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"Just go down there and get it, Fid."

Kyle Fredricks might have been a cute guy, but he wasn't the most sympathetic of boyfriends. Fidra didn't feel too bad about mocking him in a thoroughly singsong fashion as she searched for footholds by toeing her way down the rocky cliff face.

Stupid kids. True, they were all only about five years younger than she was on average, but they made her feel so old sometimes. She needed more friends her own age... or maybe just a boyfriend who didn't act like a damn infant.

"Clean up my messes. Go get the stupid frisbee I threw," she continued. Extending her leg, Fidra found a sturdy, jutting rock to rest her foot on. She put her weight on it and, for a second, it pretended it was going to hold before breaking off in a silty mess that somehow managed to rain on Fidra's head, even though she had fallen after it did.

"Ow." A shallow scrape ran down her right leg, and her arms and tailbone sported a new definition of numb after breaking her fall. The frisbee was only about twenty feet away, but Fidra took her time getting over there, ignoring the catcalls and jokey requests to 'hurry it up' with a sigh. You know, ******** them. Fidra picked up the frisbee and limped back nearer to the cliff where her friends couldn't see her. She could make her own fun without a stupid plastic disc and an even stupider group of people. This was the northern part of Abyss Beach, after all. She'd heard a little about it, but she didn't believe the hype.

She made her way along the beach, a hand running along the cool rock wall beside her, until she could no longer hear the jeers of her companions. Soon, the sand had narrowed to nearly nothing and the only sound was the rushing of the ocean over Fidra's feet. No religious zealots were waving guns or telling her to get away from the water and she smiled at how silly the rumors had been. Up ahead, something in the shallow water shimmered and she made her way over to it.

A cluster of tiny eggs sparkled up at Fidra almost cheerfully. She smiled and kneeled to be nearer to them, wincing as her leg started bleeding again. This had to be a prank. She glanced around... no hidden cameras here. A few seconds later, she had scooped up the eggs and a fair amount of seawater into the frisbee and was making her way up the side of the cliff. It was not completely vertical here, more like a strenuous hike than a death-climb, and she made it back up without spilling too many eggs or too much water.

Fidra backtracked to the parking lot where her car was parked, surrounded by the expensive SUVs her friends drove. She hopped in, placing the frisbee on the passenger-side front seat, and drove away. Kyle could find his own way back to the hotel.

Cynthia O'Connell's romance sales had reached a plateau recently. Maybe a switch to the sci-fi genre would do her some good. Hell, maybe she could even use her own name this time.

It had been nearly a month since Fidra had fallen awkwardly onto Abyss Beach and had her life changed for the... she couldn't really decide if it was for better or worse. She certainly didn't miss her boyfriend, that was for sure, but the repetitively sulky messages he kept leaving on her cell phone implied that he missed her. Or perhaps, she thought, he just missed sleeping with her.

She had holed up in a beach cabin approved for her temporary use by a friend of her editor. She couldn't bring herself to write, and most of the time, when she wasn't eating or watching movies rented from some backwater Blockbuster, she was simply staring at her blue fishy thing as it happily bobbed in its own garden-variety pet store fish bowl.

Fidra called it a 'he'; she wasn't sure why, but he seemed like a little boy in the way he played with his toys -- a bottlecap and one of those little balls you played jacks with. No, it wasn't just that. Surely she had played with a ball when she was a kid. She just knew. She hadn't named him though, that would be too weird.

She was also having dreams. Well, she called them dreams. They were more like flashes of unhappiness that just happened to occur while she was asleep. She had figured this would happen after watching Abyss Beach Weekend on the Discovery Channel. For the past three weeks, Fidra had inadvertently hoarded every bit of information released to the public about what her Twizzlers-loving sea monkey was and what they did to people who befriended others like him.

She had very recently decided she was never going to leave the cabin again.

Thadados was the only game they thought to play down here. Theirs had been a large family, but now the north wall was stacked with corpses. The smell was minimal, due to the cold, and they had learned long ago not to speak of it anyway. At night, an adventurous child conducting a satchel raid could find watches or a used tissue. Or some change. Or dice. She had found the newest pair last night, so they finally had enough for a game.

"Oh, Yahtzee," a voice said.

The girl's skin crawled. Someone was watching.

Her immediate family -- mother, father, Ivan -- had been down here for weeks before the bombs. Father was a worry wart, and this time she was thankful. The rest of the surviving family members had straggled in for months after. As long as they spent time upstairs in decontamination, they would be safe to live with. Papa said so, and she would never question his judgment again. Her cousins had tales of illness and death, but she had only listened once before steering clear. Ivan had said it was just as creepy to steal from the dead as it was to hear about what was happening above, but she disagreed. They all just looked like they were sleeping.

Eventually those cousins slept too. Served them right.

It took years to get to the new city. Everyone dug so carefully, so as not to have the ceiling crash in on them. When they finally made it, there were happy times, but still no sun. Her littlest cousin had been born in the bunker and he was just starting to talk when they arrived. There was no entertainment for the longest time, so she and Ivan would tell slightly embellished stories of what the outside had been like to keep their smallest relative occupied.

"Había sol en el cielo. Era caliente y brillante, como una antorcha," she said, and Theo's eyes lit up. He smiled and rubbed at them. It was late.

She tucked him in, pulling the blankets up to his chin, but before she left the room he said, "¡Le adoptan y SOY SU PADRE! ¡Su madre estaba en un coma cuando usted nació, pero ahora ella vive en el fondo del océano, la víctima de una maldición del pirata!"

"¡Oh mi dios!"

Fidra started awake, wincing at the pain in her stiff neck. What the hell was that? She looked quickly at Mr. Orange -- a name she had chosen for her betanked roommate because... well... he'd been orange once... and kinda was again, for that matter -- only to see him bobbing off to the side of the tank nearest the television. Some sort of spanish soap was on, which would explain all the talk of comas and adoption. Fidra sighed.

"Did you do this?" she asked, pointing at her head. Orange waved his antennae-things and bobbed some more. It was only when she got up that he hurried back over to her side of the tank, the side he'd been on when she had fallen asleep. "Don't apologize now," she said, reaching into the tank to stroke his shiny skin and frowning at the quality of the water. It was definitely time to devise some sort of filtration system before someone wondered why she was having so much seawater delivered. She wasn't as popular as most bestselling authors, but she could only imagine the headlines that might spawn from a slow month of tabloid fodder.

'Hearts Aflame' Author Quenches Inner Fire With the Sea

Life For O'Connell No 'Briny Beach Summer' Without Salty Jacuzzi

Ooh. Pulling out the Harlequins. No fair. "That would suck, seriou..."

He was running, running, running. It had just been a light on the horizon, but soon blood was raining from the sky...

She yanked her hand out of the water and stumbled back until the backs of her legs hit the chair. "Not cool, not cool, not cool," she repeated. Fidra felt around for the phone book, her eyes still locked on Orange. She finally looked down at it when she realized she couldn't find a phone number without using her eyes. Now, what to look under?

Oh screw it.

Fidra leaned over, grabbed her phone, and dialed Information.

"Listing?" a bored, computerized, recorded voice slimed.

"Rosewood. The Institute."

"One moment, please."

One ring, maybe a half of one, actually. Fidra snapped the cover of the phone closed so hard she thought she might have broken it. Well, that had gotten her nowhere. She cast a glance at Orange, who was bobbing as close to her as he could get. If he had been smaller, she could have shoved him under her coat and made her escape to safety in no time. Why hadn't she thought of this sooner?

I don't know spanish, so I am forced to use Altavista's Babelfish. Sorry, spanish speakers, because I'm sure it sucks.

Fidra exhaled and looked a little ashamed. Why was she so afraid of a group of people who helped people like her?

The phone rang.

"Aaa!" Fidra squealed. She dropped the cell onto the floor and when she tried to get up to grab it, she kicked it under her chair. "s**t! Aaa!"

Orange bubbled slowly, trying to look as calm as possible. After all, in his short experience with phones, they had always continued to ring long enough for Fidra to pick them up. He didn't really understand why, but they liked to be talked into a lot. And there she went, picking up the phone and talking into it.

"Hello?"

The imago floated back over to the television. He might not understand phones, but he knew from Fidra's mind that the people in the phone would be able to help them. He hoped they started by getting him a bigger tank.