The first flickers of bioluminescence moved past the window. Heather ignored them as best she could, feeling for the controls that would return her to the world where there was light, and air, and her sister, waiting patiently for her to come back and start apologizing.
She was still trying to restart the engines when there was another impact from above. This time it was accompanied by a trickle of water falling down to strike her shoulder, shockingly cold and impossible to ignore.
Heather closed her eyes.
When the final impact came, when the water flooded into the pod and took the rest of the world away, she didn’t fight it. It would go faster if she didn’t fight it.
It could never have gone fast enough.
CHAPTER 13
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 2, 2022
Holly’s screams were deep and primal, unshaped by her ears; they came straight from her gut, the cries of a wounded animal that knew, all the way down to its bones, that it could never be whole again. She threw herself at the startled engineers, clawing for the control panel, and it was only Hallie’s arm around her waist that pulled her back. Heather’s final words were still flashing on the screen, that unfinished sentence trailing into nothingness …
Hallie thought she would be seeing those words every time she closed her eyes for the rest of her life.
“What the fuck?!” demanded one of the bystanders, a scientist she didn’t know by name. She thought it was one of the theoretical biologists. She honestly didn’t care. He looked like he’d sink if she threw him into the pool. She wanted to throw him into the pool. She wanted to do a lot worse than that.
“She can’t hear herself,” Hallie shouted, a lifetime of explanation, of translation, of shielding her baby sisters from the world kicking in and taking over. It was almost a relief. Maybe if she translated her sister’s grief, she’d find a way to handle her own.
There are only two of us now, she thought, and her stomach clenched.
Holly jerked out of her arms, pushing her way to the controls. Hallie let her go. The scream had died, replaced by a deep, absolute silence that should have seemed familiar, and instead felt even louder than the sound that had come before it.
Hallie tapped Holly on the shoulder. Holly turned, eyes wide and wild.
‘We have to go down,’ she signed, fingers flashing. ‘We have to get another submersible. We have to go get her. We have to save her.’
‘We can’t,’ Hallie signed. ‘We can’t. She’s gone. They lost contact. Her hull ruptured. Holly … Heather’s gone.’
Holly stared at her for a long moment before flinging herself, weeping, into her older sister’s arms. Hallie bore her up, but barely; her own knees were threatening to buckle, to dump her to the deck.
Nearby, Tory watched with her hands pressed over her mouth, fingers clamped so tightly that they were going white around the edges. She jumped when someone reached over and pulled her hands down, turning to stare, wide-eyed, at Olivia.
Even with everyone running and panicking around her, Olivia seemed calm. The skin around her eyes was tighter than usual, but apart from that, she could have been preparing to go on the air. She had Tory’s hands firmly by the wrists, keeping them away from her face. She might as well have been carved from marble, for all the yielding she seemed capable of in that moment.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” she said, in a low voice. “It won’t do anyone any good, and we have someplace we need to be.”
“I wasn’t going to hurt myself,” said Tory automatically. Pain flared at the corner of her mouth. Olivia still had her hands hostage; she felt the pain with her tongue, and tasted blood. She had pulled an old split on her lip open. She winced and amended, “More than I already had. Where do you think we need to be? Heather is dead—”
“That means the mermaids are directly under us.” Olivia let go of her hands and took a quick step back, like she was afraid of reciprocal grabbing. “We’re going to wind up shutting down half this damn boat for the rest of the day because everybody’s sad and there’s nothing immediately apparent for us to take revenge on. But you—”
“I could pick up the sonar from the entire school,” breathed Tory, eyes going wide with something other than shock or sorrow.
Olivia nodded. “So move.”
They moved, leaving behind the mourning masses around the launch point. They could feel bad about it later; right now, there was science to be done, and only a short time in which to do it.
There were those who considered scientists heartless, or cruel, or uncompassionate, because of moments like these: anyone who could turn their back on a tragedy to chase down something seemingly inconsequential like a sonar rig was clearly somehow less than human. What Tory would have explained, if she’d been in a position to do so, was that curiosity was part of what made them absolutely human. Curiosity was the reason humanity had come down from the trees and spread across the world. Sadness was tempting. Sorrow held more charms than most people liked to think, and it would swallow her whole if she let it. She had been dancing with sorrow since the Atargatis. But that was what made it so important that other things happen even when the sad things were already going on.
She couldn’t bring Heather back. She couldn’t change the past. That didn’t mean she couldn’t avenge Heather, and her own sister, for the sake of the people who’d been left behind. Sometimes science was the closest thing to the sword of an avenging angel humanity was ever going to get.
“Luis!” She slammed the door of their lab open so hard that it rattled in its frame. Her partner jumped in his seat and spun to face her. “Focus any microphones you aren’t using on the space below the ship, and repurpose everything you are using! We need audio, and we need it five minutes ago.”
“What are you—” He stopped at the sight of Olivia, an unreadable expression sweeping over his face. “What is she doing here?”
“Chasing a story,” said Olivia. She followed Tory across the room, watching the taller woman settle at her computer. There was something like hunger in her eyes. “They’re right under us.”
“They … You mean the mermaids? We found them?”
“Right,” snapped Tory, hands already in motion, twisting dials, setting new parameters. “Heather Wilson went down. We got some incredibly clear visual feeds, but she wasn’t recording anything more than very raw audio.”
“Well, she’s deaf, so I guess she wouldn’t think about what those settings ought to be,” said Luis automatically. He stopped, eyes bulging in their sockets, before he managed to squeak, “Wait—what? We have video confirmation that they’re down there? Like, actual video confirmation? Not just ‘Looks like an eel, let’s call it a mermaid so we can justify this shit-show’?”
“They killed her,” said Tory, not taking her eyes off her screen. Her hands kept moving. They never slowed, never stopped.
But Heather’s had. Heather’s hands had been her connection to the world, the way she spoke, the way she defined herself as a part of the greater mass of humanity, and now they were still. They were going to be still forever. It was hard to focus on her typing, and not on the things that Heather’s hands would never say.
Luis was gaping. Olivia turned to face him, smoothly sliding into her position as professional go-between as she said, “Heather was piloting her submersible into the Challenger Deep when unknown aquatic hominids surrounded her vessel and attacked. She fled, they pursued. They were faster. She was lost at sea.”
Luis closed his mouth in favor of blinking before asking, “What the fuck do you mean, ‘unknown aquatic hominids’?”
“Haven’t you watched any of my reports on the inboard feed? You’ve been in half a dozen of them.” More often than any other scientist on the ship, except for Tory, who had been featured almost a dozen times. Olivia kept waiting for someone back at corporate to catch on to the reasons behind that. No one ever did. Sometimes the obliviousness of people was her only refuge.
&
nbsp; “Why would I watch them? I was there when you were making them.”
“Because there’s bumper text, to give context, and—oh, never mind.” Olivia pulled out her tablet, swiped her fingers fiercely across it, and offered it to Luis. “Look. Mermaids.”
Luis took the tablet. The recording from Heather’s Minnow was playing, mermaids swimming out of the deep dark and into the brighter water around the submersible. The alien lines of their anatomy hurt his eyes. If they were mammals—they couldn’t possibly be mammals—their evolution had followed a path unlike anything else on the planet. If they weren’t mammals, if they were fish or reptiles or something older and stranger and lost to the march of science, then they were mysteries and marvels.
“Oh my God,” whispered Luis. His fingers tightened on the tablet, like he was afraid she was going to rip it away from him. “This is … I mean … Is this footage going to be on the public servers?”
“If it’s not, I can have it sent to you,” said Olivia.
“This changes everything. There’s no way anyone can claim Imagine faked this. There’s no way—this is real.”
“I know.” Olivia looked over her shoulder to Tory, whose attention was consumed by her own machine, her own efforts. “It always was.”
“I have to get to work.” Luis spun to face his computer. He didn’t give back the tablet.
That was all right. Olivia would get it later, after she’d cleared the footage for him and recorded her report about Heather’s death at sea. By now, Imagine’s lawyers would be getting involved, summoned from their boardrooms and their beds to begin enforcing their ironclad accidental death clauses. There was no one on the Melusine who hadn’t signed papers stating that they understood the danger. Even if the ship was lost with all hands, this voyage would not be a repeat of the Atargatis. Everyone knew the risks that they were taking. They had chosen to take them anyway, risking their lives in the name of scientific progress. But that didn’t change human nature. There was always a chance someone connected to Heather would see her death as a way to make a quick buck, trying to balance a loss that could never be balanced with a bigger bank account.
Eventually her phone would beep and she’d be summoned to hair and makeup so they could get her ready to go on camera and record a segment about the death of Heather Wilson. Transparency was the Imagine watchword for this voyage: document everything, don’t conceal anything. They wanted to show the blood and sweat and tears, because those would put the ratings through the roof when this footage went public. Those were what mattered.
Olivia felt like the people who controlled the programming were missing something. It wasn’t Heather’s death that mattered; it was her life, the way she’d favored her left side when she signed, even though she was right handed, because she’d learned to talk with one hand and steer a submersible with the other. It wasn’t what Tory could write down that mattered; it was the curve of her neck and the slope of her shoulder, and her unending anger at a world that refused to be exactly, enduringly the way she wanted it to be. Every person on this vessel was a story in the process of telling itself, and all of them were fascinating, and all of them deserved to be heard.
Content that Luis was working, she drifted closer to Tory. The other woman’s screens were consumed by different sonar frequencies and long chains of sound-mixing panels, each of them filtering and running through a different data feed. “What are you doing?” she asked, as casually as she could manage.
Tory kept her eyes on the screen. “I’m running a sound isolation program on the audio feed from Heather’s submersible, to take out the engine noise and the other human-made sounds, and I’m enhancing what’s left, trying to find the mermaids.”
“How do you already have—”
“Heather and I talked yesterday, when she got the go-ahead for today’s launch. She set me up with a private relay, in case Imagine wanted to get weird about the video. I needed the audio as fast as I could get it.” Tory didn’t turn, but the muscles around her eyes tightened in a way that spoke of self-satisfaction, albeit a bitter example of the same. Heather had paid too high a price for the files, and everyone knew it. “I don’t have the visual feed at all. Her contract wouldn’t allow it. But wouldn’t you know it, they didn’t push the deaf girl about the audio.”
“Sneaky,” said Olivia.
“Smart,” said Tory.
“Sometimes they’re the same thing.”
Luis whooped. Olivia turned. He was spinning in his chair, arms thrust straight up like his team had just scored a touchdown. Seeing Olivia looking his way, he lowered his arms and shrugged almost apologetically. He kept smiling. It seemed like he was unable to stop.
“Sonar is picking up a large, dense mass directly below us, about ninety meters down. I’ve got the mermaids. I’ve got them on my feed. I can track them.”
“Wait.” Olivia frowned. “I thought Tory was doing sonar and you were doing … whatever it is you do.”
“We work together because we both use sound. She uses recorded sound, for analysis and study. She wants to know what mermaids and the like do when they’re at home alone. Do they sing like whales, or chitter like monkeys? Do they talk like humans? How do they communicate amongst themselves? I use sonar imaging to take ‘photos’ of things in the water, so we know where to point the microphones. Sometimes her recordings tell me where to look; sometimes my pictures tell her where to listen. Right now, we both know where we’re going, so we’re both going to get useful results.”
“And are you?”
“I know where they are now.” Luis turned back to his screen. “I can track them in real time, now that I have a fix on them.”
“Can’t they just dive and lose you?”
“They could, if I didn’t have relays seeded through the water from here to the top of the Challenger Deep. I’ve been dropping beacons since we got here. I’ll need an hour with a magnet and a recall signal to clear them all out before we leave, but right now, I could follow a sardine to the bottom of the ocean and not worry about losing it.”
“Wow,” said Olivia, hoping she was infusing the word with the right mixture of awe and delight. The scientists on the ship lost her often and easily once they started talking about things like sonar relays and tracking systems. She could report on them, once someone else had broken the science into bite-size chunks, and she could muddle through if she absolutely had to, but in the end she found that for the most part, she simply didn’t care. Mermaids were real, and they were deadly. All the scientific knowledge in the world wasn’t going to change that. What mattered was how they were going to make the people at home understand that this wasn’t a joke, it wasn’t a hoax, it wasn’t an attempt at better ratings. The world was bigger and stranger than people thought, and things that were big and strange could also be fatal.
On Luis’s screen the spreading circles of the sonar array remained static, providing a grid for the information being displayed. Everything within the circles might change, but the circles themselves would stay the same, patient and unyielding.
Far from the lab, beneath the Melusine, powerful speakers put out quick bursts of ultrasonic sound, receiving the echoes as the sound bounced off whatever was in its path, and using those echoes to model the obstacles. The result was not the photo-realistic imagery of science fiction, but rather the imprecise estimates of science fact. Something roughly the size of a human being was swimming hundreds of feet below the ship, in the company of dozens of other somethings, all of approximately the same size. They were holding their position, staying in the deep black, not coming up to the level where cameras could have captured a useful image. Without something like Heather’s Minnow, equipped with its own bright lights, they might never have been seen at all.
“They like to stay deep, until they don’t,” said Olivia.
“What’s that?” asked Luis.
“Nothing.” But she’d meant it, hadn’t she? The footage from the Atargatis was disjointed and difficult
to watch in places, but the timeline was clear. They had dropped a sampling device over the side of the ship, something designed to go deep and come back with water samples, allowing them to start the slow, arduous process of charting chemical and biological changes between water levels. What was found in the pelagic would not necessarily be present in the abyssopelagic, and so on. The presence of light and plentiful organic material changed everything.
Only the sampling device had returned with more than just water. A mermaid had come along for the ride, hitching its way to the surface, and it hadn’t shown any real signs of distress when it was pulled into the air. In fact, it had seemed perfectly at home there, showing all signs of breathing easily until it chewed the face off of a molecular biologist and pulled him over the side of the ship. His body, like the rest of those lost in the disaster, had never been found.
The mermaids liked it down in the deeps, of that there was no question. The deeps were their home. But when they needed to come up …
“They can,” whispered Olivia, and watched the shapes forming and breaking up on Luis’s screen, and wondered what was going to happen when the sun went down.
On the other side of the ship, someone else was asking the same question.
Jacques and Michi Abney had their own cabin, large enough to host a family of five, complete with a Jacuzzi tub that had been used every day since the Melusine left port. What was the point of living the high life on someone else’s dime if they weren’t going to take advantage of every amenity?
(Besides, as Michi pointed out shortly after the ship got under way, Imagine wanted to minimize their contact with the rest of the crew. Fishing was all well and good, and it passed a certain number of hours, but time spent behind closed doors was even better, and came with even less risk of unwanted contact. They weren’t going to get in trouble for sequestering themselves. If anything, they were going to put themselves in line for a bonus. Her logic was impeccable. Better yet, it aligned with what Jacques already wanted to do. He was generally happy to go along with Michi’s wishes, but found it so much more pleasant when she wished to do enjoyable things.)