Into the Drowning Deep

  The sound of the mermaid’s hands slapping the wood pursued him as he fled. He turned the corner, heading for the enclosed hallways where the sea was out of sight, acting on some deeply buried instinct that told him he might be safer if he got away from the water. Amphibious or not, the mermaid was a creature of the sea. It wouldn’t pursue him too far from its natural habitat.

  A man stepped into his path. Luis shouted something unintelligible as collision seemed inevitable. Then strong arms were reaching out of the nearest doorway, jerking him out of the way as the man—Jacques, his features becoming visible as he took another step forward, out of the shadows—raised his sidearm and fired three times. The mermaid screamed, its voice still unnervingly like Luis’s own.

  He turned his head and found himself looking into Michi’s eyes. They were brown, cold, and surrounded by impeccably applied winged eyeliner. He had time to wonder who took the time to do their makeup before coming out to hunt mermaids before she was shoving him away, a disgusted expression on her face.

  “Really, mate, what were you hoping to accomplish?” she demanded, her accent painted broadly across every syllable. She sounded like the pure distillation of Queensland, Australia, all sunny skies and brutal murder. “If you were looking to kill yourself, there are easier ways.”

  “It’s dead,” said Jacques, stepping into the room. He looked at Luis and sniffed. “Little boy, are you a fool, or are you too stupid to know when you’re taking unnecessary chances?”

  “Hold on a second,” said Luis, scowling. “I didn’t take any unnecessary chances. I knew the mermaid was coming, I went to have a look at it.”

  “Carrying this?” Michi held up his tracker gun. Luis’s hands flew to his waistband. Michi looked at him with open pity. “Please. I got it off you while you were trying to decide whether or not my breast was touching your arm. This thing doesn’t even have bullets. It was never going to save you.”

  “It’s a tracker gun, and I’d like it back.” Luis held out his hand. He was proud of the fact that it wasn’t shaking. Under the circumstances, he felt like that was a victory.

  “What do you track with it?” Michi dropped it into his palm. She looked almost bored.

  “Mostly squid and big fish.”

  “You wanted to track the mermaid?” Jacques snorted. “We know where the fish-women go. They go down to Davy Jones’s locker, and they take you along for the ride.”

  “What are you doing out here?” asked Luis, tucking the gun back into his waistband. It was less reassuring now than it had been. Guns were always less reassuring once it was clear how easily they could be taken away.

  “We should have stayed in our, how did that nice marine biologist put it? In our ‘senseless fish slaughterhouse.’” Jacques sniffed. “We are what nature designed us to be. Carnivores. Children of the veldt. We take what the world offers.”

  “We’re not actually required to stay away from the rest of you,” said Michi, putting a hand on Jacques’s arm. She smiled—the first sign of true warmth she had shown—before turning cool eyes on Luis and saying, “Mr. Blackwell feels we make people nervous, and that it’s best for us to stay out of the way when possible. As we’d prefer not to circulate with people we don’t care for anyway, we’ve stayed mostly isolated. That doesn’t mean we haven’t been keeping an eye on things. And once the security teams were activated, so were we.”

  All the data feeds for the ship were shared. Sampling data wasn’t, necessarily; Luis knew several projects were being managed under veils of partial to complete secrecy, letting the researchers who were conducting them feel secure sharing their results. Someone who sent a probe to gather water from the surface of the Challenger Deep, for example, could expect a certain measure of privacy. But the microphones that studded the hull and dangled from the body of the ship, the cameras, like his, that buzzed through the water … All of those used the Melusine’s Wi-Fi to transmit their information back to the people controlling them, and all of those feeds could be sampled at will.

  Most people didn’t care about things like Luis’s cameras, which were small and idiosyncratically oriented when compared to the cameras being operated directly by Imagine. That didn’t mean that no one cared.

  “You were spying on me,” he said dully.

  Michi waved a hand dismissively. “You say ‘spying,’ we say ‘following the closest thing we have to a native guide in these waters.’ When we hunt lion, we find a local who can lead us to where the prides are. When we hunt whale, we find someone who understands where they like to roam. We’re hunting mermaid. Dr. Toth is not a good guide. She never tried to find them. Not once since we got here. You know why?”

  “I know why,” said Jacques. “The lovely doctor does not look for her sirens, because she always knew they would come to find us. She made us the lure for her line, and she sat back to wait. How does it feel to be a wiggling worm, hmm? I think you know the feeling well.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you have the social skills of a hyena?” asked Luis.

  “I love my husband; you insult the hyena,” said Michi. “Yes, we watched your video to see where we’d be most needed. Unless you relished the thought of having your face chewed off by a horror from the deep, you owe us your thanks.”

  “I was doing fine,” protested Luis.

  “No,” said Michi, with absolute, unshakeable calm. “You weren’t.”

  Luis opened his mouth to argue. Then he stiffened, realization slamming through him like a lightning bolt. “You shot it,” he breathed, and whirled, running into the hall.

  There was the mermaid, sprawled on its face, three large holes blown in the flesh of its back. The meat they revealed was a dark, disturbing pink, like salmon or fatty tuna. Luis rushed to its side, not hesitating as he dropped to his knees in the viscous slime that had spread out to surround the body, and hoisted the head.

  Its eyes were filmed over, its mouth hanging open, revealing a graveyard of jagged teeth. It didn’t move at all. From the pliancy of its flesh beneath his hands, there was no question that it was dead.

  “We have a dead one,” he breathed, and suddenly everything was good again.

  CHAPTER 22

  Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 3, 2022

  Midnight had come and gone with Dr. Toth still gazing at the mermaid on the other side of the glass. The mermaid stared back, unblinking. It had eyelids, but used them rarely; she supposed they were an adaptation to protect the eyes from debris in the water, and possibly also to protect them from the open air. Which came first, the amphibious outings to the surface or the functional eyelid?

  “Chicken and the egg, my dear,” she said.

  “Chicken,” said the mermaid. “My dear.” Its imitation of her voice was improving. If she kept talking to it, it would be able to fool her own daughter. The thought was fascinating. Had they been ambush predators, back when the tall ships sailed more frequently through their territory, back when men were easier to catch and consume, as long as the mermaids were willing to be patient?

  The rise of steamships must have changed so much about their hunting techniques. For humanity, the industrial revolution had been the start of an era of booming prosperity and comfort. For the mermaids, it must have seemed like one of their most reliable sources of food had dried up effectively overnight. Add in the rise of the whaling industry, and it was a miracle they’d been able to find enough to survive.

  “You should have been the mascot for Greenpeace,” she said. “They would have loved you so much.” At least until the mermaids started eating the activists. That would have been a bit difficult to explain.

  “I wish you’d stop taunting the thing,” said Theo mildly.

  “And I wish you’d order the captain to deploy the shutters. You promised me.”

  “The shutters aren’t … precisely prepared for deployment.”

  Something in his tone made Jillian turn and frown at him. “Meaning what, exactly?”

/>   “Meaning …” Theo paused and sighed. “Meaning they’ve failed every systems test. We cannot currently deploy the shutters.”

  “Of course we can’t,” said Jillian, with a small, bitter laugh. She turned back to the tank. “What’s your game, Theo?”

  “My game is above your pay grade,” said Theo. “Leave the mermaid alone. You’re not learning anything. You’re just playing with it.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” said Jillian, aware that she was being distracted but unable to stop herself from rising to the bait. “Listen to its echoes. It’s learning. Maybe not what it’s saying, but how to match my inflections more closely. If it followed us for a week, it would be able to call you from the water and make you believe, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it was me calling you. It’s adapting.”

  “It’s not adapting that quickly.”

  “It’s matching the sounds made by a human throat while completely submerged,” said Jillian. “It shouldn’t be able to do that. Human speech underwater doesn’t sound like human speech. It sounds like something dead and drowned and distorted. Whether it’s thinking about the adjustments or doing them automatically, it’s matching something it shouldn’t be able to match. That’s incredible.”

  Hallie and Daniel glanced up from the workstation where they were attempting to connect the mermaid’s hand motions to the ones on the video. If they could crack the surface of its language, they had faith they would be able to start building a working vocabulary. That was what mattered: finding a place where their two worlds would meet, a form of commonality between their two species. Without that, they were going to remain predator and prey, separated by a thin glass wall.

  “We got lucky, in a way,” said Daniel.

  Hallie’s head jerked around. She stared at him like she was trying to understand who he was and what he was doing in her presence. Then she shook it off, and asked, “How do you mean?”

  “At least the mermaids have something we recognize as language. I was always afraid that when we met truly intelligent nonmammalian undersea life, it would be … I don’t know, a species of giant cuttlefish that communicated via light pulses. You know. The kind of thing where we’d never be able to translate, or where the translation would take a decade. Just long enough to find out that they’d been counting down to the invasion the entire time. Sign language is relatively easy.”

  “Spoken like a man who’s never tried to navigate the disconnect between two different types of sign language.”

  Daniel blinked at her. “There’s more than one kind of sign language?”

  Hallie swallowed a groan. She was exhausted, overwhelmed, and still numb from Heather’s death—a state she knew wasn’t going to last forever. Eventually her heart would thaw enough to let the pain in, and she was going to collapse. Part of her wanted to work as hard as she could, as fast as she could, to make sure her place on the research team was justified—to make sure she could be there when they told the mermaids, “You killed a good woman” in a way they could understand. The rest of her just wanted to lie down and let the hurting come. It was going to happen. Putting it off wasn’t going to do her any good.

  She wished Holly were here, or that she were with Holly. Even though Holly had made it clear that she wanted to be alone right now, it was hard not to feel guilty about leaving her sister surrounded by people who had never made any effort to learn how to communicate with her. For most of them, signing began and ended with an extended middle finger. Anything else was too hard for them to bother with.

  “There are multiple forms of sign language,” she said, voice tight and temples throbbing. “ASL has its own grammar, which does not match English grammar. Hearing professors started getting angry when Deaf students who were native speakers of ASL didn’t follow English rules in their writing, and started pushing more and more for something called SEE—Signing Exact English—which forced Deaf students to learn a whole new grammar in order to make things easier on their hearing instructors. The whole world is set up to be easy on hearing people, but that wasn’t good enough for us. We had to find the one corner that wasn’t designed to cater to our needs and take it over, and fuck the people who already lived there, who had a perfectly reasonable way of talking to each other, who didn’t need us to ‘fix’ them.”

  Daniel blinked. “Um,” he said, after a long pause. “Okay. I guess that means that yes, there are multiple forms of sign language.”

  “All over the world,” snapped Hallie.

  “All over the world,” said the mermaid, its voice somewhere between Hallie’s and Dr. Toth’s.

  Hallie froze. Until the mermaid had spoken, she hadn’t considered that she was talking out loud: Daniel wasn’t the only one who could hear her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be.” Dr. Toth waved a hand. “Knowledge that can be imparted loudly and with passion always lasts longer than knowledge that has to be whispered. You care. That’s a good thing. Now figure out how to talk to my mermaid.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Hallie.

  Mr. Blackwell raised an eyebrow. “Your mermaid?” he asked.

  “I know she belongs to Imagine, and you’ll have your own swarm of clever scientists—we know they’re clever; they were smart enough not to sign on for this voyage of the damned—on shore to take custody of her, but right here, right now, she’s mine.” Jillian’s eyes returned to the mermaid, tracing the outline of its body. “Right now, she’s the answer to every question I’ve ever asked, and a few hundred that I haven’t stopped to think of yet. I’m going to enjoy her while I can.”

  The phone rang.

  It was an odd, archaic sound, all the more so because it came from an actual wall-mounted receiver. It looked like the sort of thing that should have been placed in the president’s private quarters in a Cold War movie. All four people in the lab turned to look at it, some with confusion, others with contemplation. Mr. Blackwell actually looked annoyed, as if this was the last thing he’d been expecting.

  “Aren’t you going to get that?” asked Jillian. “How many people have the number for your secret lab?”

  “The captain,” said Theo, starting for the phone. “The head of security, who may also be the only member of the security team who actually knows which end of his gun is which. Jacques and Michi Abney. They’re only supposed to call in the event of an emergency.”

  “I’m curious, what’s your definition of an emergency? Two people were dead before we took one of the mermaids hostage,” said Jillian. “Do you think they understand revenge? They may be coming to get their sister back, which means they could come here first.” She didn’t look particularly worried. If anything, she looked interested, like this would be something remarkable to watch.

  “That’s horrible,” said Hallie.

  Jillian shrugged. “That’s nature.”

  Theo didn’t say anything. He just removed the phone from the wall, holding it to his ear and listening before he said, “I see. Thank you for letting me know.” There was a pause while he listened. “I see. I’ll inform her.”

  He hung up the phone and turned to find the others watching him intently.

  “Jillian,” he said. “That was Michi Abney. Apparently one of the scientists had a little run-in with a mermaid on the deck of the fourth level, and she and her husband had to shoot it. The mermaid, not the scientist. They’re preparing for a necropsy in the wet lab, and I thought you might like to supervise.”

  Jillian, who had started for the door as soon as he said the words shoot it, didn’t reply. She also didn’t look back. The door slammed behind her, and for a moment, everything was silent.

  “Supervise,” said the mermaid, in a passable imitation of Theo’s voice.

  None of the humans said anything at all.

  The Melusine had been designed using many systems and principles developed by the cruise companies: soundproofing, stabilizers, a thousand small comforts intended to make the experience of sailing
halfway around the world more pleasant than it had ever been in the past. Her passengers were, by and large, less appreciative than they could have been; even the ones who’d spent enough time at sea to notice how steady the decks were, how the vast ship almost never seemed to rock, had long since forgotten their surprise. This was just how things were now. Stable. Serene.

  Tory slammed into the door of her cabin, shoulders hitting a split second before her butt, her left hand fumbling for the handle. The locks were set to her biometrics, keyed to her thumbprint—another feature borrowed from the cruise ship industry, which had long since learned that drunken retirees looking for a little afternoon delight were not in the mood to fumble for their keys. Most of the lab spaces used more traditional hardware, but the cabins were locked to their specific occupants, and to those who had been granted explicit permission for entry.

  Tory wasn’t thinking about that. Tory was thinking about Olivia’s mouth on hers, Olivia’s hands traveling across the skin under her shirt, clever fingers tracing the topography of her skin. It had been a long time since she’d had sex, and longer since she’d had sex with a woman. Jason had been her most recent lover. His arrogance had carried into the bedroom, where he’d been happy to insist he knew how to please a woman, even as he consistently failed to make sure she was satisfied before falling asleep.

  Breaking up had been as much about her libido as it had been about her pride. If he’d been good for either one, she might have been able to stick it out. As it was …

  But Jason was in the past and Olivia was in the present, and she might have felt bad about how raw Olivia was—how likely she was to be bleeding inside from the loss of her friend—if it hadn’t been for her own wounds, which had opened the day Anne died and still hadn’t scabbed over. For the first time, Tory felt like she might have found someone who knew what it was to hurt. They could learn to heal together. Even if it was only for one night, they could learn to heal together.