by Mira Grant
Curran took a deep breath, apparently looking for another objection. He didn’t find it. In the end, he frowned, declared, “You are going to regret this,” and spun on his heel, stomping away down the deck.
“Wow,” said Teal. “Could he have sounded more like a Bond villain if he had really tried?”
The rest of the mermaids laughed, and the whole group resumed their passage down the deck, with Anne and Kevin bringing up the rear.
“I still don’t believe you woke me up for this,” moaned Anne. She let her eyes slide half closed as she walked, trusting Kevin to stop her before she could walk into any walls.
“I like the mermaids,” said Kevin reasonably. “Besides, you know you’d have been pissed if you’d missed anything.”
“I hate you,” said Anne.
Kevin chuckled.
Curran had intercepted the mermaids about twenty yards from their designated launching point. They scattered to cover the deck, stripping down to sports bras and bikini tops as they pulled on their tails. This early in the day, most weren’t bothering with the flesh-colored wraps, or with the elaborate seashell “vests” that some of them wore for shallow dives. Anne wound up next to Sunnie, watching as the purple-haired mermaid tugged her fins into position.
Teal and Jessica were already seated on the edge of the ship, waiting for their troupe mates to be ready. Anne nodded toward them and asked, in a low voice, “What’s their story?”
“You mean where are they from, or how did they join the troupe?” Sunnie looked guilelessly at Anne, watching as the other woman’s cheeks slowly reddened. “Ah, I see. You mean ‘why are they always in their tails.’ Well, you may have noticed the wheelchairs.”
“I did,” Anne admitted.
“We’ve found—us as a collective troupe, and Teal and Jess individually—that people talk one way to a woman who doesn’t stand up because she’s a mermaid, and another way to a woman who doesn’t stand up because her legs are not quite up to factory standards,” said Sunnie, checking the seal on her hips as she spoke. “If you want to know more about their individual reasons for using those chairs, you can bring it up with them. As far as we’re concerned, they’re mermaids. If they’re mermaids who don’t walk, and who need a ramp at any venue that wants to hire us, that doesn’t change the most important thing about them.”
“Got it,” said Kevin. He paused before adding, “I think I’d like to talk to you—all of you—when this voyage is over. I think a documentary film about professional mermaids might be a nice thing. It wouldn’t cost much. I could maybe even sell it to Imagine as tie-in programming.”
Sunnie smiled. “I think we’d like that. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” She couldn’t walk in her tail, but she could hop, and hop she did, until she came to the edge of the deck. Then she twisted around and fell backward off the Atargatis, dropping like a rock to the waiting ocean below. The rest of the mermaids followed her, some of them yipping or whooping as they fell, others just diving into the deep blue water. In less than a minute, Anne and Kevin were alone on the deck, and the waves were alive with brightly colored fins and the laughter of mermaids.
“I never figured you for a romantic,” said Anne, before yawning again.
Kevin kept aiming his camera at the water. “There’s nothing romantic about appreciating beauty.”
“It’s a bunch of women dressed up like mermaids,” said Anne. “Either you recognize it as make-believe on a grand scale, or you’re being a romantic.”
“What, so you’re not a romantic?” asked Kevin, taking his eye away from the viewfinder long enough to turn and look at her.
“Not before coffee,” said Anne, with another yawn. “Come on. Let’s go get breakfast before I’m expected to be perky.”
Kevin laughed, and followed her away down the deck.
The Pacific was cold, but that was what neoprene was for: the tails were weighted to provide their wearers with better marine buoyancy, but also to enable them to tolerate low temperatures for longer. The slimmer mermaids, like Teal and Andrea, would feel the need to get out of the water before their more well-padded comrades. They’d still be able to tolerate the cold better than someone in a normal swimming suit, and keeping their legs so well-insulated did a great deal to reduce the odds of hypothermia.
While all of them used the classic “mermaid kick” for primary locomotion, they each had their own style of swimming. Jessica mostly pulled herself along with her chest and shoulders, moving through the water like a large, colorful eel. Teal used a modified breaststroke, and was one of the fastest swimmers in the troupe. Her speed enabled her to do partial dolphin-lifts even in open water, and soon, most of the mermaids were emulating her, trying to copy the way she lifted her upper body out of the waves.
Sunnie hung back by the guide rope, watching the rest of the troupe frolic. Their morning exercises were mostly a matter of conditioning and preparation for the more intensive routines ahead. The man from Imagine clearly thought that they were just goofing off, and just as clearly didn’t understand what it meant to be a mermaid. If they didn’t practice here, where no one would see them, they would never be able to manage the dives and near-misses described by their contract.
Being a mermaid might seem like all fun and games, but it was a job like any other. If not all the members of the troupe took it as seriously as they should, well, Sunnie would take it seriously enough for all of them. That was her role within the troupe; that was why they had elected her leader and spokesperson for the year. To be honest, she was looking forward to the next restructure, when she could become as carefree and flippant as the rest of them, and someone else could take responsibility for a change.
Jessica was circling at the edge of the group, breathing rapidly in and out through her nose as she prepared for a deep dive. She was hoping to beat her personal best of nineteen feet straight down before it was time to perform for the cameras. There was something about seeing a woman rise up out of the depths that could thaw the skepticism of even the most hardened heart. Once she could get down to twenty-five feet, she thought she’d be ready. Her hair and dorsal scales were dark enough to let her slide into position without being seen, and then? Magic.
She looked down at the water, still breathing rapidly in and out. The sea floor was so far beneath them here that she didn’t need to worry about losing her way. All she needed to do was dive.
And so she did.
She cut through the first ten feet like a guided missile, slowing only when the water began to push back. Her lungs weren’t burning, and she still felt confident in her descent. She spread her arms, pulled herself deeper, and kept going.
When she finally stopped, the depth meter in her watch indicated that she was twenty feet below the surface—almost there. The water was dim around her, turning to twilight in the absence of direct sunlight. She spared a split second to consider diving deeper, and then decided that pushing her luck would be a bad idea. There would be other days, and other dives, before it was important that she be able to perform for the cameras. It was time to go back up.
It was easy to lose track of which way was up and which was down while floating twenty feet beneath the surface, especially with her tail providing neutral buoyancy and preventing her from being pulled in either direction. Jessica looked calmly around, finally identifying the glimmer of light that would lead her to the surface. Then, and only then, she began to swim toward it.
On her wrist, unnoticed, the depth meter dropped from twenty feet to twenty-one, then twenty-three, then twenty-seven. Jessica continued swimming downward, chasing the light, unaware that she was moving in the wrong direction until her lungs began to burn and she realized, with a dull, sinking horror, that she should have reached the surface by now. She raised her hand, intending to check the depth.
When the clawed, webbed hand lashed out of the dark beneath her and locked around her wrist, she didn’t think: she just screamed, the last of her air streaming soundlessly away in a tr
ail of silver bubbles. The hand yanked downward, and Jessica went with it, down, down, down into the bathypelagic depths of the Pacific Ocean.
If any of the remaining mermaids noticed the bubbles of her last breath breaking the surface, they dismissed them. There was no reason to think that Jessica was in distress—not until Sunnie called, “It’s time to go back,” and the others began to realize, slowly at first, and then with dawning horror, that they hadn’t seen Jessica since she made her dive.
They all went down repeatedly, searching the water around the ship; a few of them even swam under the ship, ignoring safety protocols and common sense in favor of searching for their missing friend. They didn’t find her. For all intents and purposes, the ocean had simply opened its jaws and swallowed her whole.
“Captain Seghers, we have a problem.”
Jovanie turned away from her breakfast and toward the anxious-looking crewman standing in her cabin door. He was flushed and panting slightly; he had clearly run some distance to reach her. A small pang of fear blossomed in her chest. The voyage had been too peaceful; it was inevitable that things would start going wrong. But oh, she had hoped that just this once, inevitability could be staved off by the need for a peaceful trip.
“Is this about Robert Warwick?” she asked, unable to keep the hope out of her voice. Maybe her wayward crewman had been found sleeping off a bender in one of the unoccupied cabins, and she would just need to provide some stern discipline. Actually, that would be a best-case scenario. She’d had crewmembers searching the decks until almost three in the morning, and they had found no sign of the man. It was unnerving. The Atargatis was a big ship, but it was still just a ship. It shouldn’t have been possible for someone to disappear that completely without going overboard, and while there were sharks in these waters, she found it difficult to accept that a human being, even one who had somehow managed to fall in and drown, could vanish without a trace. The currents weren’t strong enough where they were anchored, and the seas had been calm since they arrived.
“No, Captain,” said the man. “One of the mermaids is missing.”
Jovanie blinked at him, trying to force those words to make sense. There were no mermaids. This was a trip about finding mermaids, and everyone aboard knew that they were going to fail. They might find some “evidence,” and they might find the women in costume, but—
The women in costume. “Do you mean one of the performers?” she asked.
The crewman nodded. “Yes. They were doing their morning exercises off the rear deck—their contract apparently specifies that they have access to the open water whenever the ship is not in motion—and one of their people didn’t resurface.”
Oh, God. Captain Jovanie Seghers jerked to her feet so quickly that her chair went over backward, landing on the cabin floor with a clatter. “Notify the divers. I want bodies in the water in five minutes. We need to find that woman.”
“Aye-aye, Captain,” said the crewman, and was gone, running back down the deck. He knew as well as she did that sending divers in was an empty gesture; if the woman had been missing long enough for her fellow performers to raise the alarm, she was surely lost. But if they could bring the body back, her friends might at least have some closure.
Accidents can happen at sea. Accidents will happen at sea, as inevitable as the waves and the weather. All that could be changed was how people reacted to them, and what they did to prevent specific accidents from happening again.
The interns and early-rising scientists who were already out on the deck watched in confusion as the crew began to mobilize. More people than most of them had realized were on the Atargatis had already run toward the rear of the boat, and it seemed like the rush was never-ending. “Should I be concerned?” asked Alexandra, glancing toward Anne and Kevin, who had just arrived from the mess.
Anne was back to her usual focus group-tested and approved self, somehow having managed to put on a full face of perfect makeup using her reflection on the side of a coffee pot. This skill, among others, was why she was Imagine’s most popular convention correspondent. She had once fixed her lipstick in the shine off a Wolverine cosplayer’s claws. “I don’t know,” she said, watching another man push past. She itched to go after them, but was all too aware of the clause in her contract that forbade her to interfere with the crew. If there was one thing Anne did not want, it was to be confined to quarters for the rest of the voyage. Her job would surely be one of the casualties of that particular punishment.
Kevin, who was less concerned with his continuing employment with Imagine, and—more importantly—much more of a morning person, frowned. “They’re all heading for the back of the ship,” he said. “I hope nothing went wrong with the Blue Seas girls.”
“You mean the professional mermaids that we officially do not know are associated with this voyage?” asked Professor Harris, looking up and adjusting his glasses. He cast a wicked smile at the nearest cameramen, who were all, apart from Kevin, scowling at him. Mention of the mermaids meant immediate deletion of their footage, and a lot of manual editing to scrub the idea from the scene. “Open-sea swimming is never safe, but those women struck me as extremely professional. As long as they didn’t run afoul of a shark, they should be fine.”
“Are there sharks in these waters, Professor?” asked Anne.
Professor Harris hesitated. Then, apparently taking mercy on the cameramen who were waiting for his reply, he said, “There are sharks in all waters, my dear. This is their home, not ours, and we should treat it as such. Now, I have not seen the diversity of shark populations in these waters that I would have expected—but I have also not sent down the majority of my cameras yet, or chummed the waves to attract our fine, finny friends.”
“So would you say that you’d expected to find more sharks here than you have?” pressed Anne. The rushing crewmen were forgotten in her dogged pursuit of something that actually fit the documentary’s pre-constructed narrative.
Kevin almost envied her. He could never forget the real world as quickly as she could, and he liked those professional mermaids. No matter how hard he tried to focus, he couldn’t ignore the fact that the crew was rushing toward the spot where he had last seen the ladies in the water, and none of them seemed to be coming back.
“Yes, actually,” said Peter. “I was definitely expecting to have picked up signs of local shark activity by now. We’re sampling all levels of the local water, and cameras have started going down, but no sharks. It’s odd. This is clean, open ocean, with very little pollution and very high levels of the protein tags and chemicals that indicate a healthy ecosystem. So where are the predators?”
“Part of the issue with looking for sharks and other large predators in a place like this is the depth,” said Sonja, getting in on the action. The curly-haired cetologist looked bright and alert, despite the early hour. She was probably one of those people who didn’t really need to sleep, thought Anne sourly, and promptly forgot about her irritation in the face of the story. “We can’t go down to the sea floor to check for signs that they’ve been there, because we can’t actually get to the sea floor.”
“I thought sharks hung out near the surface,” said Anne. “You know, like the shark from Jaws.”
Professor Weinstein made a pained face. “There are a lot of things about the shark from Jaws that aren’t scientifically accurate. You can find sharks at all levels of the sea, but a surprising number of them like to swim along the bottom. It’s more energy-efficient, and there’s plenty down there to eat. Big apex predators like the Great White are relatively rare in the world of sharks. Smaller, more discriminating species are much more common.”
“We’re sending down the fish cameras today, and we should hopefully pick up any local shark species on our monitors,” said Sonja. Then she smiled wickedly. “Who knows? We might even find a mermaid.”
Kevin frowned. The scientists were laughing, and even Anne seemed interested and engaged, although it was hard to tell with her: so much o
f her job involved looking interested that sometimes he thought she hadn’t paid honest attention to anything in years. And yet he couldn’t manage to forget the professional mermaids frolicking in the water, or bring himself to ignore the passing crewmen.
What was going on back there?
The last of the Atargatis divers surfaced and swam back to the guard rope, shaking his head. Captain Seghers watched from the deck, her hands clenched tight around the rail. David stood beside her, his head bowed. After an hour of increasingly desperate dives, it was clear that the missing mermaid was not going to be found.
David tapped Jovanie on the arm. She turned to look at him, and he signed, ‘Do you want to tell her friends?’
She sighed. ‘No,’ she signed back. ‘I hate this part of my job.’
‘I could tell them.’
Jovanie raised an eyebrow. ‘How?’
‘I could write them a note. They wouldn’t get offended if it was from me.’ David shrugged. ‘Sometimes I have to work with what I’ve got.’
‘No, that’s all right, but thank you for offering. I’m the Captain. I’ll tell them.’ Jovanie sighed again, shaking her head. ‘This is horrible.’
‘I know,’ said David. He put a hand on her arm for a moment, lending her as much support as he could through that small contact. He and Jovanie had been friends for years, and he knew that despite her often tough exterior, things like this tore her up inside. She loved the sea. She loved her crew. She hated those moments where everything seemed to go wrong, and she was the one standing to accept the blame.
Sunnie had been waiting by the rail, watching the divers go down and come up empty-handed. Somehow that was worse. If they had come up with Jessica’s body, at least there would have been closure for the remaining ladies of the Blue Seas: at least they would have known for sure. But no matter how many times the divers descended into the blue, they returned without a pale body in their arms, without even a scrap of a brightly colored neoprene tail. Whatever had happened to Jessica, it had happened so quickly and so completely that it had left them nothing but an absence to mourn.