One (One Universe)

still here, and I exhaled a bit, bubbles trickling from my nose up to the surface. I let Brennan enjoy his fish; I’d make sure the shore was safe.
    Edging toward the bank, I raised my head out of the water and scanned the woods carefully. This was always the most dangerous part of our nighttime swims. What if someone had come across our haul-out spot while we were downstream? What if they’d found our clothes? What if they were waiting for Brennan and me to emerge and change back into human form so they could snatch our sealskins?
    That’s what happened to my parents long ago, before I was even born: a human stole their sealskins and hid them so my parents couldn’t return to the sea. They’d had no choice but to follow him home and do as they were told. Two decades later, they and Declan were still slaves, in a country of people who thought they’d eradicated slavery.
    And they’d stay that way unless I freed them.
    Earlier I’d made sure we entered the river on the upwind bank, so now I inhaled deeply, my nose sorting scents: tangy pine needles, rotting fall leaves, a faint trace of fox scat. Nothing human besides our own belongings. I counted silently to thirty, but heard nothing beyond the normal rustling of small birds. As far as I could tell, we were alone. Time to trudge back to my landlubber life.
    Bracing myself, I started the change .
    Bone-deep hurt stabbed my body everywhere, stretching and cracking and reshaping my limbs and flesh. When I was ten I’d broken an arm, and it felt like that—except all my bones at once, while my skin was raked by sandpaper. I kept going, and after an agonizing seven seconds—Brennan and I had timed each other once—my form solidified into one with legs and arms and breasts and hair.
    And, thank God, thumbs. Lack of such miraculous appendages was one of the main downsides to my aquatic form. I never knew how awesome thumbs were until I tried to scratch my nose as a seal.
    I used my lovely thumbs and fingers to grab for my sealskin, now floating like a cape beside me. Still underwater, I wrapped it around my torso before kicking my legs to take me to shore. The shallows here were little more than a two-foot-wide submerged ledge between the deeper part of the river and the earthen bank. I pulled myself up onto the ledge, crouching, and set my feet on the slick rock. The water here was just deep enough to shelter my shoulders in my curled-up position. Steadying myself with one hand on an adjacent boulder, I stood.
    Heavy. That first moment out of the water always felt like being saddled with a backpack of granite. Air wasn’t interested in supporting my weight. Though the now thigh-deep water was cold enough to turn a normal human’s toes blue in twenty seconds—it was October, after all, and winter showed up early on Maine’s doorstep—I stayed stock still. My gaze raked the shadowed underbrush for dangers I might have missed from the water, and my ears strained for the sound of a footstep. My muscles were tensed, ready to hurl me back into the river, but after a few moments, the night was still quiet. All clear.
    Bending over, I found two smooth river stones and rapped them four times against each other underwater—the signal to let Brennan know it was safe. Our mind-speech only worked in seal form.
    As I clambered onto the dirt bank, Brennan surfaced mid-river, whiskers gleaming white. Waving, I slipped behind a thick, squat fir tree and found my backpack, nestled among the branches close to the trunk. I pulled out my clothes, then reluctantly unwrapped myself.
    Once I was dressed, my fingers lingered on my sealskin, this strange key to my secret self. Growing up, my sealskin—and I—had been another’s possession, but it was mine now. I was mine now.
    I’d never give that up again, not for anything.
    To the untutored eye my sealskin looked like a dark, misshapen towel. The skin side was rough but supple, the reverse sleek and padded with guard hairs. There were no claws or a face or anything creepy like that, just an amorphous shape roughly twice as long as it was wide.
    Home , I thought. My sealskin was home to me, more so than my bedroom in my parents’ house, or even the ocean. Contact with my sealskin made me feel strong. Cleared my thoughts. I’d been anxious and tightly wound this afternoon, in a mood Brennan classily termed megabitch , but now that I’d had a good swim I felt steadier.
    I folded my sealskin, smoothing down the guard hairs