They reached the stretch of deck where Gregory was working, now using a bulb on a stick to light up the inside of an open panel. The power to that specific stretch of the ship had been cut off to avoid electrocutions while they accessed the shield servos and recalibrated them. It had been a good idea at the time, with the sun in the sky and nothing in the water. Now, Daryl had to fight the urge to shiver, glancing around and trying to measure how much distance there was between them and the water. It was easily twenty feet. Even the lowest deck was ten feet above the waterline.
It no longer felt like enough.
Gregory raised his head at the sound of footsteps, looking only mildly surprised to see the captain. “Captain,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind if I don’t get up. Knees aren’t what they used to be, and I think I’m about done kneeling for the day. I stand now, I’m not finishing this.”
“As you were,” said the captain. “I’m here for a look at Mr. Cliff’s mysterious lights. Did you see them?”
The temptation to lie was strong. Daryl could see it in Gregory’s eyes, in the way they darted toward the sea and then away again. They were both frightened. Gregory just wasn’t showing it as clearly. And now he wanted to lie.
He didn’t. Sighing heavily, he turned back to the open panel, allowing his hands to get back to work as he said, “I did. Strangest damned things. It was like some kid had scattered holographic glitter about five, six feet down.”
“Could it have been refracted sunlight?”
“That was my first thought, and if I’m being honest, that’s what I wanted it to be. But it didn’t move like sunlight. Moved like something was moving it.” Moved like it was alive, was what he wanted to say, and what he desperately did not want to say, because saying it would mean acknowledging it, and acknowledging it would give it more power than he wanted it to have. He wanted to forget about it.
Daryl, damn him, wasn’t going to let that happen. “Those mermaids,” he said doggedly. “Didn’t their hair glow?”
“Lots of deepwater creatures have bioluminescence, including the mermaids we’re here to study,” said Captain Peterman. “But they’re not at the surface. The loss of Miss Wilson’s submersible occurred in the Challenger Deep.” Even swimming at full speed, the mermaids wouldn’t reach the surface until well past midnight. That was what the scientists had told them, and with the engineering crew still prepping the security shutters to deploy, that was what he needed to believe.
“Didn’t they come to the surface when they sank the Atargatis?” asked Daryl.
“The Atargatis didn’t sink,” Captain Peterman pointed out. “She was found adrift with all hands lost. Whatever these creatures are, they’re not supernatural, and they can’t sink a vessel of this size. Now please, show me this glitter or get back to work.”
Daryl moved to the rail and leaned as far out as he dared, eyes scanning the water. There was no glitter. There was no light at all. There was only the deep, boundless sea, lapping against the side of the ship, untroubled by the things going on above it.
“It was right here,” he said.
“Now it isn’t,” said Captain Peterman. “Interestingly, neither is the sun. Looks like it was refraction from the sunset after all.”
On the other side of the ship, someone started screaming. And didn’t stop.
CHAPTER 17
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 2, 2022
The alert for the ship didn’t apply to assigned Imagine filming duties; mermaids or no, Olivia had needed to get a shot of herself in front of the sunset, talking about the dangers lurking beneath. So they’d done it, as quickly and efficiently as they could, waiting the whole time for danger to strike.
It hadn’t. Now they were walking back along the top deck through night air that was colder than Olivia would have thought possible, given how warm the days were. Wasn’t being in the tropics supposed to guarantee beautiful evenings full of moisturizing humidity, and the opportunity for bellinis on the upper deck? (Mimosas were for morning, with their invigorating orange juice base. Bellinis were for evening, when the sweetness of the peach made it easier to keep drinking them until everything seemed like a good idea.) Sure, the weather occasionally obliged; they’d had their share of golden evenings. But more often, the sun went down and the sea turned cold.
There were probably climatologists in the labs below who could tell her why that was happening, which of the many things humanity had done had caused the temperate tropical nights to turn capricious and cruel. Maybe eventually she’d care enough to ask them. Probably not, or at least not on camera. Climate science was too important to be diverting to the viewer at home. Everyone knew someone who’d been affected by a superstorm or a permanent shift in the weather. People were afraid of what the weather was becoming—what the weather had already become—and so they didn’t want it intruding on their entertainment. Anything she learned would be sidelined at best, and used as a mark against her at worst.
So she shivered in her borrowed coat while Ray walked beside her, his big body shielding her from the wind blowing off the Pacific. He looked at her with concern as they moved toward the stairwell, making no effort to conceal his feelings.
“You should tell her,” he said.
“Tell her what? That the girl who replaced her sister in Imagine’s interchangeable personnel chart is incredibly into her, and would like to hook up?” Olivia shook her head. “I’ve hinted. I’ve tried. Either Tory doesn’t want me and doesn’t know how to say it, or she’s not into girls.”
“No offense, hon, but you flirt like it’s a form of espionage and you’ll be executed if you get caught. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“It did in my household.” Liberal mother; conservative father; autistic daughter learning about social interaction one book and course of practical study at a time. Olivia had figured out flirting from romantic comedies and comic books (although, lacking superpowers, she couldn’t use most of the techniques employed by her favorite heroines). She had figured out she preferred the company of women from different books, books with long, scholarly titles and dog-eared pages. Never from her e-reader, no; like most of the kids she knew, her parents checked it regularly to find out what she was reading. Any hint of “pervert” literature would have earned her a smack from her father, followed by a lecture from her mother about how she was special, delicate, and shouldn’t worry about such things, since it wasn’t like she was ever going to have sex anyway. Little autistic girls should learn to masturbate, or better yet, to abstain, because anyone who was deviant enough to want her would be deviant enough to hurt her.
Even at the age of twelve, Olivia had known her mother was as wrong as her father, although it wasn’t until she went to college, took her first human sexuality class, and met her first girlfriend (Shoshana, who had fucked like an angel and smoked like a chimney, and was currently headlining her own punk band) that she’d realized both of them had been doing her harm. Her father had left bruises on her body. Her mother’s bruises, for all that they’d been harder to see, were proving much slower to heal.
“You don’t live with them anymore,” Ray rumbled. He didn’t have all the details on Olivia’s childhood—no one did, including, he sometimes suspected, Olivia herself; there was too much she glossed over, accepting it as normal when it was anything but—but he knew growing up and going away to college had been the best thing that could ever have happened to her.
She wasn’t as fragile as she looked, inside or out. He still took his mandate to protect her seriously. She wasn’t going to come to harm on his watch, and if he ever had the opportunity to meet her parents, they were going to hear a few things about what he thought of them. If they took offense at that, well, he was going to enjoy demonstrating the more physical side of his job. He was going to enjoy it very much.
“I know. But some habits are hard to break.” Olivia kicked the deck. “Everyone I’ve ever dated has made the first move. They say, ‘I?
??m interested,’ and I go along with it. Sometimes even when I don’t really want to, just because I’m impressed that they can be so brave. But I don’t know how to say it to her, and this isn’t the Love Boat. We’re not here to make a romantic connection. We’re to look good on camera, redeem the Atargatis, and do it without getting eaten by mermaids.”
“It’s a tall order, even without adding dating to the plate,” said Ray. “You really like this girl?”
“I do,” said Olivia. She sighed. “I’ll figure it out. There has to be something I can say to make her understand what I want without me sounding like a total loser.”
“I’m sure there is.” The horizon flickered red with the remains of the sunset. Ray didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so beautiful, or so humbling, in his life. The ocean was bigger than anything he could have conceived. If it swallowed them all, no one would ever know.
Olivia shot him a mock-venomous glare. “You’re not helping.”
“I didn’t know I was supposed to be helping. You want me to kidnap her, tie her up, and keep her in a closet until you finish writing a script for your first date?” Ray batted his eyelashes. “I am at your disposal.”
“Jerk.”
“Yes.”
Olivia sighed again. “I shouldn’t even bother. What do I have to offer except a lot of therapy over dating a sister surrogate?”
“Dunno. Brilliant, beautiful, good job … You’re right. You have nothing to offer.”
Olivia scowled. Ray laughed, walking to the rail and leaning against it, resting the bulk of his weight on his folded arms. The wind ruffled his hair. Olivia found herself wishing she were the one with the camera for once; he made a perfect picture, standing there, lit by the soft white bulbs glowing overhead. There was a patch of deck farther down where all the lights were out, due to some routine maintenance task or other, but here, it was perfect. Perfect.
“Have faith in yourself, Olive,” he said. “The rest of us have faith in you, and it’s time you caught up.”
“I’ll try.” She moved to stand next to him, looking toward the line of the horizon. It was too much and too far. She dropped her eyes, looking down at the side of the ship, and froze.
Someone was clinging to the hull.
“Ray,” she said, delivering a quick elbow to her cameraman’s side. “Look.”
He looked and swore before grabbing a safety hook from the rail. They were fifteen feet long, meant to be used to snag floating debris during a storm, when waves might crest high enough to make them useful. Of all the ship’s mandatory safety equipment, the upper deck hooks had always seemed the least useful to Olivia. Now watching Ray lean over the rail and dangle the hook toward the person clinging to the hull, she began to see their purpose. If he could pull whoever was down there to safety …
The hook brushed the person’s arm. Olivia saw their head turn, the motion somehow catching glints of light against the hull. Then they were grabbing the hook with both hands, and Ray was pulling them upward, toward the deck, toward the light.
The stranger was almost to the rail when enough of the light reached them for Olivia to see their outline. The grayish skin; the long, stringy hair; the sinuous tail where the legs should have been. Where the legs should have been. She didn’t think; she just acted, lunging for the hook, intending to rip it out of Ray’s hands and send the mermaid plummeting back toward the water where it belonged.
“Mermaid!” she shrieked. “Mermaid!”
Ray was stronger than she was. Hard as she pulled, she couldn’t get the pole away from him. He turned to look at her, alarmed by her scream. “Olive, what—”
Maybe it was his distraction, or maybe the mermaid somehow knew it was about to lose its chance, or maybe he’d simply let it get too close. It was a predator; it knew how to strike. While Ray’s head was turned, the mermaid lunged, swarming up the pole with a speed that would have seemed impossible if it hadn’t been so very, terribly real.
Its head was smaller than Olivia’s, due to the fineness of its bone structure, the delicacy of its frame. But that head contained a mouth that seemed to split it virtually in two when opened. She caught a glimpse of its teeth, bristling and needle sharp, before it drove them into Ray’s shoulder, biting deep. He howled in agony, the veins in his neck bulging as he tensed against the pain. Olivia tried to lunge for the mermaid, intending to grab those narrow shoulders and yank it away from her friend and protector. He could still be saved. She could save him. She could.
She couldn’t. Ray’s fist caught her below the solar plexus, knocking her back. Olivia landed on the deck, and could only scream as the mermaid pulled its teeth from the raw meat of Ray’s shoulder, hissed in her direction, and closed its mouth over Ray’s face.
He kept swinging, kept slapping the thing even as it chewed his flesh away, but it was too late, and had been too late as soon as he’d offered the hook to the climbing mermaid. It bit down harder, sinking its teeth so deep that nothing could have pried them free. Ray stopped hitting. Olivia kept screaming. The mermaid leaned backward, shifting its weight over the rail until it fell, dragging Ray down into the water.
Running footsteps told Olivia someone was coming—not help; help was too late, there was nothing left to help—and she scrambled to her feet, still screaming, to fling her arms around the ship’s captain. The motion knocked the hat from his head. Startled, he stood frozen for several seconds before closing his arms awkwardly around her.
“There, there, Miss Sanderson,” he said, in a strangled tone. “What’s wrong? Why were you shouting?”
“She wasn’t shouting; she was screaming,” said one of the two men with him. He was older, her father’s age, thin and sunbaked and rangy. He looked like the sort of fellow who’d offer a hook down the side of the ship if he saw someone climbing there. The thought was enough to make Olivia whimper and cling harder to the captain, who was starting to appear genuinely distressed.
“Captain.” The speaker was the other man, the younger one. He had continued walking until he’d reached the place where Ray had been standing. Now he was looking at the deck, eyes getting wider and more dismayed. “I think this is blood over here.”
“What?”
“It looks like blood.” The young man crouched, touching one of the stains with a trembling hand. His fingertips came away dark, glinting red when he held his hand up for the light. He didn’t say anything.
“What is this …?” Captain Peterman took a step forward, dragging Olivia with him. Only then did he seem to remember she was there, that his arms were full of weeping woman, and not holding some shield against whatever force had spilled blood on the deck of his ship. He stopped, looking down at the top of Olivia’s head. She had her face pressed against his chest, covering her eyes, keeping her from speaking.
That last part was going to be a problem.
“Miss Sanderson, I need you to tell me what happened,” he said, trying to make his voice gentler, succeeding only in pitching it lower in his chest, until it came out as something verging on a growl. The sound irritated him. Comforting silly reporters who had wandered into the wrong story was not a part of his job.
But protecting the people on this vessel was. Heather Wilson had died on his watch, and if the blood on the deck signaled what he feared—something dark and dire and irrevocable—she wasn’t the only one. The alternative was that Olivia had slipped and hit her head against the side of the ship.
He’d never wished so hard for someone to have injured themselves. If she hadn’t, then the estimates from the scientists had been wrong, and God have mercy on them all.
“Miss Sanderson,” he said again. “I need you to tell me whose blood that is.” Please let it be yours, he thought, half praying. Please let it belong to the living.
Olivia mumbled something, voice obscured by the captain’s chest. There was a pause as she realized it. She pushed away from him, the gesture turning into a stuttering half step backward. Not, noted Gregory, enough of a ste
p to put her near the stains on the deck where Daryl stood, fingers bloody and face white. She had a feline’s instinct for avoidance, keeping herself in the light, and well away from any chance of mess.
“It came up the side of the ship,” she said. Her voice was soft, and carried a bone-deep complaint. She was objecting to her own story even as she was telling it. “We were walking on the deck, and it came up the side of the ship. It shouldn’t have been able to be on the side of the ship. How did it do that? It’s not allowed to do that. But it did. It came up the side of the ship.”
“What did?” asked Captain Peterman. Please, he prayed.
Olivia frowned, expression shifting from confused protest to disbelief. “Why are you asking that? You know what I’m talking about. The mermaid. The mermaid came up the side of the ship. Ray thought it was a person. I did too.” Mostly. There had been something off about the silhouette from the beginning, hadn’t there? But that hadn’t seemed real, not when it was she and Ray and the rail and the thought of someone falling to their death. That hadn’t seemed real. After swallowing hard, she said, “Ray offered one of the hooks. The ones we’re supposed to use if someone falls. He held it out, and the mermaid took it, and when he tried to pull back, it climbed like it was swimming through the air, like it was so strong it didn’t even notice it was going straight up, and then it was biting him, and he pushed me away, and—and—” She stopped again, her mouth continuing to move this time, chewing at the air.
The captain looked stunned. Daryl was still staring. Gregory stepped forward, grabbing Olivia by the shoulders and turning her to look at him. He locked his eyes on hers, holding that uncomfortable stare until she turned her own eyes away.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice low, as he let go of her shoulders and allowed her to step back. Somehow, forcing her to look at him had felt like more of an invasion than touching her without her permission. “I’m sorry, but I had to.”