by Mira Grant
(And so what if she was? She had known this was a risk when she dove, when she swam for the center of the ship. Staying in the open water would have been a guaranteed death, with no chance to warn anyone of what was coming. At least this way, she would die doing something.)
(There was no way for Tory to know how closely her thoughts paralleled Olivia’s, a ship and a lifetime away. If she had known, she might have taken some comfort in the fact. Or she might have cried, adding her tears to the sea around her, because neither of them was walking away clean. Neither of them had ever stood a chance.)
The water intake port had been designed to funnel sea creatures into the pool, without leaving enough room for them to turn around or make their way back out. Tory pulled her legs in, and discovered there was no way for her to go back. Forward was the only option. She pressed onward, pushing against the walls, pulling herself across every obstacle and through every thin plastic sphincter, until she felt like she was crawling through the digestive tract of some unspeakable beast. Her lungs burned with increasing urgency, and thin trails of bubbles escaped from her lips every time she moved. She closed her eyes, choosing inner darkness over the dark that was being forced upon her.
At least she couldn’t see the light from below anymore, or the terrible shape of the thing that bore it. At least she was spared that much.
The space beyond her eyelids began growing brighter. At first she thought it was a function of her oxygen-starved brain thrashing around, looking for something to focus on. Then she realized that it was steady, lighting up a degree at a time. She opened her eyes. Artificial light welcomed her. The pool. She could see the pool. A single sheet of clear plastic remained between her and salvation. She reached for it, trying to haul it upward.
It wouldn’t budge. It was locked, and she was trapped, and this was where she was going to die.
“The shutters are down,” reported Daniel, looking at his monitor. “No more of those things are going to be able to get onto the ship.”
“Now if we only had a way to get the ones already here to go away,” said Hallie. She shot a glance at their captive siren, floating almost serenely in the tank, and added, “No offense,” pairing the words with the sign for sorry.
“It can’t understand you,” said Daniel.
“It doesn’t matter. It saved us. I’m going to show it as much respect as I can.” She paused to shoot him a venomous look. “Real respect would let it go.” He scoffed. “I’d like to hear you say that to Mr. Blackwell.”
The phone rang. Both of them turned to look at it in mute dismay before Hallie picked it up, brought it to her ear, and said, “Hello?”
“Ah, Dr. Wilson.” The voice was Mr. Blackwell’s; the tone belonged to someone who had run hard and finally collapsed. “I trust you and Dr. Lennox are both well?”
“The sirens came in through the pool,” she said. “We’re in the lab with the doors locked.” She wanted to tell them how their captive had saved them, but she couldn’t figure out where to begin. It was already starting to feel like something out of a dream—or, more accurately, a nightmare.
“Excellent,” he said. “I have your sister with me. She’s fine. She’s working with Dr. Toth on unsnarling the biology of these creatures. We may have a serviceable treatment for the toxic shock their tissues induce in humans, soon enough.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Hallie. Privately she was more concerned about the shock of teeth and claws and tearing flesh, but as long as the door remained shut, she didn’t have to worry about that as much. “Sir, the shutters are down. Does that mean the captain has signaled for rescue?”
“It means Miss Sanderson has signaled for rescue. The captain is dead, I’m afraid. Stay where you are. Continue your work. I’ll call if we need anything, but for the time being, the best thing you can do is hold your ground.” The line went dead.
Hallie lowered the phone before turning to Daniel and saying, “My sister’s alive.”
“Great,” he said. “Let’s hope the rest of us can stay that way.”
Mopping the floor had been a quick, messy affair, but it had yielded several treasures, including the captain’s keycard, apparently ripped from his neck during the fight that killed him. Olivia had plucked it from the slime and wiped it dry on the hem of her shirt, ignoring the damage she was doing to the fabric. When she was sure she’d cleaned the card as much as she could, she slung it around her neck and turned to Daryl and Gregory, trying to look braver than she felt.
They looked at her like her bravery was sincere, like she knew what she was doing. Maybe that was the secret of bravery. Maybe it was always a matter of puffing out your chest and lifting up your chin and looking like everything was going to be okay. She was an actress, not a fighter. Here and now, the one was the same as the other.
“If you want to run, you should run now,” she said. “If you want to stay, I’ll be grateful, but gratitude isn’t going to protect you. I can even walk you to the nearest stairwell and let you into the ship.”
Gregory looked to the keycard dangling around her neck and then up at her face, studying her before he nodded. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll be staying here,” he said. “A lot of these systems need two people if they’re going to work properly.”
“I’m not going anywhere alone,” said Daryl, sounding disgusted, and that was that; they were all staying.
Olivia walked back to the controls. “Let’s see if I can get this up and running,” she said, and swiped the captain’s card through the reader on the security system. The system beeped and began powering back up, lights activating one by one, followed by the flickering, rolling monitors. Some of them were dark, and others glitched steadily, making the pictures virtually impossible to understand.
Others showed scenes out of horror movies. Bodies, ripped open and left in the middle of walkways; sprays of blood painting walls in red. Sirens slithering through the corridors, their flat, expressionless faces seeming to look directly into the cameras. There were survivors—not many, most locked in cabins or hiding in corridors, makeshift weapons clutched tight—and every one she found made her heart leap a little. They represented hope. If help came fast enough, all these people might still make it home. They’d lost more than half the crew, and more than two-thirds of the scientists, but that left plenty of people to tell the story of the Melusine. Unlike the Atargatis, it wasn’t going to be a ghost ship.
The camera for the bottom deck came on, showing sirens collapsed on the floor or curled into tight balls at the bottom of the pool. Olivia frowned, glancing from that to the other cameras still showing active sirens. They were moving more slowly than they had been when they’d started the attack, she was sure of it. She didn’t know as much about their anatomy as some of the scientists probably did by now, but the way the sirens were moving made her think of people who were suffering from oxygen deprivation.
Maybe there were more reasons for their lightning-fast strikes when the fight had just been getting under way than the need to surprise their prey. Maybe they could only stay in the open air for so long before they started to suffer for it. The idea was cheering enough to make her feel warm and faintly giddy. They could just … wait the sirens out, and the air itself would punish them for daring to come to the surface. With the shields down, the sirens couldn’t even get back into the water. The ones in the pool were probably doing a little better than the others, but not too much, because that water wasn’t deep enough, and they were all clustered in the deep end, struggling to inhale.
Something was moving at the far end of the pool. Olivia squinted at the image. “How do I make this zoom?” she asked.
“Like this.” Gregory leaned over her, typing something on the keyboard. The camera shifted, zooming in on the panel that was keeping more water, and more sirens, from washing into the pool. It must have come down with the shutters.
The movement was two pale shapes, like starfish, pressed against the glass. Olivia squinted. Not sta
rfish; hands. Not siren hands either; human hands. Human hands.
She knew those hands.
Olivia gasped, recoiling from the screen. “That’s Tory,” she said, through the hand that was clamped over her mouth, blurring and blocking her words. “She’s in the pool. How do we get that wall up?”
“What?” Gregory leaned closer. “Oh, dear God. Olivia, we can’t— it’s connected to the shutter, but it’s not the same system. Someone needs to lift it from the outside.”
Tory’s hands were still slapping against plastic. They were weakening. They weren’t going to keep thrashing much longer.
“How do we contact the pool level? There are—there are doors there. There might be people there.”
“Here.” Daryl grabbed a microphone, pulling it toward her. “We can reach any deck from here, for announcements.”
“Call it.” Olivia grabbed the microphone and began shouting into it. “Hello! Hello! This is Olivia Sanderson, calling from the control room! If there is anyone on the lower deck, I need you to proceed immediately to the shallow end of the viewing pool and raise the glass shield on the entrance port. We have a crew member trapped behind the glass shield, and she is going to drown if you don’t do something. Please proceed immediately to the shallow end of the viewing pool and raise the glass shield—”
She kept talking, repeating the same information over and over again, while Gregory and Daryl stood anxiously behind her, waiting for a response.
She couldn’t be sure that anyone was listening.
There was nothing else that she could do.
“—on the entrance port. We have a crew member trapped behind the glass shield, and she is going to drown—”
Olivia’s voice poured into the sealed lab from a speaker above the door. Hallie and Daniel both stared at it, aghast.
“She’s not serious, is she?” asked Daniel. “She doesn’t honestly expect us to go out there?”
“She must have a working camera,” said Hallie. “There’s no other way she could know someone was trapped in the pool. She wouldn’t be telling us to go out if there was any danger.”
“How do you know? If it was one of your sisters, you’d lie to have a chance at saving her!”
“You’re right; I would.” Hallie started for the door.
“Wait! Where are you going?”
“I’d lie to have a chance at saving my sister, and if I don’t go out there right now, this person is going to drown. You think I can sit here while they die? You’re wrong.” Hallie glared. “Stay here with the siren. It’ll keep you safe.”
Hallie ran for the door and wrenched it open. Daniel watched but didn’t move to stop her. Instead he backed up, and kept backing up until his shoulders hit the glass wall separating him from the siren. He stopped there, shivering, and when Hallie slipped out of the room, he didn’t try to call her back. He just stayed where he was, Olivia’s voice ringing from the speakers.
“Please proceed,” said the siren, in a passable imitation of Olivia’s voice.
“No,” he whispered.
Hallie slipped out of the lab. The sirens seemed to have disappeared, at first glance; then she looked down and realized they had retreated into the deep end of the pool, where they were curling over and around each other like eels. The water around them seemed thick, almost clotted. The slime rolling off their bodies was thickening, forming a protective film between them and the rest of the world. Hallie hesitated, almost retreating.
The sirens slithered sluggishly around one another, staying in their ball. One waved a clawed hand in her direction, but made no move to separate from the cluster. Something was wrong with them.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.” She couldn’t bring herself to run, but she had the strength to hurry to the shallow end of the pool, where the plastic shield (not glass; it looked like glass, but it wasn’t, glass broke too easily) had come down to stop anything larger than a trickle of water from sliding into the ship. There, as Olivia had said, were the hands, human hands, still beating weakly against the final barrier between their owner and the safety of the air. She thought she recognized the face behind the hands, but the water was dark, and she couldn’t be sure.
Bracing herself against the shock, Hallie jumped into the shallow end of the pool, cold racing up her legs to her waist, encompassing enough to hurt. The sirens at the pool’s other end moved sluggishly again, starting to take an interest. She glanced anxiously back at them before bending to dig her fingers into the slot at the base of the shield, pulling upward.
Nothing human could have budged the exterior shutters. They were too powerful, designed to cut the entire ship off from the world. The shields on the pool intake, however, had been installed after the fact, as part of a different set of systems. They were never meant to stand up to direct force. So Hallie pulled, while behind the shield Tory thrashed, trying to escape, and the plastic moved. Just a little at first, and then with more speed, until the obstacle was out of the way and Tory was spilling through the opening into the pool.
She was still thrashing, but weakly. Hallie bent and lifted her head and torso out of the water, hoisting the smaller woman up and onto the side of the pool. Tory lay in a mixture of siren slime and water, choking and coughing, seeming to spit out more water than her lungs could possibly have held without drowning her.
“Look out!” The warning was Daniel’s. Hallie didn’t turn to look behind her; she just grabbed the rim of the pool and hoisted as hard as she could, shoving herself out of the water and onto the floor next to Tory.
The siren that had been coming up behind her swiped at the water where she had been, submerged mouth open in a soundless hiss. Hallie stared at it, panting, before gathering Tory in her arms and hauling her back into the small lab.
Tory kept coughing, but she was starting to breathe more regularly by the time the door was shut and locked once more. She leaned against the wall, spitting water and sucking in great, painful-sounding breaths. Finally she raised her head, looking blearily at Hallie and Daniel, and said, “We were wrong. We were so wrong.
“I know why everyone on the Atargatis died.”
CHAPTER 37
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 3, 2022
The phone rang. Daniel moved to answer it while Hallie remained next to Tory, holding her up.
“Yes?”
“Is she all right?” The voice was Olivia’s. She sounded slightly flat, like she didn’t know how to feel, and had opted for not feeling anything at all.
“She’s fine,” he said. “Suffering hypoxia. I think she was seeing things down there. But she’s fine.”
“Good. Good.” Olivia exhaled. When she continued, her voice sounded almost human again. “I’m glad.”
“Are you in the control room?”
“Yes, I’m—”
He didn’t hear what she said next. Tory, moving with a speed he would have thought impossible when Hallie had hauled her into the room, slammed into him as she snatched the phone out of his hand.
“Olivia?” There was an edge of hysteria in her voice. “Are you in the control room?”
“Tory! Um, yes. Daniel just asked me tha—”
“I need you to turn on all the lights. Do it now. Every single light this fucking ship has, turn it on right now. Light us up like the Fourth of July. Do you understand?”
“No,” said Olivia. “But I’ll do it. Hang on.” There was a thump as she put the receiver down, followed by the distant sound of conversation and switches being flipped, one after the other.
The lab was sealed off from the rest of the ship: there was no way to know what effect all that switch flipping was having. Tory closed her eyes, trying to shut out the memory of impossible light rising from the depths, of the thing she had seen outlined in its own eldritch glow.
Let there be light, she thought. If nothing else, let there be light. Let there be hope.
Let there be a chance.
“Tory?”
Hallie looked at her nervously. “Are you all right?”
“I know why the Atargatis couldn’t fight the sirens off and I know why Heather lost control,” she said again, not opening her eyes. “They’re fast and there were so many of them, but they’re small, and the Atargatis had weapons. There should have been survivors. There should have been bodies. There wasn’t anything, because she came, and the males were willing to do anything to feed her.”
“What—”
“They call her. They tempt her with as much food as they can gather, and when there’s enough, when it’s worth her while to move, she comes to the surface. She comes to feed. But only when it’s worth her while, and I’m betting—I’m praying—only at night. She’s not as quick as the males. She wouldn’t come to the surface at all if she didn’t have to. I don’t think she likes the light. Not when it’s bright. Not when it’s not hers.”
There was always the chance the terrible thing she’d seen rising from the darkness would view the lit-up Melusine as competition, something to fight. If that was the case, Tory might have just condemned them all. But if she didn’t, if the light scared her away …
“She who?” demanded Daniel.
“The female.” Tory finally opened her eyes, turning to look at the siren in its tank. “They’re like anglerfish. The female is hundreds of times larger than the males, and she’s so hungry. She could eat the world. She can’t leave the water, but she can drive the males into a frenzy, and she can slam into a ship this size and throw everyone off their feet. She’ll make everyone easy pickings for her boys.” One more assault added to the ongoing massacre. One assault too many.