by Mira Grant
Dolphins were good. Humans had the potential for good, although they did not always make the effort. But the creatures born from blending the two, the claw-and-tooth children of the deepest depths … they were not good. They had never been good, would not know how to be if the opportunity was offered to them. They existed only to catch and snatch and devour. They sang no songs of their own, only songs stolen from the victims of their hunger. They were voiceless and cruel and terrible, and if not for them, the dolphins would never have needed to seek the shallows, or put themselves into the path of men, or choose the safety of cages over the freedom of the sea.
Mankind could go hunting for mermaids as much as they liked. The dolphins had known where to find them all along.
Twitter and Cecil sought the mermaids because they’d been asked to, because they thought to buy their freedom with accomplishment. Do a trick, get a fish. Do a bigger trick, get the world. Kearney envied how simple things were through their eyes. He did not try to correct them. He had lived captive and now he would die free, and if he never saw the humans again, that would be fine by him.
They dove. Three together, moving as one, they dove. The pressure of the water slowed their descent. Dolphins were not made to go this deep. Maybe that was what had kept the deep-graspers from destroying them all long ago. The dolphins stayed high and the deep-graspers stayed low, and prey that could not be easily taken was rarely worth remembering.
Twitter’s voice called from below. Not an echo, not an answer: her voice, singular and strong and sounding as if from her own throat. She stopped in confusion, hanging in the water.
Cecil didn’t realize she had stopped quickly enough to do the same. He sailed past her and, finding himself suddenly in the lead, kept going as she clicked behind him, trying to call him back, trying to stop him from plunging into the alien deep that spoke to her with her own voice. Had he been worldlier, more able to be aware of danger, he might have listened. Instead he swam, tail beating against the crushing pressure, and dove, chasing his sister’s misplaced voice into nothingness.
Kearney pulled up next to Twitter, hanging there, his sleek gray side nearly brushing hers. She whistled her distress, and he whistled back, reassuring her that this was as it was meant to be. Cecil was chasing a dream into the dark.
His parents, who had been wild caught, had told him of this hunting technique, of the way the deep-graspers, in their thieving, would steal the voices of those who came too close, and how the young and the inexperienced would follow this novelty, fascinated by sounds that should not be, coming from places that should not hold them. They had lost friends and loved ones to the deep-graspers, and when the human ship had come to catch and keep them, their response had been gratitude. Humans meant safety. Confinement, but safety.
It had been a bad bargain. Kearney knew that, even if his parents never had. He would be free. He would live free, if only in this moment, and he would die free, whether now or later. He thought it would be now. He couldn’t see a future where it was not now.
A scream from the dark ahead of them, shrill and agonized. It was part whistle and part sigh, and when it stopped, he knew Cecil had stopped as well. No more songs for Cecil, no more games, no more dances. Cecil was free.
Twitter moaned. There was a pause. Kearney could have told her not to move; he could have bid her to be still, suggested she wait to see what the dark would do. But she needed to be free to choose for herself, as he had, as Cecil had, even if Cecil had believed he was following his sister. Kearney was silent.
Twitter turned and swam back toward the ship, moving as fast as she could, moving at a speed that put her earlier sprint to shame. Kearney did not watch her go. He couldn’t; the dark was too deep to allow it. All he saw was the faintest suggestion of movement in the water, something that was as much feeling as it was sight. That was enough. He knew she was gone, and Cecil was gone, and he was alone.
The sound of Twitter’s stolen song came closer, punctuated by scraps of Cecil’s scream. It was a jagged, senseless thing. The thieves knew what to steal, but they didn’t know how to put it together in a way that meant something. They acted without sense. That was the worst thing. At least the humans, when they tried, were trying sensibly. The thieves just acted.
He hung where he was, not moving, not flinching away. Some things needed to be chosen. Some things needed to be pure.
Twitter was moving fast, but not fast enough to be out of range of his screams. She whipped around, looking back at the empty space where he should have been, the lightless void that did not contain her brother, or her uncle, or anything but the sound of her own voice singing. It was so far away. It couldn’t hurt her. It was so far away.
The mermaids that dropped on her from above made no sound. That, too, was how they hunted: sound to enthrall and confuse, claws to catch and close and end the fight.
Twitter had time to scream.
She didn’t have time for much else.
CHAPTER 20
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 2, 2022
We’ve lost the tracker on the third dolphin.” Daniel stared at his screen in horror. “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”
“That can’t be right.” Hallie started to type. Her fingers fumbled; she backspaced almost as much as she moved forward. “They’re dolphins. There’s nothing out there that should have been able to surprise them enough to take them down.”
“I told you.” Jillian’s voice was calm, virtually serene: she was Cassandra speaking from the walls of Troy, watching her prophecies coming true. “I said this would happen the second you told me what you were planning to do. This is their space, Theo. This is their world, and they’ve had millennia to learn how to use it to their advantage. Dolphins are smart, but this isn’t a place where dolphins thrive.”
“Dolphins are goddamn geniuses by the standards of the sea,” said Daniel. He was still staring at the screen, like he was trying to will the tracking signals back into existence, like he could, through sheer refusal to accept reality, bring the dolphins back from the dead. It wasn’t working. The lines where their tracking chips should have been steadily, soothingly beeping, signaling that all was right in the world, remained empty. The chips were off line. The dolphins were gone. “Is there any chance—”
“No,” said Luis. Daniel and Hallie turned to him, blinking. It was like they’d forgotten he was there. That wasn’t so unusual. Tensions were mounting, and the tenser people became, the more likely they were to retreat into their own heads, into the familiar confines of their own concerns. Luis was a scientific dilettante, a monster hunter who liked to use the latest toys to try to prove his latest theories. The only person here whose concerns genuinely overlapped with his was Dr. Toth, and she didn’t want to find the things that he was looking for.
“The Marine Mammal Conservation Act of 2019 made it illegal to embed tracking chips in the flesh of cetaceans, even volunteers; there was concern about coercion,” he said. To his credit, Theodore Blackwell turned his face away. Luis continued, “The chips would have been glued to the dolphins, attached to their skin with the strongest bio-adhesive Imagine could find—and given Imagine’s resources, I’m betting that was pretty damn strong. Even if the dolphins managed to scrape them off, they’d keep transmitting unless they got too deep to be picked up by our scanners. Dolphins can’t go that deep.”
“Mermaids can,” said Jillian. “They’re dead. We sent three innocent creatures into a trap, and we did it because we could.”
Theo didn’t respond. He was staring, wide-eyed, at the tank. Slowly the others turned to see what he was looking at.
Olivia screamed—a short, sharp sound—before clapping her free hand over her mouth, keeping any further sounds from escaping. Her eyes bulged in their sockets even as the blood drained from her head. Tory stared at her.
She looks like she’s going to faint, she thought. She’d never seen someone faint before, not even when she’d volunteered at h
er high school’s blood drive, but she’d seen plenty of tourists overcome with seasickness during the whale-watching tours, and many of them had looked like Olivia did right now. The Melusine wasn’t rocking. Seasickness wasn’t the culprit.
Slowly, wishing she didn’t have to, Tory turned.
When the dolphins had been released, the door at the back of their enclosure had been left open, in case they wanted to return to the ship. Their freedom was the payment for their service, but there was no reason for them to claim it here, so far from the coasts they knew. The Melusine had been prepared to play escort to their final destinations.
The dolphins had not returned. Something else had come in their place.
The mermaid wasn’t fully aboard yet: it was hanging in the doorway, its flat, terrifyingly simian face peering over the edge. Every time it moved, its vast cloud of bioluminescent “hair” flared around it. It looked like something from another world, something that had managed to swim out of a dream and into reality. It was clearly cautious, looking around the large, bright chamber with suspiciously narrowed eyes.
Jillian Toth folded her hands over her mouth, almost like she was suppressing a prayer. Like Olivia’s, her eyes were wide and round. Unlike Olivia’s, they contained neither fear nor dismay. Tears pooled in them, not quite falling, not yet—but that moment was going to come. She was watching her life’s work inching into view, and she was overcome. Anyone would have been. Anyone.
“Can it see us?” whispered Hallie, tone caught between horror and amazement.
“Yes,” said Theo. He didn’t whisper; he spoke in a conversational tone. “I recommend against sudden movements. We wouldn’t want to attract more of its attention than we already have.”
“Why not?” asked Luis. “Can it break the glass?”
“Unlikely, but would you want to be responsible for frightening it away?” The mermaid was continuing its slow study of the tank. Finally it pushed against the side of the entrance, undulating gently into the space.
Tory gasped.
The footage from the Atargatis included several full-body shots of the mermaids above water, taken when the creatures swarmed the decks of the ship. The footage from Heather’s submersible showed the mermaids in their natural environment, but was unevenly lit, cutting in and out of focus. This was the first time any of them were seeing a mermaid in the water—where it belonged—without barriers.
“It’s beautiful,” breathed Daniel, and while there were those who would have objected to the reverence in his voice, none of them corrected his statement. It was beautiful, in its own terrible way.
So many monsters are.
The mermaid was eight feet long from the crown of its head to the tip of its sinuous tail. It lacked the classic flukes found on its dolphin-esque cartoon counterparts; instead, eel-like bands of fin ran down both sides of its body, starting at the base of its rib cage and continuing to form a fin a foot or so past the end of its cartilaginous tail. The fins were tattered and torn and even missing in some places; enough, presumably, to slow it down slightly, without doing anything to stop it. There was no way of knowing whether those small signs of damage had actually done anything to impair the creature. It swam easily, fluidly, with no obvious signs of distress.
The fins rippled and surged with every movement, sometimes propelling the mermaid forward, other times pulling it back. Once it stopped moving it drifted into an upright position, hanging there like the underwater equivalent of a biped. Dr. Toth sucked in a delighted breath, seeing her theories beautifully, if brutally, proven true.
It was difficult to tell whether the mermaid had a pelvis; without a skeleton, or at the very least an X-ray, its inner workings remained a mystery. But there was a swelling at the point where tail met torso, suggesting distinct, if narrow, hips. Its arms and shoulders were simian, and their gray, hairless skin gave them an unnervingly human cast. It had no nipples, no breasts, no belly button; whatever it was, it was not mammalian. It still had a mammal’s rib cage and sternum, pushing its shallow chest into a curve that might be mistaken, on a dark night and at a distance, for a woman’s bosom.
“Close the door,” said Theo softly.
Daniel flinched, his body moving away from his superior and the mermaid in the same motion, like he couldn’t decide which direction was the dangerous one.
(In the tank, the mermaid tracked the movement of his body with its round and terrible eyes, watching him; watching all of them, but focusing most on the movement. Movement could mean danger. Movement could mean food. The mermaid hung there like it felt confident in its ability to turn the first into the second, and felt no fear.)
“Sir?” Daniel whispered.
“Close the door.” This time Theo’s voice was a hiss, filled with a dreadful warning. Failure to obey would end in pain.
Daniel’s hand moved.
The door slammed shut fast and hard enough that it would have injured, if not outright killed, anything that had gotten trapped in it. Olivia made a squeaking noise, her hands still clasped over her mouth. Daniel went white.
“If one of the dolphins had been caught in that—” he began, and stopped as the mermaid spun in the water, still floating vertically, to look at the closed door. There was something about the angle of its body, the way its shoulders locked and its long-fingered hands curved into claws, that sent off alarm bells deep in his mind, where the frightened monkey that had come down from the trees still lingered. Instinct told him to fear what he saw in front of him, and so he did, without hesitation.
The mermaid moved so fast it was a streak in the water and began clawing at the closed door. When the metal failed to yield it drummed its fists against it, hammering hard. It made no difference. The mermaid was flesh and the door was steel; there was nothing it could do to free itself.
It stopped hammering and hung in the water, motionless save for the small, apparently automatic motion of the fins along its sides. Then, slowly, it began feeling the wall, dragging its fingers along the steel until it found the seam where the door ended and the rest of the ship began. It started methodically sliding its nails into the seam, worrying at it, trying to pry it open.
On the other side of the glass, Tory took an involuntary half step forward, toward the tank where her sister’s killer swam. It didn’t matter that this mermaid, this example of the breed had probably not been involved; all mermaids were her sister’s killers now. She stopped when a hand clamped down on her arm, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. She looked over her shoulder.
Olivia had uncovered her mouth and was holding on to her, as tightly as she could. Her eyes were still too wide, shiny with shock and with unshed tears. “Don’t get too close,” she said. “Mr. Blackwell said it can see us.”
Tory looked back to the tank as the mermaid was finishing its examination of the door. It spun, plastering its hands against the metal, and launched itself at the window. The naked eye couldn’t follow its movement. One second it was trying to escape; the next it was flying through the water, so fast and so sure that it might as well have been a missile fired from some unspeakable gun. The sound when it impacted with the glass echoed through the room. The mermaid jerked back, disturbingly human mouth opening in a silent scream, exposing an impossible number of teeth.
“They had to develop sign language for close communication,” said Dr. Toth, sounding satisfied. “Look at that mouth. They can sing, and that’s enough to get their point across, but there’s no way they would have developed complex speech on their own. And then there’s the mimicry to think about.”
“The mimicry?” asked Hallie.
“Turn on the speakers.”
“Do as she says, Daniel,” said Mr. Blackwell, before anyone could object. He was still standing, despite the spreading tremor in his leg. He took a step toward the tank wall, staring raptly at the mermaid. “We need to see what it has to tell us.”
“Sir, if we turn on the speakers, she’ll be able to hear us,” said Daniel.
“That was the point,” said Mr. Blackwell.
Daniel flipped the switch.
“We can’t be sure the mermaid is a female, even though we keep thinking of them that way,” said Dr. Toth. “Look at that skeletal structure. Everything about it suggests a human woman, but nothing about it is going to fulfill that promise. It doesn’t have the attributes of a mammal. It doesn’t need them. Everything about it is perfect for what it is and what it does. The only things out of place are those lips. You could slap them on any supermodel in the world, and she’d be selling lipsticks five minutes later. Why would something so evolutionarily perfect need those lips? They sing in their throats. They speak with their hands.”
The mermaid was looking wildly around the tank, trying to find the source of her voice. Finally it swam to one of the speakers and hung in front of it, head cocked, hair floating around its head in a great black cloud.
“So why would they have lips like that? Lips to purse and pull and shape sound? It’s funny. Because parrots can speak, but they don’t have lips. They make the sounds in their larynxes. Why didn’t the mermaids follow the same path? Mertensian mimicry only explains so much. They could have had faces like knives, an infinity of teeth, and still have spoken to us in echoes of our voices, if they’d done it through the larynx. So why evolve like this? What’s the point?”
“What’s the point?” said the mermaid. The voice, although distorted and warped by the water, was clearly Jillian Toth’s: it bounced off the walls, echoing until it filled the world. “What’s the point? What’s the point?”
“It’s not echolalia; it’s fixing on the words that had the most stress on them, which means it’s fixing on the words most likely to be a call for help, or an invitation.” Jillian walked to the glass and knocked on it briskly, causing several of the people behind her to jump. The mermaid whipped around, staring at her. She didn’t flinch. “The speech is a lure, like an anglerfish’s light or an alligator snapping turtle’s tongue. It’s a lure that specifically attracts intelligent creatures. Humans, whales, dolphins—and what do we all have in common? What is the one thing that binds us?”