by ReGi McClain
Kaito shook his head. “Water’s one thing, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to handle the pressure down here, or the temperature.”
Unwilling to admit defeat, Harsha grabbed her medical records and climbed out the hatch. She took a deep breath. The air, though heavy with brine, had a filling quality, as if infused with extra oxygen. Kaito hesitated, then followed her into the room, pouring out questions.
General held up a restraining hand. “I am sorry, but the woman is the one with an appointment.”
The white-haired merman smiled at Harsha. “So, you are de last… erm…” He looked to General.
“Spawn,” General offered.
“Mmm. Spawn of de…” He looked to General again.
“Fae-mermaid.”
“And Rakshasi?” the white-haired merman—the doctor, she assumed—asked.
Harsha pursed her lips and shook her head. “I don’t think so. Here are my medical records, if they’ll help.”
“Ah.” The doctor accepted the hefty file and put on a pair of spectacles to peruse a few of the documents. “Mmm. No Rakshasi.” He looked at her over the rim of his glasses. “I keep dis?”
“Yes.” She intended to spend the rest of her days doing better things than visiting doctors.
“Good.” He waved a hand over it, making it disappear. “I need blood tests. To see if you, erm...”
“We don’t know if your blood will respond best to magic or medicine,” General finished for him.
Settling herself on a sponge near the doctor, she held out her arm. The doctor pressed a gelatinous, white blob into the soft side of her elbow. It bit into her skin. She struggled to keep her expression neutral and her body still as it sucked her blood into itself like a miniature vacuum machine. It expanded, taking on the dark red of the precious liquid it drew out of her. When it looked about to pop, the doctor set it on a tray and applied a new one. Her squeamishness faded with each globule, sucked away with her blood. When he set the tenth one on the tray, the doctor waved a hand over the tray to make it disappear.
“Good. Look here.” The doctor proceeded to perform a physical, minus certain invasive procedures.
He tapped his notes into a device resembling an electronic tablet, muttering in the clicks and squeaks of his own language. When the tablet sang out a whale-like note, the doctor stopped his exam. “I have your numbers.” His eyes traveled over his tablet, flicking from right to left. “Good. We can make you better.”
Bolts of excitement zinged through her. Her limbs buzzed with it regardless of the loss of blood making her dizzy. She moved to the edge of her spongey seat, holding her breath, eager for him to continue.
“We can use… uh…” He looked at General and enunciated his words. “Medicine or magic?”
General nodded.
Harsha sprang off her sponge and clasped her arms around him, as much to express her gratitude as to catch herself. “Oh, thank you!”
Chuckling, he patted her back. “You must make de choice.”
She reined in her elation and fell back onto her seat with a squishy plop.
He looked to General again. “Will you…?”
General nodded. “First, let us discuss the magic fix. If you wish, we can remove your condition.”
Harsha leaned forward, ready to accept the offer. He held up a hand.
“But you must live the rest of your life as a mermaid. We merfolk have one great advantage over you humans, and one great disadvantage. We are given three hundred years to live, assuming we are not killed. You would live another two hundred and seventy-one years, plenty of time to make friends, find love, raise a family, pursue learning. But our souls… not die . The words is… expire with our bodies. We are all gone.
“You have a short life, but an eternal soul. If you keep your current form, you keep your eternal soul. We cannot remove your condition if you stay as a human, but with a big… transmission? No. Transfission? To give you the blood of the merfolk, we can give you a little time, perhaps. Maybe enough to find a better solution, but that is doubtful. We can’t guarantee you’ll survive the transfusion, and if you keep your eternal soul, you should do something good with it. Otherwise, you will regret your decision.”
The last shred of her enthusiasm crumbled, taking with it all her energy. For the second time, a cure lay within her reach, and, for the second time, required her to decide whether to keep loved ones or lose them. She slumped on her sponge, bent under the burden of choice. Deep weariness enveloped her, drowning her heart and replacing her thoughts with numbness. “May I think about it for a while?”
“Yes.” The doctor tapped his tablet. “Come back on… I tink you call it Dursday? At…” He looked to General and made deep, throaty noises.
General tapped his chin. “I think they call it tardes .”
Kaito, who had been observing silently this whole time, asked, “Do you mean afternoon? Tardes is the Spanish word for afternoon.”
“No after .” General warned. “Come right at, er, noon.”
“Is dat good?” the doctor asked.
It gave her four days, which seemed both too long and not long enough. “Yes. Thank you.”
“Good.” The doctor pressed a few buttons on his tablet. “I am happy for it, Harsha Mooreland.”
Chapter 34
Flummoxed by the choice before her, Harsha appreciated being low on precious blood for the first time in her life. It forced her to concentrate her entire mind on navigating the sub back to the boat, leaving nothing with which to ponder the unfair twists of fate. When they docked, she flopped back in her seat and closed her eyes, exhausted.
“Hey, Boss! Come on. I gotta document stuff.”
Kaito pulled her over his shoulders fireman style and climbed the ladder to the hatch. Crewmen jumped into the water to swim her to the boat’s ladder.
Zeeb pulled her up from there. “So?”
“So.” Without making eye contact with him or the others, she tilted herself forward, toward the stairs. She needed to lie down.
Seraph and Maura flanked her and kept her from landing on her face. They obeyed her silent instructions with small steps in the direction she wanted to go.
“She has four days to decide,” Kaito explained.
“What?” Seraph stopped walking. “Decide what?”
Zeeb stepped in front of her and ducked his head to meet her eyes. “Harsha? What’s there to decide?”
She looked past him to the unending blue of the horizon and shrugged. In the distance, as though a wall stood between them, she heard Kaito relating their adventure. Questions floated her way. They sounded like garbled nonsense.
Harsha slept, or pretended to be asleep, to avoid the people who came into her cabin. Seraph tried to shake her awake a few times and went so far as to check her pulse once. Harsha ignored it. She wanted to avoid her friend’s questions, terrified of the answers.
The sun sank and rose. Harsha needed the bathroom and her stomach ached with hunger, but she persisted in her charade until she heard Seraph and Maura leave for breakfast. She listened for their footsteps to recede down the hall before dragging herself out of bed and to the bathroom. Getting food required stealth she did not possess, so she decided to survive on her candy supply. She popped a candy in her mouth, and the door to her cabin popped open.
Maura stood in the door holding a fish sandwich. “Eat, Mom.” She sat on Harsha’s berth and offered the sandwich.
Avoiding Seraph and Zeeb, she felt fine about, but when she looked into Maura’s eyes, remorse flooded her. She accepted the sandwich with quiet thanks, set it aside, and wrapped her arms around the selkie.
Maura clutched her sleeve and cried.
Harsha smoothed Maura’s hair and rocked her. Her choice was clear. She was staying human.
“I’ll miss you, Mom.”
Harsha jerked back. “What do you mean? I’m going to stay.”
Maura shook her head. “The sea calls. You cannot deny the sea.”
/> Harsha held the young woman who called her mom and contemplated those words. She understood, a little, what Maura must be going through. For as long as she remembered, the sea sang in her ears like a choir of a thousand skillful voices. When she swam in the ocean, she felt free and accepted. To live in it, to feel that freedom and belonging, all the time… If what she felt represented a mere fraction of what Maura knew as a selkie, she wondered how the girl survived without it.
Footsteps sounded in the hall, interrupting her thoughts. She took a deep breath to steel herself to face whoever stepped through the door.
Maura jumped off her berth. “Quick, Mom. Lie down.” She put the sandwich on her own berth.
Bewildered, but unquestioning, Harsha lay down and shut her eyes.
“Ms. Mooreland?”
“She’s sleeping.”
“Oh. Well, when she wakes up, can you tell her I want to talk to her?”
“Yes.”
Kaito left and the door snicked behind him.
For the rest of the day, Maura conspired to help Harsha avoid everyone. She snuck food into their room and distracted Seraph and visitors with questions or requests. A visit from Emilio tempted Harsha to drop the farce and inform Zeeb his chat had failed, but Maura turned him away, too. Harsha didn’t understand why Maura wanted to help her be alone, but she accepted it. Maybe she wanted Mom to herself for a while, and that was fine.
The others took the hint. The next morning, Seraph left without trying to wake Harsha, and no one else came to her cabin. She sat on the edge of her berth, sucking rosemary candies and trying to work a Sudoku puzzle to take her mind off her problem. She erased another incorrect guess, tapped her pencil on the book, and set it all aside to drop her head into her hands. Centuries to fulfill all her dreams, or a potentially fatal procedure to spend a little more time with people she loved. If she chose one, she lost everything but her life; if she chose the other, she might lose even that.
Sitting around got old. She sneaked out of her cabin and tiptoed up the stairs. After poking her head out the door and looking this way and that, she stole across the deck in the opposite direction from the workstation. No one caught her.
They must all be looking at the merfolk’s pets . She leaned on the railing, watched the sun dance on the water, and wondered what Jason, her mother, and Ami would tell her to do.
A wet, squashy blob plopped on the deck. Harsha stared at the mass of yellowish pulp, puzzling over its sudden appearance. Nothing on the deck indicated where it came from. Curious, she picked it up by one corner. It stretched out into a sheet, like paper but heavier, and displayed four words.
To come talk please .
A face popped out of the water, surprising a squeak out of her. The green-haired mermaid smiled and waved.
Harsha smiled back and tucked the soggy note into a pocket. “Hi. You’re the one who found the camera, aren’t you?”
The mermaid ducked under the water and surfaced at the side of the boat. She held a finger to her lips. “I am not to be here.” She waved her hand in a beckoning motion. “You to come with me?”
Harsha looked over her shoulder, toward where she heard the others. They all thought her safe in her cabin, mulling over her difficult decision. She needed a good swim to clear her head and ease tension. She could leave and be back before they noticed.
Then again , she thought, looking at the mermaid, merfolk like to experiment .
The doctor’s behavior gave her the impression he found her medical files fascinating enough. That didn’t mean other merfolk felt satisfied with a pile of paper when the real McCoy lingered within their reach.
The mermaid’s eyes widened and she glanced to the left. She turned back to Harsha with an urgent look on her face. “Please. We must to hurry.”
Harsha decided to go along, to get off the boat, if nothing else, although curiosity, fatalistic despair, and stress-induced recklessness played parts in forming the impulse. Careful to keep the scraping noise to a minimum, she dragged a deckchair to the railing, climbed on, and jumped into the water. The mermaid took her hand and swam away from the boat, much faster than human abilities allowed.
They put great distance between themselves and the boat. In the endless water, Harsha discerned a sphere of lighter blue. The mermaid swam up to the bubble and pushed Harsha into it. The surface resisted her body at first. The mermaid pushed harder until the membrane surrounding the bubble molded around Harsha’s body, reminding her of times she had stuck her finger into gelatin. For a second, the membrane encased her before it spit her into the bubble.
The mermaid dove several yards beneath the bubble. With her hands met in a point above her head, she rammed the bubble, plunging her upper body through the membrane. “You to breathe in here.”
Harsha took an experimental breath and found the air to be like the air in the doctor’s office, extra filling. Breathing it eased her weariness. She touched the side of the bubble. “What’s it made of?”
“I do not know to say in your language. I am, er… I to study peoples, um, cultures. I am not to translate, like father mine.” She smiled. “I want to ask questions to you.”
Harsha smiled back. “Of course, but what is your name?”
The mermaid made a noise like a cartoon kiss and clicked twice.
Harsha puckered her lips and sucked in air to imitate the squeak then clicked her teeth.
The mermaid smiled. “It is try good.” She opened her mouth wide to let Harsha watch how she formed the sounds.
Harsha tried again and again until the mermaid nodded. “You to make try good, but it to be better for you to make name human for me.”
After spending the night thinking of her family, one name came to mind. “How about Nelly?” Her mother’s nickname.
“That is good.”
“Okay, Nelly, what do you want to know?”
“You to live in the land near here?”
“No. I live on the island of Kauai, in the Pacific Ocean.”
“Ah!” Nelly’s hair brightened. “I know this ocean, but I not to go to this ocean. You to tell me.”
Harsha strained to recall what she knew about the creatures living in the waters off the shore of Kauai. The information dribbled out of her memory like honey off a chilled spoon. Nelly listened without show of impatience, encouraging Harsha with wide smiles.
Harsha exhausted her knowledge of Kauai. She delved into the folklore when she ran out of facts to share. “I’m sorry. I think that’s all I know.”
“What is it you to do? Your… work for your people?”
“I was the chief financial officer for a small business, but I retired.”
Nelly crinkled her brows. “I not know words these.”
“I worked with money. To make it grow.”
“Ah! This I know. This is what the child of sister mine to do. This is a work good.”
“You use money?”
“With what to trade, if not?”
The belt above Nelly’s pectoral fin sported several pockets, some of which held strange items Harsha guessed to be tools of exploration. Nelly opened a pouch on her right and pulled out several beads of coral, most the typical pink and orange shades, and a few of black and gold.
Harsha picked up one of the offered gold coral beads and rolled it in her fingers, enjoying the smooth surface. “They’re beautiful. I wish human money looked this pretty.”
“You to keep. Father mine to say you to be mermaid. This gift mine for you.”
Harsha watched the dim light glint off the polished surface of the bead. Her worries, forgotten for a time, rushed back. “Thank you, but I don’t know if I’m going to be a mermaid or not. There are people I don’t want to leave.”
“You to love people this?”
“Yes.” Harsha looked at her hands, an image of Zeeb hovering in the forefront of her mind. “A little too much, actually.”
“Bah. There is not this thing to love too much. If you to love this people, you to
stay human, with them. I to ask father to make for you to visit.”
“But…”
Nelly tilted her head to one side, her wide eyes, adapted for life in the darkness of the ocean, glowing.
Harsha knew better than to put her worries on others. The invitation in Nelly’s eyes seemed genuine, though, and her broad shoulders looked suited to the task of carrying great weights. Harsha dropped her head into her hands and let the tears that had been brewing for the last two days fall. “What good is it if I’m going to die? It’s not fair to foist myself on my friends if I’m going to be a burden.”
“Ah! No, no, no, no, no.”
Harsha looked up, stunned. She accepted Nelly’s disapproval of being a burden, but the strong reaction hurt.
Nelly pulled a flask from her belt and held it up to Harsha’s cheek. “You not to waste tears.” She brushed tears into the bottle.
Harsha submitted to the treatment. Aside from being a welcome distraction from her embarrassing lapse of self-control, she found Nelly’s concern for the cheap commodity of tears fascinating. Nelly caught the last tear, put a stopper in the flask, and held it out to her.
Harsha gave the mermaid a wan smile. “You keep it. I have plenty.”
This time, Nelly looked stunned. “You to give me tears yours? This is gift too precious.”
Harsha chuckled, torn between bitterness and amusement. “Not to me.”
Lips parted and eyes wide, Nelly wrapped both hands around the flask. She pulled it to her heart and closed her eyes for a moment before tucking the flask into her pouch and arranging items around it to cradle it.
“This is gift great. We to be friends, but this thing you to speak of: all people to die, all people to be burden. You not to waste tears more on this. This people you to love not to love you?”
“Well…” Harsha shifted. The bubble gave her room to sit up and stretch out her legs, but it felt cramped at the moment. “Yes. I think so. Seraph is the best friend I’ve ever had, and Maura loves me, I’m sure, but it may be mostly gratitude.” She explained the circumstances of Maura’s adoption.