by Mira Grant
Jason paused in the act of reaching for the scalpel. Pulling back the pseudoshrimp’s head seemed to have triggered some biological mechanism; a long spike, maybe an inch long—a third of the pseudoshrimp’s body—protruded from a previously unseen sphincter at the base of the tail. He leaned closer, studying it. It was thin as a needle, with a wicked barb at its tip.
“Well, hello,” he murmured, picking up his tweezers and using them to grasp the end of the spike. He tugged. It held fast. He was enough larger than the pseudoshrimp that he could have pulled the thing free, no question; any anatomical structures designed to hold it wouldn’t stand a chance. The question was what the structure was meant to be in the first place. A stinger? That would make sense, given its location on the creature, but wouldn’t fit with any known species of prawn.
The deep sea kept secrets. If the sirens were mimics playing at being humans, what was to stop the shrimp that combed their hair from being some form of spider, or ambulatory mollusk, or even something stranger? There was no reason to discount the idea of venom just because of what the thing looked like. If not a stinger, it could be an ovipositor, designed to deliver eggs into the body of an unwary prey creature, or some sort of biological anchor. Drive a spike into a siren’s scalp, never get knocked loose.
Jason gave the spike another tug. It squirted a yellowish liquid with surprising force; it splattered all the way to the end of the corkboard. He let go and stepped back, surprised. His heel hit a wet spot on the floor, created when he’d been preparing a saltwater bath for his waiting specimens. His foot slipped and he flailed, arms pinwheeling to catch himself before he fell.
In his haste to lay out his specimens, Jason had lined up four of the pseudoshrimp, setting each on its own piece of corkboard. His hand hit the third in the row, slamming down on its abdomen. The impact caused the creature’s stinger to burst forth, hard enough to puncture the thin blue plastic of his glove. Jason stopped flailing and lifted his hand, looking at the tiny, smashed creature now hanging from his thumb.
“Dammit,” he muttered. He plucked the thing from his hand. The stinger remained, buried deep. “Dammit,” he repeated, and plucked the stinger loose. A bead of blood followed the removal, gleaming deep red against the glove.
“Dammit,” he said, for a third time. He dropped pseudoshrimp and stinger to the board before stripping off his glove, revealing the puncture at the base of his thumb. The stinger had gone in at an angle, creating a pocket in the skin that was rapidly refilling with blood. He squeezed it. More blood dribbled out.
“Dammit.” This time, the word carried an air of desperation. He still didn’t know whether the spike was a threat or some harmless quirk of anatomy. There were species of snake whose fangs carried venom long after their death. There were others whose fangs were harmless unless the snake chose to activate its venom glands. He could be fine. He could be dying. He had no way of knowing which it was.
Help. He needed help. Calling for someone to come here would just waste time. The medical bay was only one floor down, and the elevator opened directly in front of the doors. He could make it that far. He was certain of that.
The wound in his hand was still bleeding as he staggered out of the cabin, his heart racing at a tempo that could have been the result of poison or panic. That was the trouble with situations like this one. It was so damned difficult to tell the difference between medical crisis and paranoia.
Had he taken a closer look at the blood, and realized it was trickling from the wound at a speed that implied an absolute absence of clotting factors, he might have realized that paranoia was not the issue here.
Inside Jason’s body, red blood cells were beginning to break down, shredded by a toxin they had no idea how to fight. As they were destroyed, they clumped together, forming knots of tissue that bore no resemblance to healthy blood clots. His body struggled to form a functional immune response. Nerves went dead, refusing to transmit any sensation to the body around them. In their absence, Jason pressed onward, not realizing that only necrosis was saving him from agonizing pain.
His head spun. His lungs tightened. The whites of his eyes turned red as blood vessels burst, spreading broken blood through the sclera. He reached the elevator, and pressed the button with his blood-sticky hand, staring in dismay at the fingerprints he left behind. There was so much blood. How could there be so much blood from a little pinprick?
He looked at his hand. There was even more blood there, covering his fingers, washing along his palm all the way to his wrist. Something was very wrong.
The elevator dinged. The doors slid open, and Jason stepped inside, slumping against the wall. The elevator dinged again as the doors closed. He punched the button for the level of the medical bay and closed his eyes. Almost there. Almost to someone who could help him. It was just a little prick. There was no way this could be anything truly dangerous.
The world was going to remember his name. He was absolutely certain of that. All he had to do was get medical treatment and get back to work. That was … that was …
The red behind his eyelids turned black as his heart stuttered in his chest, unable to keep forcing the increasingly thin blood through his veins. He fell. He was dead before the elevator came to a stop, one deck down. All things considered, that may have been a mercy.
CHAPTER 26
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 3, 2022
Tory was at her desk, pulling apart the audio recordings of the last hour. The sirens were still down there, shouting across the void, their voices including so many “ordinary” sounds that she could only isolate them through their incongruity. She didn’t believe an orca could have gotten under the ship without showing up on a single sonar reading, or that one of the RIBs had not only been launched, but somehow continued to run despite having been hauled easily forty yards below the surface.
“They must have a way of understanding one another, even when they’re speaking in borrowed sounds,” said Tory.
Luis, who had shared a lab with her for years, did the sensible thing: he ignored her, continuing his own work. Olivia, who hadn’t been sharing a lab with either of them for more than a few hours—and technically wasn’t sharing this lab; she just wanted a place to sit while she watched a playback of the necropsy—looked up from her laptop.
“Did you ever watch Star Trek?” she asked.
“Which one?” asked Tory.
“Next Gen.”
“Sure. Who didn’t? The special effects are terrible, but it was the foundation for the modern series.”
“What if their language is the borrowed sounds? I mean, what if they’re talking in mermaid metaphors?”
Tory’s hands went still as her head came up. She stared at the waveforms on her screen. “It’s not the words, it’s what they represent,” she said, tone bordering on awe. “It’s not the sound, it’s where the sound was encountered. It’s what the sound does.”
“There you go,” said Luis. “You put a quarter in her. Everything that happens now is on you. You understand that, right? This is your fault.”
“What’s my fault?” asked Olivia.
“Orcas. To us, orcas are intelligent animals in need of conservation, but once, they were viewed as dangerous killers. Why? Because the people encouraging that idea of them wanted people to be willing to stand by while they were killed and taken captive. Orcas represent one thing now, and something else then. What would they represent to the sirens? Food. They’re prey. Dangerous prey. There aren’t any orcas here, so when the sirens use their calls … what if they’re talking about us? What happened with the Abneys?” Tory began opening files. “The RIBs … They didn’t come for us while those were in use, but we split ourselves up to use them. We would have been easy to take.”
“Why didn’t they?” asked Luis.
“If they’re as smart as we’re starting to think they are, they left us alone because they were trying to get into position to take us all at once.” Tory kep
t moving files. “We were ignoring the issue of cultural literacy. We didn’t think they had culture. That was on us. All these sounds they’ve been collecting, all these things they’ve been shouting at one another—they’re coordinating through shared experience. Listen.”
She pressed a key. The distorted roar of engines came from her computer. The wailing songs of orcas sliced across the sound, high and bright and clear. She pressed the key again. The sound stopped.
“That was the exchange right before the siren came up the side of the ship and took your friend,” she said, turning in her chair to look at Olivia. “They talked about a successful hunt. They talked about prey. They talked about prey that hunts via ambush. They’re coordinating. Everything they steal, everything they share, it’s another piece of the continuity they have with the rest of the school. The spoken component of the siren language isn’t learned. It’s felt.”
“So how do we decode it?” asked Luis.
Tory shook her head. “I don’t think we can. We can map out every logical connection, and some of the illogical ones, but we don’t think like they do. There are going to be components we can’t prepare ourselves for, because they’re coming at them from such a radically different direction.”
“Like the sirens wouldn’t understand what I was doing if I started humming the Star Trek theme, but you’d know what I was doing,” said Olivia.
“From context, yes. I would—”
“Miss Stewart?”
Tory stopped talking and turned toward the doorway. Olivia and Luis did the same, Luis calmly, Olivia with a sudden taut tension, like every bone in her body had been yanked into alignment at the same time. She was a student of human vocal inflections—had to be, to navigate the world she lived in—and this man’s voice was filled with the echoes of nothing good. Nothing good at all.
We only had a few minutes, she thought, like a plea to an uncaring divinity. For a few minutes, they’d been safe, they’d been comfortable, they’d been distant enough from the reality of the deaths around them—even the deaths that had touched them all, that could never be forgotten or forgiven—that they’d been able to relax and be human again. To think, to plan, to care, to do those plain and human things that mattered more than anything else in the world. And now it was all resuming, the consequences of their actions and the dangers of their situation crashing down with a brutal, undeniable finality.
From here, it doesn’t stop, she thought, and she wasn’t wrong.
“I need you to come with me,” said the man in the doorway. He was tall, broad shouldered, and too good-looking to be anything but one of Imagine’s security staff. There was a pistol at his side. That was less reassuring than it could have been.
Tory, conditioned by years of exposure to obey the orders of uniformed people on ships, started to stand. Then she paused, frowning. “Why?”
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge that information.”
That was enough to put some steel into Luis’s spine. He stood, faster than Tory had, and turned to offer his hand to Olivia. “Bring your camera,” he muttered, through gritted teeth.
Olivia didn’t say anything. She simply nodded, taking the offered hand and levering herself off the floor. The camera was a reassuring weight in her right hand. She never took her eyes off the man in the door. Unlike Tory, she recognized him, and she didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust any of Imagine’s security forces. They weren’t trained well enough. They knew more about their angles on camera than they did about how to use their weapons. It wasn’t safe.
“In that case, I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to accompany you.” Tory crossed her arms and looked witheringly at the stranger. “Please feel free to tell whoever sent you that I’ll be happy to come see them as soon as they’re happy to tell me why I’m wanted.”
The man frowned. “Miss—”
“Brett, right?” Olivia stepped forward. “I knew I’d remember your name if I looked at you long enough. It’s a gift. Also I made flash cards. Brett, Miss Stewart is a contractor in the employ of Imagine for the duration of this voyage, but is not subject to Imagine’s authority unless she’s working on a specifically sanctioned project goal or has been accused of malfeasance. Her audio analysis is approved but not funded by the corporation, and she’s been with us since leaving the company of Dr. Jillian Toth. So unless you’re here to accuse her of having terrible taste in music, this is where you tell us what you want or go away.”
Brett’s eyes narrowed. “Miss Stewart needs to come with me to be questioned in regards to the death of Jason Rothman. We understand that she was seen speaking to him on the deck shortly before he died, and we need to determine what, exactly, was said.”
Tory went pale. Plastering her hands over her mouth, she gave a low moan before asking, “Jason’s dead? But that’s not possible. He can’t be—I mean, he’s not—I mean, what happened? He was fine when I saw him.” She looked frantically toward Luis. “He was fine,” she repeated.
“Who’s Jason?” asked Olivia. “Did the sirens get him?”
“Had the creatures taken Mr. Rothman from the ship, we would not be here to question Miss Stewart,” said Brett stiffly. “She’ll need to come with me now.”
“So will we,” said Luis. “There are dangerous creatures in these waters. We’re not leaving our friend alone.”
Tory’s hands were still clapped over her mouth. Tears overflowed her eyes, trickling down her cheeks. She didn’t look like she remembered how to move, or what it was to want motion.
“Tory.” Olivia touched her elbow. “You need to come on, okay? Mr. Blackwell can send more men to get you if you don’t, and that’s not going to go very well for you. For any of us. We know you didn’t do anything to this Jason guy.”
“He’s my ex-boyfriend.” Tory lowered her hands, looking bleakly at Olivia. “We were together for three years. We broke up at the start of the summer. He said … he said I had no ambition. I said he was wrong.”
“He was wrong,” said Olivia. “Come on. We need to go.”
Brett scowled. “I don’t recall inviting the two of you.”
“I don’t recall asking you for an invitation,” said Luis. “Isn’t this fun? We’re having fun. Let’s keep having fun. Let’s not make things worse than they have to be.”
Olivia tugged on Tory’s arm, guiding her away from the desk, toward the doorway. Luis followed close behind.
Together the four of them walked down the deck. Tory pulled away from Olivia and Olivia let her, falling back a step to put herself level with Luis.
“What is going on?” she whispered.
“Jason’s a jackass, but there’s no way Tory killed him and got caught,” said Luis. “If she were going to kill him, she’d have done it at school, and there wouldn’t have been anything to link her to the murder. Whatever this is, it’s amateur hour enough that there’s no way she was involved.”
Olivia blinked. “You know she didn’t kill him because if she’d killed him, she wouldn’t have gotten caught?”
“Pretty much.”
“That’s … Okay, you’re right. That’s oddly reassuring.”
Luis grinned, the expression not touching the worry in his eyes. “I know, right? It’s good to know your friends well enough to have faith in their limitations.”
“But who was he?”
“Like Tory said: ex-boyfriend. Controlling asshole if you asked me, which, naturally, she never did, since it was none of my damn business. He had the future plotted out for both of them. Used to say her fixation on mermaids was going to be the death of her career, and then he had the gall to show up on this boat, like he had some sort of a right to be here just because there was scientific discovery going on.”
“He was a science hipster,” said Olivia. “Everything was awful until enough other people liked it, and then he was there bragging about how he’d gotten in on the ground floor.”
“That’s a good description,” said Luis. “I thought yo
u didn’t know him.”
“I’m a geeky woman whose job involves looking cute on camera for a major genre media producer,” she said. “I’ve seen his type before.”
“And been quizzed by a few of them on the convention floor, I bet,” said Luis. His eyes went to Tory’s back. “She had every reason to mistrust him. I’d even believe it if someone said she’d slapped him and he was pressing assault charges. He always knew how to press her buttons. He’d do it just to get a rise out of her, since once she started yelling, he was obviously in the right. Didn’t matter who started it. What mattered was all those people seeing him getting picked on by his crazy girlfriend.”
“Sounds like a real prince.”
“He was part of some fucked-up rebellion against the establishment, like dating an asshole would prove that she didn’t care what people thought. She dumped him. Didn’t stop him from going around telling people that he’d been the one to dump her, and didn’t stop a lot of them from believing him.”
“People are credulous,” said Olivia. “If they weren’t, I wouldn’t have a job.”
Luis chuckled darkly, and kept chuckling as it became obvious that they were heading back to the wet lab. The doors were still closed. Apparently, once the place had been turned into a makeshift surgical bay, there was no rush to reopen it for casual use. It made sense that they’d go there for an interrogation. With nothing to cut open, the lab was unlikely to be in high demand.
Brett opened the door. The reason for the wet lab’s closure became even more obvious. The tables where the siren had been dissected were still in the middle of the room. They weren’t empty: Jason’s body was there. Tory’s eyes went to his face, expecting to find it covered by a sheet. It was not. He was staring at the ceiling, eyes open, thin rivulets of blood running down his cheeks. She gave a short, sharp cry, clapping her hands over her mouth again.
“I told you she didn’t do it,” said a female voice. Tory turned. Dr. Toth was standing next to the captain, arms crossed. “The fact that they used to be romantically involved isn’t relevant. Not in a situation like this one.”