by Sarah Porter
“I believe I’m speaking to Catarina Ivanovna Smekhov, born in Anadyr, Russia, on February fifth, 1961. Reported missing by her parents in January of 1977. Catarina, you have a name that means much more than queen. You have a history—”
Catarina screamed wordlessly. Any words now seemed hideous, an insult to feeling. Without quite thinking she lunged up on the bed—up onto her knees.
Realizing that made her scream again, both hands flailing out into empty air. Those lumpy, bony things holding her up were much too weak. Her legs felt muddy, saggy, teetering; she was already pitching forward, her head swinging helplessly toward the floor.
Rafe caught her by her shoulders, tipping her back onto the bed.
With all her strength Catarina slapped him across the cheek. But even her arms were so much weaker than they used to be. The blow felt sloppy, flimsy. Rafe was standing over her now, holding both her wrists in an oddly light grip, looking at her as if he were staring through a window and into a deepening sky. She waited for him to strike her back, to pulp her face with furious blows. She would welcome a beating; this body she had now deserved no better.
Instead he let go of her wrists and sat back down. “Would you have preferred if I’d let you fall?”
“Can you do anything besides ask questions?” Catarina snarled. She was sitting on her heels in a tangle of sheets, and her new legs were trembling under her. “Only a weak man does that. That way he never has to give an answer!”
“So take a turn doing the asking, Catarina.” Rafe shrugged. “I’ll tell you the truth.”
“You said they reported me missing. So tell me, if you sold a thing—if you sold your watch to the pawnbroker or to some filthy man on the street—would you run and tell the police that it was missing?”
For a moment Rafe just looked blank. Then his eyes altered; all their darkness seemed to be falling to some terrible depth. His lips parted and pinched closed again. “No. I absolutely wouldn’t do that.”
“So you say,” Catarina hissed.
“I also wouldn’t sell something that didn’t belong to me.” Rafe’s breathing came fast and strained.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean you didn’t belong to your parents. You weren’t theirs to sell! You only belonged—you still only belong—to yourself.”
“Then let me leave here.”
Rafe stared. “I don’t think you can even walk. Not yet. You need time to build up your strength. And the idea of you wandering through the streets, Catarina, in the shape you’re in now—”
“I can swim! Only take me to the bay. I can beg Luce, she can try . . . perhaps she can sing me into my proper form again.” Catarina swallowed. “Please, Rafe.”
“I was wondering when you’d finally use my name,” Rafe observed quietly. “Do you think I’m your jailer, Catarina? That it’s up to me if you stay or leave? If I tried to take you out of here we’d both get caught before we reached the elevators. That’s the reality now. I’m not your jailer, so it’s not in my power to free you.”
He was lying, Catarina thought bleakly. For a while there she’d half believed he might be better, different, than the men she’d known in her human life all those years before. She turned away from him, tugging the sheet up around her head.
“I was expecting you to ask me a question,” Rafe said to her back. “I thought you would say, ‘If you’re not my jailer, Rafe, then what are you?’ But now it looks like that might be a misplaced hope. Your only interest in me is what I might be able to do for you. Isn’t that true?”
Was it true? Catarina suddenly wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of telling him so. She stayed curled away from him, shrugging the sheet a bit higher.
“I’m a research psychologist, actually, Catarina. I’ve done studies on the effects of severe trauma: people in war zones, victims of . . . of human trafficking. The Department of Defense brought me in to prepare a report on mermaid psychology. That’s why I have the opportunity to be here with you now. And a colleague of mine here has been working on a database of missing girls who we suspect might have become mermaids; there were only two Catarinas on the list. That’s how I was able to guess your real identity.”
Catarina couldn’t let that go. “You mean that name you said? Smekhov? It has nothing to do with me! Luce might demean herself by using a human name, but even for her that is not her real identity. That identity fell away from her when she changed. And even if I’ve . . . lost my proper body, lost it for now . . . I don’t accept those noises you say are my name! Dogs barking, goats bleating as their throats are slit, are more my name than those! Ivanovna! That you could dare to call me Ivanovna!”
“Your patronymic. ‘Daughter of Ivan.’” Rafe said softly. Then he seemed to realize something. “Oh, Catarina, I’m sorry. I should have thought . . .”
“Surely when that man sold me for cigarettes, he sold my name as well! What right does he have to be called my father?” Catarina rolled over to glare at him.
A tear glittered on Rafe’s cheek. He wasn’t looking at her. “No right at all, Catarina.”
“And you dare to speak of our psychology, as if you knew anything.”
Rafe started laughing bitterly, brushing the tear away with the back of his hand. “I don’t think the Department of Defense is going to be too pleased by my report, honestly. They might be glad to hear your opinion that I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Against her own will, Catarina was curious. For several seconds she struggled to suppress her desire to ask him the question and then failed. “What will you tell them, then?”
“That you’re no different from humans. Psychologically a mermaid is indistinguishable from a human who’s been through a similar degree of trauma. The only real difference is the physical manifestation. Suffering transformed into beauty, into magic. It’s fascinating.”
“I am hardly a human,” Catarina muttered. She felt an impulse to flick her tail—and instead felt bare feet kicking at the white sheet.
“You’re . . . both, I’d say. Human and mermaid. That’s what’s so intriguing about you, Catarina. You have an exceptional richness of experience and identity. I mean, are you a beautiful young girl? Or are you a woman in her early fifties, with a lifetime of struggle and exploration behind her? On paper, of course, you’re the much older version of yourself, born in 1961, and not a teenager at all.”
“I’m sixteen years old!”
“And fifty-two years old. Simultaneously.” For the first time Rafe grinned at her, almost rakishly. “Now, I’ll be the first to admit that you look simply fantastic for your age.”
Hearing him say that made her feel so old, so weary. In a way he was right: she could sense all the long years dragging at her back, years that split the ocean waves with grief and death and pleasure. But Catarina also suspected that Rafe had reasons of his own for wanting to think of her as an adult and as at least somewhat human. She meant to stare at him contemptuously but instead looked down at her hands. She was annoyed to feel herself flushing.
“I’m sorry,” Rafe said after a long moment. “It’s inappropriate for me to tease you.”
Catarina shrugged.
“Can I return to an earlier question? I’ll understand if it’s too private, but I do care . . . about how you see things. About what matters to you.”
Catarina twisted away from him, but her body was tense and her head cocked as she waited for him to speak.
“What was it that Luce said to Nausicaa? That hurt you so much?”
Catarina leaned on one hand, thinking. If he was telling the truth, if he actually cared about the answer, well, nobody else did. Her breath rushed on, much too quickly, filling her lungs and then abandoning her again.
“Luce said—” Catarina paused, feeling her chest rise and fall, curling her unaccustomed toes and then spreading them. “She said to Nausicaa, ‘While you were away, you saved me so many times!’ As if even absent Nausica
a meant more to her than I could while staying faithfully by her side! As if the times I saved her were worthless in comparison!”
Rafe was silent, but his silence had a slow, serious tone to it that Catarina understood as if it were speech. “That sounds extremely painful,” he said after some time. “You’re saying you saved Luce’s life repeatedly, but for some reason she couldn’t acknowledge that, only what Nausicaa did for her. Is that right?”
She wouldn’t look at him, but after a moment she nodded.
“Excuse me for asking you this, Catarina, but . . . am I correct in thinking that you’ve been involved in sinking ships? With the deliberate intention of drowning people?” Rafe was using the same extremely careful tone she’d noticed earlier, his words seemingly placed one by one on velvet.
“I’ve drowned many hundreds,” Catarina answered dully. She was surprised to find that the statement felt strange to her. “Of course I have. The humans are owed our vengeance! It was only this madness of Luce’s that made me cease to kill.”
“And yet what you want most is to be recognized for saving someone, for saving Luce. Catarina, what does that tell you about yourself?”
Catarina looked at him.
“To me it says that you’ll get much more of what you truly want from life if you try approaching it from a different angle.” He grinned again, and his dark eyes sparked with sudden amusement. “It sounds like bringing vengeance isn’t actually all that fulfilling for you.”
“You mean that I should be like Luce is, with her plankton?” Catarina snarled. Rafe just smiled at her, his look calm and warm.
Before she could stop herself Catarina realized that she was smiling sadly back at him, smiling even as her first uncontrollable tears began to flow.
33
Regret
The blue-black water seemed boundless, pierced by myriad points of starlight. After months of living in a tank only five feet deep, with no room to leap or spin or plunge, this wild, welcoming space intoxicated Anais. She yanked the idiotic inflatable swimmies from her arms immediately. For half an hour she dived as deep as she could and then spiraled her tail and went rocketing back to the surface, over and over again. She swooped until dizziness reeled through her and green lights scattered themselves across her eyes. It occurred to Anais that she’d never really noticed before how incredibly fun it was to be a mermaid. If it weren’t for that flabby-faced old lunatic and his assignment, wheeling through Baltimore’s night-covered harbor wouldn’t be so bad at all. Mermaid song licked through the water on all sides, until she seemed to part countless ribbons of music with every stroke of her fins. It did sound a lot like the odd, smooth tone Luce had always used when she called to the water, only much more so now: the same tone multiplied, curling and rebounding and blossoming as it passed through dozens of different voices. But that kind of singing wasn’t so great, Anais thought sullenly; it wasn’t real singing at all. It wouldn’t kill so much as a five-year-old kid!
Moreland been right about one thing. However reluctantly, Anais had to concede that much. If she approached these strange mermaids and claimed to be a metaskaza, her ruffled ivory silk top and the diamond studs in her ears would instantly mark her as a liar. After a few moments of hesitation, she pulled the studs from her ears and dropped them, then wriggled out of her shirt and let the current loft it away. It flowed like a moon-colored kite through the darkness. Now Anais was as naked as the water around her, and she bared her teeth as she watched the silk fluxing away into a small pale blot. Moreland had given it to her, she thought. Of course she didn’t want it; of course she felt better without it clinging to her skin.
But nakedness alone wouldn’t be enough to convince these unknown mermaids that her story was true. Anais had never encountered a newly transformed mermaid herself, but she’d heard enough stories to recognize that her own reaction to the change hadn’t been typical. She should seem stunned, bewildered, stricken. She stopped swimming and simply hovered in water that now graded from jet black to violet-gray along its eastern fringe. Dawn was coming. Anais held herself in place with tiny ripples of her fins, carefully assuming the emotions she knew would be expected of her. To her, it felt like getting dressed for a party. She furrowed her brow, widened her eyes, and bent a scared, sagging mouth just as someone else might adjust a scarf.
Anais was aware of her peculiarity: the veils of dark shimmering that any other mermaid would see clinging around her didn’t reveal anything. With her there was no horrifying story displayed in a language of winking darkness. That made her different from other mermaids; all the others were marked forever by flickering images of whatever heartbreaking event had stolen their humanity from them. Anais had always been glad to be set apart from the pathetic, broken girls she lived with in the sea. But in a situation like the one she was going into now, a distinguishing feature like that might be dangerous. She needed a story of her own personal horror, and she needed to describe it with enough shaken, vulnerable intensity that the mermaids might start to think they could see it happening when they gazed into her shimmer—or at least feel bad about not seeing it.
Anais thought for a moment and chose the story she would tell.
On her face the emotions she’d selected shifted and flowed: grief, consternation, denial. She was ready. She came up and sighted the high, palpating wave heaved up as an imperfect barricade across the harbor’s narrow mouth and made for it. Pale lilac dawn glazed a tangle of freeways with dripping blue; on the other side of the harbor some kind of old fort loomed in a mass of sullen gray. It would be better if she didn’t swim straight up to the Twice Lost mermaids who were singing under that wave; instinct told Anais that it would be more convincing if they found her instead. She swished closer, stopping some fifty yards away from the wave’s base. Then she let her body go limp in the water, and let out a few wild, stabbing, fragmented notes. Just as if she hadn’t yet developed any control over her voice. Just as if the power of her own singing terrified her.
As she’d known it would, that outburst of music brought two mermaid guards dashing over so quickly that she hardly saw them arrive: a sweet-faced younger girl with hair streaked in shades of deep gold and soft caramel and a thin, nervous brunette, maybe seventeen or so, who looked at Anais guardedly. Anais gaped back at them with assumed terror and then shook her head violently and threw her hands over her eyes. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “Oh, God, this just can’t be real!”
“Hey,” the younger girl soothed. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re going to be okay! We’re here to help you. My name is Sadie, okay? We’ll be friends. You don’t need to be scared.”
Anais peeked between her fingers, then howled and covered her eyes again. “Oh, no! I don’t know what this is, and I don’t know what you are.” A stolen glimpse told her that she’d miscalculated; Sadie’s tender look had altered into a flash of skeptical surprise. Of course: everybody in the world knew that mermaids were real now. “I mean, I guess you’re mermaids like everyone is talking about, but I just can’t believe this is happening to me! After what my uncle did—I couldn’t take it anymore! But I never thought—”
Sadie and the brunette mermaid both responded to Anais’s statement on cue, turning their heads to gaze sideways into the dark, cloudy sparking hovering around the newcomer. “That’s so weird,” the brunette murmured after a moment. “I can’t see anything. Sadie, can you?”
Anais lowered her hands enough that she could watch the two strangers. Sadie’s lips were compressed and her brows were drawn; a shadow danced in her eyes. “I can’t. I’ve never seen anything like this! Paige, I’m not sure . . .”
There was only one way to deal with this. Anais burst into frantic tears. “He kept hitting me whenever he got drunk, but this time . . . this time he . . . oh, I can’t say it! And I was so, so scared, because I knew . . . if I stayed, he’d try it again! Oh, God,” Anais sobbed, then carefully dropped her voice into a whimper. “Please help me.”
“Of course we’ll help yo
u!” Paige cried. Her arm was already wrapped protectively around Anais’s shoulder. “Mermaids always help each other, okay? And your uncle won’t find you, and we won’t let anyone hurt you ever again!”
Sadie bit her lip and didn’t say anything. That was okay, Anais thought; she could work with one sympathizer to start with. She leaned against Paige and cried harder.
“But . . .” Anais sputtered. “But you can’t promise that! They’ll come for us, and they’ll catch me and hurt me. I know it! Just like they did today, when they caught General Luce . . .”
For several seconds Paige and Sadie didn’t react to that at all apart from the glazed look that came over them. Then Sadie’s hand shot out and gripped Anais’s shoulder dangerously. “You’d better explain what you’re talking about right now!”
“Sadie,” Paige whispered urgently. “Sadie, calm down. We’d better take her to Lieutenant Tricia. That way she can explain to everyone at once.”
Sadie was glowering, her mouth opening to speak, when Anais yowled abruptly and cut her off. “Oh, God, you mean you don’t know? But I can’t be the one to tell you; I just can’t say it. It was so, so terrible! She died so slowly, and they kept on . . . kept on . . .”
Sadie’s sunset-colored tail was lashing in vexation. It reminded Anais that her fins should be flicking, too. “She’s lying,” Sadie hissed. “Paige, I can tell!”
Anais did her best to look wounded. She began rippling her tail so vigorously that her whole body gyrated.
“Why would she lie about something like that!” Paige yelled. “Sadie, nobody would just make that up. Why—if those filthy humans killed General Luce, we’re going to make them pay for that! Come on. You have to explain everything to Lieutenant Tricia. I don’t care how hard it is for you to talk about it!”
Anais went slack in the water, passively letting the two strangers grab her by both arms and drag her toward the glimmering, upright wave. Serene golden light rose like a mist on the horizon, and the wave concentrated the dawn’s glow into brilliant pleats and falling streamers of unbearable purity. Below the wave was the line of mermaids, their hands linked except now and then when one of them broke free and rose to the surface for air. And in the center of the line was a harsh-looking girl with vivid green eyes and ash brown hair who had to be Lieutenant Tricia. There was something in Tricia’s look—something stubborn, furious, and full of raw, unexamined emotion—that made Anais think she might be in luck. She shot Anais a hard, slightly contemptuous look. But for all Tricia’s apparent toughness Anais detected a quiver deep inside it: Tricia was already fighting a continuous undercurrent of panic.