by Ally Blue
“You’re an annoying bastard,” Armin grumbled, but he let Mo steer him to the nearest chair. He sat down and held out his hand for Youssouf to examine.
Twenty minutes later, Youssouf finally let Mo and Jem take Armin to the lab, after making him swear he wouldn’t use his injured hand.
When they got there, Dr. Jhut waved them over without looking away from the tracking screen. “You absolutely must see this. It’s fascinating.”
Mo and Armin exchanged a glance. Excitement lit Armin’s face, almost obliterating the pain-shadows.
Almost. Mo patted his pocket, where he’d stashed more pills for later. He’d force them down the stubborn idiot’s throat if he had to.
Armin took the chair beside Dr. Jhut’s and rolled it closer to the 3-D display. “What’s happened? What are we looking at here?”
A pure-white octopus glided across the dark cube, and a thrill shot up Mo’s spine as he remembered a TV show he’d seen as a child about the discovery of that particular species. Antarctica. He sat beside Armin, where he could see better.
“Your mermaid crossed into Antarctica about five minutes ago.” Dr. Jhut cut them a look full of excitement. “So far, it’s been in no particular hurry. It stopped twice while in the canyon in Richards Deep, for forty-five seconds the first time and two minutes seventeen seconds the second time.”
Armin frowned. “What was it doing?”
“I’m not certain. Both times, at least one other mermaid was nearby, hovering in the water just as ours was doing.” Her forehead creased. “Judging by the cross-movements I saw, I believe there may have been more than one, but I can’t be positive.”
“Gathering in groups. No one’s observed them doing that before. Well, not until this canyon, anyway.” Armin leaned forward, staring at the display like he was trying to teleport himself into it. “Were they communicating? That would definitely be new.”
“If they were, it wasn’t through vocalization.” Dr. Jhut massaged her neck with both hands. She looked tired, but hell, so did they all. “Perhaps they use gestures? Their pectoral fins are very nearly prehensile.”
“Or chemicals released into the water at short range.” Armin rubbed his wrist above his bandaged hand. “Neither idea is entirely without precedent, even among marine life.”
Mo thought about the voices in his head when he’d found that ravine in Richards Deep. The voices that seemed to come not from poor Daisy, but through her.
Death or change.
“They communicate telepathically.”
Dr. Jhut and Armin turned to look at him at the same time—Dr. Jhut with a what-the-fuck frown, Armin with resignation.
“What in the world are you talking about?” Dr. Jhut’s voice was sharp and clipped, her patience obviously hanging by a string.
Fine. Mo couldn’t blame her. “I heard them. I didn’t know it was them at the time, but they talked to me when I took the cart and went out to Richards Deep on my own. They led me out there.”
Armin studied him with eyes full of understanding and fear, which surprised Mo not at all after what they’d both experienced in Richards Deep. “Do you mean to say they wanted you to find this . . .” He gestured at the tracker cam’s display. “This gateway, or whatever you want to call it?”
“Yeah. They told me I’d see amazing things there. Things nobody else knew. They tried to get me to go in.” Mo paused, thought about whether or not he should mention the next bit, and decided the time for keeping secrets was gone. “You know what I’m talking about. You heard it too.”
Dr. Jhut’s eyes went wide. “Armin? Is this true?”
Armin sighed. “Yes. I heard a voice in my head urging me to go into the crevasse. To follow the light and learn what it had to show me.”
“Death or change,” Mo whispered, very softly, for Armin’s ears only.
Armin’s jaw tensed. He touched Mo’s knee, a brief brush of fingertips that said he understood what Mo was saying. Mo leaned closer and nuzzled Armin’s ear because, Christ, he hated that these goddamn things were in Armin’s head too.
“Well. Even assuming that I believe these mermaids actually communicated with both of you via telepathy—and I’m sorry, but that’s a tremendous leap—we have no way to prove it. The sort of technology one would need to gather evidence doesn’t exist. In the future, perhaps, but right now—” Dr. Jhut stopped, all her attention on the 3-D. “Something’s happening.”
Mo looked. The dark still stretched into infinity beyond their cube of visual, but he could see now. The same bizarre, backward illumination from Richards Deep filled this place. The tracker’s cam picked up other sleek gray-white shapes slipping in and out of the blackness. Mermaids, filling a narrow chasm that seemed to reach to the center of the Earth. Their mermaid made a sharp turn, revealing a tremendous rock wall, gray and sleek as if it had been built and polished.
“Shit.” Mo stared, impressed. “Where the hell is this?”
“This area is uncharted.” Dr. Jhut pointed to the readout from the mapping software at the bottom left of the 3-D. “It’s very deep. Almost eight thousand meters where our mermaid is, and it seems there’s a chasm that may stretch deeper.”
“A new deep-ocean trench.” Armin laughed. “My God. We need to put together an expedition to study it.”
“Let’s get through this one first, shall we?” Dr. Jhut cast him a sour glance. “Look. There’s an opening in the wall.”
Mo got a glimpse of a long, jagged vertical crack, pulsing with a hard black glow, before the mermaid banked again and it veered out of view. He didn’t need any more than that to know what it was, though.
“This is another gateway.” Armin’s words perfectly echoed Mo’s thoughts. “Oh my God.”
“I wonder how many there are?” Mo found the idea a little scary and a lot intriguing. “Could we use them? It could change everything.”
Dr. Jhut held up one hand. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Just watch for now. Let’s see where our mermaid goes, and what it does. We can decide what to do with the larger implications after we figure out why people here are changing, and what in the bloody hell to do about it.”
She had a point. They shut up and watched.
Black-lit water and green-eyed, sharp-toothed mermaids streamed past. Another mermaid swam alongside for a minute, its muscular side undulating like a snake’s. It pulled ahead just in time for Mo to see the vastness of the ocean vanish as their mermaid entered the crack in the wall.
Instantly, the sensible world gave way to chaos. The dark spun and sparked, twisted and pretzeled and turned reality inside out, and finally spat them into a spot Mo didn’t recognize on sight, but whose coordinates he knew by heart.
“Jesus, it’s in the fucking Mariana Trench.” He glanced from Armin to Dr. Jhut and back. “Are you seeing this?”
Armin nodded without speaking. His face reflected the same shock Mo felt.
“This is . . .” Dr. Jhut leaned back in her chair, shaking her head. “It’s unprecedented. I don’t even know what to think.”
“Of course this phenomenon must be studied, eventually.” Armin glanced at Mo, then stopped and stared at the display again. “Wait. What’s that?”
The what? on Mo’s tongue died when he saw the small, round object on the trench floor. Their mermaid swam past it without stopping, but they all got a good enough look to recognize the way the impossible light reflected off the thing’s glassy black curve.
A sudden white blur filled the display. The feed went dark.
Mo blinked. “What happened?”
“I have no idea.” Armin touched Dr. Jhut’s arm. “Can you get it back?”
She shook her head, fingers dancing over the controls. “No. It looks as though the feed’s dead at the source.”
Mo mouthed a silent oh. “So something’s happened to the tracker?”
“It seems so, yes.” She did something else. “I’m going back a bit in the record and slowing it down to see if we can t
ell what happened.”
Mo rolled his chair closer to Armin’s and watched, rapt, as the blur resolved itself frame by frame into a mermaid with hate in its eyes and long, sharp teeth closing around them like a living cave.
“My God. It bit off the tracker.” Armin aimed a wide-eyed look at Mo. “Did you see that?”
“Yeah.” Pulse thumping, Mo rested his hand on Armin’s shoulder. “Why would it do that? Are they that smart, that they recognize a tracker when they see it?”
Dr. Jhut let out a soft laugh. “I have no idea what to even believe any longer.” She backed up the vid and started the last few seconds once more, at the lowest possible speed.
“Wait, what’s that?” Armin pointed to a fuzzy reddish spark on the attacking mermaid’s upper lip. “Freeze it.”
Dr. Jhut halted the playback. To Mo, it looked like nothing much. A trick of the light, maybe. But Armin paled when Dr. Jhut magnified the still. “Jesus, Mandala. Do you see?”
She nodded, grim faced. “Yes. We’d guessed, but still . . .”
“What?” Mo glanced from one of them to the other, confused. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Look at the still.” Armin gestured at the 3-D. “It’s a ruby in that mermaid’s lip.”
Mo studied it. “Huh. Looks like it, yeah. That’s weird.”
“It’s more than weird.” Armin turned and met Mo’s eyes. “Dr. Longenesse had a ruby stud in her upper lip. That mermaid is her.”
Like Dr. Jhut had said, the ruby didn’t suggest anything they hadn’t already guessed. But having it confirmed in such a concrete way left Mo reeling.
It had to be much worse for Armin and Dr. Jhut, who’d worked with Dr. Longenesse. Known her not only as a fellow scientist, but as a human being with strengths and weaknesses, friends and enemies and loved ones. How awful must it be to see someone you knew so radically changed?
Mo tightened his grip on Armin’s shoulder. “Jesus, Doc . . .”
Armin’s hand on his silenced him. “Mandala. Can we be certain?”
“You know we can’t. Not short of capturing that particular mermaid and taking a DNA sample.” She made a low, broken sound and hunched forward, covering her face with her hands. “And who knows if the DNA would even match any longer? God, Armin. What in all the hells is happening? And why?”
In Mo’s head, the mermaids grinned and beckoned. Death or change, friend.
Since that didn’t really answer Dr. Jhut’s question, he didn’t say it. They already knew people were changing. He wasn’t going to make a bad situation worse by telling Mandala the mermaids said they had to change or die.
“I don’t know.” Armin put his arm around his colleague and hugged her, his head resting on the curve of her back. “But we won’t give up until we solve this. All right? Promise me, Mandala. I can’t do this without you.”
She drew a deep breath. Blew it out. Straightened her spine. Her resolve seemed to have returned when she sat up. She gave a single, sharp nod. “We’re all in this together.”
She held out her right hand without looking away from the still of the mermaid’s open mouth. Armin put his left hand on top of hers. Mo added his right hand. It wasn’t much, but it was still a pact of sorts, and it made him feel better.
He stared at the blurred rapier teeth and the single red ember on the 3-D. We’ll stop you, he thought at it. You can’t make us do anything. We’ll find you, and stop you.
The frozen image didn’t move. Didn’t speak. But Mo knew, somehow, that it mocked them anyway.
They decided, after some discussion, that their findings ought to be reported to Dr. Youssouf in person rather than via coms.
She wasn’t overly receptive.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” She threw both hands in the air when Armin and Mandala both shook their heads. “Great. Just great. You’ve both lost it.”
Armin swallowed his irritation. “Amara, the video from the tracker was rather obvious. The mermaid who bit the tracker off of the one I tagged had a ruby stud in its upper lip. Dr. Longenesse had a ruby in her upper lip. If you have another explanation for how a mermaid fish would have acquired such a thing, I’d love to hear it.”
Dr. Youssouf scowled. “Just because I don’t—”
The com from upside squealed, announcing an incoming message. The office went silent.
“Peregrine for Dr. Youssouf,” said a staticky voice. “Please come in.”
Amara lunged for the com link. “This is Dr. Youssouf. Who am I talking to?”
“Oh thank God.” The voice breathed relief through the room like a perfume. “This is Dr. Ngalo. I’m afraid I have bad news.”
Armin’s stomach rolled. He was glad when Mo edged closer and slid an arm around his waist.
Amara cut a quick sidelong glance at them. Armin saw his own fears reflected in her eyes. “What’s happened?”
A pause, short but eloquent. “Hannah Long died a few minutes ago. I’m so sorry, Doctor. We did everything we could, but nothing helped. She died of hypoxic respiratory failure, on one hundred percent oxygen through the ventilator . . . She wasn’t able to absorb any oxygen at all. I can’t explain it.”
Dr. Youssouf closed her eyes. Beside Armin, Mo tensed and made a pained sound so soft Armin barely heard it. But he knew what it meant. Hannah had been Mo’s friend. This must be devastating for him.
Armin wound his arm around Mo’s hips and squeezed. He turned his face to Mo’s, nuzzled his cheek, and kissed the sensitive hollow behind his ear. I’m sorry, he said with his touch, with his lips and the warmth of his body at Mo’s side. I’m here for you.
Mo leaned his head against Armin’s and thanked him with warm brown eyes and a long breath in his ear. Armin held him close and promised him without words that they would find the reasons behind this. That Hannah’s death—and Ryal’s, and all the others—would not go unresolved.
“Thank you for letting us know.” Amara remained calm and controlled as a leader ought to be. She opened her eyes. They burned with anger and the need for revenge, though that need could find no real target. “What’s your situation?”
“Not good. Whatever this is, it’s spreading fast. And we’re not even certain how or why.” Ngalo paused. “If you have any new insights, this would be a good time to share.”
They all looked at each other. Armin noted without much surprise that Dr. Youssouf no longer seemed worried about looking him and Mo in the eye.
Mandala was the one to answer. “We don’t know anything for certain. You already know about the growths we’ve found, and our theories regarding light-wave spread.” She paused. “We’re still not certain why some people with growths have gone on to exhibit physical changes and psychosis, and others haven’t. And we’re not positive whether or not those without the physical changes can pass it on. We have a great deal more work to do in order to identify the specific trigger from dormant brain growths to active symptomatology.”
Dr. Ngalo was quiet for a moment. Armin could almost feel her thinking. “What would you suggest we do, Doctor?” She sounded calm, resigned, doing what she must in order to save as many of her people as she could.
When Mandala hesitated, Armin jumped in. “Isolate anyone with growths in their brain, if you haven’t already done so. If they start to exhibit physical changes, sedate them immediately. And cover their eyes. If our theories are correct, that will prevent them from passing on the contagion to others.” They’d probably already done so, but it couldn’t hurt to remind them.
“Oh.” Mo sat up straight at his side. “I have an idea. It seems like the people who’re infected can’t breathe, right? Or at least Hannah couldn’t.”
“Many of our other infected patients are showing the same signs,” Ngalo said. “I am open to suggestions.”
Mo paused. Swallowed. “Hannah’s lungs changed. Right?”
“That’s correct, yes. Or at least that was my initial impression on postmortem scanning. I haven’t had time to perform
an autopsy.” Ngalo paused. “Who am I speaking to?”
“Maximo Rees. I’m a miner. I was just thinking. Why not try Mist?”
“Mist?” Armin heard Dr. Ngalo’s frown as clearly as if he could see her. “Why? We’re already using liquid therapies. Not that it’s made any difference. I can’t image what advantage Mist could offer.”
Mo leaned forward, his features alive with the force of his ideas. “I know it sounds weird. I don’t imagine the gas mix is exactly what you’d normally use since it’s meant for use at depth. But if nothing else is working, why not?”
Pregnant silence hung from the com. Armin nudged Dr. Youssouf, because Mo was right. If it kept someone from dying, it was worth a try.
Youssouf cut him an irritated look, but did what he wanted. “I think he’s got a point. I don’t want to go into the whole thing right now, but we have pretty compelling evidence that—”
Mandala kicked her. Youssouf stopped to glare at the other woman. Mandala shook her head. Youssouf turned to Armin with eyebrows raised. He also shook his head. Dr. Ngalo hadn’t seen what they’d seen. If they told her what they suspected about the contagion changing people into mermaids, even after what had happened to Hannah, she’d cut them off entirely.
Youssouf licked her lips. “We. Um. Have evidence that this contagion changes the physiology of the lungs. We’re not sure how yet, but it seems as though infected people have a harder time extracting oxygen from the air. You saw that with Hannah. It might be worthwhile giving the Mist a try. It might be easier to keep them oxygenated with a specialized depth mix rather than the usual liquid therapies.”
It was true, as far as it went. A mermaid’s respiratory system was radically different from that of a human being. Armin wished they could share the full truth with their colleague on the surface, but it was simply too risky.
Ngalo sighed. “Well, I’m ready to try anything at this point. Hannah’s the first one we’ve lost, but she won’t be the last if we can’t turn things around quickly. We’ll be in touch. Ngalo out.”