Into the Drowning Deep

by Mira Grant

  “I know,” she said.

  “Where did it go?”

  Olivia was silent for a long moment before she turned her eyes toward the rail, and past them, to the dark and endless sea.

  “It took him,” she said. “It took him into the water.” She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering for reasons that had nothing to do with the chill.

  “It took him,” she said again.

  No one else said anything.

  CHAPTER 18

  Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 2, 2022

  Tory glared at her screen. The waves and curves of audio slithered across the display, twining together as they passed their strange messages from one to the other. And she couldn’t understand a damn thing they were saying. Oh, she had the basic structures; she knew the underpinnings of the conversation, the places where the sound of the sea met the sound of the Melusine met the songs of whales and fish and squid and other deep-sea creatures.

  “I can’t even tell if the goddamn mermaids are down there,” she snapped, flattening her hands against the keyboard. It was better than putting her head down. If she did that, she wasn’t sure she’d pick it up again before morning. The loss of Heather was echoing through the chambers of the ship, bouncing off the walls, coloring the air. It was in everything they did. It was never going to end.

  “I do not think that they will sing for you,” quipped Luis.

  “Go to hell.”

  “I have been there, and it is these data feeds.” Luis shook his head. “Half the data I’m getting doesn’t make sense. It says we’re above a huge pod of whales, and there aren’t any whales down there. There aren’t—”

  He stopped, eyes going wide. Tory’s eyes widened in tandem, but rather than stopping, she started, her fingers stuttering into motion, first tiptoeing across her keyboard and then slamming down with the sort of force that had broken three laptops before she’d turned eighteen. She couldn’t be trusted with a touch screen when she was like this; she needed equipment that was built to stand up to tsunamis.

  “They’re mimics, we knew they were mimics, we knew they remembered what the engines of the Atargatis sounded like, of course we can’t pick them out, because they don’t sound like them!” Tory kept typing faster, gathering speed. “They have three languages! The one they sign, the one they sing, and the one they steal, and they use that third language when they’re hunting, so the prey never hears them coming! It’s genius! You’re a genius!”

  She paused for Luis’s reply. When it didn’t come, she spun her chair around, directing a quizzical look at the back of his head. He was sitting very straight and very still, his own hands resting on the desk, motionless.

  “Luis?” she asked.

  “Do you know what you just said?” He shook his head. She didn’t know; of course she didn’t know. It had always been about revenge for Tory, but somewhere along the way, revenge had been transmuted into a need to understand. She wanted to know why the mermaids did what they did, why they had chosen to leave the safety of the water to hunt prey that should never have been a part of their world. She wanted to hear them. That meant she was willing to listen.

  “I said they were mimics,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “You said that they use mimicry when they’re hunting. They stop using their own kind of sounds when they’re hunting. What are they hunting now, Victoria? What are they looking for? They killed Heather. They’ve killed humans before. They know humans come from ships; what happened to the Atargatis is proof of that. Between the season and the climate changes, we represent the most food they’ve seen in one place in God only knows how long. They’re hunting. They’re hunting us.”

  Tory stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Nothing else makes sense.”

  “You’re assuming a level of intelligence that—”

  “Doesn’t seem so far-fetched when you’re talking about something with three languages.” Luis glared. “Think about your words.”

  Tory slumped in her seat, face going blank. Luis waited. He’d worked with her long enough to have seen that expression a hundred times; he knew it meant she was combing over her stores of accumulated data, both considered and unconsidered, and using it to draw a functional conclusion.

  Finally the light came back on in her eyes, giving way quickly to absolute horror. “We need to tell someone.”

  “Yes.”

  “We need to tell Mr. Blackwell.” The captain might control the ship, but it was Mr. Blackwell, and Imagine, who controlled the voyage. If anything immediate was to be done, it would be Mr. Blackwell who approved it.

  “Yes,” agreed Luis. Both of them stood, turning toward the door to their lab.

  Olivia was there, small and pale and swimming in a green sweater at least four sizes too large for her. Luis and Tory stopped, bewildered by her sudden appearance. The door had been closed; she must have slipped it open without making a sound. She was hugging herself and shivering.

  “Olivia?” said Tory.

  “The captain brought me here after the nurse said I was okay, but you were working, and I didn’t want to interrupt, so I waited for you to be done, and then I realized I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.” Olivia’s voice was slow, measured, the voice of a woman who was looking over the edge of the world, and didn’t like what she saw. “I still don’t know what to say. Do you really think they’re hunting us?”

  “Yes,” said Tory.

  Olivia nodded. A tear ran down her left cheek, dropping from her chin onto her sweater. She’d been crying for a while, Tory realized; her sweater was soaked.

  “That makes sense,” she said. “One of them came up the side of the ship and took Ray. It just … took him. Into the water. Do you think he drowned?”

  “No,” said Tory, and it was the absolute truth, even filtered through her horror. No, she did not think Ray had drowned. If one of the mermaids had taken him—one of those deep horrors, with teeth like daggers and the hands designed to catch and keep—then he hadn’t drowned, because he wouldn’t have had time. He would have died before his body hit the water.

  “Good,” said Olivia. She paused before asking, “May I have a hug, please? I don’t want to impose. But I very much want a hug right now.”

  “Yeah,” said Tory, and crossed the few feet of floor between them, folding her arms around the smaller woman. Olivia stiffened for a moment, like she had requested the hug without really expecting to receive it. Then she melted against Tory, burying her face against her chest. She didn’t sob. All her sobbing seemed to have been used up. She just stood there, shaking slightly, and clung.

  Finally Tory asked, “Are you okay?”

  “No,” said Olivia. She raised her head, not letting go. “Ray pushed me away. He saw what the mermaid was going to do, and he pushed me away so it couldn’t get me. I think it would have taken us both, if he’d let it. Why would it do that? He was bigger than it was. What could it possibly want with him?”

  “Food,” said Luis. Tory winced. He continued without seeming to notice, saying, “Prey is scarce around here, and we know from the footage we’ve collected so far that they hunt as a group. So it probably took him because it knew it would be able to eat its fill and still support the school.”

  “Is that the collective noun for a group of mermaids?” asked Olivia.

  “It’s the best we have,” Tory said. She let go of Olivia, taking a step back to give her some space. “We need to go tell Mr. Blackmore what we’ve figured out. Do you want to come with us? You can stay here, if you’d rather.”

  “I like to watch old music videos when I’m stressed,” said Luis. “I could queue up a bunch for you.”

  “Thank you for the offer, but no, thank you; I’d rather go with you,” said Olivia. “I don’t … If I’m alone, I’m going to dwell, and if I dwell, I’m going to retreat, and if I retreat, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to come back. That’s what I want t
he most right now, to go away and not come back, and that’s why I’m not allowed to have it, no matter how much I want it. So thank you, but no. I need to go with you.”

  Luis nodded. Then he hesitated, and turned, and walked back to his desk, beginning to rummage through the piles of paper and small objects that had accumulated there. Olivia blinked after him before turning a blank look on Tory, who shrugged.

  “I don’t know either,” she said. “Luis moves in mysterious ways.” Then she winced. “I’m sorry. This probably isn’t a good time for jokes.”

  “No, it’s the best time for jokes,” said Olivia. She forced a weak smile. “Jokes remind us that we’re alive. And that your sense of humor is terrible.”

  “No contest here,” said Luis, walking back over to join them. He held a small black rectangle out toward Olivia. “I thought this might help.”

  “What is it?”

  “Handheld video recorder,” he said. “I know Ray was, well. I know he was the one who held the camera for you. I know that’s important. So I thought maybe, for right now, you could hold the camera for yourself.”

  Olivia’s eyes widened. She pulled the camera toward her chest like a child with a teddy bear, chin dipping in what seemed like an abortive nod. “Thank you,” she said.

  “No worries,” said Luis.

  He waited for Olivia to collect herself, and then the three of them—Tory with her arm around Olivia’s shoulders, Olivia hugging the camera—left the lab and walked down the long stretch of deck between them and the nearest stairwell. It was impossible not to look at the sea, that great dark sheet stretching from them to the horizon. Luis had always found that darkness comforting. Who knew what lurked down there, waiting to be discovered? Let deforestation do away with Bigfoot, let sonar destroy Nessie, but the sea would always be deep, always be dark, always be filled with wonders. Every cryptid hunter he knew had turned their eyes toward the sea years ago. That was where the monsters might still be.

  Well, he knew something about the monsters now. He knew they were real, for one thing, and he’d been wasting his family’s money by looking for them. He should have been using it to build better barriers. Anything to keep them safe from the so-called lovely ladies of the sea.

  A few crew members rushed by as they made their way into the depths of the ship. Luis watched them with a weather eye, noting how quick their steps were and how reluctant they were to make eye contact with anyone. The captain had sent out the all-hands alarm after Heather’s death, asking people to stay out of the open, to stay in groups, while they prepared the shutters for deployment.

  Most of the researchers had remained calm. They were scientists, and a life spent in service to science had an odd effect on the sense of self-preservation. They started out as safety inclined as anyone else, and then they spent their careers learning to run toward explosions, to collect novel toxins for research purposes, to pick up venomous snakes and see the beauty in their alien eyes. Luis didn’t think there was much reason to worry about panic among the ship’s scientists. As long as their equipment kept working and they weren’t actively being eaten alive, they were going to keep doing their research, and keep enjoying the opportunity to do so.

  Olivia stayed close to Tory’s side. She hadn’t loosened her grip on the camera Luis had given her even once. He considered pointing out that a camera was just an object when it wasn’t being used, and let go of the idea as a bad one. It was hers now. If she gained comfort from its existence, and not its use, that was up to her. People had their own ways of experiencing trauma, and he wasn’t going to interfere.

  “Where do you think they’re all going?” asked Tory, as they reached the last flight of stairs. This one would take them down to the pool level, where Mr. Blackwell spent the majority of his time.

  “If they’re smart and we’re lucky, to the lifeboats,” said Luis.

  Olivia frowned. “We’d be lucky if they left us here?”

  “No, but I’m betting the mermaids go for small craft first. If they’re big enough cowards that they want to desert us, let them get what they deserve, and give us a little extra time to prepare. Maybe the damn things will fill up on the crew, and leave us alone.”

  Tory looked at him levelly. “You don’t really think that.”

  “We don’t know how many are down there, how much they eat, or whether their smarts extend to having figured out a form of food storage.” Mermaid larders filled with bodies, preserved by the salt water and growing slowly bloated as they drank in the surrounding sea. And if the mermaids were smart enough to do that, they would be smart enough to figure out that having corpses around would attract other predators, predators that acted on instinct, that couldn’t plan; that would be helpless in the face of an organized attack like the ones the mermaids were capable of.

  They weren’t going to get full. Things like that never did.

  “To think, up until today, I wanted to find the monsters,” he muttered.

  The women shot him a sharp look, but neither of them said anything, and he was grateful for that.

  They descended the stairs in silence. There were no people around the pool for once, although the saltwater sluice was open; fish swam in the shallow end, darting in and around the artificial coral provided to comfort them. As Luis watched, an octopus snaked out a mango-colored arm and snatched a young parrotfish, sucking it back into its hidey-hole. An adolescent bull shark circled in the deep end, bumping its nose on the walls, never going into water shallower than five feet. But it would. Once it got hungry enough, it would, and the temporary paradise of the shallows would come crashing down.

  There were a few engineers clustered around the control station for Heather’s Minnow, still taking readings, chasing the ghosts of any mechanical failures that might have made her situation worse. They’d finish their due diligence in the next day or so, and that would be that: Heather Wilson would be officially lost at sea, written down in the history books as one more consequence of man’s unending expansion.

  Luis couldn’t look at them. Neither could Olivia. But Tory turned her head and watched them until they were out of view, marking every hand on every control, every motion and whispered conference.

  The door at the end of the room was visible but closed. There weren’t many closed doors on the Melusine. They tended to slow the free and open exchange of ideas, which was counter to the purpose of this voyage. All of them had been assuming that if they were going to find the mermaids, they were going to do it by working together.

  It seemed almost hubristic now, when the mermaids were real and present and dangerous. The Atargatis hadn’t found the mermaids through a free and open exchange of ideas. The Atargatis had found the mermaids because the people on the ship were made of meat, and the mermaids had empty stomachs that they wanted to fill. That was how you found things, in the sea. Be delicious. That was all you ever had to do.

  Luis knocked on the door. The sound echoed, almost startling in the open air of the lower deck. He waited, counting slowly to ten, before he knocked again.

  “Do you think he’s in there?” asked Olivia.

  “Mr. Blackwell has been working on something down here for days,” said Luis. “I saw him heading for the stairs with Dr. Toth earlier, and when I went to the cafeteria, Holly was there, getting coffee, and told me her big sister was doing something with him. Put it all together, it sounds like a private think tank.”

  “With an acoustician, a sirenologist, and a bureaucrat? What the hell could they be working on?”

  “Brokering a peace treaty with the mermaids to convince them to stop eating us?” suggested Olivia, and giggled, high and shrill. Tory gave her a concerned look. She stopped giggling, cheeks coloring red. “Sorry. I just … I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Tory forced a smile. “You’ve had a bad night. You’re allowed to be a little off.”

  Olivia, who was staring down the barrel of a lifetime of nightmares, assuming her lifetime extended past this place
, this ship, this damned and doomed voyage, said nothing.

  The door opened. All three of them jumped.

  The man in the doorway wasn’t Theo Blackwell, who they would have known how to deal with; it wasn’t even Jillian Toth, who could be capricious and unpredictable, but was at least familiar. This man was tall, solidly built—more than solidly; he had the sort of small belly that spoke of healthy meals and a marked enjoyment of mealtime—with long brown hair and sensible glasses totally at odds with his multiple tattoos.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  Luis was the first to respond. He grinned, big and bright, stepping forward and saying, “Daniel, my man. What do they need a whale doctor in the basement for? Did you catch something amazing?”

  “I’m not a whale doctor, I’m a cetologist, and you are literally the last person on this ship I should need to explain that to,” said the stranger—Daniel. He frowned. “I repeat: can I help you?”

  The name and discipline had been enough of a clue for Tory, who nodded in comprehension and said, “You’re Daniel Lennox, our whale expert. That makes sense. The mermaids sing, and you’ve done groundbreaking work with whale song. Who else is down here?” Why aren’t I down here? She hadn’t known there was a secret think tank to have been rejected by until this moment. It still stung, realizing there was something on this ship that she hadn’t been asked to be a part of. Especially if it was related to sound. There was no one with a better understanding of the way the mermaids sang than her.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t talk about this,” said Daniel, and moved to close the door.

  Luis was faster. He shoved his foot into the gap before the door could close, smile firmly in place. “I don’t think you get to say that right now,” he said. “Olivia?”

  “Have you spoken to Captain Peterman?” she asked, voice dropping with each word, until it was barely above a whisper.