It began with a song and a shatter.
Marina’s voice rose in a silver thread through the vaulted gallery, a lazy melody she hummed when she was bored, which was often. Pearlescent light strobed through the water as schools of needlefish flickered past the open arches. Her tail—scales like coin-bright sun—swept carelessly, and the fin-tip clipped a pedestal.
The pedestal held her father’s favorite bauble: a moon-pale sphere of compressed sea-glass, not especially powerful, but the first curio King Triton ever found as a boy-prince on a forbidden dive. It had sentimental value. Marina knew that because everyone in the palace had told her not to sing and swing in the Hall of Keepsakes.
The sphere fell. The sphere cracked. The echo carried like thunder through the palace ribcage.
She froze, mouth in an O.
Across the hall, her father lifted his head from council. He was a silhouette at first—broad shoulders, coral crown like flames—but when he turned, his face was just a father’s: astonishment melting into the weary despair of a man whose youngest child had again made ruin from boredom. Around him, courtiers flurried; her sisters—elegant, eel-sleek—traded looks that said, not again and don’t smile.
Marina, reflexively, smiled.
“Marina,” King Triton breathed, and that was almost worse than a roar. He swam to the broken artifact and gathered it in his hands, big fingers gentled by memory. The white shards slipped through like snow.
“It’s only glass,” Marina said, because when you were wrong, boldness was a cloak. “And I can sing you a new one.”
“You cannot sing me a new first.” His voice wavered, then found iron. He lifted his gaze, past her, to the courtiers. “Enough. I have been… indulgent, and indulgence has made you reckless.” He faced her fully then. “On your mother’s birthday, of all days—no more.”
It struck like a spear: the reminder of Mother. The court had arranged sea-silk banners in her favorite green; anemones bloomed bright around the throne. Marina had meant to behave. She had. But the hall had been so quiet, and the fin had twitched, and—
“Your Majesty,” said her eldest sister Althea softly, “perhaps—”
“No.” Triton’s jaw set. “I will be obeyed. Marina, daughter of Triton, from this hour you will be banished to the human realm for a season and a day.”
The hall inhaled. Somewhere, a harpstring sang itself out of tune.
“Banished?” Marina laughed, a gull-bark of disbelief. “To those awkward, air-choked walkers who think a boat makes them a god? Father, don’t be dramatic.”
He flinched as if struck. “You are my child. I will not be mocked by you.”
Silence sank heavy. Marina looked into his eyes and saw there a distance she had never respected because it had never punished. It would now.
“Fine,” she said, lifting her chin. “Send me up. I’ll come back when I’m a—what was it?—‘proper lady.’” She rolled the words in her mouth as if they were grit. Then, because surrender without defiance tasted like kelp, she added brightly, “Or sooner, when I’ve conquered their world. Maybe I’ll bring you back a city as an apology.”
Gasps, small and many, bubbled from the court.
Her father closed his eyes as if the weight of the ocean pressed there. “You hear only yourself,” he murmured. When he opened them, the king had replaced the father. “Captain. Prepare the tidegate. She leaves with the turning.”
They took her to the shoreline vault where the tidegate shimmered like heat. A guard handed her a cloak woven from storm-weed, good for warmth on the surface. Althea slipped three pebbles into Marina’s palm—sleek and common—closing Marina’s fingers around them like a prayer. “For luck,” Althea said. Her voice trembled. “Or for throwing at gulls. You always hated gulls.”
Marina smirked despite the lump in her throat. “They sound like harpoons getting divorced.”
Althea almost smiled. “Listen, foolfish. The rules of the old magic linger. Water binds what water touches. If your skin stays dry, your legs will hold. If you’re soaked, the sea will call your tail back. Rain counts.”
“Rain?” Marina scoffed. “On land?”
“Sometimes the sky is a broken jar up there,” Althea said. “And Marina—” She glanced toward their father, who hovered at the gate pretending not to watch. “He loves you clumsily. Try to learn something before you come home.”
“I will,” Marina said, surprising herself by almost meaning it. “I’ll learn how to make them kneel when I sing.”
Althea’s expression cracked. “That is not—” She stopped. “Be careful.”
The tide turned. The gate opened like a slow-blinking eye, and cold poured through, surface-cold, thin and sharp. Marina swam into it without looking back because if she looked back, she might stop, and stopping wasn’t a story, and Marina had always imagined herself a story.
She rose fast, water thinning, pressure easing until her bones itched. Light speared down, growing harder, whiter, like knives. The world broke with a slap and a shout, and she burst into a night that stung.
Rain.
It came down in sheets so dense the river wore a thousand crowns. Marina coughed, not understanding why air hurt. She flung an arm onto something wooden and slimy—the side of a ferry dock. The smell of tar and hot metal and a thousand human foods—burnt sugar, scorched coffee, onion fat—surged around her. Above, the sky was a bruise and the buildings were teeth.
She laughed then, exhilarated. The human world smelled like chaos.
“Hey! You can’t be in there!” a voice called, faint under the drum of rain.
Marina clamped her hands and hauled herself up the pier ladder with the brute confidence of someone who had never failed at climbing because stairs didn’t exist underwater. Cold rivulets ran down her hair, her back, into the seam where—oh. Where tail met not-tail. A fizzing heat slid over her hips and—there—legs, pale and strong and entirely too long. Toes. Ten tiny shells. She wiggled them and giggled.
Then another sheet of rain slammed down. Water licked her calves, sluiced her knees, and the fizzing reversed with a lightning-fast snap. Her thighs welded into a single lithe limb, the scales rippling out of nowhere, and she pitched sideways onto slick boards with a yelp, tail slapping.
“Are you—what—” The voice was closer now, attached to a human shape in a hooded jacket, black with rain. He skidded to a halt, sneakers sliding, eyes wide as harbor moons. He was young, around Marina’s age, face clean and worried, jaw shadowed like a penciled-in secret. He stared, and then, because humans are dumb or kind or both, he shrugged off his jacket without looking away and threw it over her like a tent.
“Don’t—don’t move,” he said, breath fogging. “Or do move. Just—” He fumbled, got the jacket to drape, then crouched so his back shielded her from the rain. “I’m Ethan. Ethan Cole. Can you hear me?”
Marina pushed the jacket aside enough to see his eyes properly. They were brown like river stones and full of alarm. “I can hear you, Ethan Cole. You are very… land.”
He blinked. “You’re very… not.”
She glanced at the rain bouncing off the jacket. Water trickled underneath, but less. Skin, mostly dry now. The magic crawled like ants, then snapped again, tail sheathing into legs, scales retreating beneath skin. Marina wriggled, gasped, and then—two legs, again. She peered under the jacket at the transformation and then up at Ethan with the smug delight of a child who has found a loophole in bedtime. “See? It’s only temporary. I am extremely adaptable.”
“Right,” Ethan said faintly. “And extremely naked.”
She considered. “That seems true.”
“Here.” He pulled the jacket tighter, then yanked his sweatshirt over his head and pushed it blindly in her direction, eyes resolutely on the skyline. “Put this on. Please. There are cameras everywhere. And cops. And TikTok.”
“I don’t know those words.”
“Lucky you,” he muttered.
She pulled the sweatshirt on. It smelled like laundry detergent and coffee and something sweeter, like rain on warm stone. It fell past her knees. She shivered, then stopped, marveling at the sensation of chill easing. “This is… surprisingly excellent.”
Ethan risked a glance and swallowed. “Okay. Okay. Can you stand?”
“Of course I can stand.” She pushed herself upright and immediately wobbled, catching his shoulder. Balance is a lie for the newly legged. He steadied her, hands warm and patient. For a flicker of a moment, their eyes met close enough for Marina to count the tiny gold rings around his pupils. He looked away first.
He guided her off the pier, under the dripping belly of the Brooklyn Bridge, into the skeleton of a shuttered coffee cart. The storm’s edge roared like a beast. Lightning stitched the low sky. Across the river, Manhattan’s windows glowed in a thousand human constellations.
“Where are we?” Marina asked, because names mattered.
“DUMBO,” Ethan said. “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Brooklyn.” He hesitated. “New York.”
“York,” she repeated, tasting it. “You named it after a yoke? Humans and your farm things.”
“I—never mind.” He huffed a laugh. “You need to get inside. My place is four blocks. We’ll cut through the arts district. Fewer people.”
“We?” Marina arched an eyebrow. “We are very fast friends, Ethan Cole.”
“You fell out of a river with a tail,” he said. “Tonight you count as my responsibility.”
She liked the sound of that. “Then lead, responsible boy.”
He led. She followed, learning the choreography of pavement—how your feet whisper when rubber meets rain, how puddles hide ankle-deep traps, how cars hiss like sleek predators. She asked questions because silence felt like sinking.
“What is that?” she asked, pointing at a mural of a woman with eyes like storms.
“Art.”
“What is that?” She pointed at a trash bag ballooning in the wind.
“Regret.”
“What is that?” A neon sign flickered: BLACKWELL LIVE—SOLD OUT.
Ethan’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “Noise.”
“Is noise a person?”
“Sometimes.”
She stored the word away with a dozen others. She had a collector’s mind, if not a curator’s restraint.
They ducked into a narrow street where rain thinned to a silver mist. A single figure stood at the far end beneath an umbrella, motionless. The umbrella was the glossy black of oil, and the stance was too still, like a heron deciding whether to strike. Marina felt the hairs on her arms rise, surprised to find she had hairs at all.
“Inside,” Ethan said quietly, and his hand found her elbow. “Almost there.”
They climbed two flights in a building that smelled like paint and time. Ethan’s apartment was no bigger than her smallest dressing room, but it was warm and full of objects that announced their uses without pretension: a kettle, a couch with a brave patch, a wall of books that had clearly been read. He found a towel, then another when the first failed to tame her ocean of hair.
“Thank you,” she said solemnly, letting him wrap her like a burrito. “You may present your petition.”
“My what?”
“In my court,” she said loftily, “those who rescue me are granted one petition.”
He stared. Then laughed, sudden and helpless, like a man who had been standing very still for a long time and forgot how good it felt to move. “I don’t need a petition. I need an explanation.”
“I am Marina of the—” She paused, cataloging the impulse to brag and placing it gently aside. “I am Marina. I am learning to be a proper lady.” She considered the phrase, grimaced, and amended, “Or at least a manageable catastrophe.”
Ethan’s smile flashed, then faded. “And the tail?”
“A condition. Water calls it. Rain counts.”
“So if you shower—”
“Disaster.”
He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Okay. We’ll figure it out. For tonight, no water near your feet. No windows. No—” He caught himself and glanced at the dripping pane. “Well. Less window.”
“You are calm for a man who has adopted a sea monster.”
“You’re not a monster.” He said it too quickly, as if challenging a world that might disagree.
She tucked that away, too.
Something buzzed—a cheap, plastic insect noise. Ethan fished his phone from his pocket. A notification lit the screen: a local page had posted a video. He frowned, thumbed it open. The caption said: Girl Singing in the Storm, DUMBO Pier. Real or AI?
The video started with rain—grainy, relentless—and then a note threaded through it, pure as a blade. Marina’s note. It had the wayward pull of tides. The camera shivered behind a column, as if the person filming wasn’t sure they should be. A flash of a girl’s face, half-covered by a jacket, eyes bright and unafraid. No tail. Just sound and the suggestion of something impossible.
Within a minute, the view count jumped. Comments flowered like algae blooms.
Ethan’s face drained. “You were filmed.”
Marina leaned in, fascinated by her own ghost on a tiny slab of glass. “They liked my voice.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Is it not?” She tilted her head. In the mirror above the sink she saw a stranger in an oversized sweatshirt, cheeks flushed, hair wild, eyes like moonlight ripened into mischief. She smiled at the stranger. The stranger smiled back. “Maybe this world wants to be conquered.”
“Please don’t say that out loud,” Ethan said. “Ever.”
Outside, the storm’s temper frayed to a steady hiss. Somewhere below, a car idled, engine purring. Marina glanced at the window and felt it again—that prickle of being watched. She moved closer to the glass. On the street, a figure stood under a black umbrella without moving, face shadowed, as if listening for a note only he could hear.
The phone buzzed again, harder, a bee now. Another notification stacked over the first: Blackwell Entertainment has liked a video you posted. Then: Message request from @A.BlackwellOfficial: “Where did you hear that voice?”
Ethan swore softly.
Marina’s smile sharpened into something bright and dangerous. Father, she thought, are you watching? I am learning.
The umbrella below tilted, as if the man had looked up. For a fraction of a breath, Marina felt the unmistakable certainty of being found.
And then someone knocked on Ethan’s door—three steady raps that sounded like a decision.
