summer is past, and we are not saved
The girl’s eyes show their whites like a frightened prey animal. Her hair is tossed into a frenzied chestnut tangle by the wind, and her mouth has been pulled into a nearly comical expression of surprise. She looks wild, in a way O only recognizes from watching fights in the colosseum: it’s the expression of someone who expects to be injured, if not killed, but is less afraid of the pain than they are of the surprise.
That, at least, is admirable. This girl must know; the act of dying is rarely worse than the shock of it. For a moment they stand there, in the cold gray wind, worked over by the sting of salt, and stare at each other, and O commits the look of her to memory. Bright-eyed. Wild-haired. Her dark skin flecked by gold. The impression of a leaf, fancifully detailed with veins all through it, like real flesh, is baked into her forehead like a pawprint into mud, shining with the kind of bright-yellow light that only comes from something divine.
The question, then, is what. Solis certainly doesn't give out markings like that.
O licks her teeth. She pushes back the urge to let the hurlbat hang in her grasp, as it usually does upon meeting strangers. Instead she is careful not to move it from its holster at all, despite Tuchulcha’s hiss in her ear to be careful, be careful, be careful. It hardly seems like this girl will be a threat. And even if O’s instincts are steering her wrong (has that ever happened?), she has all the advantages of being a native and a soldier.
Some part of her even dares to hope that, should anything open, Andi might rise from the sea and protect her. How pathetic a thought. How terribly romantic.
The Solterran shakes her head, dislodging the thought. She stands stoic in wait of a response. But when it comes, it throws her off guard. This girl repeats, in a voice that doesn’t quite stutter but does pause in places, like she doesn’t know what she’s saying, or how to do it properly: The… ocean?
For a moment, O wonders if she’s being played.
Even the kids she grew up with—Solterran natives who might never need to leave the desert, and had certainly never actually done so at the time they knew each other—had heard stories of the ocean. If nothing else, they’d have seen it in paintings or woven into tapestries. Each of the courts, too, have their own beach: it is nearly impossible for her to imagine that there is anyone at all who doesn’t know what the ocean is. (Perhaps it is better, then, that she doesn’t know of Nicnevin’s thoughts on the sky. That would almost be too much.) On the other hand—why lie about it? There's nothing to gain from acting dumb, at least not here and now.
Briefly O’s face scrunches up in thought, and she searches the girl’s expression for a sign of dishonesty. But there are none, and she cannot decide whether or not that is surprising. There is some part of her that expected this all to be a prank or a lie, and another part of her that is bone-achingly glad it isn’t. Life has been a chore recently. To meet someone from a different world feels like a swift kick, an omen, a god smiling down from above to say—here you go, girl.
You will never run out of things to learn.
O clears her throat. Her expression is unusually eager when she raises her mismatched eyes to meet the stranger’s; and when she realizes the girl’s are mismatched too—one red, one gold—she half-smiles at all the ways they seem to mirror each other. Then O answers: "Yeah. The ocean." And this time she draws the word out slowly, trying to clear it of the sharp clip of her Solterran accent to let it sing more clearly through the air. "Have you never seen it? Or—heard of it?"
