Nnedi Okorafor - Lagoon

“Oh my God, the man dey craze,” Agu muttered, but the corners of his mouth quivered as he fought his laughter.

“You should have plenty of new material for a new album,” Adaora told Anthony.

“Artist is artist,” he agreed.

“Agu, you can put me down now. Before you pass out. I know I’m heavy.”

Anthony put his arms beneath her and helped Agu lower her to the sea bed. Once seated, she crossed her arms over her bare chest. Her fin felt heavy and useless.

Agu sat beside her and Anthony sat across from her. For a long time, they were silent, Adaora more than aware of her strange naked mermaid body and the cold dryness of the air. Anthony thinking and thinking about all he’d discussed with the Elders when they were first pulled into the ocean, only two nights ago. And Agu looking out into the water.

“I thought it would kill me the first time it happened,” Anthony said. He’d spoken in Twi, so the others didn’t understand. He switched to English. “I call it the rhythm.” He recounted the story of the day he’d discovered his power. A story that he’d never told a soul.

“Wow,” Adaora whispered when he finished.

Agu laughed hard and clapped him on the shoulder. “Do you believe in God now?”

Anthony chuckled. “Yeah.”

The three of them burst out laughing and didn’t stop for the next minute. Adaora’s eyes watered and her fin slapped the damp stone. Agu rolled on the sea bed as he guffawed. And Anthony held his cramping belly. In the water outside the bubble, clouds of fish wiggled toward the surface and a giant pink squid spiraled by. This sent them into more hysterics.

Several minutes passed and they calmed.

Then it was Agu’s turn. “I have no name for it. But the first time I used it was to save a boy we called Stick Boy.” He told them about punching the other boy unconscious and how as the boy lay there, he decided to become a soldier. Then he told them about nearly killing Benson. Then he told them everything that had happened in the streets of Lagos. As he spoke, he watched Adaora’s eyes grow wider and wider, especially when he spoke of possibly killing people in the streets during the riots.

No one laughed when he finished.

Adaora knew they were expecting her to explain the origins of her powers, just as they had. But her story was different. “OK,” she said. She looked around. They were at the bottom of the ocean in a bubble created by aliens, surrounded by sea monsters. She shut her eyes, still aware of her fin. It was drying out and her scaled skin was starting to sting. She opened her eyes and looked at both of them. “I don’t know what this is,” she said. “Mine wasn’t something that kicked in when I was a girl, as it did when you were boys.” She paused, fighting the voice that told her never to speak of such taboos. The knowledge that made her feel like she was evil. The stigma that burned brightest when she thought about her husband’s constant accusations of witchcraft. And the fact that after all her denials, maybe she was a witch. Well, she was certainly something .

“I was born with webbed feet and hands,” she blurted. “And my legs were joined together by flesh.” Even after everything they’d been through, she half expected them to recoil in disgust.

“That’s… that’s disgusting,” Anthony said. But he smiled as he said it.

Agu was laughing.

“My father… he said that if it were the old days, they would have thrown me in the bush,” Adaora continued. “He liked to remind me of that whenever my grades were too low in school. It always worked.” She sighed. “Anyway, they surgically separated my fingers, toes and legs. Still, from the moment that my mother first took me to the ocean, I could swim. No one ever taught me. I was… like a fish.”

Both Agu and Anthony burst out laughing. Adaora wanted to cry, but she laughed, too. “I’ve always loved the sea. I am fascinated by it, the smell, the creatures, its size and depth. It is no surprise that I became a marine biologist. But that’s all there is. I don’t have any childhood stories about doing amazing things. All this…” she gestured to her tail, “is completely new. Two nights ago when I was fighting my husband, that’s the first time anything ever happened!” She frowned. “But… maybe it’s always been there. Beneath the surface.”

Agu nodded. “I was about to say that.”

“What are we?” Adaora asked, after a moment.

“We’re people,” Agu said. He looked at Anthony. “You can make a sonic boom.” To Adaora, he said, “You can create some sort of force field. I have super-human strength. And we all walked into each other’s lives just as aliens invaded Lagos.”

“Not a coincidence,” Anthony said. “ Na the work of de universe.”

“It’s the work of something,” Agu said.

Adaora shivered. “My father would have said it’s the work of the gods.”

As Adaora finished speaking, she felt a terrible pressure, enough to make her ears hurt. She looked up and saw the bubble’s bowl shape distorting, as though something were pressing on it. The air pressure dropped. The temperature dropped. Adaora’s fin stung horribly as her sleek fish skin continued to dry and began to turn brown.

They all saw it at once.

Adaora screamed.

Anthony whimpered.

Agu began to cry.

The spider standing above them was the size of a mansion. Rough hair covered its eight endlessly long legs and bulbous body. It – she , Adaora instinctively knew – was looking right at them, down at them. With all eight of her intense black eyes.

“Even in the corners of palaces, spiders dwell,” she said. “Remember that, if you ever find yourself walking the halls of the great and powerful.” Then she was gone.

“What the fuck was that?” Anthony asked.

There was a wet splashing sound behind Adaora. It was Ayodele flipping water into the bubble as she hovered outside it. “ They are ready for you. Come. ”

Adaora, Agu and Anthony met with the Elders.

There were eight of them.

And that is all that Adaora, Agu and Anthony will ever remember about that thirty minutes of their lives.

Anthony and Agu had been given bubbles of air, like helmets around their heads, and they’d all swum back to where Adaora had seen the President speaking with the Star Wars -like creatures.

Then her memory grew hazy and she remembered nothing until her head was breaking the surface of the water beneath the late-afternoon sun. She felt as though she had encountered something enormous; something so far beyond anything she could have imagined, and that its presence threatened to force her out of existence. Whatever had happened with the… spider, with the Elders – it was all too huge to contemplate.

Hawra and the President, Femi and the two guards were on the boat when Agu, Ayodele and Anthony emerged from the water. All but Ayodele looked shell-shocked and none said a thing as Adaora was pulled onto the boat, naked, half fish and half human. Hawra fanned Adaora’s fin and each burst of air was like a thousand needles against her scaly flesh. But soon the scales of her fin grew transparent and began to flake away, revealing her brown human legs.

“Can you imagine?” Hawra whispered over and over as she helped Adaora pick the peeling scales from her flesh. All the men had turned their backs to give Adaora some privacy.

“I can imagine anything,” Adaora murmured.

Hawra leaned close to Adaora, smiling. “I spoke to a giant swordfish,” she whispered. “I heard its voice in my head.”