CHAPTER 1

Reaper's POV

One thing about me: I hate the water.

Another thing about me: I hate Hanji fucking Zoe's teaching methods. Why? Because, as my marine biology teacher, she was able to force me to come to the beach.

Shiganshina, South Carolina, was a coastal town, bordered on its east side by a swath of the Atlantic Ocean. The town itself was small and quaint, populated by about ten thousand people all in all, and that was including the seasonal occupants known as Snow Birds – old people who came to the South from the snowy North during the winter. The only real attraction there was the school, Sina High School, one of the country's most exceptional private schools – if by exceptional you mean full of assholes and a fucking insane marine biology professor with too much time on her hands.

I was thinking about just how insane she was as I walked along the beach at three in the morning with my classmates and Hanji. The professor in question held a Styrofoam cooler full of hatched baby sea turtles in each hand, and Marco Bodt cradled another cooler in his arms. Everyone but me was barefoot, digging their toes into the wetly packed sand or kicking up sand dunes as they laughed loudly. I walked along the back edge of the beach, far away from the water, and watched my classmates mess around, pushing and laughing and telling jokes. I tightened my ponytail and stuck my hands in my pockets.

Eventually Hanji put up her hands, signaling for everybody to stop walking.

"Alright, everyone!" she called happily. "Form walls!"

My classmates immediately configured themselves into two even lines, kneeling down in the sand. I knelt at the back near Hanji and beside Jean Kirstein. Hanji gently placed her two coolers in the sand before taking the third from Marco and coming to kneel down at the back of the tunnel we had created with our two lines.

"I'm about to release the turtles!" she said. Everyone made noises of recognition.

Hanji took one cooler and removed its top, gently turning it on its side to allow the baby turtles to escape. Tiny creatures too cute to be reptilian scrambled over the edge of the cooler and began making their stuttering ways towards Armin, who, unsurprisingly, was in the water with a flashlight to guide the turtles out to sea.

We repeated this twice before all the little turtles were in the water. When we were done Hanji whooped in triumph, pumping her fist in the air and kicking up sand with the top of her foot. The whole company – minus me – copied her whoop, though no one else kicked up any sand.

"Alright, team!" she exclaimed. "Good work! Let's head back to the bus!"

Everyone turned around and began walking back up the beach to find their shoes. I felt something wet on my leg and immediately brushed it off with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Now was not the time to get wet.

I looked to my left and saw Armin walking beside me, his pants rolled up and legs sopping wet. I instinctually stepped away from him to avoid getting wet.

"What is it?" he asked when he saw me take that step.

"You know I don't like the water, Armin," I said, shoving my hands deeper into my sweatshirt's front pocket.

"You don't even like being wet?"

I shook my head.

"Not one bit," I lied. "Showers are horrible for me."

"I don't get it. How can you not like the ocean?"

"It's not that I don't like the ocean. It's that I don't like being in the ocean."

Armin shrugged and I watched as the ocean breeze ruffled his blonde hair. I eyed his wet legs cautiously.

"Why did you sign up for such a hands-on class if you don't like getting wet?" he asked as if I hadn't told him the answer a million times before.

"It was the only class that would fit in my schedule," I said.

My friend shrugged again and pushed a piece of hair behind his ear. He looked out at the ocean and sighed.

"Sometimes I wish I was a fish," he admitted. "I wouldn't ever have to leave."

"If you were a fish you'd have such a tiny brain that you wouldn't care where you were," I said dryly. He stuck out his tongue at me.

By that time we had made it to the bus. The first ones there piled in the back, laughing and talking loudly. I said goodbye to Armin and went to find Hanji, who I discovered on the other side of the bus sending out a text. When she saw me she hit the power button on her phone and dropped it in her pocket, smiling brightly at me. I noticed that one of her hands was wet, probably from helping stray turtles into the ocean.

"Hey, Reaper!" she said cheerily. I couldn't help but smile at her. As much as I hated the fact that she could make me come to the shore I couldn't quite hate her. "What's up?"

"I came on my bike. I live right around here," I said. "Do I have to ride back to the school?"

"No, of course not," she said. "Go on home and get some sleep. Just don't forget that we're coming back tomorrow at the same time."

I nodded.

"Thank you, Hanji," I said. She smiled brightly and the moonlight glinted off her glasses eerily, giving me the impression that she could kill a man without blinking.

"Not a problem."

I turned around and waved at everyone through the bus windows. Only Eren, Armin, and Mikasa noticed and waved back. Trudging up a particularly steep sand dune I found my bike perched atop it. I set it upright and carried it over to the pavement, shaking sand out of my shoes as I went. Once on the pavement I got on the bike and began pedaling away. The bus soon passed me, leaving me alone on the seaside road.

I was accustomed to taking midnight walks or bike rides along the beach, so navigating the backroads in the dark wasn't a big deal. I slowed down my pace and looked to my left at all the beach houses, their bright colors washed out by the moon. I could already see my house, an off-white two-story on stilts that was the envy of the neighborhood. Instead of turning left and going down the side street I kept going, looking to my right and out at the night-blackened ocean. I sighed. It really was beautiful.

And then I saw it. It was tiny and in the distance and almost unnoticeable, but it was there. It looked like a head sticking out of the water, and from the way it stood straight up it didn't seem to be disembodied. I clamped down on my brake handles and my bike skidded to an abrupt halt in front of a cliff-like drop off. My jaw clenched.

It was just a swimmer. Stupid kids were always going skinny dipping. That's all it was.

The thing was that there were no other people out there, and skinny dipping tended to be a group activity. It was just the one head – maybe it was just trash. The oceans weren't all that polluted in Shiganshina, but it wasn't impossible that an empty milk jug had gotten into the water.

But then it turned around, and I could tell there were eyes even in the dark. The whites were almost glowing, giving me a very clear picture of steely grey irises. Those were human eyes.

The eyes widened when they saw me looking at them, and the head instantly disappeared under the water. I waited for several minutes, but it didn't reappear. But it had to. This person had to breathe. I vaguely wondered if I had imagined the whole thing, but then I saw a tail fin and my heart froze in my chest.

I only saw it for a brief moment, but I automatically knew that it wasn't a normal fish. The fin was parallel to the water like a whale's, but it was far too small and thin to be a whale. It looked too familiar and I was going to hyperventilate if I stared for any longer.

I blinked several times and then the head was back, those glowing human eyes peeking partially out of the water. I could tell that whoever or whatever this was was staring at me. I felt the telltale shiver run down the back of my neck and my hands squeezed tighter on the brakes.

"Hello?" I called. The eyes widened again and the head disappeared.

I shook my head, still not fully believing that I had seen what I had seen.

"If you can hear me…" I trailed. "Never mind."

I waited for several more minutes, but I saw neither the tail not the head emerge from the water. The waves hit the edge of the cliff and I looked down the four feet into the ocean. All I could see was black.

I unclenched my hands and released the brakes, placing my feet back on the pedals and leaving, not daring to look back out into the water.

When I got home neither of my parents were waiting up for me. I tiptoed past their bedroom and up the stairs, eventually reaching my bedroom. I grabbed my pajamas (which consisted of a pair of flannel pants and a long-sleeved shirt that used to be my father's) and headed into the bathroom, then plugged the tub and turned on the water.

I couldn't get that… person? Animal? I couldn't get whatever it was out of my head. Those eyes had been too bright and too silver and too intelligent. And the tail… it was too similar to-

I must have been thinking for quite some time, because the bathwater was suddenly touching my hand. I quickly retracted my arm and wiped the appendage on my sweatshirt, then stripped myself of my clothing. I dumped my clothes into my laundry hamper before grabbing a towel and placing it beside the tub.

I grabbed onto the sides of the tub and carefully lowered myself in, watching as the bathwater rose as I settled in.

It was instantaneous. I felt the scales begin to bubble up along my legs and hips and I gripped the sides of the tub even more firmly, nearly cracking the porcelain in the process. I knew my knuckles would be white but my eyes were clenched to tightly to see. I felt the nerves rewiring themselves and the scales coming out and my thighs fusing together and my feet stretching out and thinning out and I threw my head back, biting the inside of my cheeks to keep from crying out and waking my parents. The last thing I needed was them to come bursting through the bathroom door, knocking it off its hinges and uncovering their mutant fish freak of a daughter doing her mutant fish freak thing.

When it was done I could tell; there was no more cramping and no more pressure, something for which I was incredibly grateful. I let my eyes slide open.

There, where my legs had once been, was a single long appendage. It was solid black and gleaming and scaly and it had wispy fins at its bottom and along its sides, not unlike those of a beta fish. I flexed a muscle and watched at the fin where my feet had once been flopped about against the side of the tub.

The tail stuck haphazardly out of the tub, given that the appendage itself was probably over four feet long. I finally let go of the sides of the vessel and massaged my aching hands, still staring at my tail.

It was exactly like the one I had seen in the ocean earlier that night.

I leaned back against the tub and pressed my palms against my eyes before trailing my fingertips down to the sides of my neck. I found the ridges of gills.

Maybe I wasn't the only one.

Levi's POV

It had seen me. I was sure of it.

I ducked back down under the water, only coming up when I heard the clicks of that thing it was riding on disappear. It was gone.