Mere seconds had elapsed since she had lost contact with Naga, but when she located her again her mother was already sinking deep below the surface. Dema sensed that the impact with the waves had knocked most of the air from her lungs, and she had no buoyancy.

Although Naga's mind remained in a semi-conscious drug haze, she had enough swimmer's instinct that she was not attempting to breathe. But Dema knew that her body's physiological response to lack of air would soon suck water into her lungs. Dema beat her way onward, desperate to reach her before this could occur.

But then Dema sensed that, like her daughters, in this emergency Naga's deeper instinct was to transform. Suddenly hopeful, Dema swept her own awareness through the aquatic environment, and guided Naga's opening shaman sense to the presence of fish. Together they located a big muskellunge. Muskie, king of the northern pike. Perfect, thought Dema.

She helped her mother open her awareness to the big fish's sense of itself. In response Naga plunged deep into the fish dream. A spread of feathery gills formed on her neck and her jaw gaped open to let the cold oxygen-rich water flow across them.

As the life-sustaining oxygen entered her blood stream, Naga relaxed further into the link with her fish-familiar. Her fish dream deepened, and her legs became a fish tail, her arms long fins. Still confused by the drug, but with her metabolism now altered to permit survival in the watery environment, she swam off in this new form, with no other thought than to get as far away from Ortega's yacht as she could.

With her mother safe for the moment, Dema was pulled two ways. She wanted to board the ship and take down Ortega and Rankine for having caused all this. But that had to wait. Naga was swimming away from the yacht, but she was also swimming away from the small boat that Sedna and Kore were racing across the waves. Closing in on the area where her mother was swimming deep below the surface, Dema skimmed low, dreamed away her bat wings, and plunged into the water.

Once beneath the surface Dema shifted quickly to snake shape, but although this form was far better suited to swimming than her human body, she knew she couldn't match her mother's speed. And she would have to go back to the surface periodically to breathe. So once again she reached out to the big muskellunge, and she too used it as a familiar, adopting its fish-form gills and fins. Still strongly aware of her mother's presence, and trusting her shaman sense to guide her, with powerful tail strokes she set out in pursuit. With water rushing in through her gaping mouth and out over feathery gills, Dema felt the life-giving oxygen finding its way into her cooling blood, giving her energy for the chase.

Along with the water came the taste of all the substances it contained. There was a taste of fuel oil from the yacht's underwater exhaust, but this was diminishing as she swam away from it. Dema suspected that this alone might have been guiding Naga's headlong rush away from the area, for she continued to head north toward deeper water, away from the Chicago shore.

Before long, Dema picked up a taste that she somehow recognized as her mother, and gained hope that she was closing the distance between them. She reached out to Naga with her shaman dream, and encouraged her to slow her pace.

This time, Dema found Naga more receptive. The cold water, the changed metabolism and the exertion of swimming had combined to clear her mind of much of the drug's effect. But for Naga, it was like waking from one dream to find she was in the middle of another.

She understood that she was in a shaman dream, that she had become partially fishlike in form and metabolism, that she was swimming deep beneath the surface of the lake. She knew that her daughter had assumed a similar fish-like form, and was racing toward her.

Naga was amazed, and frightened, but analytical as ever. She found herself pleased to now have first-hand experience of the phenomenon. But she was not quite sure how or why all this had happened. She stopped her headlong rush, no longer under the compulsion to flee, and with some trepidation waited for Dema to arrive. As she swam closer, Dema stayed in the dream with Naga and asked her to look back through what had happened, starting with leaving her clinic.

Gradually, with Dema's coaxing, Naga recaptured the moment when she had been abducted, and the ensuing hours when her mind had been fogged by drugs. She recalled her escape from the smoke-filled cabin, the fall overboard, and sinking into the depths. She recalled becoming familiar with this fish form through her shaman contact with the muskie, and shifting into this new shape. As she recalled these things, her mind became more at ease. She started to swim back toward Dema.

Dema turned her shaman awareness to Sedna and Kore. Sedna, sensing what had happened to her children, had been keeping their small boat headed in the right general direction. But they were still miles away when Naga and Dema found each other. Remaining in their fish form, an unseen pair of deep-water mermaids, they started swimming toward a rendezvous with the boat. The first gray light of morning was dimly illuminating the waves when they finally surfaced to see the boat approaching.

Dema helped Naga make the shift back to fully human form. Not having suffered the extreme physical trauma that Kore and Dema had experienced, for her it did not take much more than seeing the boat approach and knowing it would now be safe to wake from her fish dream. It helped that Ortega's yacht was nowhere in sight.

Dema had retained her black shift, and somehow Naga had not lost her blouse and skirt. But Sedna wrapped them both in big towels she had found stowed under the deck of the boat. The ride back to shore was long but uneventful. They returned the borrowed boat to the marina where Sedna and Kore had found it. Ever thoughtful, Sedna left what she felt was a generous payment for the use they had made of it, tucked between the cushions of the pilot's seat.