Early November, it happened again: sea monster sighted in the bay off Eido. This had happened on and off the last few months, and had the town in what Cordelia Wade considered an unhelpful tizzy. The latest report of sudden cross-waves and pale flesh breaking the surface had returned with a few boats from checking lobster traps just past the lighthouse islands. They’d claimed it was massive and serpentine, with dappled-cloud skin and a call just past the lowest range of human hearing that rattled the traps as it resubmerged in sixty-foot water. It was the talk of the town. It was certainly the talk of the storm response office, also known as the rickety third floor above the cheesemonger’s up on Bittern Point. Despite the impending storm, speculations continued right past the meeting’s scheduled start.
Cordelia had little patience for that. Maybe the monster was dangerous, responsible for the last few capsizes and lost souls, and maybe it wasn’t, or was but wasn’t malicious. She would rather the team focus on the known, non-malicious danger they were supposed to be preparing for. However, her technical position was junior coordinator, which meant she had a clipboard and very little authority. Five years wasn’t much seniority on the storm response team. She sat perched on top of the tulipwood chest that held the records, held her tongue, and watched the antique barometers waver in the cabinets. The sheer volume echoing in the crammed room was rattling the markers more than the shifting atmosphere.
Eventually, the senior organizers called order, and everyone shuffled towards business. At this point, the preparations were set, and it was a matter of predicting the impact. They’d had the second storm of the season a few weeks before, mild still. This third seemed, at best calculations, big, fierce, and worryingly slow. Eido hadn’t had a true stormspeaker of its own in decades, but they got reports from a town upcoast. Those, combined with weather data and trained instinct, made up the forecasts and the lockdown calls. The meeting opened with predictions read and corroborated, and then the debate began. Cordelia wasn’t a proper stormspeaker, but she had a bit of the knack. She could already feel this one in her teeth. “I think we’d better batten down tomorrow,” she said, once they’d gone around the room and the upper positions had gotten a word in.
“This looks like it’s hitting the day after,” one of the assistant weather-charters, Giokki, said from within a fortress of reports and calculations. “Maybe even midmorning?”
The current leader, Sura, had come up through charting, and asked for confidence intervals and wind speeds. Then she went into conference with her seconds. “Spread some caution,” she ruled. “Best if the fishers get back early, to be safe. But there’s always a lot to lose by calling lockdown too soon.”
This frustrated Cordelia, but the decision was made. At least it was actionable.
***
The next morning, walking the docks to check how many fishing vessels had gone out, Cordelia saw a few of her former schoolmates scurrying about in the fog. She followed them to a bustling boat in one of the townie docks. “What are you doing?” she demanded of the crew — about ten people (more than necessary), mostly men, all young enough to be constitutionally reckless. They mostly hauled catch, worked at the packinghouses, repaired tidegates, that kind of thing.
“We’re going out monster hunting, miss,” said Halimed, and behind him several people winced.
“Storm’s coming in later,” she said. “You shouldn’t be taking out.”
“It hasn’t been called yet,” Ken said, over with a box of what had to be slop bait. She could smell it from five paces. “The boats went out.”
“Some of them went out,” Cordelia said. She almost added, And some of them took a dock day, which is why all of you shiphands have it free for foolishness.
“Besides,” Halimed said, having nominated himself spokesperson, “we know water.”
“Not too well, I hope.”
One of the more sensible ones, Marvin, was frowning out oceanward. “She has a point,” he said. “Visibility’s not great, neither.” He was wearing an endearingly badly-knitted yellow hat.
“It’s a really big monster,” Ken said. “Can’t miss it.”
“People manage to hit coastlines in this sort of weather,” Cordelia replied, and Halimed tried to tell her that submerged rocks were the cause of most shipwrecks. Behind him, several people exchanged jokes likely at her expense (she’d heard it all before, from her stupid causes to her illsuited haircut), and kept with preparations. The only two really paying concerned attention were Yir, cousin to Cordelia’s best friend, and Marvin.
Halimed concluded with, “Whatever, Wade. We’re gonna find this. Skipper, call it!”
Before Cordelia could learn who’d been put in charge, Marvin clambered out of the boat, head down. He glanced up at her, ducked back under his hat, and started to walk away. “Coward!” Ken called, and a few of the others jumped on with variously creative additions as he left the dock.
“She has a point!” Marvin yelled over his shoulder. “Be safe out there.” Yir considered it, hand braced against the dock as if to climb out, and then turned back to their friends.
“I hope you all stay above water,” Cordelia said, the ache of a lifetime’s funerals eroding the spite, and abandoned her cause. She had too many other things to do.
***
Without the official lockdown call, Cordelia did her best to encourage and aid voluntary preparations: dragging up, tying down, filling water barrels, locking upper shutters, taking plants in—the general routines. The low pressure was ringing in her skull, and the sky loomed down, sharp across her skin. Most people were fairly agreeable to the routine and its logic. But the storm held off, and only as evening drew in did the threat really catch on. The call happened after six o’clock, four-strike bells from the temples and the courthouse. That had the town bustling in earnest, scrambling through dinners and evening plans. Cordelia ran into Marvin shortly after, going opposite directions up the Dockside hill, and he stopped her. “Everyone got back alright,” he said. She’d figured, but had been wondering. “They didn’t see scale or tail or ripple of it, ‘course.”
Cordelia rebalanced the basket on her hip, spare candles and simple water test strips. “I’m sorry for making a fuss about that.”
He shrugged, and leaned against the ladder he’d been carrying. “It was real stupid. We didn’t have a plan if we spotted it.”
“Where’re you headed?” She indicated the ladder.
“Pulleys broke over at Jodonis, so we’re in fix-it. You?”
Cordelia laughed. “Everywhere. This is just when it starts.” The storm was showing on the horizon now, and preparations were behind but not terribly. They got scolded for blocking the path about then, and had tasks to rush off to.
“Stay dry, Cora!” Marvin said in parting. He attempted to wave and just about dropped the ladder.
“No chance, but back at you!” she said, and went to get her rainclothes.
***
The storm hit hard, and the initial front timed badly with high tide — the lower streets washed with sharp salt waves. One of the why-on-the-sun’s-lost-daughter-is-it-built-there cliff houses buckled into the sea, its inhabitants shooed out in a scary-close escape. The wind tore to absolute bits anything it could claw into. It hailed in patches, the fingernail-size ice chips not damaging enough to be a main concern, but still rattling against everything. The schoolhouse was the designated shelter and centralized base, and that team had done a good job setting up sections. Cordelia had regular patrols to keep on top of outside happenings, noting weather intensity, damages, blockages; doing a few evacuations back to the shelter; and helping keep necessary transports moving. All of her clothes soaked through, then trapped moisture against her body, cold on softening skin. Cordelia had a good sense for when to venture, when to hang back, but it was all water: fresh from above, salt from below.
The next morning’s briefing was held in the school’s music room. It was standing room only, and absolutely jam-packed with steaming coffee, damp, and anxiety. Cordelia arrived fresh off a sleep shift, four to nine in the morning in order to stay of any use. She’d slept exhausted and barely dried under a bench in the assembly hall, but she could barely remember her own soreness while there were updates she’d missed. The southside grid had gone down, probably tree damage, and that cut power at the clinic. The stormwater system was doing valiantly, but was soon to be overwhelmed with the tide surging again, and contamination spillover from wastewater was a likely story (they were working on fixing that, but had been for decades). Eido and its immediate south seemed to be getting the worst of it, and the stormspeakers in Kachalot were worried enough with their area to not be reaching this far for specifics. Lead coordinator Sura had left sick, and Tis Mossbunker, retired lead coordinator, was stepping in — Cordelia joined in the incredibly reluctant applause. Things were rough all around.
Around high tide, Cordelia and her draw-straws patrol team, Dimitria and Mako, took the ridgeroad out to check on the Gasaur neighborhood. Cordelia was watching the rain-obscured clouds from the cliffside path when Dimitria, without her glasses, asked for confirmation on a strange sight. Mako swore when he stepped to the edge, and Cordelia hastened cautiously over. Below, against the rock spurs of Jason’s Break Cove, lay a still, white mass organic in its geometry. It had snagged at about the normal high tide line, made an island by storm surge.
“Let’s not tell yet,” Cordelia said once they huddled a bit back from the precipice, focusing on Mako. Several of his younger kinfolk had been on that boat with Halimed. “Shouldn’t climb down there ‘til it all dries, regardless, but some’ll try.” It took some convincing, but they agreed to her logic to not spill that upset into the lockdown. They lingered for a strange moment to regard the corpse, then picked through the litter of branches and runoff streams to Gasaur, and did the rounds. It’d gotten off pretty well so far, being mostly leeward and high up, but people were frustrated. They wanted an estimate for when they could go about and get to clearing up, since the radio wasn’t saying specifics. Dimitria kept giving very optimistic answers, even though she knew as well as Cordelia did that big meant slow.
Cordelia’s plan was to write the sea monster discovery in their patrol report as required (it was something of note, no matter her wishes against that), keep it out of the verbal brief in part due to its relative irrelevancy, and just get on with the day. Dimitria had other ideas. Everyone at base knew before Cordelia could wring out her hair or start plotting retribution, and that was that. Eido, like many smaller towns, was plagued by news.
Cordelia wasn’t part of what happened next, which involved several broken limbs, far too much hypothermia, an amateur anatomist, six saws from the icehouse, a suddenly confirmed folktale about razor blood, and a nasty all-out brawl over who got to take the monster’s teeth. She was dealing with the stormwater problem, making lists of all the roofs in dire need of patching, hiding angry messages sent by inland fish-buyers from Mossbunker, and generally doing what needed doing instead of engaging in foolishness.
She saw the carcass properly a few days later, under clear skies. The seabirds were half-heartedly picking and finding little worth taking in the soft dark gashes. Snake-ish was the simplest description, despite the tentacle fringe and three-finned tail and ruined, massive jaws. The final measurement, tip to tip, rounded to 47 feet. It had started to corrode away the rocks it’d caught on. It took ages to start rotting, like even the bacteria didn’t want it, although the inland scientists did and took various samples for distant laboratories. The town found out by the end of the season that it had no skeleton, this icy monster from unknown waters. Speculations ran rampant, and the sea monster of Eido lived on in continuously exaggerated stories, long after its body straggled back to the sea. Long after, though, the grit in Jason’s Break still cut like glass.
Years later, when her children asked about it, Cordelia kept her line: it’d been a distraction, and she’d had a normal severe storm experience, focused on real problems. Then she’d hand them to Marvin and he’d show them the small tooth he’d managed to snag, somehow, a hollow thing as long as his thumb and wicked strange. That always went over better.