Saltbound Siren

The first thing I learned about the surface was that everything here is loud.

Not loud like the deep currents during a storm, that low grinding groan the ocean makes when it's angry. Not loud like my mother's shell-horn calling us home across the reef. This was different. This was a thousand separate noises stacked on top of each other, none of them talking to each other, all of them insisting on being heard. Car horns. Train brakes. Somebody's phone buzzing. Somebody else's music leaking from their headphones. A vending machine humming a note so constant I wanted to peel my own ears off.

I pressed my back against the brick wall of the alley and counted my breaths the way my grandmother taught me. Four in. Six out. The trick was to make yourself smaller than the noise. Older than the noise.

It didn't work on land.

I'd been in Musutafu for eleven days. Eleven days of sleeping in a capsule hotel with a ceiling so low I could touch it flat-footed, of eating food that had been cooked instead of caught, of wearing a borrowed hoodie with the hood up even indoors because the fabric was the only thing that kept my ears from giving me away. I'd mapped three routes to the hero agency I was supposed to report to. I'd practiced saying my own name in the mirror until the accent flattened out of it. *Lena Kaimana. Lena Kaimana.* Like a stone skipping across a pond instead of a fish moving through it.

The alley smelled like wet cardboard and old grease. Two stories up, a fire escape dripped water from last night's rain, and I watched the drops fall with a hunger that embarrassed me. Eleven days without saltwater. My skin had started to feel like paper. My gills, sealed shut in this form, itched like a healing wound.

*You can go back,* said the small voice I'd been ignoring since the ferry. *Nobody's making you do this.*

I pushed off the wall and kept walking.

---

The agency was a glass tower on a street with too many people and not enough sky. I stood outside for a full minute, watching my reflection in the revolving doors. Hood up. Shoulders hunched. A girl who looked like she was about to rob the place instead of apply to work there.

I'd been assigned to Dynamight's agency through the exchange program. That was the official language. *Assigned.* Like a package. Like a problem that needed solving.

The lobby was cold. Not ocean cold, which has texture and memory, but manufactured cold, the kind that comes out of vents and doesn't belong to anywhere. A receptionist with a tight bun looked up at me and blinked twice.

"Can I help you?"

"Lena Kaimana. I'm here for the, the sidekick orientation." My voice came out smaller than I wanted. I cleared my throat. "Siren. That's my hero name."

Something flickered across her face. Recognition, maybe. Or the particular expression surface people make when they've heard about you before they've met you. She tapped at her screen. "Take the elevator to the fourteenth floor. Conference room B. They're already started."

Already started. Of course they were.

The elevator was worse than the lobby. A metal box that hummed and dropped my stomach when it rose. I gripped the rail and watched the numbers climb, and in the mirrored walls I caught a glimpse of myself from four different angles. The hood. The too-big jeans. The bare feet I'd refused to cover even though the pavement outside had been cold enough to sting.

*Shoes,* my host family had told me, gently, twice. *You really should wear shoes.*

I'd tried. I'd made it half a block before the trapped feeling got so bad I had to sit down on a bench and pull them off. The pavement was honest. It told me where I was.

The doors opened on fourteen and the noise hit me like a wave. Voices. Chairs scraping. Somebody laughing too loud at something that probably wasn't funny. I stepped out and followed the sound down a hallway lined with photographs of heroes I didn't recognize, all of them smiling, all of them standing on solid ground.

Conference room B had a glass wall. Through it I could see maybe twenty people in matching training uniforms, all of them seated, all of them turned toward the front of the room where a man was talking with his back to me.

I knew who he was before I saw his face. Everyone did. Dynamight had been on the news every week for six years running, and even in Kaihō, where we mostly ignored surface politics, his name traveled. Explosion hero. Top three. Temper like a lit fuse.

The door was heavy. I pushed it open and twenty heads turned.

"—and if any of you think you're here because you're special, you're not. You're here because you passed a test. That's it. That's the whole—"

He stopped. Turned.

Katsuki Bakugo looked exactly like his photographs, which is to say he looked like someone who'd rather be doing literally anything else. Blond spikes. Red eyes that did a quick, surgical pass over me and filed away everything they found. Hood. Bare feet. The way I was holding my shoulders like I expected the ceiling to fall.

"You're late," he said.

"I'm not. Orientation started at nine. It's 8:58."

Somebody in the back row made a small sound. Bakugo's eyes narrowed.

"Name."

"Lena Kaimana." I made myself meet his gaze. "Siren."

The room went quiet in a way that felt different from the regular quiet. This was the quiet of people who'd been talking about you. I could hear it in the shape of it, the way you can hear a current change direction before it reaches you.

Bakugo stared at me for three full seconds. Then he jerked his chin toward the empty chairs at the back.

"Sit down. Don't be late again."

I sat. The chair was hard plastic and my bare feet pressed flat against the floor, and for the first time in eleven days I felt something that wasn't fear or exhaustion or the low constant ache of missing home.

I felt watched. And I couldn't tell if that was a threat or a promise.

---

The orientation was two hours of logistics. Patrol schedules. Chain of command. The agency's incident reporting system, which apparently crashed every other Tuesday and was nobody's problem to fix. I took notes because it gave my hands something to do, and because every time I looked up, Bakugo was looking somewhere else, which meant he'd been looking at me.

At the end, he dismissed everyone with a wave and a grunt. People filed out in clusters, already forming the small tribes that surface people seemed to need. I stayed in my seat, waiting for the room to empty, because crowds still made my gills itch and because I needed a minute to figure out how to ask what I needed to ask.

When the last sidekick left, Bakugo turned to me.

"You got something to say or you just gonna sit there?"

"I need access to water."

He blinked. "What?"

"During patrol. I need to know where the water is. Fountains. Hydrants. Anything I can use." I stood up and pulled my hood back without thinking, and I heard his breath catch, just barely, when my ears came free. "My Quirk doesn't work without a water source. If I'm going to be useful out there, I need to know what I'm working with."

He recovered fast. Of course he did. "You think I don't know how your Quirk works? I read your file. Twice."

"Reading a file and knowing a person aren't the same thing."

Bakugo's mouth did something complicated. Almost a smile. Almost a snarl. "You always this mouthy with your superiors?"

"You're not my superior yet. Orientation just ended. I haven't signed anything."

The silence that followed had weight. He stepped closer, and I made myself hold still even though every instinct in my body was telling me to put my back to a wall and climb. He was taller than me by a lot. His eyes were very red and very direct and I had the sudden, disorienting thought that he was looking at me the way I looked at the ocean before I dove in. Measuring. Deciding.

"Fine," he said. "You want to know where the water is? Tomorrow. Five a.m. Wear shoes."

"I don't wear shoes."

"Then don't complain when your feet bleed."

He turned and walked out, and I stood alone in the empty conference room with my heart doing something fast and stupid in my chest.

Through the glass wall, fourteen floors down, I could see the city spread out like something that had never been underwater. All that stone. All that light. No salt anywhere.

*You can still go back,* said the voice.

For the first time in eleven days, I didn't listen.