“You’re trespassing,” said Tory. Anger flared in her like a lit match. Her eyes narrowed. “Who are you? This lab is private property. You can’t be in here.”
“You’re correct that the lab is private property. It belongs to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which does not fund your research but, as I understand it, is willing to let you conduct your work here in exchange for a healthy donation from Mr. Martines’s parents”—the man nodded toward Luis—“and in the hopes you’ll discover something that can benefit this institution. If you read the fine print of your contracts, you’ll find the aquarium reserves the right to allow anyone access to your lab at any time, providing they are confident the individual or individuals in question are not here to interfere with your research in any way. I assure you that I’m not here to interfere.”
“So why are you here?” Luis’s inflection mirrored Tory’s almost exactly.
The man rose, extending his hand for one of them to shake. He didn’t seem concerned about which of them it was. “My name is Theodore Blackwell, and I’m here as a representative of Imagine Entertainment.”
Tory stiffened, the blood draining from her face so fast it left her reeling. For one terrified moment, she was afraid she was going to collapse, leaving Luis to deal with this—whatever this was—alone. The moment passed. Her heart, while beating too fast and too hard against her ribs, did not go out on her; her lungs continued to fill. She was still standing.
“Get out,” she said, through clenched teeth. The soothing sound of the sea seemed impossibly far away.
“Miss Stewart, you’ve been asking—begging, cajoling, and occasionally ordering—Imagine to send a second expedition to the Mariana Trench for the past seven years, and for the past seven years, Imagine has been refusing. There was insufficient data to make a second voyage viable. As I’m sure you understand, Imagine remains in a highly precarious position where the events of 2015 are concerned. On the one hand, there is no one who wishes for answers more devoutly than my employer—no.” His voice hardened on the last word. “I see you preparing to contradict me, to cite the loss of your sister as proof that no one has suffered as much as you have. I concede that you’ve suffered. I do not dispute that you’ve paid a greater price than anyone anticipated. But your sister was not the only one lost at sea.”
Mr. Blackwell took a step forward. “There were dozens of Imagine employees on that boat. People I’d worked with for years. People I considered personal friends. My losses are greater than yours in volume, and again, I’m not the only one. Each of those people had a sister, Miss Stewart, or a brother, or a lover, or a parent. So yes, we want to know what happened as much as you do, if not substantially more. But there is always the other hand to consider. The hand which answers to shareholders and the court of public perception. The Atargatis was a tragedy—one the world has, by and large, allowed to be forgotten. The footage is dismissed as false; the tragedy becomes an unavoidable accident. The word hoax overtakes the much less pleasant slaughter. There was no hoax. The footage is real.”
“We knew that,” said Luis softly.
Mr. Blackwell spared Luis a tight smile before returning his attention to Tory. “Going into those waters for a second time will reopen old wounds and bring all the old accusations and armchair experts flooding back into the light. To use the maritime metaphors your people seem to be so fond of, we’ll be throwing out chum, and the sharks will come. A second voyage can only be undertaken under the most specific and particular of circumstances.”
“What are those?” asked Tory. Her jaw felt like it had locked in on itself. It was beginning to ache. It was oddly difficult to see that as a bad thing. If she was focusing on the pain, she wasn’t going to hit the man from Imagine with a chair.
“We must have new information that would allow us to get answers from sending another ship. A crew that will be careful, cautious, and invested. And absolute secrecy, of course. That goes almost without saying.” The corner of Blackwell’s mouth twitched. “Imagine will film everything for release if we’re successful—it could bring peace to those who’ve been questioning for the past seven years—but if we fail, or if what we find is less than savory, nothing will be said. We need people who understand that.”
“So you decided to sit in our lab like a creeper because you wanted to gloat at Tory about how you were never going to make her feel better?” Luis stepped up next to his partner, hands balling into fists. “I don’t know how you do things at Imagine, but where I come from—”
“Where you come from, disputes are settled by calm discussions in beautifully appointed boardrooms, while the people having the discussions pretend they’ve bucked the old trappings of the business world simply because they no longer need to wear ties. I know where you come from, Mr. Martines. You cannot frighten me by playing on the idea that you might commit violence. I know better.”
Luis frowned. “That’s not how this was supposed to go.”
Again, the corner of Blackwell’s mouth twitched. “My apologies. Next time I’ll have my office call ahead for a copy of your script.” He returned his attention to Tory. “I’m not here to toy with you or waste your time. I’m here to make you an offer.”
“What’s that?” she asked, warily.
“Imagine has been taking an interest in your research,” he said, still calm, still unruffled. “We find your approach to the mystery of the Mariana Trench fascinating. Sonar, for the depths where light cannot go. Ingenious, if unlikely to produce any truly useful results—but unlikely is not, as they say, impossible. Your findings have been remarkable.”
Tory’s eyes widened. She hugged the printouts to her chest, finally finding her voice as she demanded, “How do you know what I’ve found?”
“We’ve been monitoring the same data feeds. We’ve even been instrumental in convincing some of the feed holders to reduce their fees for you. Without informing you, of course. We didn’t want you to feel beholden to Imagine.”
“I would never!”
“We’re aware, Miss Stewart.” Blackwell shook his head, lips pressed into a thin line. “The filming aboard the Atargatis was never expected to be hazardous. If it had been, we would never have been there in the first place. We’re an entertainment company. We never wanted anyone to die. Had we possessed the slightest inkling that there might be something real out there to find, we would have handed responsibility for the mission over to a research group that could handle the more dangerous aspects of the project. Errors were made. People were lost. Some of their associates have attempted to blackmail the company, even after Imagine was found innocent of intentional wrongdoing. Not you. Not your family. You’ve never taken a dime from us—”
“I would never,” said Tory again, more hotly.
“—voluntarily,” said Blackwell. Again, that twitch of his mouth, like it was all he could do to conceal his amusement. “Imagine has been interested in your research for some time. Mr. Martines has provided enough financial support that our contribution has been … masked, shall we say. We’ve been able to slip certain necessary items to guide your professional development into the gaps he would otherwise have left.”
All those years. All those times when a data feed would become accessible exactly when it was needed, when a piece of equipment she would have sworn Luis didn’t care about had suddenly appeared in the lab, letting her work progress. Even the ease with which certain applications had been approved by committees infamous for their slowness and reticence to consider research not focused on feeding people or relieving the increasingly global droughts … Tory had taken all those things as a consequence of Luis’s family wealth, or her own status as a victim of the Atargatis tragedy, or both. Suddenly she was seeing them in a whole new light, and she didn’t like it.
“I can see this distresses you,” said Blackwell. “I knew it would. I recommended to my superiors that you be left out of this project. I was outvoted. Apparently, there are those who believe your expertise is key—or at leas
t, that your presence on the vessel, as one of our scientific experts, will prevent rumors of hoax.”
“Project?” said Luis.
“Vessel?” said Tory.
“The Melusine sails from San Diego in three weeks’ time; preparations have been under way for years, only waiting for the science to catch up with the ambition. You have the sonar reports. You know how the equipment works. We—by which I mean the board of the Imagine Network—want you on that vessel when it launches. It will travel to the Mariana Trench. It will use its dynamic positioning system to settle itself in the best possible place. And it will, God willing, finally answer the question of what happened to the Atargatis. The entire voyage is being funded by Imagine, with support from several other interested parties. It will cost you nothing but time. It might provide the answers you seek. So.” Blackwell paused. “Will you set sail with us?”
“I don’t even see how that’s a question,” said Tory.
Blackwell nodded and reached for his briefcase. “Excellent,” he said, although his tone implied that it was anything but. “As it happens, I have the paperwork right here.”
CHAPTER 4
Berkeley, California: August 3, 2022
The mermaid.”
The slide showed an elegant woodcut of a woman, naked from the waist up, scaled from the waist down, sitting on a rock and staring toward a city on the nearby shore. Her face was turned away from the viewer, but she was lovely, with long, flowing hair and gently sloping breasts.
“The earliest entries into the mermaid monomyth were recorded in ancient Assyria, twenty-five centuries before the Common Era, when the goddess Atargatis supposedly flung herself into the sea in grief over the death of her human lover, a shepherd, whose name has been lost to antiquity. The theme of human women being transformed by the combination of grief and drowning continued in the myth almost to the present day.”
The slide changed to a shot of Disney’s iconic little mermaid, hair blazing red and enormous blue eyes turned toward the distant surface. The longing implied in the woodcut was fully realized here: the animated princess yearned, ached, for whatever was above her, straining toward the forbidden.
“When Hans Christian Andersen wrote ‘The Little Mermaid’ in 1836, he inverted the old mermaid stories. No longer were women going to the sea: instead they wanted to leave it, to explore the clearly superior wonders of human society. The majority of mermaid stories written after this fable took root have shown this same sensibility—the idea that somehow life on land is superior. Please note that I said ‘the majority.’ I’ve been teaching this class for some time now, and I can assure you that I’ve seen every exception to the rule. Writing and self-publishing a novel to prove me wrong is a viable use of your time, but you should be aware that six people have gotten there before you for specifically that reason.”
Laughter swept the darkened lecture hall, some of it sincere, some of it nervous. The room, which could seat three hundred, was full, with TAs and interested auditors standing against the back wall. The lecture was being streamed into another two hundred homes, for the sake of the distance learners and the students who were unable, for one reason or another, to attend.
It would have been nice if they’d all been there to witness her genius. Dr. Jillian Toth knew that most of them were there to see the village fool dancing naked in the square. She was a quack, having been written off by everyone outside her admittedly specialized field—sirenology being an offshoot of marine biology, with aspects of physiology and cetology mixed in—and regarded as the scientific equivalent of a tabloid reporter. But she kept speaking, and she kept working, and someday, she was sure, she would show them.
She would show them all.
It was hard for the audience to see her with the lights as low as they were; she was a shadow, a silhouette, a conversation that began and ended in comfortable darkness. Even when she’d been held in higher regard by the academic community, Dr. Toth had never been inclined to seek the spotlight. Instead she kept to her podium, her online forums, and her growing body of essays, which many dismissed as the ramblings of a woman whose crackpot theories could thrive only in academia, where concept and execution were sometimes so divorced as to bear no relation to one another.
In the light, she was a tall, strongly built woman of mixed English and Hawaiian descent who managed to seem angular and rounded at the same time. From her father she had inherited strong legs, brown skin, dark hair that required little more than regular brushing, and an absolute conviction that those who challenged the sea would eventually get what was coming to them. From her mother she had inherited a tendency to freckle a darker shade of brown, a certain emotional distance from the people around her, and pale green eyes, like chips of sea glass that had somehow missed the shore and washed up in her face instead. Her admirers said she was beautiful, confident, and clever. Her detractors said she was fat and loud and took up too much space. All of them were, within their limited spheres, correct.
The slide changed again, this time to a screenshot every person in the class recognized. That didn’t stop the vague murmurs of discontent as people realized what they were looking at.
In the picture, the creature—the mermaid—was facing away from the camera, pulling itself along the Atargatis deck with clawed hands. Its tail was broad and flat, more like an eel’s than a dolphin’s, and while the substance growing from its scalp could have passed for hair under the right light, it was clearly something … else.
“The Atargatis, 2015,” said Dr. Toth. “This picture was taken prior to the disappearance of all hands on board. People have spent the last seven years with this image and the others like it, devoting their time to the effort to discredit the so-called ‘mermaid mystery.’ Apparently, it’s more believable that the Atargatis had a complete special effects lab manipulating the film as it was created than it is to say that perhaps mermaids—or something terribly like them—are real.”
“The film could have been manipulated after it was taken but before they were lost,” said a voice. The speaker didn’t yell, but his voice carried surprisingly well in the silence left by Dr. Toth’s last statement.
“And all copies of the unmodified footage were somehow successfully wiped from the Atargatis systems, to the point that the navy’s computer science experts have been unable to retrieve them?” Dr. Toth turned to face the room. If she was perturbed about being interrupted, she didn’t show it; she still sounded effortlessly calm, almost sedate. “If the Imagine Network had released this footage as one of their television specials, I’d be right there with the skeptics, arguing that this couldn’t possibly be real—if we can’t figure out how the trick was done, it simply means they’ve been stepping up their game. But they didn’t. The Imagine Network fought the release of this footage tooth and nail. They wanted it to disappear. The United States Navy started the leak. Without them this might be a tragic footnote, forgotten by all except for the families of the victims. The film is too comprehensive, too complete, and too flawed to be anything but real.”
“Shouldn’t flaws make you question more, not less?” The voice sounded amused now, like it had found the weakness in her entire thesis.
Dr. Toth wasn’t taking the bait. “Some flaws create questions. Why does the monster have a zipper; why did the ghost of Lover’s Lane wait until new construction was announced before attacking. Some flaws are the key to a Scooby-Doo mystery. Other flaws are necessary for a thing to be realistic. The film from the Atargatis is internally consistent. Objects do not appear or disappear without cause. People talk in a realistic way, repeating themselves, stuttering, stumbling over their own words. There are individuals we only know by name from the passenger roster, because they are never called by name on film. Reality is much less convenient than fiction. People don’t introduce themselves every time they see someone that they already know. Mascara doesn’t magically reapply itself between takes. The flaws in the Atargatis video are the flaws that appear in reality.” r />
“So you’re saying perfection is the enemy of the truth.”
“I’m saying this is my classroom, and you’re disrupting it. The veracity of the Atargatis footage is not up for discussion at this time. Please hold any further questions until the end of the lecture.”
“Why did the navy release the footage?”
For the first time, Dr. Toth stopped cold. For the first time, she actually looked displeased. Then she took a breath, and the world resumed.
“The Atargatis was captained by a woman named Jovanie Seghers. Her father, Lieutenant John Seghers, was retired navy. He had contacted his former colleagues as soon as his daughter stopped responding to his messages, asking them to check up on her. Without him the Atargatis might not have been found for substantially longer, if it was found at all. Someone on the ship which found the Atargatis also found some or all of the footage. They watched it, realized that Imagine was likely to bury it, and released it before any official cease and desist could be issued. Imagine was still cleared of all charges. The footage was deemed both falsified and illegally released. So far as I am aware, the only person to suffer actual consequences was the seaman who chose to upload it.”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“That is not your concern. Now.” Dr. Toth cleared her throat. “The Mariana Trench has long been considered a likely spot for the existence of ‘real’ mermaids. Deep, isolated, and on several historical shipping lanes—”
She was still talking as the shadowy figure of a man detached from the wall and walked up the stairs to the door. She continued talking as he made his exit, and it was anyone’s guess whether she saw him go.
It was no real surprise when, after the lecture concluded, Dr. Jillian Toth returned to her office to find a well-groomed, remarkably forgettable man sitting in the chair she kept for visiting students. She walked past him, shaking her head, to drop the thumb drive holding the day’s lesson into a fishbowl filled with similar drives in varying sizes and colors. All were labeled in her private shorthand, making it virtually impossible for anyone else to make sense of her filing system.