Swim Day

Leaning forward in her lifeguard chair, Nixie squinted at the two swimmers—if you could call that swimming—about seventy yards out, well past where most casual swimmers dared. Was one of them in trouble? Maybe not. She swept her gaze around the rest of the beach, then back at them. Maybe. That was far enough out to catch a rip current if the ocean felt surly.

“Why do you have boobs?”

Nixie made a soft choking noise and stared down at the questioner, open-mouthed.

The rabbit boy might be all of thirteen. Just into puberty. Natch.

“You’re a shark, aren’t you? Sharks are fish,” he continued, as if he might be imparting new information to her.

“Unevolved sharks are.” She gestured at herself. “I’m not a shark in the same way they are. They don’t even have limbs to evolve into arms and legs, right? And these?” She touched one of her long, decidedly non-fishy ears.

“Or the boobs!”

“Yes. Or those. Where’s your mum?”

“Your accent is funny. Do you eat people?”

“Lovely chat.” She made a shooing motion. “I’m on duty. Scoot along now.”

He pouted. She made a point of looking back at the ocean, back at her two bad swimmers. Hm. That was definitely a flail, and they were getting farther out. Nixie stood up.

“Holy shit, you’re tall!”

At two point five meters—eight feet two inches in this country’s charmingly nonsensical measure—she was a veritable giant, except compared to the true giants supposedly over the hill in Mensura. Even so. “Does your mum know you use that kind of language?” The other swimmer waved frantically at the shore, and other beachgoers bobbing in the water had started to shout.

“What are you—”

She took off full tilt toward the water, diving in the moment she had enough depth.

Few creatures could outswim even an untrained shark. Nixie was a trained shark. She rocketed past other swimmers, trying to maintain a serene ignorance of the way they screamed and leapt away from her, sometimes inadvertently blocking her route. Sharks were a little scary. Big sharks were a lot scarier.

The flailer, a strapping wolf guy who looked like he might be, like Nixie, in his late twenties, clung to his willowy vixen girlfriend, threatening to pull her under as well. Great. Nixie circled around them, her back fin breaking the surface as she slowed.

“Shark!” the vixen screamed, just as Nixie popped her head up.

“She’s the lifeguard,” the wolf gasped.

The vixen flushed with embarrassment.

“Shark lifeguard,” Nixie confirmed. “C’mon, let’s get you both back to shore.” She easily grabbed both of them, the vixen with her left arm and the wolf with her right. floating on her back and holding them to her sides, keeping their heads above water, she propelled herself backward with her tail.

“Sorry, I thought you were…” the vixen’s mumble trailed off. They both looked acutely aware of their faces being pressed against the side of her chest, which was, as the rabbit boy had noted, far more mammalian than piscine.

“Everyone always does, unless they see me on the lifeguard stand. Sometimes even if they do. But the rip current warning signs aren’t a joke.”

“We’re good swimmers,” the vixen protested.

“Even good swimmers can get caught.”

“I bet you wouldn’t.” The wolf sounded partway between admiring and sulky.

She grinned, trying not to show too many teeth. “Ah, but I’m a great swimmer.”

They reached the beach, and she climbed out of the water, still carrying them under her arms. She crouched to set them down. “You both okay?”

“Yes.” The vixen sounded curt, her eyes on her wolf boyfriend, specifically on the way he was gazing up at Nixie. Apparently he’d decided she wasn’t a monster after all. Or that monsters could be sexy.

“Thank you,” the wolf said. “You saved me.”

“It’s my job.” She patted them both on their shoulders and straightened up to her full height, which made both of their eyes bulge. “You might want to take a break for a bit, and please, don’t go out that far out again.”

When she returned to her chair, someone waited there for her—two someones. A mouse and a cat, both middle-aged women, both maybe one and two-thirds meters high. Both pretty attractive, although she saw a lot of attractive people in this job. (As well as a lot of people who should have chosen different bathing suit styles.) The mouse had fairly short brown hair and hazel eyes, wearing a black bikini; the cat was all white, with luminous sky blue eyes, decked out in a burgundy one-piece.

“That was most impressive,” the mouse said.

“Just my job.” She took her seat.

“The point still stands. Have you ever taught swimming?”

She looked down. “No. Are you looking for lessons?”

“She’s trying to recruit you,” the cat said, tone amused.

The mouse laughed. “Not me. But I know our school’s looking for a swimming instructor.”

“I’m not great with kids.” Not true, at least back home. Here, though, it was the way the kids reacted to her. Except for the ones asking about boobs.

“It’s a college,” the cat said. “Mensura College.”

She furrowed her brow, leaning over toward them. “The one with the magic and the giants?”

“That’s the one.”

That might explain why neither of them flinched at being loomed over. “So who are you, exactly?”

“I’m a librarian. Julia Webb.” She indicated the cat. “This is Arilin Thorferra, one of our professors.”

“Nixie Wilkinson.” She waved around the beach. “I’m flattered, but I wouldn’t be good at teaching. People here get…tetchy around sharks. Lifeguard’s a good enough job right here for someone like me. If your instructor position is something that’s part-time, maybe I can try to make it work with this, but…”

Thorferra shook her head. “All our positions are full-time. With good benefits.”

Nixie’s huge tail flexed, and she brushed back her own hair. Compared to the luxurious fluff of the two short women in front of her, the thick, wet strands made her feel like she had seaweed stuck between her ears. The lifeguard position paid decently, but it was only thirty hours a week, and didn’t include any extra benefits over the most basic government-mandated health insurance.

But a teacher? Her? As if. These two might not be flinching away, but she knew the proverbial exception to the rule when she saw it.

Webb studied her keenly for a few moments, as if reading her thoughts. “You might also find the college to be a more, hmm, hospitable environment than Santa Salchicha.”

“I don’t think I’d like to be that far from the ocean.” Mensura was only forty-five minutes away, assuming traffic was good, but the couple of times she’d visited it felt like another world.

“It’s the everything else I’m thinking about. But I won’t press. If you change your mind, Ms. Wilkinson, or just want to talk about the possibility, come by the campus in the next couple of weeks, to see me or just go to the employment office. You can give them my name as a reference.”

“If I do, I will.” Her left ear flagged. “I mean, if I go, I’ll give them your name.”

The cat lifted a brow fractionally, but the mouse just nodded. “Good. We won’t keep you any longer. Have a nice rest of your day.”

“You too.”

Nixie turned to watch the two head off to another part of the beach, then looked back out at the water, sinking down in her seat and crossing her arms. Hopefully she wouldn’t have to go back in the water again today. “Which is a damn ironic thing for a shark to think, isn’t it,” she muttered under her breath.

The rest of the week remained blissfully quiet at the beach, and the next week started out well enough. Tuesday, though? Tuesday was a shitshow.

It started out with someone knocking themselves unconscious with their JetSki. Nixie didn’t see it happen, and she couldn’t even picture it in her head. When you fall off one of the damn things, they shut off. Did he fall off in front of it? How do you even do that? Almost immediately after that, some rat kid managed to start drowning in the shallows, his mother screaming and flailing rather than just picking him up and dragging him out of the water. When the shark did exactly that, rat mom got even screamier and flailier, until Nixie finally snarled, “Do you want to keep insulting the lifeguard, lady, or do you wanna let her do her job?”

But those were nothing, nothing, compared to the divers.

She knew about the shipwreck a half-mile out—it was part of lifeguard training and, she suspected, part of local lore. As far as wrecks went, it was as unglamorous as it got, though. No old galleon, no sunken treasure, nothing worth exploring. A decade and a half ago, some weekend sailor type managed to sink their ten-meter fishing boat just offshore. The end. From what she’d heard, while there’d been a storm, it hadn’t been much of one; the boat just hadn’t been properly maintained.

So why were the divers bothering? She could only guess because it was relatively shallow. At about twelve meters down, most people without gills still couldn’t get to it without scuba gear, but aquatic mammals could. Like otters.

As usual, the first sign something was wrong was somebody starting to flail in the water, but this time the flailing was someone swimming strongly toward shore—almost as well as she swam—pausing to stop and wave and scream every few seconds. Leaping to her feet, Nixie ran into the water to meet her.

The otter didn’t look like she’d quite hit legal drinking age. When she saw Nixie barreling toward her, she stopped short, floating in the water, scream caught in her throat.

“I’m the lifeguard. What is it?”

“I—” To her (partial) credit, the girl forced down her obvious burst of fear over Nixie’s size and appearance. “It’s my boyfriend. We were exploring the wreck that’s out there and he got caught on something and it’s through his foot and I can’t—I can’t—”

Nixie’s eyes widened. “Is he still underwater?”

She nodded quickly, starting to point. “Y-yes. It’s—”

“I know. Get to shore and call 911.” Without waiting another moment, she dove forward, barreling into the water, keeping close to the ocean floor as she swam. Unlike an otter, she did have gills; breathing wasn’t an issue for her.

It only took a minute for her to get to the wreck, but she felt every second of it. The otter had to have been trapped there—somewhere here—at least five minutes, which meant he only had a couple minutes of oxygen left at best. And she could smell something ominous in the water.

Not on the shore side of the wreck. Naturally. But that scent, a thin, dark line—

Shit. Blood.

She followed it right to the otter, stuck by the ship’s stern. The blood was seeping out of his left paw. What in the everloving fuck, was that a fishing hook?

She swam close. Sure enough: the kind of hook you use fishing for tuna or swordfish, tied to a strong rope-like filament. It had hooked all the way through that paw, somehow. The cord disappeared under the wreck’s side—the weight of the boat itself held it in place.

The otter saw her swimming close, reaching out to tug at the cord, and his eyes bugged out. Despite being underwater, he screamed, wasting precious oxygen, and shoved at her with both hands.

Stop it, you idiot, she thought, trying to grab his arms with one hand while pointing at the lifeguard logo on her one-piece swimsuit. He wasn’t having it.

Fine. Whatever. The cord clearly wasn’t going to pull lose, and she was losing time. She had to cut it. No knife, so teeth it was.

As she bit into it, she heard—more felt—him scream again. He started pounding at her, weakly, until he abruptly went limp.

In a panic, she grabbed the filament in both hands and yanked back on it with her jaws. Damn, it was strong. It cut into her lip, adding her own blood to the otter’s, before ripping with a painful twang.

Grabbing the otter in both arms, she swam straight up, breaking the surface and holding his head and shoulders above it. “Come on, mate. Breathe.” Pulling him against her with one arm, she started swimming backward as fast as she could, using her other hand to start chest compressions.

Two-thirds of the way to shore, he coughed, spat up water, took a heaving breath, coughed up more water. Then looked around, screamed again, and tried to get out of her grip. “Help! Help!”

“Easy. I am help. We’re almost—”

“Help!”

“—to shore.” Swimmers and paddlers looked over at his screaming, some rolling their eyes at him, some flashing her fearful looks.

As they reached shore, he struggled more furiously, managing to squirm out of her grip and drop to the sand. He screamed again when he landed, not at her but at the feeling—and sight—of the hook in his foot. He dropped onto his butt, moaning.

The other otter ran up. “Help is on the way—oh, Three Lords!” She clapped a hand over her mouth at the sight of the hook.

“Pull it out!” the wounded otter gasped, too weak—or maybe just too panicked—to make it a full scream.

“Don’t.” Nixie crouched beside him, holding his arms still. “If you do, you’re gonna lose a lot more blood.”

“You tried to bite me!” He glared up at her accusingly.

“I bit through the cord that was holding you under.”

He shook his head. “Sharks go crazy at the smell of blood. Everyone—”

“That’s a myth.”

“She saved your life, Aaron,” the other otter hissed. “Stop being an asshole!”

“Mary—”

“You’re welcome,” Nixie said, tone flat. “Shut up and listen to your girlfriend.”

Fortunately for both him and her sanity, the paramedics were running up, a fox and a rabbit, carrying a stretcher between them. “Wow,” the rabbit said after they’d set it down by the otter’s side. “You did a number on your foot there, didn’t you?”

“He nearly drowned.” Nixie pointed at the ocean. “He got hooked in that old fishing boat wreck out there. I did compressions on him as I was bringing him back.”

“Feels like my ribs are broken,” the otter wheezed, tone petulant.

“Means she did it right,” the fox said. “So does you breathing.” He grabbed the otter’s shoulders; the rabbit carefully took his legs, and they lifted him onto the stretcher.

“Good work,” the rabbit said, looking up at Nixie. She didn’t act flummoxed by the shark, at least.

“Thanks.”

As the medics and the otters headed back to the ambulance, Nixie flopped backward into the sand, looking up at the bright blue sky, and groaned. She closed her eyes and gave herself a full minute of rest before trudging back to her post.

Her shift’s last three hours had the decency to stay blissfully boring. She clocked out at the office across the shoreline road and headed straight home. Of all days, this was one that sorely deserved a night out drinking, but the first person who stared up at her and made a nervous joke about her height or her teeth would get punched through a wall. Instead, she ordered a taco plate and an extra-large margarita from a food delivery app.

The next morning, she’d barely had time to pour a cup of coffee before the phone rang. Bonnie, her boss at the city’s recreation department. Great.

The squirrel woman on the other of the line mumbled through a perfunctory hi, good morning, how are you before launching into, “So, we had some reports of problems yesterday.”

“Like?”

“A swimmer reported you, uh, tried to bite him?”

“Oi. For f—” She caught herself and forced her voice to be level. “Is this the guy I rescued? The guy who’d managed to impale himself on a tuna fishing hook still attached to the fishing boat wrecked right off shore?”

“I, well, yes, he did have a foot injury. But the biting attempt is what he—”

“I freed him from the wreck.” Her volume rose despite herself. “Ask his girlfriend.” (Ex-girlfriend, if she was smart.) “Or the paramedics who responded to the scene.”

“Did you, uh, use your teeth?”

She calmed herself, taking as big a swig of coffee as she could without burning her mouth. “They’re what I had.”

“Even so, you can’t just go biting—”

“What the hell else was I going to do, Bonnie? The kid was running out of air. It’s not like I swim around with a utility knife. Anyone with teeth like mine—”

The squirrel’s voice rose, too, cutting her off. “There isn’t anyone else with teeth like yours, Nixie, and that’s the problem, isn’t it.” Bonnie took a slow, deep breath, making the phone line crackle faintly. “Look, I admire your quick thinking, and I understand why you did what you did. But if you hurt someone doing your job, the city’s liable for it.”

Liability had come up often enough during her job interview a couple of months ago that she was surprised she’d gotten the offer. At least at the time, the pluses of being a big, strong, lightning-fast swimmer outweighted the minuses of being exotic and scary. “And I haven’t hurt anyone.”

“I know. I know. But it’s…”

She took another sip of coffee, this time to collect herself enough not to sound angry. “That it’s obvious I could hurt people real easy.” The coffee wasn’t keeping her from sounding tired. And probably angry anyway.

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Am I being fired?”

“Nnnnno.” Bonnie drew the word out in a way that couldn’t be good. “As you remember, we agreed it’d be a three-month term at first to see how things went, then we’d decide whether to pick you up for a full year.”

Nixie rubbed her temples. “So you’re not firing me, you’re just not picking me up.”

“We haven’t made that decision yet, and you have four weeks left to go no matter what. But we’d like you to take the rest of the week off while we evaluate where we are.”

Asking whether “we” consisted of anyone other than Bonnie wouldn’t improve her already dismal chances of continued employment. “All right.”

“We’ll call you on Monday with your new hours.”

“Great.” Oh, did that sound bitter? Before she had time to amend it with some forced cheer, Bonnie hung up.

“Great,” she muttered again, setting down the phone.

The highway over the mountains fed into multiple intersections of interstates and expressways; if Nixie was following her phone correctly—never a sure thing—she’d need the expressway that ran right alongside downtown Mensura to get to the college.

She’d half-jokingly wondered whether she’d need the map app at all. Shouldn’t a giant campus be, well, giant? But when an exit sign read “Mensura College, next right,” she wasn’t prepared for it. The buildings on the west side of the highway looked distinctly shabbier than those on the east, and the street ran right through them. This didn’t seem promising.

It wasn’t until she’d gone another two miles, to the edge of town, that she pulled up short, staring out of her Jeep. (Easy enough to do, since her head was higher than the frame. Not very safe, but she couldn’t afford to do much about that.) She could see the archway that had to be the college’s entrance ahead, and it looked like a half-dozen other stone archways she’d seen over entrance roads to unis. But it had to be at least seventy meters high.

“Fuck me,” she murmured under her breath.

She’d never seen a giant, and frankly, she never heard one word about them back home outside of once-every-few-years news stories that she forgot about as soon as they were read. Unless something reminded her, like a bloody humongous stone arch.

Surely, they weren’t that big. After all, she was a giant by nearly anyone’s standard. Wasn’t she?

Swallowing, she sprayed her arms and face with the water bottle she kept in the console—she wasn’t that dry, but sometimes it helped calm her—and kept driving.

While she was following a bus, there weren’t any other cars on the road, and there was another road—separated by a substantial wall—to the right. And another to the left. Definitely weird. Also weird that the place looked so empty. But if it was like other colleges, they were on summer break now, weren’t they? Students smaller than her had to be off-campus, and students bigger than her, well, they weren’t driving anywhere.

While she could see pleasant hills, and the mountains in the distance to the west, buildings were sparse—sometimes low office-like structures, and once in a while impossible fantasies. Stately brick structures like those of century-old campuses, but scaled up to aircraft hangar size. And wasn’t this place barely a decade old?

It took nearly a mile for an information booth to manifest in the median. The bus kept on going; she stopped.

The guard, a chipper-looking chinchilla, leaned out of the information window, looking up. “Hello, ma’am. Have you been on campus before?”

“First time.”

“Where are you going today?”

“Right. Good question.” What was the mouse’s name? “I’m looking for, uh, Julia Webb? The employment office?”

“Are you looking for Ms. Webb, or the employment office?”

She furrowed her brow. “Both?”

“Ms. Webb is the head librarian. Do you want directions to the library, the employment office, or both?”

“Oh. Right. Yes.” She stopped herself from giving him an explanation he didn’t need. “Both it is, then, I guess.”

He handed her a photocopied map, and pointed to two of the buildings. “This is the library, so you’ll take the next left and follow the signs. The administration building is here, with the employment office.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

“Since you haven’t been here before, I have to underline, like, three times, that it’s important you stay on the roads marked for automobiles and park in designated lots and garages. Absolutely do not go onto grass, fields, or paved areas that are unmarked or have warning signs on them.”

“Or what, I’ll get stepped on?”

He met her eyes without returning her smile. “Probably not on purpose, but accidents do happen.”

“Right,” she said again after a moment. “Uh. Thanks. I’ll be careful.”

“Have a nice day.”

It was only two minutes after that—right after she’d taken the next left, as instructed—that she saw her first giant.

He was a coyote, jogging along the other “road” to the right of hers. He wore only shorts—tight shorts—and wristbands. And one of his digitigrade paws could absolutely have pancaked her car.

She slowed down to a crawl, then a stop, gaping up. He was handsome, but he was so—so—

As he passed directly by her, he turned and looked down over his shoulder, flashing a grin and a wink.

“Fuck me dead,” she murmured under her breath, but managed a weak smile in return.

She dropped back into her seat hard enough to send a stabbing pain up her fin (folding it against a seat back didn’t hurt if she was careful, but sucked if she wasn’t), staring out—partially over—the windshield. She might be a giant, but she was not a giant. She was just…just unusually tall.

Okay. Deep breath. She misted herself again, then gave one of her cheeks a firm slap, gripped the steering wheel, and resumed driving.

She’d thought the library would be one of those unbelievably massive buildings she’d seen earlier on the drive, and as she drew closer, she realized it absolutely was. It had the same “old ivy” look she’d seen on the buildings in the distance, but to her eye the lines—and the use of glass—spoke to a more modern design. She’d call it a touch severe, but not unattactive. Were it in a city, though, it would occupy multiple blocks.

The road was less empty now, with a few more cars and another bus. She could see some giants outside the library’s mammoth front entrance, too. At least, the entrance on their scale. Where was the normal entrance?

The road to the library stopped following the giant sidewalk as it got close, dropping down to go under it through a tunnel to emerge on a ramp running alongside the building. Okay: they’d set the structure into the side of a hill, or maybe built up a berm? She was heading to a parking garage that, from her vantage point, looked like ground level, but had to be at least twenty meters higher than where she’d started.

Inside, the garage looked like any other garage. The ceiling height, the elevator, the short hallway the elevator opened onto—everything remained reassuringly commonplace, until the hallway ended on a wide, open floor overlooking the real library.

The decor on both this floor, the normal floor, and the floor below maintained the same stately look, grand wooden desks and solid shelves, plush couches and chairs arranged in sitting areas. But the area below—and above—was, inevitably, giant scale.

Nixie walked to the railing and just stared, up and down. She’d come out on the third floor of five, and each of these normal-sized levels all but overflowed with books. Books books books. The giant-sized floor had far fewer shelves, but one shelving unit had a crazy steampunk-looking gadget, brass dials and wheels and levers and buttons, on each end. As she watched, students occasionally came up to one or the other, twiddled the dials and switches, and threw the lever. When they did that, some of the giant books faded away, replaced by different sets.

The shark watched, open-mouthed. Magic. It was a magical book management system.

After nearly a minute passed, she looked around for anything that resembled an information desk. The floor was busy, dozens of students, all shorter than her and none of them giving her a second glance even when they noticed her. Hmm.

Ah. There, a big half-circle desk with two women sitting behind it: a prim-looking rabbit and a more punk-looking sheep. She headed over to the sheep.

“Good morning.” The sheep glanced up from her computer—that seemed unexpectedly modern, somehow—and flashed a smile. Her brows lifted fractionally at Nixie’s height; maybe her scale was still unusual on campus.

“Hi. Um, I guess I’m looking for Julia Webb?”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I’m, uh, here about a job. My name’s Nixie Wilkinson. She and I met at the beach last week.”

The sheep arched a brow at that, and she laughed. “Huh. All right, I’ll send her a message.” She typed out something on the computer and watched her screen for a few seconds. “She says she has a few minutes. She’ll meet you over there.” She pointed back at the balcony railing.

“Uh, all right. Thanks.” She headed over to the indicated spot. Were there any offices on this level? Probably on either the first floor, or the fifth, so she should keep an eye on the elevator.

When she glanced back at the main floor, it took her a moment to realize one of the giants was walking toward her, and another to realize who the giant was.

Julia Webb wore a steel blue knee-length skirt with a matching suit jacket over a white blouse. Open-toed, high-heel sandals clacked audibly on the floor as she approached; the trim, elegant look of the shoes belied their size. Black-rimmed glasses reinforced her professional librarian bearing.

Nixie tilted her head back as the mouse approached, acutely aware she was staring but unable to stop. When they’d met on the beach, she’d thought Webb was cute. At nearly thirty meters high, she was still attractive, but cute was no longer the word. She was intimidating as fuck.

“Ms. Wilkinson.” Webb rested one hand on the railing, just a meter or so away from the shark. “What can I help you with?”

Words didn’t come for several seconds. Then she blurted out, “You’re a giant!”

“Yes, I am.”

Nixie gulped. “Oi, I must sound like an idiot. I, um…the job you mentioned. Is the college still looking for a swim instructor?”

“It’s not my position to fill, so I can’t give you a definitive answer. You need to check with the employment office.”

“Right. I just wanted to make sure it was still okay to use you and, uh, the cat?”

“Professor Arilin Thorferra. Yes, it’s still fine to use both of us as references.”

“Right. Thanks.” She paused. “Is Professor Thorferra normally a giant, too?”

“Yes.”

Nixie got the disquieting impression Webb was fighting to keep a straight face. She cleared her throat. “Do you have any tips? Like, things about the school that aren’t obvious that’d be useful to know.”

Webb laughed. “That’s a broad subject, Ms. Wilkinson. There’s so much about the college that isn’t immediately obvious. If I were you, I’d think about the parts that are. How well will you deal with being around people my size, both on land and in the water? Do you think you’ll be comfortable around magicians, knowing that magic can be just as unpredictable in real life as it is in fantasy stories?”

“I can’t say for sure, if I’m honest.” She scratched the back of one ear. “But it might be easier to be comfortable around people who aren’t uncomfortable with me, and like you said, maybe this place might fit the bill. I only have a few minutes to go on, but it’s promising so far.”

“That’s good to hear.” The mouse lifted her wrist, glancing at a mechanical watch that belonged on a clock tower face. “The office closes for lunch in an hour, so you might want to be on your way now.”

A very gentle, professional dismissal, but she got the message. “Okay. Thanks again.”

Webb smiled, readjusting her glasses. “Good luck, Nixie.” She walked back toward her office.

Taking another deep breath, Nixie headed back to her Jeep, checked the map, and drove on toward the employment office.

The administration building looked much more like any standard office: still an attractive brick building that looked like it’d been around for decades, but just two normal stories high. Did giant employees like Ms. Webb and Professor Thorferra go to some other building entirely? Sit down in the lawn and wait for somebody to come out? The latter was funnier, but the former seemed a lot more likely.

Inside, she saw no information desk, just a directory sign and a map. The employment office was on the second floor, suite 230. Okay.

Once she got there, the process felt exceedingly anti-climactic. Introduce herself to the vixen clerk (not unfriendly, but not a bastion of warm fuzzies), get a generic application to fill out, write a paragraph about the specific job she wanted, list references. She put down Webb and Thorferra, along with one of her current coworkers—not her boss, since she wasn’t sure she trusted her. It all struck her as unusually old school, but maybe that fit this campus. And she’d have had to keep herself from screaming if she’d been told to fill everything out online, on a website she could have accessed from home.

When she handed it back over, the vixen glanced over it quickly. “Have you worked with Ms. Webb and Professor Thorferra before?”

“No. But they saw me in action at the Santa Salchicha beach and said maybe I should apply for this job. So here I am.”

“‘Action.’” She flipped backward. “As a lifeguard?”

“Right.”

She nodded. “If you have a few minutes to wait, Ms. Wilkinson, I’ll see if the athletic director is available.”

Nixie tried to hide her surprise. Talk to the hiring manager? Right now? Not wait for a callback? “Yes, uh, yes. Great. Thanks.”

The vixen turned back to her work. Nixie took a seat on a cushioned bench, clearly not built for someone her size, not that anything in this area was. At least it didn’t risk catching her fin. And to be fair, not much was correctly sized back home, either, unless it was made by sharks for sharks. A lot of hand-made, custom furniture, most of which she’d barely been able to afford even with “village resident” discounts. (Silver lining: the village as a whole was pretty damn well off, since its reputation for high-quality goods had spread across the region.)

After a minute of fidgeting, she got up, slowly walking around the reception area, browsing the wall art: weird, abstract colorful shapes bursting across white canvases. At first glance, they looked like they’d been created by paint thrown randomly at the canvas, but they were placed far too precisely, sometimes outlined in black. She didn’t like them, but they sure weren’t the typical bland pastels typical of office paintings.

“Student art,” the vixen said, just as the door opened and a wolf strode in.

Nixie hadn’t expected the athletic director to be a woman—and she’d half-expected them to be a giant—but she doubted this could be anyone else. The grey wolf stood a “mere” two meters, but stretched at least a half-meter wide shoulder to shoulder. She didn’t look like a weightlifter as much as she looked like she juggled weightlifters to relax. Long hair, dyed purple, had been tied back in a ponytail; she wore only a sports bra and athletic shorts, unless you counted studded leather bracelets as clothing.

Ignoring Nixie for the moment, she walked to the desk, where the vixen already held out Nixie’s application. Scanning it in a few seconds, the wolf turned to look up at Nixie. “Hi.” She held out a hand. “Imala Morningsong.”

“Hello.” She took the wolf’s hand. “I’m Nixie Wilkinson.”

Morningsong squeezed her hand in a brief shake. While Nixie’s hand enveloped the wolf’s, the strength made it feel like the opposite. “So, you want to be my swimming instructor?”

I don’t know if I’d say “want,” honestly, but my current job’s circling the drain and this is the only lead on anything else I have. “I’m definitely considering it. I’d love to hear more about what it involves.”

The wolf lifted her brows at that answer, then grinned. “Honest enough. You have lifeguard experience, I see. But I didn’t see any teaching experience, running training sessions, that sort of thing. Have any of that?”

Nixie started to shake her head, but stopped, thinking about it. “Does tutoring count?”

“Mmm.” The wolf waggled her hand in a kinda sorta gesture. “Can’t hurt, at least. I’m guessing you haven’t spent much time around giants.” She pointed up at the ceiling. “That kind of giant, not your kind of giant.”

“No,” Nixie admitted.

Morningsong nodded. “I don’t think anyone who isn’t naturally giant has before they get here, and the giants don’t have much experience with littles, either. First time I saw somebody I was ankle-high to, I just about shit a brick. Come with me and I’ll show you the swimming lake, and tell you about the job. Did you bring swimwear?”

“I might have my spare work one-piece in my Jeep.”

“Great. Okay, how about you drive and I’ll tell you where to go.”

Nixie walked back to the parking lot, Morningsong following. “Nice ride. Do much off-roading?”

“A little.” The shark sat down, adjusting her thick tail. “Mostly I got it because I can fit in it.” She patted the roll bars, which were below her eye level.

“What do you do when it rains?”

“Get wet.”

The wolf laughed.

Swimming lake conjured multiple images in Nixie’s head, none of which met the reality, even though none were that far off. It was absolutely a lake, not so big that she couldn’t see to the other side, but far from small, either. Assuming it was deep enough, it was both wider and longer than a regulation swimming pool on Ms. Webb’s scale, several times over. The near side of the lake, though, looked like the side of a swimming pool: perfectly straight side, tiles, markers for depth, ladders, steps, several diving boards. And, yes, a lifeguard stand. Also a boat ramp, admittedly not standard pool equipment.

“Wow.” She looked out over the water. “I’m used to seeing boats and swimmers mix, but I’ve never had to deal with swimmers bigger than boats.”

Morningsong folded her arms. “How would you coach someone who was?”

“I…” Nixie thought a moment, then shrugged. “The same way I’d coach someone who wasn’t. We’d have to account for the bigger size, sure. More depth needed, you’d definitely need to think more about leaving a wake and about clearance to your sides and sometimes above. But the mechanics of the body, of how you swim, are still the same.”

“Let’s find out.” She nodded toward a low, short wooden building that looked like it was set at the base of—what was that, a fire tower? Huh. “Go change, then swim out to me.” Morningsong started walking toward a canoe rack near the boat ramp.

Nixie tilted her head, then grabbed her swimsuit and headed toward the changing room. By the time she got out and threw her clothes back in her Jeep, Morningsong was already far out to, er, out to lake. But the wolf could paddle a canoe fast.

All right, then. You want a race, you got it. Nixie jogged to the shore, side, whatever, checked the depth marker—four feet was something like one point two meters, right?—and dropped into the water. Not as cold as the ocean was. She liked that. Compared to where she grew up, the seas here were positively arctic.

Kicking off, she rocketed toward the canoe, traveling just below the lake surface. The lake stayed shallow until maybe twenty meters out, when the floor dropped down fast. She lost sense of where the bottom was in no time at all. Was that natural? Maybe, especially if this lake had been a spring formation. But no, the water was too warm for that.

She didn’t lose sense of where Morningsong’s boat was, though. In another few seconds she slowed, getting ahead of the canoe and popping up ahead and just a little to the side.

The wolf pulled the canoe to a stop expertly (better than Nixie could have: great swimmer, so-so boater). “Impressive.”

Nixie shrugged, bobbing in place. “Shark.” She did a double-take as she glanced back at shore. The changing room wasn’t under a fire tower, it was under a giant-sized lifeguard tower.

“All sharks are that fast and that good at staying on course, even underwater?”

“I don’t know about all sharks, but…”

“Don’t undersell yourself, Wilkinson. This is a job interview.”

Her ears splayed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Explain how you swam here.”

Nixie squinted. “What?”

“You swam from the shore to here. Tell me how you did it.”

She blinked rapidly. How do you put that into words? Well, if you’re going to pretend to be a teacher, you’d better figure that out pronto. “In a pool—or a lake with a flat side—you start by kicking off. Same motion as jumping in place, but staying parallel to the water for an initial push. Now, what I do is mostly driven by my tail and legs. I can stay underwater just about indefinitely, though. If you’re not swimming underwater, you’d want a different style. You’d want to drive with your arms more than your legs.”

“How?”

“You want the crawl stroke. That name sounds slow, but it’s the fastest way to swim on the surface if you get good at it. Start moving forward with your arms, pushing the water like this.” She lifted an arm over her head and “windmilled” it, cupping her hand, bringing the other arm up as the first arm went down. “If you have webbing between your fingers, you should spread them; otherwise, you should keep them together.”

“And you kick with your legs?”

“Yes, but keep your legs straight and flex your feet, kind of a flutter kick.”

“Like this?” Morningsong jumped out of the boat.

Nixie chirped in surprise. Before she could say anything, Morningsong started swimming, more or less as the shark had described. Not bad, but—

She swam alongside, quickly catching up. “Move your head, too. Every other stroke, move to the side and breathe in.”

The wolf started doing that. “Good catch,” she panted.

Nixie squinted again, but kept up with her interviewer.

Abruptly, Morningsong started treading water. “Okay, now we test your theory that giants have the same mechanics as littles.”

“How?”

“Wear this.” She pulled a choker out of her cleavage and held it out to the shark.

Nixie opened her mouth, then closed it. “Ah, sure.” She examined it. Leathery, but it didn’t seem to quite be leather. Just as well, since it’d be ruined by the water if it was. No adornment other than the clasp. She put it on. “Now what?”

“Swim over there,” she pointed, “and become big.”

Another rapid blink. “Do what now?”

“Visualize yourself as a giant—say, Webb’s size—and focus on the choker.”

“And I’ll become giant.”

“You’ll become giant.”

“Just like that.”

“Just like that.”

She suppressed a skeptical frown—mostly—and swam “over there,” about ten meters away.

So now what? What did visualize yourself as a giant even mean? Well, okay, that was obvious. But she needed something to compare herself to, right? Like, standing nose-to-nose with the librarian. She could picture that. Oh, and picture them both in the library, so the scale was right. Check.

Nothing happened.

Wait, she had to focus on the choker, too. How could she do that and keep all the rest of the images in her mind?

Hmm. Maybe if she pictured herself wearing the choker, standing in the library, nose to nose with Ms. Webb—

All at once she launched into the air, her vision distorting crazily as the lake geysered around her. She started to scream, but her voice was wrong, dropping in—no, it wasn’t dropping in pitch, but it was adding bass. Somehow. And volume.

The spinning of the world slowed. She was still in the air. But still in the water. Not just a higher vantage point, but—but—

Morningsong was holding on to the side of the canoe, waving up. The toy canoe. The doll-sized wolf.

“Holy fucking—” Abruptly she clapped both hands over her mouth.

“So,” the wolf called up. “How does swimming like that feel?”

Nixie looked back and forth, then took a hesitant, slow crawl stroke, then another. Then she slowly moved into a more natural rhythm, swimming out deeper into the lake fifty meters or so—no, no, more like a kilometer. Shit. She stopped, getting her bearings again, then swam back to the wolf underwater, breaking the surface a few meters away. She wondered if Morningsong would jump, but bet she wouldn’t. She didn’t.

“It’s…not the same as when I’m little.”

“What’s different?”

“I can feel all the new mass I have, but at the same time it doesn’t feel any heavier. My strength’s grown to match. Is that making any sense?”

“It is. What else?”

“When you pivot your arms and legs, swing them back and forth, you describe an arc, right?” She slowly windmilled one arm in place. “What feels like the same amount of power moves more slowly along that arc. But there’s more momentum, more force.”

“So does it feel like your speed scales up linearly?”

“No. It’s definitely not linear. It’s like…I’d have to look up the math.”

The wolf nodded. “It’s the same math as a pendulum: the difference in speed you get by increasing length is the square root of the difference beween the lengths. If you get nine times taller than you were, your walking—or swimming—speed isn’t nine times faster, it’s three times faster.”

“Huh. Okay.” She looked down at the wolf. “I’d still teach giant students the same way, though. It’s not that different.”

“I’d like to set up a couple trial classes for you to teach. Next month, you come back for three sessions with people my size the first week, and three sessions with people your current size the second week. We’ll pay you for both weeks, the same rate you’d get if you were hired. Then we’ll go from there. Sound good?”

Nixie’s heart skipped a beat. She tried not to sound dismayingly enthusiastic. “That’d be great.”

“Good. Now change back.”

“How…wait, I’ll get it.” She visualized herself “small” again, still wearing the choker, using Morningsong and the canoe as a reference. All at once she was back to her normal size, floating where her giant self had been—about ten or eleven meters lower. She looked up at walls of water towering overhead; before she made sense of it, they crashed down, leaving her underwater.

Damn. Good thing she had gills. She swam back to the surface, breaking it a meter or so away from Morningsong. “I guess I should have expected that.” She took off the choker and handed it back.

“I’d have warned you if you weren’t a shark.” The wolf grinned. “Probably.”

“You’re all doing great.” Nixie swam to the side of her four students in a near-upright position, a kind of cross between a backstroke and treading water that she’d learned before she’d become a lifeguard. It let her keep an eye on them all while she was in the water. “Terry, keep your fingers cupped.” She held her cupped fingers over her head. “I have webbing, but you don’t.”

The tiger going by grunted at her, but corrected his form.

After she brought her three students to a stop, Jennifer gave her an eager look, mixed with concentration as the rat paddled in place to keep her head above water. “So what’s next week?”

“This is the end of my trial period, so I couldn’t tell you.”

Her ears splayed. “But you’re going to take the job, aren’t you?”

“They’ve got to offer it to me first.” She motioned toward the lake shore. “Come on.”

Swimming back as a giant—and staying giant, even as she climbed back onto land—still gave her a thrilling, disorienting frisson. Following Morningsong’s offhanded advice earlier in the week, Nixie had made sure she was taller than any of her giant students, just as she was taller than any of her little students when she was little herself. (She’d been informed the proper term was “little,” not “normal.”) The difference wasn’t as dramatic—she was a bit over a head taller than Terry, the biggest of the group—but it felt right, somehow. Looking up at giants was fine for her when she was little, but when she was giant, she was going to damn well be a giant giant.

Although this was, most likely, the last time she’d ever be giant. Even if they did offer it to her, could she take it?

“I don’t see why they wouldn’t,” Terry said.

“Hmm?” She snapped out of her thoughts. “Wouldn’t what?”

“Offer it to you. You’re a natural talent.”

She shrugged, looking away and half-smiling. “That’s the catch, isn’t it, love. It is natural for me. I can’t teach anyone to be a shark.”

Jen put a hand on her hip. “When you’re actually on staff I’m not going to be able to talk back to you like this, so I’m going to take advantage of it now. For fuck’s sake, Nixie, stop selling yourself short.”

“Seriously,” Jason added before she could respond. The squirrel waved back at the lake. “I mean, I know I still suck, but three lessons from you and I’m doing better than I ever did before. And believe me, I’ve tried.”

“All right, all right.” She held up her hands, feeling embarrassed and a little irritated. “Don’t lay it on so bloody thick. I’m glad I’m not making too much of a fool of myself. But I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about moving back. I think I’m in the wrong half of the world.”

Jen tilted her head. “Homesick?”

“No.” She answered so quickly it was almost a snap. All the students looked at her quizzically. Ah, good way to increase your embarrassment there. She cleared her throat. “I mean, I like the place, but it’s not as much that I’m missing it as I don’t fit in here. I have a funny accent, I’m a giant all the time—”

Terry snorted, which made Jen laugh.

“You know what I mean.” Nixie crossed her arms, but couldn’t help smile. “Seriously, between that and being a species it seems like nobody here’s seen except on TV shows where we’re always cast as feral seaside killers… I’m just tired of being looked at like I’m a monster.”

“But you’re gorgeous,” Jen blurted. “And I love your accent.”

Nixie stared at her.

Jason gave the rat a gentle shoulder shove. “How many staff members do you have a crush on now?”

Alison, the ewe who hadn’t spoken up yet besides nodding along with the others, grinned. “That would be one hundred percent of the hot women.”

“Shut up,” Jen muttered, ears blushing. “Just two. Or three.”

Nixie arched one brow. “Hot women?”

Terry helpfully started, “It’s slang here for attractive—”

“I know what it means. I just don’t think anyone here, especially, would call me hot.”

All four of the students just looked at her. Terry and Jen both crossed their arms.

She looked back, feeling a blush started to rise around her own face, and laughed self-consciously. “And if I get offered the job, and take it, this is really inappropriate.”

“We’ll all behave if you’re hired,” Terry said flatly.

Jason pointed at Jen. “Except for her.”

Jen gave him a return shoulder shove. “I don’t know much about where you’re from, Nixie. But I know there’s one thing you can do here that you can’t there, just like me. And you and I are both doing it right now.”

Nixie started to ask the obvious question, but the obvious answer came to her. She touched her fingers to the choker and frowned in thought.

As Imala Morningsong ran down a list of critiques, Nixie felt each one as a little papercut, sinking a millimeter into her uncomfortable seat with every nick. Yes, the review had started out with positives, but the clear subtext was Boy, you don’t know much about teaching, do you.

When the wolf finished, she leaned back in her desk, eyeing the shark. “So do you have any questions for me?”

That was always a trick question in a job interview, wasn’t it? If you said no you didn’t seem interested enough, even if it was honest, and even if the outcome was a foregone conclusion. “You explained what I could have done better well enough. I’ll keep it all in mind for the future.” She hoped Morningsong wouldn’t ask her for specifics, because in truth it was all a fog. Maybe she’d be able to review it all by tomorrow, but she didn’t see why she should bother.

Even so, Nixie knew the interview dance, and she might as well run through the motions. “Is there anything I can answer for you?”

“Yes. When can you start?”

“I, uh.” Was this just an abstract, offhand question? Just for the files? What? “I guess two weeks?”

“Great. I’ll get the offer letter out to you later today.” She stood up and held out her hand. “Welcome aboard.”

Nixie stood up, feeling so dizzy she barely remembered to shake her new boss’s hand in return.

When the letter arrived at her apartment the next day, she nearly called them to ask if the number was a typo. It wasn’t insane amounts of money, no—but it was a salary, not an hourly wage, not tied to the number of classes she taught, just “here’s what you get every week and it’s more than you’ve ever made.”

She considered quitting by phone—Bonnie would have had no compunction about firing her that way—but the squirrel worked at the tiny seaside office across the road from the beach every other Wednesday, and she could go in person and look back at that particular beach one last time. While she couldn’t stay away from the ocean, she’d found less crowded and far prettier beaches near Santa Salchicha.

When she got to the office, she made a point of exaggeratedly ducking under the door frame. “Hi, Bonnie.”

“Nixie.” The squirrel looked up from her desk with a stiff, nervous smile. She’d always seemed like she was desperately trying to hide how terrified she was around the shark. “You’re…not supposed to be here today.”

“I know.” She walked over to the manager’s desk, leaning forward. Bonnie looked like she was about to dive under it. Nixie smiled, widely. “Just letting you know I’m not coming back.”

“You’re…you’re quitting? We’ll be sorry to see you go.”

Nixie leaned down farther, keeping her smile. “Will you?”

The squirrel chittered, gripping the desk.

She straightened up. “Thanks for being so understanding and supportive during my time here, Bonnie.” She dropped the smile, looking straight down into her former supervisor’s eyes. “I promise I won’t forget any of it.”

“Great,” Bonnie got out voicelessly.

Nixie turned and walked out, not looking back.

Out on the beach, she strolled toward the lifeguard chair—not a tower by any stretch, and currently occupied only by a sign that read LIFEGUARD NOT ON DUTY, SWIM AT OWN RISK. Well, wasn’t that nice. That’d be a great help to the next dude who got stuck in the rip current.

A soft, startled chirp drew her attention to two otters on a beach towel nearby, a girl and a guy. When they saw her looking down at them, the guy nearly jumped out of his fur.

“Oh, you two. What is it, Aaron and, uh, Mary? You got me suspended from my job, Aaron.”

Mary winced. “I’m so sorry.”

Aaron looked like he was about to start running. “I thought you were about to bite me!”

“Yeah, we kind of established that I was saving your life, mate, not biting you.”

“You want me to say I’m sorry?”

“Are you? Don’t say it just because you think I want to hear it.”

He looked down and sighed deeply. “I was scared, okay? I was scared out of my mind already and I had a giant hook in my foot and when I saw you I freaked out because I’d never seen anything like you and I wasn’t thinking straight to start with.” He looked back up at her, this time finally looking more distraught than frightened or angry. “You did save my life and I kept being a scared little shit. I’m really sorry. Thank you. If you want me to call your boss or something—”

She shook her head. “Nah, I already quit. This wasn’t a job for me. Not here. I’m going to work over the hill in Mensura, where they’re just less worried about sharks.”

“Mensura, uh, with the giants?” Aaron said hesitantly.

“That’s the place. I’m going to be giving them swimming lessons.”

“How?” His voice got squeaky.

She leaned down closer to him again. “Picture that shipwreck you got stuck in, Aaron, and then picture me big enough to bite that ship in half.”

Mary’s eyes seemed to double in size, but she smiled. “That sounds—incredible.”

“It does, doesn’t it. What do you think, Aaron?”

He looked at her, looked at Mary, then fainted.

Nixie straightened up. “This is going to be a great swim day.” She waved to Mary, then walked down the beach into the water.