fiddling with on the kitchen bench. “Oh darling, you know the drill. Aegir and Ran were magical, but apart from the instant magic of water-breathing, none of it passed. Even telepathy we just developed out of necessity, so we could communicate under all that water. Essentially we’re just very clever fish.” She stopped, turning around and taking me in, wet and shaken, standing in front of her in my dressing gown. She was at my side in a heartbeat, holding me up with arms so strong I remembered all over again how different we really were from humans. A random thought skittered into my brain as she steered me over to the couch and lowered me down firmly. Wonder if she could beat me in an arm wrestle? It had never occurred to me to challenge her to one.
Mom was patting and fussing on me when I clicked back into the moment.
“Mom,” I squawked. “I’m serious. About the powers thing. Something just happened to me. A… a vision, I think. I’ve never had anything like it before.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “Do you know anything about this? Has it ever happened to you?”
Mom rubbed her hands over her eyes, shaking her head. Then she sighed, rolled her shoulders and nodded slightly. “Okay darling. Listen. No, no I’ve never had a… vision. But-” Again, that thoughtful pause, like she was weighing up what and how much to tell me. “But maybe it’s not so crazy.” She pulled me closer to her on the couch, and pressed my head down on her shoulder, but whether it was to get closer to me or because she didn’t want to look me in the eyes, I couldn’t tell. “I had a friend once, who was very… learned. He believed that we… Aegirans, that is... were experiencing an evolutionary quantum leap.”
I lifted my head off Mom’s shoulder and raised an eyebrow, trying not to feel like I was in physics class.
Mom sped it up in deference to my low boredom threshold. “He believed that certain abilities, including, perhaps, a certain psychic capacity, were starting to appear among our race. We were starting to evolve, I guess.”
The skeptic in me was thinking about all the times I’d gone off to Aldus about Dirtwater Spiritual Adventures, the little shopfront down on Main where two-bit psychics and ghost-spotters milked the locals for all they were worth. But some other bits of me were saying I should be a little more open-minded. Given, you know, my own baggage.
My tension must have played out on my face because Mom leaned forward and took my hand as she went on. “My friend, he’d followed several cases where our people had experienced... visions as you call them. Or second sight. He believed… well, he used to say… the most exceptional and gifted would change first. The rest would follow. Evolution. Another Awakening, to begin with the most remarkable. But he’d never been able to prove it.”
I sighed with relief. Maybe I wasn’t going mad after all. But I was still kinda skeptical about whether I fit the theory. Remarkable?
Mom encouraged me with her eyes. “So. Tell me about it darling.”
I hesitated. “As… as I got out of the shower, I saw things. They didn’t all make sense, but it was definitely some kind of vision. And I’m sure it was about Aegira.”
She nodded and waited, taking my hands.
I could feel them shaking, and my heart was still hammering in my ribs from what I’d just experienced. This kind of shit just did not happen to me. I mean, there were certain wild bits about who we were, but I was used to them. I was used to being strong, and the telepathy, all that stuff. All that aside, I’d always felt very… normal. Very workaday. Maybe if I’d had that tail it might have been different. I would have had a daily reminder of my otherness.
As it was, most of the time, when I wasn’t thinking about the fact that a seer from an underwater kingdom had predicted my early demise, I just felt like another harassed cop, trying to stumble along, doing the best I could. I didn’t believe in ghosts or any of that stuff. I knew seers existed (knew more than I wanted to know about them, in fact) but I’d always thought second sight was the province of other creatures and I’d never thought of myself in that category.