybe you’ll ask me some questions to answer when I’m next ashore?

Chapter 1

I let out a moan of pain, throat too raw to achieve much more. I’d just finished a ten hour endurance “test” in a dry, hot room and had only been let go because I collapsed from heat exhaustion. I’d been given a couple bags of saline, fed… something in a tube. It tasted of chemicals but I ate it anyway before collapsing onto my pallet.

I knew from reading the notes outside my door that I was test subject #42, my genetics a cross of human stock and something far older. Fat lot of good that pedigree did, I mused as I rolled onto my side. I was recovering, lactic acid leaving muscles at a rate that far surpassed a normal human, but it didn’t make it hurt any less. Swelling in my calves lessened and disappeared over a couple hours, though I only knew of its passing by counting the seconds on the clock in the guard station down the hall from my cell. My wrist, twisted in my collapse earlier, was healing as well, electric shocks of pain coursing up my arm as it did so. There was nothing to do but wait for it to heal and try to focus on something other than the pain and time’s slow passage.

My search for any other stimulation let me sense what was coming before the humans had a clue. The bag strapped to my back quivered as I tensed, wondering what I was feeling seconds before the first shift of the floor under my feet. It was an earth quake, I’d heard about them when the guards would watch the news. The building pitched violently, the ground underneath rolling as stress from tectonic plates was released in a burst of furious energy.

Alarms sounded throughout the building before the power blinked out. Before the back up generators could cut in, I heard the electronic lock on my door click open, just like it would in a life or death emergency.

Life… I sprang to my feet and rushed to the door, the bag exploding to release my four extra appendages. The doctors had compared them to the extra limbs of an octopus but with higher dexterity. And far greater strength. They called them tendrils and I had no better word so used it myself.

With the electronic lock gone, I slid the door open, eyes alert as I scanned the hallway. The guards had flashlights on, trying to find each other in the dark. I saw the emergency exit door at the end of the hall past the guard station, its light like a beacon of hope to me. Between the locks and tracking systems, I would never escape. But with all the systems down for these heartbeats, maybe…

Before I’d planned to do anything, I was darting down the hallway, crawling along the floor outside the guard post and out the door, setting another set of alarms off. They belted out a second before the back up system came online and overpowered them with system interruption alarms. I was in a stair well now, up or down my only choices.

My breathing hitched, lungs tight as I looked down into what I knew were further labs and chose up. It couldn’t be worse. I ditched the stairs extra arms grabbing at the railings and walls as I threw myself upward. Lungs expanded, sucking in sterile oxygen as I flung myself higher.

A door was visible at the top, cameras around it but I didn’t care. I flung it open and surprised the guards on the other side. I threw myself into them, hands flying out to grab and break wrists, extra arms snapping femurs as I pushed through them. Bullets flew past me, one hitting my right upper arm and lodging there but I fought on, adrenalin letting me ignore the pain.

The air tasted different here, I noted as a symphony of screams echoed in the concrete halls around me. I pushed through door after door, the concrete giving way to tile and then carpeted spaces with desks, computers and the scent of many other humans. Guards chased me but were slower in the dark of the unlit space. Guess office humans didn’t rate emergency lighting.

My path led me into a large office and I knew by scent whose it was. It was hers, the woman who had contributed the human part of my genetics. I hated her but had no time to hunt her down. I slammed the door shut and shoved her wooden desk at hit, barring the human guards who chased me. The bullet burned in my arm but there was nothing I could do about it now.

I stood at the plate glass floor to ceiling window and saw the outside world with my eyes for the first time in life. It was dark, so night I guessed, but a full moon lit the sky and the forthing ocean waves below the office. It was a sheer drop into the waves, the ocean crashing against the cliff in its efforts to destroy the land. Rocks, angled and worn, clustered at the base of the cliff.

My pulse raged in my ears as I backed up to wall opposite the glass wall. My extra arms coiled against the wall until I took a deep breath and exploded into movement. Legs pushing, arms up to take the blunt trauma of colliding with the plate glass, tendrils pushing against the cliff as I soared past it and into the water that raced from the shore.

Hitting the water was like breathing for the first time. The shock of a cool warmth, salt and other elements with the water flooding my lungs, coursing out the gills on either side of my rib cage. The vibrancy of what was around me, so different from the clinically sterile air and purified water I had known my entire life. As I was pulled out from the tide I could see spot lights from above, the barest hint of an alarm. I sunk deeper until the tide pulled me into a small canyon. I hovered there, chest heaving as I fought to get enough oxygen to release the panic of being caught.

The receding of adrenalin left a gap that pain flooded into, making me hiss, hand moving to my arm. I gave a voiceless scream as I swam deeper into the canyon, searching for something sharp enough to widen the wound. The still water of the deep canyon let me hear another sound. So high pitched I had missed it before the florescent lighting and electronic hum of the labs before. It was a ceasless pulse.

A tracking device, like in that movie with the dinosaurs that the guards liked. They would find me and take me back, like they did the velociraptor. I had no idea of how far it would take to get away from the trackers. How far to get to be safe.

Hitting the bottom the canyon was a relief, the rocky bottom covered in a layer of fine sand and human detritus. A diver’s knife was uncovered by my descent and I pounced on it, pulling the lanyard over my head. I drew the blade and brushed my thumb against it. It drew a drop of blood that I licked away, the skin closing quickly. I could feel my arm knitting around the bullet, time was running out and I didn’t know if the metal would poison me or not.

The knife was a blinding pain as I sent it in after the bullet, reopening and widening the wound. Blood clouded the water around me as my tendrils thrashed. The bullet came out and I went limp, body floating with neutral buoyancy. I pushed clear of the pain and listened hard for the tracker, ignoring the sounds of the water, the swimming of nearby animals. It was near where the bullet had gone in but that wound was closing and the angle ackward for me to approach with my hands. I brought a tendril forward and gripped the knife in it, my hand holding my arm steady. With a sharp movement, I plunged the blade to the tracker imbedded in my latissimus dorsi, the muscle right below the shoulder joint. I felt the blade hit the tracker and pushed it through to the other side by force. The pain made me vomit, losing my grip on the blade as I learned that it was very possible to throw up underwater and somehow just as unpleasant as doing so on land. The withdrawl of the knife caused a series of dry heaving that pushed me about forty yards south of where I had first dropped into the canyon.

My vision was blurry, left hand ripping off the left of my pants to wrap around my arm. It seemed silly but I did it anyway. A lifetime of being treated in an infirmary left me with a need to wrap all of my wounds, even if I wasn’t sure a wet dressing underwater would stop bloodflow.

After tying off the pantleg, I drifted up to the cliff wall, wondering if I could cry underwater as well. My head was leaned back against the wall when I felt it.

Something moving toward me in the water. Something big.

Something with lots of teeth.

I felt more than saw the approaching leviathan. She was easily over 8 meters long, sleek and muscled, her mouth open and tasting the blood in the water. Her mind was a clear voice in my head as she spoke.

“I hear you, sister-mine, god-mine,” she told me. ”Who has harmed you? I shall eat them.”

“You’d get a stomach ache,” I responded in a haze. I was too tired, too hurt, too scared of capture to fear death from her. At least should be quick. “I am not a god.”

“You sing like the elder ones do,” was her response. “You are either an elder one or their child and your blood has spilled in my hunting waters. I will slay them for you.”

Her belly was wide with pups and I laid a hand on her side as she swam by me in easy ovals on the canyon floor. I felt the spark of their lives within, she had four that were bigger than the others, perhaps all four would make it past the competition of the womb and into the ocean. If she didn’t get killed by those hunting me.

”No,” I begged. ”No, you cannot risk your life, your children, for mine. Help me get away and I would be grateful. They’re hunting me. They’ll be in the water soon.”

She thought about this for several moments as she glided back and forth. She caressed my hand with her body and I moved it in waves along her side. When she was closer I could see the pale creamy underbelly coloring, a sharp contrast to the blues and dark greys of the rest of her body. She was beautiful and her words made her my savior. “As you ask, my god. Though I must leave for the southern birthing waters soon to welp my pups and it is a long journey. They would not survive here in the north.”

”Take me south then,” I whispered. I raised my hand enough to catch her dorsal fin, my body trailing behind her limply for a moment. “I will watch your pups in the southern waters to repay you for taking me there.”

“The people are fierce, our young need no help,” she said with what I could only call a snort. ”But they may be glad of your presence for I must leave after they are welped. I do not recall much of being a pup other than hunger and fear of bigger hunters. I will take you south, god who is not a god.”

“Thank you,” I managed as I wrapped myself around the shark. My body swayed with every powerful thrust of her tail as my tendrils wove around her, holding me in place as my body gave into exhaustion and I slept.

One hell of an eighteenth birthday, right?