Sylia was carried away almost instantly. The rip pulled her in and almost under. She raised her arms to keep afloat, buffeted from one side and other by liquid bodies and shadowed faces. She lost sight of the shore, hazed behind the salt spray, lights of the sky and booms of the depths.
Priss managed to reach her, riding in on a peaking wave. Her mouth moved, shouting, Slyia could not hear her. Green and red and blue lights turned her drowned.
Her biker-chick reached out, just as she had to Linna earlier, expecting a similar response. Sylia did not. She did not want – need – the help. The fingers closed on empty air, Sylia let herself be pulled back further, away, to chance on the fates by herself. Priss shouted. Angrily.
Sylia turned and was surrounded by a wave taller of sea-frond hands swaying high above her head. She moved through them without pattern. The fate of becoming entwined was mortal.
On she went, deeper, further until she came up to the barrier of a wall. Above and below multicoloured lights spun and strobed.
She touched her forehead and it was damp with sweat, own and others shaken on. Her feet ached, thighs tremoured and breath heaved, a shipwrecked survivor pulling themselves onto a raft of live-saving debris.
To return she would have to endure it again.
And she had willingly entered. Just to show Priss that she could, wasn't burnt out, or only a talker.
Her smile was a grimace.
Wait here for a little while to recover and let the storm ebb. But the minutes did not make her legs stop trembling or the ache of her feet, inappropriately heeled, and the tropic sweat did not stop and her breathing was still hard and heaving and tethered to the beat.
The worst would be if Priss came and had to drag her back. Linna returned under her own steam, mostly. It would not do for her to be rescued.
She would have to bear it, plunge in cold and keep swimming and emerge, Ursula, from the rolling swell a triumphant aphrodite. To show them that she was the leader for a reason.
In another minute. The light and sound and loss of salt and water pounded against her temple. The wall was reassuring.
The crests looked higher and higher. She found that she was indeed slipping beneath and the images before her eyes danced and swam as truly as the deepest pressure of the pool that ran top to bottom of her store and apartment.
Her hands had no purchase to keep her up. There was no strength in her arms to reach out and take one of the aquarians. Alone she was going to drown.
"Sylia,"
She heard it in her head.
"Sylia."
A hand took her chin. Cold, ice cold.
The jolt threw Sylia's fading eyes wide.
The raven. Mirror. Deep sea green eyes, castaway pallid flesh pulled from the lightless depths.
"Gal-"
"at-"
"ea."
Another arm, as coiling as an octopus' tentacle wrapped around her waist and reversed her decline.
"Im-"
"Possible." Galatea finished.
"How?"
Buried in the earthquake. The city destroyed. Genom rising, boomers proliferating, rogue increasing, Mason scheming, the hunt.
"I am your present, Sylia."
Sylia shook her head and blinked. Hallucination. She had lost control of her mind.
Galatea smiled. She let go of Sylia's chin and held the hand palm up before them. "It's Christmas, sister-mother. I am your present. I will be given to you, soon, wrapped in a cocoon as silver as the hairs of your head. You will open me, the Gift that your father had wanted to give himself."
"Father,"
"Isn't Christmas the time for gifts? Frankincense and myrrh? Gifts for a King. Me? I am the gift to make Gods. Wasn't that what your father wanted, to be God? As God gave His son, he gave his daughter."
"I don't understand," was all Sylia could say, feebly.
She was held upright, standing, with what could not exist, a face her own and dark. Galatea was trapped beneath the city ruins, a formless embryo, not a woman as tall, as cruel, as what she was, felt, understood through layers of concrete, metal and bedrock. Galatea could not be here.
Airless, Galatea's mouth spoke: "Your father left me to you. The time is coming to find me, Sylia. Others are looking, I am not for them. I was always only for you to open."
"And then what?"
Green lips smiling.
"You will have a sibling. God only had a Son. Our world will have two Daughters and Mothers to guide their children."
Hair black, hair silver, floated about their faces.
"Open you. Not here."
Sylia's arms jerked, grabbing Galatea, who did not react, still smiled back. Physical. She was there. Cold, not human. Give, before uniform firmness.
"It is time to open your present," Galatea's voice drifted distant.
"Not here!" boomer.
Galatea was not here. She was holding onto a boomer.
The reflected visage pebble drop rippled. Galatea was no more, replaced by an ordinary looking female hospitality boomer.
"Can I take you back to your booth, Ms. Stingray?" the boomer said in metallic femininity.
"No, wait."
It was not a hallucination. The boomer was here. It had her face. Galatea had controlled it. From wherever she was buried she had reached out and taken control of the boomer, found her, and saved her.
And given her a message.
Sylia's was hers to find.
She was not the only one who would be looking.
"Lead the way," Sylia said to the boomer and was lead through the parting waters back to her booth where the three other girls of the Knight Sabres sat.
"Look what the dolphin dragged in," Priss said tartly.
As Slyia passed the boomer to sit down with her friends, rest, and drink heavily, it said Galatea's voice: "Merry Christmas."
