The Sirens

by Emilia Hart

voice had valleys and crags, telling you of sadness or delight. You could almost feel it under your fingers, like it was land.

If you create a silence, people want to fill it.

The sea gives, but it also takes.

For the first time, she’d experienced the world and its injustice; the way the cards are stacked against her, just because she’s female. (She doubted anyone had implored Ben to think of her future.)

With this awakening, there’d been something else, too. A new awareness of her power. Freed from her prior inhibitions—from the compulsion to be nice, to be a good girl—she’d become something she could never have imagined being. She’d become … dangerous.

Most people just want an easy life. It’s unsettling when someone starts pulling apart the stories we’ve stitched together, the things we tell ourselves for comfort.

“They won’t be burying my body at sea. I’ll die an old matron, with hundreds of acres and gold rings on fingers so fat that no one will be able to get them off. All that gold, lost to the worms.”

There’s something about this place, something different. It keeps its women safe.”