by Mira Grant
The water around her was alive with glittering points of light, and it took all Tory’s strength of will not to suck in a lungful of water. The sirens were here. They were swimming upward, toward the ship, and downward, into the depths, passing on all sides. Dozens of them, more than she had ever imagined. The lights in their hair allowed her to pick them out, creating dark outlines against the darker water.
They were, for the moment, ignoring her. She knew that wouldn’t last. Still, as she got her bearings back and began kicking her way toward the surface, she kept her legs together, trying to draw as little attention to herself as possible.
Why aren’t they grabbing me? She didn’t dare thrash—thrashing would be a death sentence—and so she tried to focus on the science of her situation. The sirens were man-eaters. They’d been taking people off the side of the boat since they’d made contact. They had taken everyone from the Atargatis, and from uncounted smaller ships. So what made her so different? Why weren’t they grabbing her and pulling her down?
A siren swam by, so close its fins brushed her arm. She glanced down automatically, and realized the water below her was brighter than the water above. The sirens were hauling their kills toward the greater light source. Maybe that was the explanation. The sirens on the way down had something to deliver, while the sirens on their way up weren’t thinking in terms of prey being already in the water. They were smart, and maybe that was the problem. She’d seen humans ignore things they knew simply couldn’t be where they were. Maybe sirens worked the same way.
Now she just had to get to the surface and find her way back onto the Melusine without attracting their attention, or going into hypothermic shock. She could feel the shakes beginning as the cold sank into her extremities, rendering them numb and sluggish. And her lungs were beginning to burn.
Every motion felt like a risk she couldn’t afford to take, but if she didn’t risk something, she was going to die. The sea would carry her body away, and no one would know what had happened to her. Olivia wouldn’t know. Luis wouldn’t know. Her parents, thousands of miles away and already and forever mourning their eldest daughter, wouldn’t know.
Moving as quickly as she dared, Tory swam upward. She kept her legs together, pushing herself with fluttering kicks and pulling with great sweeps of her arms. It wasn’t exactly like the graceful, natural movement of the sirens, but some of them were using their arms, either to change their direction or because they were carrying something. Kicking hard would have been an instant giveaway. This was the only way.
Foot by foot, she fought her way toward the surface, and the sirens paid her no mind, all of them so set on their own tasks that they dismissed her as someone else’s problem. Intelligence, and its attendant blind spots, might be the thing that would save her.
If she could be saved. If she could find a way back onto the ship. If the sirens didn’t see her. The world had been redefined by if, and she wasn’t sure she was going to last long enough to change the conversation.
Lungs aching, feet cold, Tory swam, and prayed for a miracle.
“What the fuck just happened?” demanded Daniel. “Why didn’t they eat us?”
“Our siren saved us,” said Hallie. The siren was still floating behind the glass, keeping itself upright with tiny sweeps of its tail. It was watching her. She was sure of that. She couldn’t read its facial expressions, and there was no reason those expressions would map to anything mammalian, much less anything human, but it was watching her. It knew her. She smiled, trying not to show her teeth, lest the siren take that as a threat and change its mind about protecting them. “I taught it my name, and when the other sirens came in here, it told them to go away. It saved us.”
Daniel pushed away from the glass, turning to look at the siren. He frowned. “Why? We’ve got it locked in this big damn tank. There’s no way we can let it out.”
“And you wouldn’t if we could, because you want to be part of the team that brings one of these creatures back alive.” Hallie didn’t try to keep the disgust from her voice. The siren was a person. It had saved them. Yes, its brethren were tearing through the ship like wasps through a beehive, but how much of that was a simple lack of comprehension? The sirens didn’t know that they were killing people.
(What about Heather? whispered a small, terrible voice in the back of her mind. Did they think her submersible was a shell? Did they think she was some kind of nautilus? They knew she was a person. They knew she’d made that thing. They don’t spare us just because we’re people.)
She wasn’t being a traitor to her sister by letting herself trust their siren. She wasn’t betraying the human race by starting to see it as a person. She was doing what scientists always did. She was responding to the available data, and she was letting it tell her where to go.
‘Thank you,’ she signed to the siren—one of the handful of signs they’d been working on for the last few hours.
The siren hesitated. Then, with the deliberation of someone who was learning a foreign language, it signed back, ‘You’re welcome.’
Hallie smiled.
It wasn’t just cramped and dark inside the tube: it was hot, almost dismayingly so. It was cold outside, but the ship’s systems were still running, pumping warmth and comfort to all the occupied cabins. So many of them had been smashed into that the heater had to be working triple-time, struggling to keep up with the perceived demand. Sweat rolled down Olivia’s cheeks and pooled in her armpits and under her breasts. Worse yet, her palms were getting slick. Sooner or later, she was going to—
Her hand failed to lock properly on the ladder, and she fell, plummeting easily ten feet before she managed to get her legs braced against the sides of the tube. Something inside her knee crunched, sending a bright bolt of pain racing through her leg. She whimpered, biting her tongue to keep the sound from turning into a scream. Screams would give her away. Even if the sirens couldn’t get in, she was eventually going to need to get out. That would be so much easier if they weren’t waiting for her.
Olivia let go of the ladder, leaning back with her shoulders against the wall and her legs keeping her from dropping any farther, and scrubbed her hands against her shirt until they were dry. Once she was sure she’d be able to hold on, she reached up, grabbed the ladder, and unlocked her legs.
Climbing was harder now. Every move made her knee ache more. She kept her lip pinned between her teeth and closed her eyes, trying to focus on the process of putting one hand over the next, pulling herself upward. At least she was heading for the top. Sure, that meant a longer climb, but it also meant she didn’t have to pay attention to how far she’d already come. When she hit the top, she’d know. She wouldn’t be able to go any farther, and she’d know.
The walls of the tunnel had been designed to muffle the sound of laundry being thrown down to the bottom, keeping passengers from asking what that strange noise was. They hadn’t been intended to stop sound from coming in from outside. Screams came through from time to time, muffled by the walls, but still distinct enough to be undeniable. Olivia bit her lip harder, trying not to think about what was happening out there—and more, trying not to focus on the increasingly pressing thought that maybe Ray had been lucky. He’d died quick and early, without knowing how bad things were going to get for the rest of them.
Things were getting so bad.
Olivia kept climbing. The world had narrowed to that simple action, to putting one hand over the other. She didn’t think she was bleeding. Her knee pulsed with every step; it was going to swell, it was going to need ice and a brace and elevation. She’d hurt her knees before, a natural consequence of having a job for which she sometimes had to wear high heels on the exhibit floor at large conventions. Of course, she might not get any of those things, not when the ship was swarming with sirens, when there were teeth and claws around every corner. She might not get any farther than the top of this tube.
That was farther than she’d expected to get when she left the lab. She hoped Tory
was safely back with the others, shut in and safe and worrying about her. She hoped Tory wouldn’t worry too much. Places like this, times like this, they were never meant to last. They were one frozen moment in a falling catastrophe, and their beauty was that they’d existed, even if it was only for a little while, even if they’d never been really real.
The air tasted like steel and disinfectant. Olivia breathed shallowly as she climbed, afraid that taking a deep breath would trigger a coughing fit and bring the sirens swarming. She just kept climbing, until her head hit something hard and knocked her back to a lower rung, where she clung, reeling, waiting for the shock of impact to fade.
Bit by bit, it did. She pulled herself up again, more cautiously this time, and felt around until she found the indented square in the tube wall. That was her exit; that was how she got out onto the upper deck, and brought herself to the captain. Or maybe that was how she delivered herself to the waiting sirens, gift wrapped and ready to devour.
She took a deep breath.
“My name is Olivia Nitsan Sanderson, and I’m reporting live from the deck of the Melusine, bringing you the latest scoop from Imagine,” she whispered, and pushed on the hatch, opening it, revealing a dimly lit slice of deck. Mucus trails crisscrossed the visible wood. Some of them were tainted with red, and where it had mixed with the slime, it was still fresh and bright, making it impossible to tell how long it had been since the vein had been opened.
Getting into the tube had been easy; she had climbed in headfirst, grabbing the ladder and pulling herself up. Getting out was trickier. If she went headfirst, she might dump herself onto the deck, and while Dr. Toth hadn’t explicitly said so, she was pretty sure she’d regret it if she got a mouthful of mucus. But she couldn’t go up any higher, and her knee protested every time she bent it.
In the end she ground her teeth against the pain, folding her legs as close to her chest as she could and extending them carefully out the opening, fighting to get her footing. There was enough slime that she still slipped before she could stabilize herself and ease her torso out, but she did, inch by inch, until she was standing on the deck, breathing in the cool night air, wishing she didn’t feel so damn much relief.
This situation could end with her, and every other human being on the Melusine, dead and lost at sea, no bodies, no burials. But she was no longer in that damned tube, and she was breathing cool clean air that only smelled a little bit like human blood, and the relief came without her inviting it. The fact that it was inappropriate didn’t seem to matter much, and maybe it shouldn’t have. Maybe this was one of those situations where relief would come to anyone, not just to her.
She didn’t think so, though.
She turned, intending to make her way toward the prow, and stopped as lights shone in her eyes, bright enough to be blinding. She put up her arm, trying to block them out.
“Who the hell are you?” demanded a male voice.
CHAPTER 34
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 3, 2022
Silence filled the medical bay, broken by the steady drip-drip-drip of viscous yellow fluid coming from Michi’s hand, dripping from her cot onto the floor. It was an almost hypnotic sound, getting mellower as it formed a puddle on the floor. Minutes ticked by, wasted, scattered like sunlight on the sea.
Dr. Vail shook herself out of her shock and asked, “Do we have a mop? I don’t think the custodial staff will be coming.”
Dr. Odom turned to stare at her. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about mopping the floor before someone gets hurt,” Dr. Vail snapped. “And for the love of God, cover her face. Give the woman a little dignity.” She had never liked Michi—few people on the ship had, save for her husband, and the thought of what Jacques was going to do when he found out she was dead was terrifying—but that didn’t mean she should be treated with anything less than the respect owed to all human dead.
When a person died, you covered their face. You told them they would be missed. You closed their eyes, if necessary. You lied to them. Perhaps all those things were superstitions, and perhaps she was flawed for believing in them, but … “As we’re currently under siege by mermaids, I’d rather not do anything that might encourage ghosts to join the party,” she snapped, and went off in search of a mop.
Dr. Odom watched her walk away before reaching up and closing Michi’s eyes. Her flesh felt overly soft beneath his fingers, like it was decaying too fast. He suppressed a shiver.
Raising his head, he looked around the medical bay. There were a dozen people present, most watching him warily, while one helped Dr. Vail with the cleaning supplies. “Does anyone have a walkie-talkie?” he asked.
“I do,” said one of the guards. “Do you want me to call for Jacques?”
“Yes,” he said. “No. Maybe … Wait. Do you think we should call for him?”
“No, sir,” said the guard. “I think we should find a way to triple lock the doors, and maybe set a few land mines to make sure he doesn’t get in. He’s going to lose it. I can’t say I blame him. I’d lose it, if that were my wife. But he’s going to lose it bad, and then we’re all going to be in trouble.”
“Define trouble.”
“That’s the problem: I can’t. He’s got no impulse control under the best of circumstances. Michi was the one who told him not to do things he shouldn’t do, and he listened to her, because dealing with the rest of us was easier than having her mad at him. You take her out of the equation, and I genuinely have no idea what he’ll do.”
“This gets better and better.” Dr. Odom removed his gloves and dropped them next to Michi before rubbing his forehead with one hand. “We have to tell him. His wife is dead. There’s no way we can justify holding our tongues.”
The skin of Michi’s cheek sank inward and tore away, leaving gelatinous edges behind. Dr. Odom jumped back with a sharp sound of disgust.
“We may have a bigger problem,” he said, eyes wide, face suddenly feeling too tight for his bones. “Vail! We need a biohazard bag. And more mops. As many mops as you can find. Bleach, and mops, and … and …”
There was a wet, sucking sound from Michi’s chest. The dissolution was coming faster now. He thought of Jason, in his own body bag on the other side of the room, and wondered how much of the humanoid shape of the thing resulted from the fact that the skeleton was notoriously difficult to dissolve.
There was a knock at the door. Quick, almost polite, and very human. Dr. Odom’s head snapped around, transferring his stare to the other side of the room. The guard who’d spoken before shifted his weight, clearly uncomfortable.
“What should I do?” he asked.
“Let the man in, and be prepared to restrain him,” said Dr. Vail. She walked back with mop and bleach and bucket. “He’s going to need you to do that. Can you do that?”
“As long as the little French fucker doesn’t shoot me,” said the guard.
“He might,” said Dr. Vail calmly, and it was the truth, because Michi had died of novel toxins introduced to her body by friendly fire; she would have lived if she’d been scratched or bitten. Lots of people had been scratched or bitten. The sirens weren’t venomous. It was introducing their blood to hers that had triggered this catastrophic collapse, first of her circulatory system, and now of her tissues. The clash between their proteins and hers had killed her, but without the bullet, that would never have happened.
The guard grunted before crossing to the door and easing it open.
“You may check for mermaids if you like, but there are none,” said a calm, French-accented voice. “All of them are dead. Quite dead.”
“Jacques.” The guard opened the door the rest of the way, and Jacques Abney was revealed.
He was covered, head to toe, in gore. Some of it was human, kept fresh and red by a thick coating of siren slime. Some of it was more watery, thinner and darker, and recognizably inhuman in origin. None of it appeared to be his. He had gone into the ni
ght on a mission, and come back having fulfilled it.
The guard frowned. “Where are the others?”
“They were slower than I,” said Jacques, stepping inside. “Your Davis was taken over the side before we knew what was occurring; I killed three of the creatures as they converged on the spot where he had been. Your Sandra I shot myself, after one of the things clamped its mouth over her face, and it was clear medicine would not save her. She did not survive, but they did not take her. The rest, I do not know. Where is my Michi?”
“Jacques, I want you to listen to me. The doctors did everything that they could.” The guard moved to block Jacques from fully seeing the room. “No one here is at fault.”
The door swung closed. Jacques frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Dammit, Jacques, you know what I mean.”
“No. I do not. Because what you are saying, it sounds like you are saying my Michi is dead, and that is not possible. My Michi does not die. She is a killer, and killers do not die.” Jacques stepped to the side. The guard did the same. Jacques scowled. “Let me pass.”
“Not until you accept that the doctors did the best they could.”
Drs. Vail and Odom exchanged a look. Normally they would have stepped in; normally they would have told the guard—what was his name? Too many people, too many problems, and there had never been time to circulate, to socialize, not when there was so much to be done keeping a ship full of scientists from dying of dehydration or heatstroke—this wasn’t the way to deal with someone who was grieving, or about to be. But this was Jacques Abney. He’d been hired because he would not hesitate to pull the trigger if he saw something worth shooting, and there was a good chance he was going to see them as worth shooting once he accepted the situation.
Jacques tilted his head. Then, without flinching or changing his expression in any way, he brought up his knee and hit the larger man squarely in the testicles. There was a terrible crunching sound, like an eggcup being smashed, and the man went down, clutching his injured genitals.