by Mira Grant
But he loved those ghosts. He loved her. In the end, that was all that truly mattered. “Yes, what?”
“Yes, you’re right. We should adopt.” Stacy smiled. Only for a moment. Then the expression faded into something more calculating—something that was sadly more familiar, since the Rising. “Boy or girl, do you think? A boy might be seen as an attempt to replace Phillip, and we’re not doing that. But I don’t know how to raise a little girl.”
“We could get one of each,” said Michael.
Stacy smiled again.
Chapter 4: What We Stole
Thank you for coming back. I promise you, you won’t be sorry.
—Edie Song, Director of the East Bay Children’s Center, August 7, 2018
You’re doing a very good thing. You’re heroes today. Don’t forget that.
—Roy Baxter, Director of the Sacramento Children’s Center, August 7, 2018
1.
The crowd outside the Berkeley courthouse was becoming restless. It was barely a crowd, really—eight reporters, each with a handheld recorder, and a few armed guards. It was enough.
“How’s my hair?” asked Stacy. She lifted the towheaded toddler on her hip a little higher, surprising him into opening his eyes and giving her a suspicious look. She patted his head with her free hand.
“Perfect,” said Michael. His own arms were full of a second toddler, this one dark-haired and clinging to his neck like she was afraid that he was going to disappear. “Are you ready?”
“The adoption’s final,” said Stacy. “Let’s go.”
Michael nodded to the guard, who pushed the door open and allowed the new family to step out into the bright light of morning. Stacy was instantly all smiles, even as the toddler in her arms eyed the shouting reporters with suspicion and dislike.
“Ms. Mason!” shouted a young blogger with a camera that probably cost more than his family’s first car. “What are their names?”
“Well, Nicholas, this is Shaun,” said Stacy.
“And this little bundle of shyness and sunshine is Georgia,” said Michael. “Everyone, we’d like you to meet our new family.”
The reporters closed in, asking questions and taking pictures, and all the while, serene as the morning, Stacy smiled.
Michael watched her out of the corner of his eye, and wondered whether he had made a mistake. Too late now: The cards were dealt.
They were going to have to play them.
Hush-a-by, don’t you cry, go to sleep, you little baby.
When you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses
Dapples and grays, pintos and bays,
All the pretty little horses.
Hush-a-by, don’t you cry, go to sleep, you little baby.
When you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses.
—traditional pre-Rising lullaby
extras
meet the author
Photo © Carolyn Billingsley
Bestselling author Mira Grant lives in Washington, sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests you do the same. Mira Grant is the pseudonym of Seanan McGuire—winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Find out more about the author at www.miragrant.com or follow her on twitter @seananmcguire.
BY MIRA GRANT
PARASITOLOGY
Parasite
Symbiont
Chimera
NEWSFLESH
Feed
Deadline
Blackout
Feedback
Rise: A Newsflesh Collection
Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box (ebook novella)
Into the Drowning Deep
WRITING AS SEANAN MCGUIRE
Rosemary and Rue
A Local Habitation
An Artificial Night
Late Eclipses
One Salt Sea
Ashes of Honor
Chimes at Midnight
The Winter Long
Once Broken Faith
Discount Armageddon
Midnight Blue-Light Special
Half-Off Ragnarok
Pocket Apocalypse
Chaos Choreography
Magic for Nothing
Sparrow Hill Road
Every Heart a Doorway
Down Among the Sticks and Bones
If you enjoyed
ALL THE PRETTY LITTLE HORSES
look out for
INTO THE DROWNING DEEP
by
Mira Grant
The ocean is home to many myths,
But some are deadly...
Seven years ago Atagaris set off on a voyage to the Mariana Trench to film a "mockumentary" bringing to life ancient sea creatures of legend. It was lost at sea with all hands. Some have called it a hoax; others have called it a maritime tragedy.
Now a new crew has been assembled. But this time they're not out to entertain. Some seek to validate their life's work. Some seek the greatest hunt of all. Some seek the truth. But for the ambitious young scientist Victoria Stewart this is a voyage to uncover the fate of the sister she lost.
Whatever the truth may be, it will only be found below the waves.
But the secrets of the deep come with a price.
Monterey, California: June 26th, 2015
The sky was a deep and perfect blue, as long as Victoria—“Vicky” to her parents, “Vic” to her friends, “Tory” to herself, when she was thinking about the future, where she’d be a scientist and her sister Anne would be her official biographer, documenting all her amazing discoveries for the world to admire—kept her eyes above the horizon. Any lower and the smoke from the wildfires that had ravaged California all summer would appear, tinting the air in poisonous-looking gray. Skies weren’t supposed to look like that. Skies were supposed to be wide and blue and welcoming, like a mirror of the wild and waiting sea.
Tory had been born in the Monterey City Hospital. According to her parents, her first smile had been directed not at her mother, but at the Pacific Ocean. She had learned to swim in safe, municipal pools by the age of eighteen months, and been in the ocean—closely supervised—by the time she was three, reveling in the taste of saltwater on her lips and the sting of the sea spray in her eyes.
(She’d been grabbed by a riptide when she was seven, yanked away from her parents and pushed twenty yards from shore in the time it took to blink. She didn’t remember the incident when she was awake, but it surfaced often in her dreams: the suddenly hostile water reaching up to grab her and drag her down. Most children would have hated the ocean after something like that, letting well-earned fear keep their feet on the shore. Not Tory. The riptide had just been doing what it was made to do; she was the one who’d been in the wrong place. She had to learn to be in a better place when the next riptide came along.)
Her big sister, Anne, had watched Tory’s maritime adventures from the safety of the shore, slathered in SPF 120 and clutching her latest stack of gossip magazines. They’d been so different, even then. It would have been easy for them to detest each other, to let the gap in their ages and interests become a chasm. Anne had seven years on her baby sister. She could have walked away. Instead, somehow, they’d come out of their barely-shared childhood as the best of friends. They had the same parents; they had the same wheat-blonde hair, although Anne’s had started darkening toward brown by the time she turned seventeen, prompting an endless succession of experimental dye jobs and highlighting processes. They both sunburned fast, and freckled even faster. They even had the same eyes, dark blue, like the waters of the Monterey Bay.
That was where the similarities ended. Tory was going to be a marine biologist; was doing a summer internship at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and starting at U.C. Santa Cruz in the fall on a full scholarship. Anne was a special interest reporter—read “talking head for geek news”—and well on her way to a solid career as a professional media personality.
The last time they’d seen each other in person had been three days prior to the
launch of the SS Atargatis, a research vessel heading to the Mariana Trench to look for mermaids.
“We’re not going to find them,” Anne had admitted, sitting on the porch next to Tory and throwing bits of bread to the seagulls thronging the yard. “Mermaids don’t exist. Everyone at Imagine knows it. But it’s a chance for the scientists they’ve hired to do real research on someone else’s dime, and it’s a great opportunity for me personally.”
“You really want to be the face of the cryptid mockumentary?” Tory had asked.
Anne had answered with a shrug. “I want to be the face of something. This is as good a place to start as any. I just wish you could come with us. We could use some more camera-ready scientists.”
“Give me ten years and I’ll come on the anniversary tour.” Tory had grinned, impish, and leaned over to tug on a lock of her sister’s sunset-red hair. It was a dye job, but it was a good one, years and miles and a lot of money away from the Clairol specials Anne used to do in the downstairs bathroom. “I’ll make you look old.”
“By then, I’ll be so established that they’ll let me,” Anne had said, and they’d laughed, and the rest of the afternoon had passed the way the good ones always did: too fast to be fair.
Anne had promised to send Tory a video every day. She’d kept that promise from the time the ship launched, sending clips of her smiling face under an endless ocean sky, with scientists and crewmen laboring in the background.
The last clip had come on May seventeenth. In it, Anne had looked…harried, unsettled, like she no longer knew quite what to make of things. Tory had watched the short video so many times she could recite it from memory. That didn’t stop her from sitting down on the porch—so empty now, without Anne beside her—and pressing “play” again.
Anne’s face flickered into life on the screen, hair tousled by the wind, eyes haunted. “Tory,” she said, voice tight. “Okay, I…I’m scared. I don’t know what it is I saw, and I don’t know how it’s possible, but it’s real, Tory, it’s really real. It’s really out there. You’ll understand when you see the footage. Maybe you can…maybe you can be the one who figures it out. I love you. I love Mom and Dad. I…I hope I’ll be home soon.” She put her hand over her eyes. She had always done that, ever since she was a little girl, when she didn’t want anyone to see her crying.
“Turn off the camera, Kevin,” she said, and Tory whispered the words along with her. “I’m done.”
The video ended.
Six weeks had passed since that video’s arrival. There hadn’t been another.
Tory had tried to find out what had happened—what could have upset her sister so much, what could have made her stop sending her videos—but she’d gotten nowhere. Contacting Imagine led to a maze of phone trees and receptionists who became less helpful the moment she told them why she was calling. Every day, she sent another wave of emails, looking for information. Every day, she got nothing back.
She was starting to think nothing was all she was ever going to get again.
She was sitting on the porch six weeks and three days later, about to press “play” one more time, when the sound of footsteps caught her attention. She turned. Her mother was in the doorway, white-faced and shaking, tears streaking her cheeks.
Tory felt the world turn to ashes around her, like the smoke staining the sky had finally won dominion over all. She staggered to her feet, unable to bear the thought of sitting when she heard the words her mother didn’t yet have the breath to say. Her laptop crashed to the steps, unheeded, unimportant. Nothing was important anymore.
Katherine Stewart put her arms around her surviving daughter and held fast, like she was an anchor, like she could somehow, through her sheer unwillingness to let go, keep this child from the sea.
Footage recovered from the Atargatis mission: aired for the board of the Imagine Network, July 1st, 2015
The camera swings as the cameraman runs. The deck of the Atargatis lurches in the frame, slick with a grayish mucosal substance. Splashes of shockingly red blood mark the slime. There has been no time for it to dry. There has been no time for anything. The cameraman is out of breath. He stumbles, dropping to one knee. As he does, the camera tilts downward. For a few brief seconds, we are treated to a glimpse of the creature climbing, hand over hand, up the side of the Atargatis:
The face is more simian than human, with a flat “nose” defined by two long slits for nostrils, and a surprisingly sensual mouth brimming with needled teeth. It is a horror of the deep, gray-skinned and feminine in the broadest sense of the term, an impression lent by the delicate structure of its bones and the tilt of its wide, liquid eyes. When it blinks, a nictitating membrane precedes the eyelid. It has “hair” of a sort—a writhing mass of glittering, filament-thin strands that cast their bioluminescent light on the hull.
It has no legs. Its lower body is the muscular curl of an eel’s tail, tapering to tattered-looking but highly functional fins. This is a creature constructed along brutally efficient lines, designed to survive, whatever the cost. Nature abhors a form that cannot be repeated. Perhaps that’s why the creature has hands, thumbs moving in opposable counterpoint to its three long, slim fingers. The webbing extends to the second knuckle; the fingers extend past that, four-jointed in place of the human two. They must be incredibly flexible, those fingers, no matter how fragile they seem.
The creature hisses, showing bloody teeth. Then, in a perfectly human, perfectly chilling voice, it says, “Come on, Kevin, don’t you have the shot yet?” It is the voice of Anne Stewart, Imagine Entertainment news personality. Anne herself is nowhere to be seen. But there is so much blood…
The cameraman staggers to his feet and runs. His camera captures everything in fragmentary pieces as he flees, taking snapshots of an apocalypse. There is a man who has been unzipped from crotch to throat, organs falling onto the deck in a heap: three of the creatures are clustered around the resulting mess, their faces buried in the offal, eating. There is a woman whose arms have been ripped from her shoulders, whose eyes stare into nothingness, glazed over and cold; two more of the creatures are dragging her toward the rail. The cameraman runs. There is a splash behind him. The creatures have returned to the sea with their prey.
Some of the faces of the dead are familiar: employees of Imagine, camera operators, makeup technicians, all sent out to sea with the Atargatis in order to record a documentary on the reality of mermaids. They weren’t supposed to find anything. Mermaids aren’t real. Other faces are new to the silent executives who watch the film play back, their mouths set into thin lines and their eyes betraying nothing of their feelings on the matter. A dark-haired woman beats a mermaid with an oar. A man runs for the rail, only to be attacked by three of the creatures, which move surprisingly swiftly out of the water, propelled by their powerful tails.
Around the boat, the sea is getting lighter, like the sun is rising from below. The camera continues to roll. The cameraman continues to run.
A thin-fingered hand slaps across the lens, and the video stops. The screaming takes longer to end, but in time, it does.
Everything ends.
Western Pacific Ocean, East of the Mariana Islands: September 3rd, 2018
The yacht drifted on the endless blue, flags fluttering from its mast and engine purring like a kitten, the man at the helm making small adjustments to their position as he worked to keep them exactly where they were. On any other vessel, he would have been considered the captain. On any other vessel, he wouldn’t have been subject to the whims of a reality television personality and his bevy of hand-selected bikini models, all of whom had been chosen more for their appearance than for their ability to handle being on a yacht in the middle of nowhere. They weren’t just miles from shore: they were days from shore, so far out that if something went wrong, no one would be in a position to rescue them.
That was what Daniel Butcher had been aiming for. The married star of three reality cooking shows just wanted to “escape” and “unwind,” f
ar from the prying eyes of the paparazzi and their long-range telephoto lenses. He had the resources to take his entourage to the ends of the earth, and enough of a passion for fresh-caught seafood that this was his idea of paradise. He had the waves. He had the sun. He had a wide array of beautiful women happy to tell him how smart and handsome and witty he was, without him even needing to prompt them.
“Dinner’s at sunset, ladies,” Daniel called, checking the lines hanging off the side. This far from the commercial fishing lanes, they should be drifting in fertile waters. He’d even gone to the trouble of buying data on the known dead zones manifesting in the west Pacific, just to be sure he wasn’t being steered away from where the fish were. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth? Pay tens of thousands of dollars to buy a top-of-the-line yacht, stock it, crew it, sail it away from civilization for three days straight, and wind up someplace where nothing was biting. But no. They’d eat well tonight.
(The actual gutting and cleaning of the fish would be left to his sous chefs, two of whom had been brought on this voyage for just that reason. Daniel Butcher believed in roughing it, but he was still a star, and stars didn’t get fish guts on their hands unless there was a camera rolling to capture the rugged masculinity of the moment.)
The bikini models giggled and preened, their oiled skins shining in the tropical sun. This was the life. This was the way things were meant to be: just him, and the sea, and people who actually appreciated his brilliance.