by A. L. Knorr
Jozef coughed into his curled fist, retrieved a bottle of water from the cup holder in the door, and took a few long swallows. I thought his eyes seemed a little red and my heart reached out to him. I knew what it was to lose a father, but I had been so young. Young people seemed to bounce back from death more quickly than adults did.
“I came to find you, Targa. I thought you might be able to help me find your mother.” He leaned forward and put the bottle back in its pocket and settled back, lifting a shoulder in a shrug. “If not you, then who?”
“You know about the Dyás,” I stated. “And you saw how much Mom was suffering before I finally made her go. Why did you think I would help you make her come back?”
“Because of what I found in Loukas’s research.”
Antoni and I shared a look. “More than just Atlantis? Are you talking about his…dissections?”
“No.” Jozef frowned and two lines appeared beside his mouth. He looked ill at the mention of Loukas’s scientific work on mermaids. “I knew that sirens needed the gems to be able to live without the Dyás hanging over them, torturing them. But I learned a lot more about how it became that way, at least in Loukas’s mind. It’s only a theory, but it made sense to me.”
“You know about the curse?” My heart began to speed up a little.
But Jozef shook his head. “Not the curse, no.”
“Let him explain,” Mom said gently. Her expression said he’d already filled her in on what he was about to tell us. She looked calm and had been thoughtful and quiet all morning. Fair enough; it was a lot for her to process.
“When my father gave me the key to Loukas’s labs and library, I found a journal he kept for his thoughts as he was working. Most of it was scribblings that made no sense to me, but part of it was a theory on why there were no tritons.” Jozef braced his shoulder against the door as Adam took the on-ramp and began to speed up. “See, tritons had been gone so long that no one alive believed they existed.”
“But Loukas did?” I asked.
Jozef nodded. “He thought it went against the natural order of things for a species to only have females, but he couldn’t pinpoint any place in time where the tritons had gone extinct. There were no strange events, no illnesses, nothing that might be a cause for the elimination of one gender.”
“Mira said she saw something in Loukas’s journals that referenced crossbreeds,” Emun said, one knee bouncing up and down.
“Yes, that factors into his theory,” Jozef agreed. “See, at some point in time, an Atlantean or a group of them discovered the gems’ value. That group made a commitment to one another that if they ever crossed paths with a siren, they’d do their level best to steal her gem. It was a way of disabling them without a violent attack. They knew that sirens without gems began to cycle, and some of them ran the risk of losing their minds.”
“Why would they steal the gem as opposed to just killing the sirens outright?” Antoni asked.
“Who knows?” Jozef replied. “Loukas asked the same question. He theorized that they didn’t want to out and out start a war they probably wouldn’t win. He thought that if an Atlantean attacked a siren one on one, they’d lose. But the thinking went that if an Atlantean could catch a siren off guard and steal her gem, then he could get away from her. Atlanteans would collect the gems. They earned bragging rights to their friends, maybe they were even rewarded when they turned it in to someone.”
“Someone like your father?” I asked, keeping my tone as neutral as possible.
Jozef winced, but agreed. “Yes, someone like my father. Only we’re talking centuries ago. Over time, Loukas thought that this activity of stealing gems from sirens became a part of Atlantean culture. If there was a plan or an end game in mind, it has been lost to time, but in the meantime, Atlanteans raised their children to do this. It became hardwired.”
“Like that guy in the bar.” Emun’s eyes were fixed on Jozef’s face and his brow was wrinkled thoughtfully. “It was like he knew he was supposed to take gems away, that it would weaken sirens, but beyond that it was all up to fate. Like it was a superstition or something.”
“Yes, that was one of the words Loukas used in his ramblings.”
“How did the gems end up back in Okeanos, then?”
Jozef paled a little and looked out the window for a moment before resuming the story. “That was my father’s idea, his and his lieutenants. Over the years, my father and Loukas groomed their Atlantean friends and friends-of-friends to bring any stolen gemstones to them. They’d amassed quite a collection, as you know. After they’d mined all the orichalcum from Okeanos and left its interiors mostly in ruins, they put the gems inside and had someone put up a magical barrier to make them inaccessible.”
Antoni and I looked at one another with wide eyes. We’d seen these magically protected gems. We’d even seen the magic kill.
Emun had been there too but his mind was on something else. “So, concerning the lack of tritons…I’m not sure I understand yet.”
Jozef nodded. “Loukas thought that the decline and eventual extinction”––he paused here and gestured to Emun––“obviously he was wrong about the extinction part––happened as an accidental byproduct of the sirens slowly losing their gemstones.”
“Because of the crossbreeding,” Antoni interjected with a nod to Mom. “The note she saw in Loukas’s lab when she was rescuing Fimia.”
“Yes. The sirens having to cycle meant that they bred mainly with human men, rather than Mer, because tritons didn’t have to cycle, and generally stayed underwater.”
“I certainly haven’t,” Emun replied.
“No, but tritons of old did, according to what we understand. So the sirens had no choice but to mate with men, and as a result…”
“Male offspring were human, and female offspring were sirens,” I finished.
“Exactly.” Jozef gave a deep nod, keeping his eyes on me. “And over time, this meant that with no new tritons to replace the ones who died, they just became less and less common, until they were rare, and then finally, nonexistent. Over time they fell into the realm of myth, with almost no sirens alive today even believing that they ever existed at all.”
“Even the curse isn’t seen as a curse,” Mom added. “Sirens alive today don’t see it that way because it’s the way life has always been. It’s the way it was for their mothers, and their grandmothers.”
There was silence in the car for a few minutes. Adam turned the SUV onto the airport road. We were nearly there.
“So you discovered all of this,” I said to Jozef as we all swayed in our seats when the SUV cornered, “after your father died and gave you the keys to Loukas’s stuff. And you wanted to find my Mom…”
“I wanted your help to find her and give her a gemstone. It never occurred in my wildest dreams that you’d have done that for her already.” Jozef’s eyes seemed a little glassy and he looked away. I saw him swallow, fighting to keep his emotion under control.
The SUV came to a halt in the parking lot and we could see Ivan and his co-pilot waiting on the tarmac near our plane. Adam and Antoni pulled out the bags and passed them to their owners.
Mom and I shared a grim look as we heaved our bags onto our shoulders and headed for the plane.
“I’m glad I asked him all that stuff before we got into the air,” I muttered.
“Yeah, it’ll be lights out from now until Gibraltar.”
“Too bad the gemstone doesn’t cure the flying sickness.”
“No, but maybe on the way back…” She let her sentence trail off without finishing it.
“You think the flying sickness is part of the curse?”
She shrugged. “One can always hope.”
Six
“This isn’t the only reason I was so desperate for you to come to Gibraltar with me,” Jozef said, his hands laying flat over the satellite imagery and documents we’d been perusing.
We’d been in Gibraltar for just over twelve hours. Mom and I
had slept away half that time. Since we’d woken we had done little else but pore over the Atlantis documents while snacking on fruit and hard-boiled eggs.
I looked up from the photograph of The Richat Structure at these words. Antoni and Emun paused in what they were doing as well.
Jozef’s eyes were all for my mother. “I have something else to show you, something even more… well, I don’t know if exciting is the right word, but…honestly I’ve been wracking my brains trying to find the right words to tell you but I find myself at a loss, just like my father was. I just have to show you.”
Mom stood up. Antoni, Emun, and I all shared a look. We hadn’t specifically been invited by Jozef to come and see this thing he was clearly so nervous to show my mother, but there was no way I was going to sit this out…whatever it was.
Jozef wiped a hand across his brow. “We have to return to Loukas’s lab. I’m sure it’s the last place in the world you would ever want to go back to, considering what he did there.”
My gaze darted to my mom. “Where he dissected sirens?”
A cold hand slipped around my heart and began to squeeze at the thought of it.
Jozef nodded. “That’s the place.” He looked a little green himself as he got up from the table.
Antoni took my hand as we followed Jozef through the manor and out into the back gardens. It was just the way my mother had described it. Topiaries, trickling fountains, and borders of flowers decorated the large courtyard and pathways. We passed through this courtyard and headed toward a free-standing building at the rear of the property. It was boarded up and to say it needed a spot of repairs was a massive understatement. There had to be a resident ghost or two.
Ivy crawled through the crevices between the bricks, and soft fuzzy mosses crept up the lowest stones from the damp ground. The door Jozef led us to––at the bottom of a long, narrow stairwell leading below ground level––looked newer than everything else. It was a metal door, painted black, and crusted with several locking mechanisms.
“Looks like Loukas stepped up security,” Mom said.
Jozef nodded as he fished a set of keys from his pocket and began to unlock the door, lock by lock. When he swung the door open, a musty smell drifted from the doorway. We followed Jozef inside. The space within was pristine with stainless-steel surfaces and several computers. A door to the right drew my eye––also new, metallic, and painted with the same black finish as the entrance.
“That’s where you found Fimia?” I pointed at the closed door across the room.
Mom nodded and I saw a shudder pass through her.
“Is it just me or does this place feel evil?” Emun muttered, his dark blue eyes scanning the table and bookshelves, boxes and computers. Everything was covered in dust, and several cobwebs dangled from corners and in the spaces between the bookshelves.
“With your help, perhaps we can exorcise a few of the demons,” Jozef answered.
But he didn’t lead us to the doorway where Fimia had been kept in an aquarium and slowly starved. He headed straight for the back wall. A plain plastic cover hid a panel of numbered buttons and a small circular keyhole. Jozef punched in a code and inserted a cylindrical key. The panel blinked to life with a muted yellow glow and there was a creaking sound. A gentle breeze came from nowhere and drifted past my face. It smelled of mildew and salt.
Antoni took a step back and pulled me with him at the sudden noise and the mysterious wind. His eyes darted about, looking for the source.
“It’s a secret doorway,” Jozef explained.
What had looked moments ago like a seam in the wall, had cracked open and was widening before our eyes as a door swung inward. Shadows tinged with a false green light yawned from within. I could hear a slow but steady electronic beep.
Jozef entered and reached for something near the doorway. A fluorescent light flickered above our heads, revealing a small chamber.
A long computer screen blinked dimly in front of a set of chairs. Below it was a panel of complex boards with dials and switches. A film of dust had formed over everything. Just like the rest of the lab, no one had been in here for a very long time. In the corner of the room was a semi-circular rod holding a curtain, like privacy curtains in hospital. It was hanging in front of what I thought might be another doorway.
Jozef reached for the curtain and drew it back.
My mother gave a low cry and covered her mouth with one hand. She walked up to the glass Jozef had revealed and put her hand on it.
Jozef had revealed a circular tank with a heavy silver lid and a sturdy looking base, with several cables connecting it to the panel against the wall.
Inside the tank was a mermaid.
The room was so quiet that I could hear my own heartbeat. I left Antoni and Emun in the doorway and went to stand beside my mother. I could not have torn my eyes from the siren within the tank if I had wanted to.
“Is she dead?”
She looked dead. Her eyes were closed and her body lay relaxed against the bottom of the tank, her tail curled in front of her torso. Her fins disappeared beneath her head, like a pillow, and her hands were together in front of her nose, almost in prayer.
“She’s in what Loukas called diapause,” Jozef answered. “That beeping sound is her heartbeat.”
“So slow?” Antoni asked, his voice quiet and awed. “It can’t be more than fifteen beats a minute.”
“Something like that.”
The mermaid had dark skin, but long white hair that drifted in the water like a cloud above her head, and a black tail. She was so thin that muscular striations were visible on her arms, belly, and chest. A small aquamarine dangled from a thin chain fastened around her neck.
“This is what you must have looked like when you came out of diapause,” I said to Mom. My stomach squirmed at how fragile the siren in the tank appeared––like her bones might snap if the water around her shifted too much.
“And Emun, too.” Antoni stood close enough to my back for me to feel the comforting heat of him. I leaned against his warmth and solidity, fighting the cold filling my heart.
I finally tore my gaze away from the comatose siren when my mother moved in my peripheral vision. Mom put both hands on the glass and looked at the siren, but tears were now over-spilling her cheeks and running down her neck. Only then did I realize that she knew this siren.
“Who is she?”
Mom took time to find her voice and when she faced me, I realized that she was in a strange ecstasy of emotion––both elated and grieving.
“It’s Nike,” she said. “Annikephoros, the siren sorceress who saved my life by reversing my age.” She took a breath and her eyes softened. “The sorceress who gave me you.”
It felt like my eyes were going to pop out of my head and I stared at the sleeping mermaid again. “This is Nike? But…”
“I thought she had blue hair,” interjected Emun, stepping to my left side and peering down at Nike’s fragile form. Even the siren’s face was sharp, the cheekbones jutting and her features seeming too big for the bones of the face that held them.
“She did,” Jozef answered. “Loukas actually records that in his notes. After they put her in this chamber, he documented that her hair turned white some time later. You can still see a little of the blue at the very ends if you look closely.”
I looked, and yes, I saw it. The very ends of her hair were a darker shade that the rest, a shade that looked more like shadow in the water and dim light of the tank––a barely-there tint of sky-blue.
“How do we wake her?” Mom looked over at Jozef and took her hands away from the tank. She wiped at the moisture running down her face.
I fished in my pocket for the small packet of travel tissues I kept for the inconvenience of siren tears. Pulling one out of the sack, I handed it to her. She took it and gave me a wobbly smile. After thinking about it for a second, I gave her the whole packet. She gave a sodden chuckle and took that, too.
Jozef looked pained. “We
ll, that’s the tricky part. I don’t know.” He gestured to the computers and to the room we’d passed through. “We have all of Loukas’s notes. He was good at documenting everything. But what I’ve read so far suggests that this is the first time he’d ever done this––forced a siren into diapause.”
“This is a special chamber, obviously,” Emun said, moving to get a closer look at the vintage computers and the complicated looking panels. He murmured to himself as he began to read some of the writing on the panel below the screen. “Some of this is her vitals, which must be coming from the clip over her finger.”
Blinking, my gaze shot back to Nike’s hands. There was a pale plastic clip fastened over the skin just below the base of her pinkie fingernail. The clip had a thin cable coming out of one side, which disappeared underneath Nike’s arm and shoulder.
“I hadn’t even noticed that.” I felt Antoni’s breath against the top of my head.
“Me either,” I added. “I noticed her fingernails, but not that thing.”
Nike’s fingernails were so long they had begun to corkscrew.
Jozef nodded. “It’s a high-pressure chamber, made to mimic the deepest of underwater sea environments exactly. When he put her in here, he writes of slowly increasing the pressure and documenting what happened to her vitals. Initially, he was trying to learn at what point sirens might…expire.”
“Expire?” Antoni echoed sharply. “He might have killed her––this one-of-a-kind siren––for his experiment, and not even cared?”
“That was Loukas.” Jozef looked regretful. “Science was worth every cost to him, and certainly siren lives didn’t matter.”
“Like a nazi,” I said, feeling my lip curl with disgust.
Emun agreed and leaned over to frown at the panel. He bent to blow the dust away from one of the small screens on the dashboard.
“So, he wanted to know the limits of siren endurance in terms of depth,” I summarized, more for myself to understand what had happened here than for anyone else, “and she eventually just fell asleep?”