“Ma’am,” he said, coming to a halt. Dr. Toth was Mr. Blackwell’s wife. They didn’t advertise it—he wasn’t even sure most of the crew knew, since it had been years since they’d been a couple in anything more than the legal sense—but there it was. If she wanted to ban him from the biological tests, she probably could. Best to tread lightly.
“Let me guess: you carried the specimens I gave you to Dr. Lyons, and he took them, because he’s the real doctor and you’re the graduate student. Young people always think they’re hungrier than we are. You forget that you’re omnivores, while we’ve become specialists. It’s like a goat asking a koala why it doesn’t want to share the eucalyptus.” Dr. Toth turned to look at him. “He’ll devour you if you let him. Strip you down to your bones and sap every bit of nutrition he can from your flesh, because you’re what he used to be, and somewhere deep, he hates you for that. We all do.”
“Dr. Toth?” Jason risked a step forward. “Are you feeling all right?”
“I feel fine, and why shouldn’t I? I was right about everything. There’s something I’m not seeing, but that will come with time. That sort of thing always comes with time.” She shook her head. “But you, you’re here to ask if you can comb the siren’s hair, aren’t you? You were intending to ask?”
“Of course,” lied Jason.
“Good. Yes, you can comb its hair. Pretend to understand what the sailors saw, and pick out every scrap of information you can find. Just make sure you catalog things thoroughly. We’ll need to be able to account for every scrap of material we were able to retrieve. You have”—she glanced at the clock on the wall—“ten minutes, maybe a little more, before Theo sends the retrieval team. This pretty thing is going to be sliced up and stored in a hundred jars, until we unpick every mystery it has to offer.”
Jason took another step before hesitating. “I thought you’d be happier,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“I’ve read your books. I attended one of your lectures.” With Tory on his arm, her breast pressed against his elbow as she listened to the woman on stage. She’d been so excited by hearing someone else talk about mermaids like they were real that she’d ridden him hard that night, her passion slamming them against the headboard until his head rang. “This is what you’ve been looking for. I thought you’d be happier.”
“Ah.” Dr. Toth looked back to the siren. “It was never about being right. It was never about gloating. It was about proving the existence of a deep-sea predator we kept forgetting about the second our backs were turned. It was about showing the world there was a threat. Well, I was right. The threat is real. Two people have died so far on this journey. They’re putting safety protocols in place, but they’re not going to be enough, and the captain says that we can’t close the shutters until we’re sure we’re under attack, since they use so much power—which is a lie, by the way. Something is keeping them from closing, and he doesn’t want to admit it. How many more people are going to die?”
She stepped away from the body.
“I need a drink,” she said. “Do what you came here to do. When Theo’s men come, you’ll have to release the body, so I suggest you do it quickly.”
Jason watched her make her way to the door and out onto the deck. Then, as if magnetically drawn, he started toward the body of the siren.
From a distance, it could be mistaken for a bad special effect; it was rubbery and strange, scaleless, limp. The open striations of its muscles and skeletal system were detailed enough to be those of an anatomical model, but those could be fabricated by clever artists with good reason to deceive. From a distance the world hadn’t necessarily changed.
As he drew closer, it became more and more apparent that no, the world had changed; the world was never going to be the same. The most skilled makeup artist in the world couldn’t have fabricated the delicate texture of the skin, the gleaming pallor of the exposed musculature, the yellow shine of the fat. It was too imperfect and hence perfect, crossing the line between artifice and reality without any hesitation.
Rigor had set in, drawing the siren’s lips taut across the sharp-edged bones of its skull. It was hard to look at it like this and understand how the sailors could have mistaken it for a beautiful woman; it was a monster, an alien dweller in the deeps.
“You are ugly as hell,” Jason informed the siren, and pulled on a pair of gloves.
He had always had an eye for detail: that was part of what had drawn him to the study of plankton and photosynthesis, both of which required a remarkable amount of patience and fine motor skills. As a child, he’d yearned for his grandmother’s needlepoint kits, which were far more appealing than Legos or paint-by-numbers kits. He wanted the tiny nuances of needle and thread, the interplay of distance and attention, to know that missing even a single stitch would change the entire picture. His father had refused to let any son of his play with embroidery hoops, but Jason had found ways, sneaking to his grandmother’s room and sitting next to her on the love seat, each of them with needle in hand, watching gardens grow beneath their hands.
He still did needlepoint to relax. Not those pointless “emBROdery kits” that the craft stores tried to force on him, claiming, even as his father had, that real men didn’t embroider lilacs and roses; no, he did the real kits, the hard kits, the ones even battle-hardened grandmothers couldn’t tackle without preparation and prayer. He’d won a few awards at the state fair. No first-place ribbons yet, but they would come. Give him time.
Carefully he separated each section of the hair, seeking the scalp and, once there, seeking the small forms that had been trapped when the water went rushing into the first basin. And what treasures he found! Not just pseudocrabs and pseudoshrimp, some still twitching feebly, their mouths bubbling with the frantic effort to breathe; he found more worms, anchored at the roots of the hair. They were motionless but huge compared to their cousins in Dr. Lyons’s lab. He’d be able to achieve a full dissection.
He found clusters of fat orange eggs. They were affixed to the hair with a thick, gluey substance, and some of them popped as he coaxed them loose, but most came away intact. He found tiny barnacles rooted to the scalp itself. He even found white, eyeless fish that must have become tangled when the siren surfaced. A few were half-eaten. The pseudoshrimp, judging by the claw marks. It was an entire ecosystem, like every siren was an individual coral reef.
Jason hummed as he worked, unaware of his surroundings, focused entirely on the task at hand. He was going to make history. If he had to do it with a mermaid’s head lice, that was fine by him. As long as they remembered his name, he’d be fine.
All they had to do was remember his name.
CHAPTER 25
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 3, 2022
Theo.”
Theodore Blackwell stood in front of the tank with the sort of rigid stiffness that spoke to recent application of his medicine, watching the captive siren explore the limits of its confinement. His hands were folded behind his back. He didn’t turn.
“Yes, Jilli?”
“Where are your linguists?” Jillian crossed the room to stand next to him.
“Daniel went to get some things from his lab; Hallie is checking on her sister. She realized Holly might not know about the mermaid in the wet lab, and thought it best she hear it from someone who cared about her feelings.” He frowned. “I’d been hoping to keep her here a little longer. She really has been immensely helpful.”
“So you’d leave Holly to deal with everything that’s happened alone? That’s cold, Theo.” Jillian’s eyes sought the siren. “You shouldn’t call them mermaids.”
“The world will call them mermaids.”
“Yes, but we’re not the world, and you know better. The one I dissected was male. I suspect this one is, too.”
“Why? Fish have low sexual dimorphism. This could easily be a female.”
“Amphibians have more pronounced sexual dimorphism, and I’m missing
something.” She shook her head. “It’s staring me right in the face, and I can’t see it. I’m tired, and I think I’m a little bit in shock.”
“You didn’t think we’d find them?”
“We didn’t find them. They found us. I always knew that would be the case. They don’t have our technology, but they have the whole damned sea. If they didn’t want to be seen, they weren’t going to be. That’s how they’ve stayed out of the science books: when they didn’t want us getting in their business, they disappeared.” Jillian paused before saying, “I knew we’d wind up sharing space. But somehow, I never translated that into my laying hands on one of them. Seeing how they worked, how they fit together … and now this. A live siren, right in front of my eyes.”
“I told you I’d give you the moon one day. You only had to be patient with me.”
Jillian sighed. “Have you spoken to Lani recently?”
“She called a little after midnight. I told her we were still taking readings, but that we were hopeful.” Imagine’s media stranglehold extended to even Theo: he could talk about things that were officially approved for public distribution. He couldn’t be the source of any leaks. “She asked how we were getting along. I said it was like old times.”
“Even though it’s not.”
“I don’t know. You, and me, and some beautiful thing swimming around its tank, flipping its fins for us to admire. Seems exactly like old times.”
Jillian gave him a sidelong look. His eyes were on the siren—on the prize he was taking back to his employers, for whatever reason. Because she knew him. She knew that even if he wanted to claim he was planning to release the thing, he wasn’t going to. It was going to accompany the Melusine all the way back to shore, and from there …
From there, what would happen would happen. She’d be surprised if there was any word of a “mermaid” touring the aquariums of the world. This was the first, and it was going to disappear.
“From what I remember, in old times, we would have been the ones standing in front of this tank with hammers in our hands, getting ready to set the captive free.”
Theo’s expression, what she could see of it, hardened. “Some things have to change for the rest to stay the same.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I’m going to do nothing with it. I have a job, and so do you.”
“My job is to learn as much about these creatures as I can. Where this one is going is something I don’t know, and that means I need to learn it.”
Theo turned to face her. “I love you,” he said. His tone was dispassionate: he could have been telling her about the weather. “I’ve always loved you. We could get divorced tomorrow, we could remain separated for a hundred years, and still I would love you. That doesn’t mean I can put your curiosity above the needs of my employers. Please stop asking that of me.”
“Oh, Theo.” Jillian sighed, reaching out to touch his cheek. It was a glancing contact. He recoiled like he’d been struck. “That, right there, is why I don’t trust you, and why I left. You wouldn’t give me the ocean, and you wouldn’t tell me the truth. I’ve been second in your life for years. I wasn’t going to stand by and let you make me second in our marital bed.”
She turned and walked away, leaving Theo alone with the creature she had been chasing for most of her adult life, and neither of them said a word.
‘Where have you been?’ Holly’s fingers were a blur. She wasn’t shouting—her hands were close and tight to her body, shutting her off, closing her down—but she was anxious enough that she couldn’t seem to slow down.
Hallie, who’d been reading her sister’s conversation for as long as she could remember, sighed and signed, ‘I was doing my work. When I signed on for this trip, I said you should bring a second translator. I said I might not always be available.’
‘Heather is dead. How can your work matter now?’
‘My work matters more than ever, because Heather is dead. I have to make sure she didn’t die for nothing.’
Holly stared at her, eyes going wider and wider, until it seemed like they would consume the lower half of her face. Her hands stilled, shaking before they sank into her lap. Stunned to silence, she continued to regard her sister until Hallie squirmed, casting her eyes downward, away from that accusing stare. Holly reached out and tapped Hallie’s shoulder, signaling her to look up.
Hallie looked up.
‘I don’t understand how you can say that,’ signed Holly. ‘She was your sister. She was my sister. She was the world. Of course she died for nothing. There’s no other way she could have died. If she’d been dying for something, the world would have realized it was a stupid thing, and given her back.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Hallie signed contritely. ‘But she knew the risks. She knew what she was doing. She wanted to see the Challenger Deep.’
‘Now her bones get to rest there. I don’t think that’s fair.’
Hallie sighed. ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘It’s not. I still have work to do. You have work to do. Don’t you want revenge? Don’t you want payback? We can have it. I’m going to figure out how these things communicate. I’m going to learn their language, and I’m going to tell them to go to hell. They don’t get to kill our sister and live.’
‘You aren’t just fascinated by the science?’
‘I have the chance to learn the first full nonhuman language. Of course I’m fascinated.’ Hallie knew better than to lie to her sister. It would have been transparent. Her hands continued moving. ‘You should be fascinated too. Their bodies are probably full of novel compounds. Things you’ve never seen before. But if you start testing their blood, looking at the water, maybe you can find something that will kill them. I want to kill them. We can do a better job of killing them if we understand them.’
Holly nodded, eyes filling with tears. ‘I miss her,’ she signed. ‘I woke up and I opened my eyes and I thought it was a dream. I thought she would be here. She wasn’t here. She isn’t going to be here ever again. She’s gone.’
‘She is,’ agreed Hallie. ‘So let’s make sure they pay for what they did. Are you with me?’
Holly nodded again, faster this time, some of the fire coming back into her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she signed, and there was nothing else to say.
Jason’s basin was a treasure trove of wonders. A dozen new species at minimum—some of the specimens he assumed were related might actually be cousins rather than siblings, the finches of the deep blue sea. Pseudocrabs and pseudoshrimp, worms and fish and barnacles and other, stranger forms. One of the pseudocrabs was unlike the others, with twelve delicate, frond-like limbs that had curled inward when it died, making it resemble a mutated huntsman spider, still clutching desperately at its prey. They were scientifically priceless, every damn one of them, and they were his.
Tory considered him naive for letting Dr. Lyons set the course, but what Tory had never been able to comprehend was how much freedom it gave him, having a mentor who didn’t need him and whom he didn’t rely upon. Dr. Lyons was a grasping, greedy bastard who would seize everything he could get his hands on. Jason knew that. Lyons had never seized anything Jason didn’t want him to have. In exchange for occasionally letting his grip on something weaken, Jason had a lab, a patron, and, best of all, the plausible deniability to keep his research moving forward. “Dr. Lyons needs it” was a phrase that could open considerably more doors than his own as yet untried name.
But this … this was going to change all that. Dr. Lyons had the living specimens. That didn’t mean he would be able to keep them alive, or that he was going to learn the things he needed to know without killing them. By the time Dr. Lyons brought himself around to the idea of making sacrifices, Jason would be recording his own conclusions, writing them down and codifying them, analyzing his samples. He would be the first to get his answers. The time stamps on his research would prove that. He would also be the first to publish. Dr. Lyons, for all his considerable skills, had been depending on grad student
s and research assistants to handle his filing for too long. He’d never think to have his paper in the queue, waiting for the moment Imagine cleared research for transmission to the mainland.
Jason was going to get the scoop. Jason was going to win. And if winning required him to perform dissections in his cabin, behind a locked door, then that was what he was going to do. Whatever it took.
Carefully, he used a pair of tweezers to adjust one of the pseudoshrimp on his dissection board. This would have been easier with a microsurgical robot, one of the clever machines designed for operating on small animals and human arteries. Sadly, while there was a microsurgery suite on the ship, it was intended for medical use, and getting clearance would require explaining why he wanted it. Involving Lyons at this stage would have made everything else he’d done pointless. So it was the old-fashioned way for him, pins and corkboard and a scalpel in his hand. The traditional way.
He’d be able to spin that into an incredible story, when he was telling it to the news blogs. A scientist, a ship, a creature from the watery deeps, and none of this newfangled scientific equipment to make things easier on him. It would look rugged. It would look authentic.
It would look like another zero on the check he’d receive for his eventual memoirs. Anything worth doing was worth doing meticulously, from top to bottom.
The pseudoshrimp was three inches long. Its shell was curved enough that it refused to lie flat on the board until he spread its five-lobed tail and drove pins into the two largest segments, stretching the creature’s hindquarters to their full length. He followed it up with a pin to the throat, effectively severing any internal structures. He had other specimens. If he had to dismantle five or more to get a full idea of their anatomy, then that was what he was going to do.