Prologue
Ondina was the type of mermaid who enjoyed peace and quiet.
It wasn't that she didn't enjoy company. She might have been somewhat reserved, but she was friendly and accepting towards almost everybody that she came across, mermaid or not. If a mermaid from the pod greeted her, she would smile and greet them back. (Albeit quietly.) If a sea creature wanted to stop and make small-talk with her, she would set aside a few minutes and talk to them.
Like most other teenagers, mermaid or not, Ondina often spent time with her best friends. There was Sirena, the venturesome mermaid that had pulled Ondina out of her shell when she first came to the pod. There was also Zac, Sirena's brother, who, over the years, had become something of a brother to Ondina as well.
But, when she wasn't occupied with saving Sirena from whatever she'd gotten herself into that day, or conversing about the deadly effects of pollution with a disgruntled stingray, Ondina was often found on her own. Ondina had learned something about herself within her first week of being a part of Lyla's pod; unlike the other mermaids, who could talk and be around other mermaids all day without fail, Ondina needed to take some time for herself. This was probably because she wasn't used to having so much company. Like the other mermaids in the pod, Ondina was an orphan of some sort. In fact, the entire pod consisted of orphaned mermaids; Lyla had formed the pod by finding mermaids who needed protection and company during her travels.
The difference between Ondina and the other mermaids had taken her a few months of getting to know everyone to realize. While the other mermaids all at least remembered their pod or family the way they were before whatever incident had occurred to leave them lonely and defenseless, Ondina couldn't even remember a time when she wasn't alone. Before she'd gotten picked up by Lyla two years prior, the only company she had ever really had was the company of the aquatic animals that inhabited the ocean. She couldn't remember a single detail about her parents, although she knew that she had to have had parents at some point or another. In fact, Ondina couldn't even recall a single memory from the earliest years of her life. After a while, she just grew to accept that she was different.
Of course, independence wasn't the only trait of Ondina's that had resulted from her foggy upbringing. Having no one to protect her, she'd needed to learn to be observant. After a particularly nasty incident involving a sharp piece of coral, Ondina had found her main goal in life. She didn't know what her place in the world was, but she at least had a will to survive.
Ondina was so observant that her heedful nature earned her a position of high-esteem in the pod. She was one of five other mermaids and mermen who had been chosen to be sentinels. Their job was the most important in the pod; the open ocean offered up many threats, including (but not limited to) curious humans. Whenever one of the lookouts spotted a problem, they would warn the rest of the pod to swim for cover, and then they would hide themselves. If worse came to worst, the members of the pod that had been trained for battle would be sent out to fight. Ondina had never actually witnessed this happening; in fact, in her two years of being in the pod, the worst thing she'd experienced was a lost, angry great white that kept the pod in hiding for two weeks.
Luckily for Ondina, her job was only part-time, so she had plenty of time to spare, and she often preferred to spend this time relaxing and reflecting on life in her small shelter. Every mermaid in the pod had their own living space. These shelters were just crevices and caves cut into the sides of the submarine canyon the pod had chosen as a home.
On the fateful day that started it all, Ondina spotted something that she had never noticed before. This came as a surprise to her, because, up until that moment, she had been sure that she knew every inch of the pod's land like the back of her hand. About ten feet above the entrance to her tiny cave, there was an opening in the canyon wall. The young mermaid racked her brain, trying to think of who might live there. After accounting for every mermaid in the pod, Ondina decided to swim up and investigate the opening.
Upon getting closer to the opening, Ondina started to understand why, as far as she was concerned, no one had ever took notice of it. It was about as small as a large sea turtle, certainly not large enough for a mermaid to fit through without great discomfort. She tilted her head and pushed her eye up against the small fissure, trying to see inside. To her dismay, she realized that the only way to be able to see the inside would be to squeeze through the fissure, because it was too dark to see. (Ondina noted that this was probably because the entrance was so small, there wasn't enough room for a significant amount of light to travel through it.)
"Hello?" the mermaid called into the opening. Her own voice echoed back to her. At this point, curiosity was starting to get the better of her, which almost never happened. Ondina had witnessed Sirena getting herself into too many unlawful situations to remain ignorant about the consequences of curiosity. But, the sudden impulse to investigate overcame her too quickly for her to fight it. Ondina glanced behind her. The canyon was busy and filled with mermaids finishing their tasks. No one was paying attention to her.
"Please don't let me be swimming into someone's home," the teenage mermaid prayed. Then, before anyone could stop her, she squirmed through the opening and into what appeared to be a small cave.
Inside the cave, it took Ondina a few minutes to adjust her eyes to the low lighting, but once she did, she started to make mental observations of it. The first thing Ondina observed about this cave was that there was nothing in it. The typical living quarters for a mermaid consisted of at least storage spaces filled with food and resources, but this particular cave was bare.
It didn't take long for Ondina to make her second observation of the cave. It was much larger than the average mermaid's living space. Ondina swam from one side of the cave to another, touching the walls. Despite the size of the entrance, this cave was roomier than she had expected it to be.
After a few more minutes, Ondina realized something else. The wall she hadn't touched yet, the back one, was dark compared to the others. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, the mermaid realized that she wasn't looking at a back wall; she was looking at a tunnel.
The young sentinel started to swim through the tunnel, just to get a sense of how long the tunnel was. After about a minute, Ondina looked behind her. She had traveled about twenty feet by swimming slowly. Looking ahead, she noted that the tunnel didn't seem to have an end anywhere in sight.
Ondina swam back to what she had come to recognize as the main area of the cave and debated her options. She could just notify Lyla or one of the other sentinels about her discovery. She was almost positive that Lyla would want to hear about what she'd found. She could tell them about the cave, and then they could all investigate it together. They would travel through the tunnel, explore the other side, and make sure that the cave didn't mean any danger for the pod. That WAS the job of a sentinel, after all.
And yet…
There was a voice, a small voice, speaking from the back of Ondina's mind. The voice urged her to go. Slowly, Ondina swam closer to the tunnel. This time, she felt no skepticism; it was almost as if she had some sort of connection to whatever was on the other side of that tunnel, and it was pulling her to it, pushing her to swim on.
For the first time in her life, Ondina pushed her reservations to the back of her mind and followed her heart.
Ondina had been following the dark path for about a half hour before the tiniest bit of dread set in. Although she felt compelled to move on by the strange pull she felt, there was also a part of her that felt a sense of foreboding. She had been worrying about running into a fork in the pathway that would force her to choose a direction, making it easier to get lost. Instead of running into a choice, however, the tunnel just continued on without interruption.
"What if there's something bad at the other end of the tunnel?" she distressed, "Then my only option will be to go ALL the way back the way I came. There will be nowhere to hide!"
Still, she pressed onward, swimming through the darkness, although she had been in the cave for so long that the darkness no longer felt like darkness. She swam on for another fifteen minutes before her worries really began to consume her. The tunnel seemed to go on forever, twisting and turning through what Ondina presumed was still the canyon wall. What if something on the other end chased her? She would never make it all the way back without passing out. Or what if she did make it? Then she would have led a monster into the mermaid's land, and everybody she knew would be in danger. It would be all her fault.
Just as she was about to let her fears chase her back to the open ocean, Ondina heard a faint noise. She stopped swimming immediately and listened intently to the noise. It was hard to tell, but the noise seemed familiar. Certainly not like the growling of a monster.
Ondina decided to confirm her suspicions about the noise. She continued swimming through the tunnel. The farther in she swam, the louder the noise became, until, finally, it wasn't just a noise anymore.
"I can't believe we're finally sophomores!"
A voice.
As she identified the noise, Ondina turned one final corner, and, to her relief, reached the end of the tunnel. She swam out of the first tunnel… and right into another one.
Ondina, a mermaid who didn't get particularly angry about much, was about to scream in frustration when she heard a voice again, clear as day. This time it was a different voice, a slightly raspier one.
"Ugh, Emma, I can't believe you're excited about it! I can't even think about school right now. Can't we just enjoy the summer?"
"Of course! But that doesn't mean I'm not going to be preparing myself over vacation! I've got lots of studying to do if I want to maintain my grades!"
Ondina turned in a full circle, trying to figure out where the voices were coming from. She wondered if the voices were other mermaids. A small part of her was excited at the prospect. She had never met mermaids that weren't from Lyla's pod, meaning that she hadn't made any new friends in two years. Ondina could be somewhat anti-social, but she was always excited to meet new mermaids, especially after so many years of feeling like the only mermaid in the world.
"I'm just happy we get to spend time with our friends in the reef! I feel like I haven't seen Bernie in ages,"
A third voice. This time, Ondina was listening intently. Slowly, she tilted her head upward. She could see the surface of the water, about five feet above her head, right at the end of the tunnel. Cautiously, she swam towards it. As she swam upwards, she considered the information she had just taken in. One of those voices was excited to visit someone named Bernie in the reef. Could she be talking about the reef next to the submarine canyon?
Ondina took a deep breath to calm her nerves, and then she broke the surface.
It was sometime in the milliseconds that it took her to break the surface of the water that Ondina grasped a key piece of information. If she was breaking the surface of the water, then that meant that whatever was above was not the ocean. And if whatever was above wasn't the ocean, then the source of the voices weren't mermaids, and they weren't sea creatures either.
Humans.
Ondina assessed the area. Looking around, she realized she was in a small cavern of some sort. The cave was filled with sharp and jagged rocks that lined the sides, and it seemed to glow with some sort of mystical energy.
But, Ondina wasn't concentrating on the energy the cave was emitting. She was more focused on the source of the voices that she had just identified. In a corner of the cave, she had spotted three human girls, sitting on large boulders and stripping off their clothes. The girls were engrossed in conversation, but Ondina was silent anyway. She had no desire to be caught; she'd heard the stories the other mermaids of the pod told, stories about how humans polluted the ocean and captured mermaids for experimentation. If being in Lyla's pod had taught Ondina anything over the past two years, it was that humans were dangerous. They were not to be trusted, no matter how harmless they seemed. Lyla's own story was proof of that.
And yet, here she was, ten feet away from three human girls, spying on them.
The three humans seemed to be of about the same age. Ondina guessed that they couldn't be any older than herself or her friends. One of the girls had long, straight, raven black hair. Heightwise, she was in the middle of her two friends. The girl with messy, fiery red hair was the tallest of the three, while the girl with short, curly blonde hair was the shortest. A quick scan of the area showed Ondina that there were no weapons in sight. Besides herself, there were only the three girls and their clothes, laid out neatly on one of the largest rocks in a corner of the cave.
Suddenly, the girls turned and started walking towards the water. In a panic, Ondina dove below the surface and swam into the tunnel she had come out of. She swam ten feet before turning a corner and stopping to catch her breath. She heard a splash, and she turned the corner in a hurry, frightened that the girls had spotted her and were trying to follow her.
She was so shocked by what she actually saw that she stopped breathing.
The three humans were floating in the water, and they were starting to resemble something other than human. A magical aura seemed to surround the girls. Their legs were melding together in a whirl of light and energy. The shortest girl's blonde hair grew significantly in length. Sparkly hair combs appeared in each of the girls' hair. Finally, there was one final flash of energy. The flash was so bright that Ondina had to close her eyes. When she opened them again, the three girls were mermaids.
Ondina could feel her jaw drop. Each of the girls had long, shiny tails that nearly matched the color of their hair. Their tops had changed to match their tails, as well. The redheaded girl started to swim into the tunnel, and her friends followed. Ondina swore under her breath and ducked behind the corner.
"Let's follow this tunnel!" the voice exclaimed. Ondina guessed it was the voice of the tallest girl. There was a sigh.
"Rikki, we already went down the tunnel, remember? It was blocked at the end,"
Rikki. Ondina took note of the name. The redhead was named Rikki. At the same time, she felt a surge of gratitude towards whichever girl had answered Rikki.
"I just thought maybe we could try again. I don't know why, I just have a good feeling about it. I feel like there's something good on the other end of that tunnel."
The voice that had answered before answered again with skepticism. " That tunnel didn't even exist until about a week ago. I highly doubt anything's changed since last time,"
"A week ago?" Ondina thought, "That's probably why I never noticed it,"
The third voice (that didn't seem to talk nearly as much as the other two voices) spoke this time, voicing her unspoken question.
"I wonder who dug the tunnel? I mean, there's no other way that I can think of that would explain it, and we would have noticed if it had been here before,"
"We can follow the tunnel later," the second voice answered, "We should head out to sea though. We can swim for a while, and then go back into the bay in time for dinner with Lewis,"
Ondina realized with a start that these humans (or whatever they were) weren't from around this area of the sea. She recalled a conversation she'd had with a lookout. The lookout had been voicing concern about staying in the canyon because it was close to a bay that served as the coast of a large landmass filled with humans. Undeterred, Lyla had insisted on staying, She was tired of losing resources and time to humans, the sentinel had told her. Tired of living in fear.
"Fine, mom, we'll go through the other tunnel, " Rikki teased, " But, tomorrow, we come back to explore,"
Then, it was silent except for the swishing sound of three tails. Ondina peeked out from behind the corner. The three mermaid-human things were swimming away. Ondina watched them until they turned into the second tunnel and swam out of sight. To be safe, she waited a few more minutes to make sure they were really gone. Part mermaid or not, you could never trust humans.
When she was sure she was alone, Ondina turned and swam back the way she had come as swiftly as she could. Her head was spinning.
"How is it possible for humans to turn into mermaids like that?" she puzzled. Then, she had an even more alarming thought.
"Do they have powers?" she wondered.
Ondina raced back to the pod with these thoughts. But, amidst the questions swirling around in her head, one requisite stuck out.
She needed to find Lyla. If these mermaid-human things stayed true to their word, they were going to follow the tunnel right to the canyon the next day. The entire pod would be discovered, and Ondina had no idea what side these three girls were on.
Time to find a solution was already running out.
