by Sarah Porter
“What happened today?” Anais repeated. She was distracted, her thoughts churning behind her eyes as she tried to make sense of everything he was saying. “What do you mean?”
“What you’ll tell the mermaids here is that you’ve just changed form. This very hour. You’ll explain that you saw an attack on the Twice Lost Army on TV immediately before you changed. Tell them that General Luce was captured and tortured to death in front of the cameras. I’d suggest you describe it, my dear, in sickening detail; describe precisely what you’d like to do to Luce yourself. Then tell them that just before she died she cried out the order for the mermaids of the world to release their waves and drown the cruel and treacherous humans.” Moreland tried to smile, but the ache in his chest and the musical throb in his mind sent his lips torquing into a strange sloping curl instead. He knew he looked hideous. “You’ll have to be very persuasive.”
“But . . . did that happen? Did Luce really say—”
“Suppose it happened. As far as you’re concerned, Anais, as far as winning your freedom goes, it absolutely happened. What do you care what the truth is?”
This had to end. Everything had to end; the music had to be stripped from the sea, from his mind, the murmuring enchantment purged, so that he could simply rest. Even prison would be a relief if it could lock out those voices.
But prison wouldn’t be enough. He already knew that.
Anais was still bleary from the drugs. It had the odd effect of making her calculations all the more apparent. Her sly smile advertised her thoughts so distinctly that, had their situation been less desperate, Moreland would have found it comical.
“Okay,” Anais chirped, her smile so oddly heavy that her mouth seemed carved from some impossibly dense stone. “I’ll do it. Exactly what you said.”
“How touching, Anais. I’m moved by your enthusiasm for your work. Whatever our differences, we’ve always come together to serve a greater cause, haven’t we?”
Anais nodded, too carefully, her smile unaltered. “I like being helpful.”
“Oh, I know, tadpole. I have hours of recordings that prove exactly how helpful you’ve been. And if I need to, I can play those recordings through loudspeakers at a very high volume, not just above the harbor in Baltimore but up and down both coasts. You know, in some of our conversations you expressed views that might be perceived as . . . perhaps a touch disloyal . . . to the great General Luce.”
It wasn’t true. He’d given explicit orders that none of his conversations with Anais be recorded—for reasons so obvious that Moreland worried even she might realize he had to be lying. No sane man would tape himself instructing a captive mermaid to commit a series of murders.
Maybe Anais was still under the influence of the sedatives. Or maybe she just didn’t think of him as sane. Either way, her face greened with dismay as the threat sank in. “They’ll tear me apart! If they hear anything—those things I told you—they’ll . . .”
“Ah, but they won’t have the slightest inkling of how you’ve helped me, tadpole. Because you’ll do exactly what I’ve told you to do. I’ll be waiting to see the results of your work. And then”—and then and then and then, darling Anais, you’ll be the one to cure me, to save me—”you’ll report back to me here, as soon as the water recedes enough to make the shore passable. Once you do that I’ll honor our agreement, and you’ll be entirely free of me for the rest of your life. Do you understand?”
She nodded.
Thank heavens, she nodded. And she didn’t even ask him why he wanted to see the Baltimore waterfront destroyed.
To her the urge for destruction must seem self-explanatory, Moreland thought. As natural as waves.
The truck was already parked so that its back end protruded over the harbor. Moreland swung the back door wide open, giving Anais her first view in months of lacquered violet water and star-shattered sky. A hot, humid sigh of late-August air brushed in while in the distance Baltimore’s new standing wave wobbled, starlight pitching on its unstable crest. He was short of breath, and there was an awkward lull as he struggled to heave himself onto the walkway. The steel edge dug into his belly as his legs kicked in midair.
Not that long ago he’d been so strong, so agile, his body swift and unpredictable and deadly. Just as Anais was still. As he righted himself on the platform he saw her glorious form hanging in the blue water like a twist of golden, blue-fringed flame. “Anais,” he said. His hand was on the lever now, poised to set her free.
She watched him with intense interest. “I used to think I hated Luce, sir,” Anais said suddenly. She delivered the word sir with a vehement sneer. Her azure fins switched. “But now maybe I actually like her.”
Anais waited for him to ask why her feelings had changed. He stared at her, breathing heavily, and didn’t oblige her with the question.
“I like her because she’s made you so miserable. And pathetic. And because she’s showed everybody what a loser you are. You’re so messed up and weak now, it’s even better than if Luce had drowned you. Because this way you’ve suffered for longer. And,” Anais added with a smirk, “I’ve gotten to watch it happening. Almost every day I’ve seen you getting more and more wrecked.”
Moreland smiled at her. His face felt slippery and distorted, wet and rotten. “A man can’t be more than a ship, Anais,” he said, without quite knowing what he meant by it. “A ship, a song, and a shore.” The words felt true even if he didn’t understand them. “Remember to take your jewelry and your shirt off. Before you swim out there. Otherwise those other mermaids won’t believe you’ve just changed.”
He grasped the lever tighter, dragging down with all his strength. The glass wall swung outward, disgorging a wild and sudden flood that sparked with the pink and azure of Anais’s racing tail, the gold of her streaking hair.
The violet water leaped as it received her. Moreland gazed down into dim lapping depths and saw nothing. To his left the masts of moored sailboats gouged black lines from the starry sky; he’d parked in a lonely spot near a boat club. Behind him a highway hissed and whispered.
Faintly, faintly, he could hear the mermaids singing. They were singing as they always did in the rough sealed pit of his mind.
But now they also sang in the sweet dilating sky that knew nothing of him.
32
Catarina Ivanovna Smekhov
The room had bars covering its single window, but apart from that it could have been a room in a hospital. The sky beyond the bars was the blue of late evening. She was lying in a plain, clean, very white bed, wearing some sort of equally white nightgown. The dry powdery feeling of the sheet covering her was horrible, but she didn’t move to throw it off. What would be revealed would surely be even worse than the revolting sensation of cloth on skin. Apart from the bed there was a night table and a chrome armchair with olive cushions. A half-opened door showed a small bathroom. And of course there was another door near the foot of the bed. That one was closed, naturally. It would be locked.
Just in case, though, she should check. The question was whether she could reach it without glimpsing the horror concealed by the sheet, without sensing more of its configuration than she absolutely had to. Catarina inhaled deeply, reaching for courage.
Only a moment later, she found herself obliged to breathe again. Her lungs intruded on her consciousness and demanded it.
She became furiously aware of the continuous, repetitive wheezing of breath into her chest, instead of single breaths spaced far apart as they ought to be. With a simple act of will, couldn’t she make her breathing stop? Catarina closed her eyes and pictured the deep green of the Bering Sea crossed by fans of sunlight. She pictured her fingers spreading out, parting the sun into rays; submerged cliffs whipping past beside her; water like streamers in her hair. She could stay here in this glassy airlessness for a long, long time. She simply wouldn’t allow herself to surface, no matter how that aching pressure swelled inside her, no matter—
Catarina gasped, and he
r eyes flashed wide as breath tore through her again. Her vision of the sea abandoned her, and instead she saw the pale, oppressive walls. She completely forgot the door. If the air kept on invading her in this insulting way, she would never be able to return to the sea. She’d never be able to forget what had happened to her body: this sudden deformity.
Breath was the first thing she had to conquer. Everything else could wait. She squeezed her eyes tight again, pulled a pillow halfway over her face, and dived into her dream of water . . . She’d swim deep, far down where the light turned thick and somber, where a whale might pass within reach of her trailing hand.
There was no need to head for the surface. Not for at least half an hour, at least . . .
“I’m sorry if we’ve been neglecting you,” someone said.
Catarina exhaled with such force that bile rose into her mouth for a moment. Her face was hot and damp, and she was ready to scream from frustration. She didn’t move the pillow to see who had spoken, but she did notice the sound of the door closing again.
“It’s incredible. We have an actual lieutenant from the Twice Lost Army staying with us, and everyone’s so caught up in the drama of the moment that they can’t even come check up on you,” the someone continued. It was a man, probably fairly young. Catarina found his nervous, placating tone distinctly annoying. “I guess the first thing is, can I get you anything to eat? What would you like? I can order delivery from twenty different places, so please don’t hesitate . . .”
Catarina threw the pillow away from her face and sat up slightly. The man stopped talking.
Young but not that young. Perhaps thirty. Moderately good-looking, with light brown skin and neat black hair and a strong, narrow face with prominent bones: not quite what she would consider handsome. Still, he was attractive enough that Catarina couldn’t help thinking that, if circumstances were different, she might enjoy drowning him. “Murderer,” Catarina murmured. “I need nothing from you.”
The man recoiled, wide-eyed. “Of course. You could only think that. But what happened to your . . . companions, the attack with the net, that was completely unauthorized. That’s why everything here is in such chaos. No one understands what happened or where that order to attack came from. There seemed to be two conflicting executive orders given at the same time, but one of them was faked. I have to say, your general showed remarkable strength of character in her response. We were all watching the whole thing on television, expecting the wave to come smashing down at any moment, and we were all stunned when General Luce refused to give in. It made a tremendous impression. She was faced with such a tragic, such an impossible choice . . .”
Catarina leaned her head heavily against the wall. Somehow in the brief time since she’d regained consciousness she hadn’t remembered the other mermaids in the net with her at all: their suffering the same as hers but still impossibly remote; their writhing and dying the same as hers, shared and yet incomprehensible. Their dying: that was what this man was talking about. All of the others must have died. And she, somehow . . . She’d heard that in very rare cases mermaids could survive leaving the water, but she hadn’t quite believed it. And why would she be the exception?
When she’d called this man a murderer she hadn’t been thinking of the other mermaids at all but only of herself. Of those two grotesque, suggestive bulges she could see running down the lower half of the bed . . . Hot shame rose in her face, confused and horrible. Her mouth was full of a strange sensation, something like burning pins.
“The president has already conveyed his apologies to your general for the loss of life. But—you could say that’s only a formality—any talk of tragedy is a formality—but the mermaids aren’t alone in grieving for what happened today. Much of the country is united in mourning for your friends. Catarina, I promise you that . . .”
She couldn’t let herself cry in front of this stranger. A hot, buffeting force was rising inside her, and its unwelcome winds were salty with tears.
“Lieutenant Catarina, I mean. I certainly don’t want you to think I don’t respect your rank.”
“Please leave me.” She could barely manage the words. Her throat felt raw; she’d screamed so long, so wildly.
“I’m . . . not sure you should be left alone, lieutenant.”
“I am not a lieutenant,” Catarina muttered.
“But . . . General Luce introduced you that way. On the news, immediately after the wave first went up. I’m sure I recognize you.”
“Luce was wrong. She is often wrong. Mermaids died today because Luce was wrong.”
The man pursed his lips as if he wanted to start an argument, but then he shook his head. “Just Catarina is good, then?”
“Queen Catarina.”
He’d been standing at the foot of her bed the whole time, but somehow her reply moved him to walk closer—it was almost unbearable to see those stalklike legs scissoring along, to think of her own body—then pulled the olive chair to her bedside and sat down, watching her with focused speculation. “I’m Rafe Naimier. Honestly I’d probably be more comfortable just calling you Catarina. Calling anyone queen doesn’t come too naturally to me. Can you live with that?”
Catarina kept her face turned away from him. The bed was made of white metal bars. Through the bars she could see plaster, also white and covered with small round blobs like bubbles rising in water.
“Can I ask you something? If you don’t think of yourself as a lieutenant, then do you consider Luce a general? I noticed that you called her simply Luce just now, without her title.”
“No. Luce is not my general.” Catarina thought of the net, the astonishing pain in her tail, and the scrape of scales against her back and lips as the mermaids around her shuddered and died. She must have lost consciousness at some point; her memory gave away to dark bewilderment. Now the cold metal of this bed frame was digging into her cheek. “So many of us are dead. To call Luce a general—it doesn’t help the ones who died in that net. The word has no meaning.”
From the corner of her eye Catarina could see him nodding. “So what would you call Luce?”
“What would I call her? A heedless, destructive child! Wild with power, thoughtless of the honor that all mermaids must live by!” The words rolled out as if they didn’t belong to her, drowsy and incantatory.
“You don’t like Luce, then?” Rafe’s voice was soft and curious.
“No, I don’t. I love her.” Catarina rolled her head from side to side, feeling the metal ribs striping her face with their chill. “Luce was a little sister to me. Ungrateful, impossible, but still much beloved. And I was her queen.” Rafe didn’t answer, but somehow his silence had a warm, receptive quality that made Catarina want to tell the story. “I saved her life when she first changed, when she knew nothing of our ways or of what her transformed body could withstand. I followed her into the depths to pull her back, at great risk to my own life! And that was not the only time I rescued her. And after all that, to hear the things she said to Nausicaa!” Catarina reared back and slammed her forehead into the bars. The ache was almost comforting. She reared again.
And then Rafe’s hand was there—his human hand, as warm as earth in sunlight—cradling her forehead with just enough pressure to keep it from hitting the bed frame again.
The heat of his touch entered through her skin, suffusing her face and then brushing deeper. Catarina jerked sharply away from him, glaring into his dark eyes. “I won’t allow you to hurt yourself, Catarina,” Rafe said apologetically. He pulled his hand back and held it out for a moment as if he weren’t sure what to do with it anymore. “I won’t touch you again, unless . . . What did Luce say to . . . Nausicaa—was that the name? Luce said something to Nausicaa that was very hard for you to hear.”
Catarina scowled at him. His touch had woken her to the discomfiting awareness that she’d already said far too much to a strange human; worse, to someone who was holding her as a prisoner. “Why do you ask me such things?”
Ra
fe held his eyes on hers. “Why? Because I care about the answers.”
“It was wrong of me to speak to you at all. Please leave me now. It is a violation of the timahk for a mermaid to speak with a human. It dishonors me.”
She meant to look away from him again, but somehow her gaze seemed linked into his. His face was very serious as he waited, letting the air hold her words, letting them linger like unwinding smoke. Then he spoke again very quietly. “Are you a mermaid, Catarina?” He let his eyes travel, just for a moment, to the two elongated shapes under the sheet, then turned to look at her face again.
Catarina let out a sharp hiss.
She wanted to sing—to sing him to death—but the fear of what her voice might sound like now gagged her. A sickening silence filled her chest.
Rafe nodded gently, taking her silence as some kind of answer. “You have an accent. It’s subtle, but I keep noticing it. Are you Russian?”
It was a strange change of subject, Catarina thought. But she still felt relieved that he had dropped his earlier, intolerable question. “I was Russian, once. Now I do not belong to any nation in the way a human would.”
“Where were you born?” Rafe’s voice was careful, neutral; Catarina was vaguely aware of how much effort he was putting into controlling his tone. Still, she felt again that inexplicable impulse to answer him.
“A town called Anadyr. On the Bering Sea. Not that this is of any importance to me now, of course.”
“You don’t consider your own life history important, Catarina Ivanovna?”
A bullet made of silence seemed to explode in Catarina’s chest. Airy shards scattered, shocking her with a kind of white pain. Then the silence dissipated, and Catarina’s voice came back to her as a scream. “WHAT did you call me?”