She watched as the captain and her first mate exchanged a rapid flurry of signs, their hands moving too fast for her to follow. Sunnie had some experience with ASL. One of their former mermaids, Hallie, had been a certified interpreter who eventually chose to hang up her fins and go into working for the Deaf community full time. The small handful of signs that Hallie had taught to her co-workers didn’t include any of the signs Sunnie could pick out of the flurry of dancing fingers, but she did know enough to know that whatever was being discussed, it wasn’t something that could be talked about calmly.
Then Captain Seghers stepped away from her companion, and Sunnie knew. She stood frozen as the other, smaller woman walked down the deck toward her. The Captain opened her mouth.
“Please.” The word was half spoken, half moaned; it escaped from Sunnie’s lips almost without her consent, hanging in the air between them. “Please, don’t say it. Say that you’re still looking. Say that you’re going to try something else. Say that this is a joke. Just please, don’t say it.”
“You have my sincere condolences for your loss,” said the captain. She sounded sad. That was good. She should be sad. They had been swimming alongside her boat; whatever had happened to Jess, it had happened in the shadow of the Atargatis.
The thoughts were weak and petty, and Sunnie regretted them as soon as they were fully formed. Captain Seghers hadn’t ordered them into the water, and their contract with Imagine had been very upfront about the dangers of swimming in an area this uncharted, this untouched by man. They had signed up anyway, for the money, and for the experience of swimming in an ocean where no other professional mermaid had ever set fin. She could be angry. She could be devastated. But blaming Captain Seghers wasn’t fair, and she refused to let grief make her into someone she wasn’t.
“We knew the risks,” Sunnie said. “She knew the risks. Thank you for your sympathy, but she died the way she would have wanted to—with her fins on and the whole ocean in front of her. Just…please, do you know if the divers will be able to find her body? Her family would very much appreciate it if we could bring her home.”
“I don’t know,” said Captain Seghers. “If you want my honest opinion, I don’t think so. The water is too deep here, and there’s too much of it. They weren’t able to find her quickly enough, and by now, even if she wasn’t taken by something, she’s too far away for us to find.”
“Taken?” asked Sunnie, before she could stop herself.
Captain Seghers managed not to wince. “It was a poor choice of words. You have my apologies. These waters are known to be home to a wide range of predators. Sharks, squid, anglerfish…I’m sorry to have put it so baldly, but by now, those predators will have definitely found her. We will not be able to recover her body. I am sorry.”
“I see.” Sunnie closed her eyes for a moment. She could still see Jess, the sunlight shining off her hair, laughing as she joined her fellow mermaids in the sea. It was a painful thing to look at. She opened her eyes again. “Thank you for your honesty. May we have access to the main dining room tonight? We’ll want to hold a memorial for her.”
Jovanie nodded. “I will talk to Mr. Curran and make sure that Imagine is cleared out of the room for the night. If there are any issues, they’ll go through me.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s the least we can do.” Jovanie forced herself to look the other woman in the eye before turning on her heel and walking back toward David. It was time to pull her divers out of the water and notify Imagine that the mermaids would be using the cafeteria for the evening. There were times, like these, when she genuinely regretted her decision to become the captain of a passenger vessel. She could have run a garbage scow. She could have operated a container ship.
She could have never been forced to deal with the pain of leaving a passenger’s body in the sea.
The scientists on the deck were subdued. News of Jessica’s death had filtered back to them through various channels—the crew, the interns, the various Imagine cameramen and support personnel—but they couldn’t take the time to mourn her. Those who had spoken to her in more than passing were sorry for her loss. The rest knew her only as a body on the ship, and were sorry in a more abstract way. None of that collected the data that they needed to harvest from the sea. None of that answered their questions or fulfilled their contracts. Science was not a thing that could be put on hold.
Anne and Kevin lingered around the edges of the group, continuing to film. They had nothing to hang the narrative on at the moment, but a large part of what they did was waiting. Waiting for the light. Waiting for the right scientific accomplishment. Waiting for something to happen.
“Peter? Your computer’s beeping,” called Alexandra, hoisting another probe up onto the rail. She had checked all the calibrations, and was ready to send it down deeper than anything else she had sent into the water. This should tell her what was hiding down there in the bathypelagic.
“Got it,” said the ichthyologist, dropping back into his chair. He brightened. “My descending camera is picking up motion.”
Instantly, he was surrounded by a ring of his colleagues, who moved aside only when Kevin forced his way through with his camera. They wouldn’t have given ground even then, but none of them felt like getting into a fight with Imagine’s legal team over intentionally blocking a filming opportunity. Anne was glued to Kevin’s side, her eyes as fixed on the screen as everyone else’s.
The small camera that Peter had sent down was protected from the crushing depths by an elaborate shell. Even that wouldn’t hold forever; the camera was not rated for multiple dives. The mechanism would inevitably be compromised by the pressure, ending the recording. Until then, drives on the ship itself would capture every moment of footage, preserving it for future review.
As they watched, a long ribbon of a fish swam by, bathed in the greenish light of the camera. “Gulper eel,” said Peter. A squid jetted past, too quickly for anyone to identify its species. A school of smaller fish with brightly glowing spots on their heads and bodies scattered out of the camera’s path. “Lanternfish.”
“What’s that light below the camera?” asked Anne.
There was a momentary pause. Most of the scientists had been so enthralled by this glimpse of a world that most of them would never visit that they had forgotten the presence of the Imagine team. It was an easier thing to do than any of them would have thought before embarking on this voyage.
Finally, Peter said, “I don’t know. There are many bioluminescent fish in the bathypelagic zone; we may be about to encounter one of them. Those lanternfish we just saw are bioluminescent—that’s why they glow the way that they do. It helps them to attract prey and, we think, allows them to identify other members of their species as ‘safe.’”
The light Anne had noticed below the visual frame was continuing to rise, faster than the camera’s rate of descent could justify. Whatever was down there, it was coming up to meet them. The observers leaned closer, some of them holding their breath, others just frozen with the urgency of waiting.
A hand reached out of the blackness and slapped itself across the camera lens. Anne shrieked—just a little. Everyone else was silent, staring.
Finally, in a voice that implied she already knew the answer, Sonja asked, “Is that some sort of deep-sea starfish?”
“No,” said Peter. “No, I don’t think so.”
The hand that blocked the camera had four fingers instead of five, but was as broad as a normal hand; the fingers that were there seemed to be set further apart than was normal, perhaps to allow for the stiff-looking membranes that connected them up to the second knuckle. Two more knuckles extended past that thick webbing, causing several of the scientists to gasp as they finished counting the bones of the fingers. The tips of the fingers extended past the lens, but the end of the thumb was visible, and bore a claw instead of a fingernail. There were no scales; instead, the skin was a strange, chalky gray, and looked slick, like it was coated
in something.
“Imagine is messing with us,” said Anton. “They have to be messing with us. I’m going to sue. They promised they wouldn’t interfere with any of our experiments.”
“Hey, man, if this is on Imagine, they didn’t warn us about it either,” said Kevin.
“Why is it a hand?” moaned Anne. “Fish don’t have hands. Why is it a hand?”
“Lots of things have hands,” said Peter, leaning closer to the screen. “Monkeys, otters, even some sorts of lizard. The koala has a hand with two thumbs. Nature enjoys making hands. Almost as much as it enjoys making beetles.”
“Is it a fish?” asked Sonja. “That’s not a cetacean bone structure. Look, here.” She leaned forward and tapped the screen, indicating the central bone of the hand’s longest finger. “That’s too narrow. Even infants don’t have finger bones that narrow.”
“They certainly look like fish bones,” agreed Peter. “I doubt this hand’s owner would have the gripping strength to, say, turn a doorknob or work a stiff lever.”
“So what’s the point?” demanded Anton. “You’re just proving this thing’s a fake.”
“The point is fine manipulation,” said Alexandra, finally joining the conversation. “Fingers like that could pick meat out of shells, or pick knots open. You can do a lot with weak, dexterous fingers.”
“It’s moving.”
Anne’s two moaned words brought everyone’s attention back to the screen. The hand was shifting positions, adjusting its grip. For a split second, it uncovered half of the lens. What looked like a face came into view, only to be obscured again as the hand moved back into place. There was a jerk, and the camera began to descend again, so rapidly that Peter’s depth meter started to beep, warning him that the pressure was building. He leaned forward, typing rapidly.
“Go back to that face,” demanded Sonja.
“I can’t without cutting off the live feed,” said Peter. He kept typing. The meter kept beeping. The picture went black. He leaned back in his chair, shaking his head in disgust. “I lost it. The camera’s dead.”
“The camera may be dead, but it’s still tethered to the ship,” snapped Anton. He bolted for the rail, where he slapped the button that would pull Peter’s equipment back on board. There was a dial next to the winch, controlling the speed. Without waiting for anyone to say anything, he cranked it all the way to full, bringing the camera rocketing back toward the surface.
“You lost the feed, now go back to the face,” urged Sonja, sparing only half a glance for Anton.
“I’m working on it,” said Peter. He resumed typing, more slowly this time. The picture reappeared, running backward until it abruptly stopped on a single frame. The hand was still there, blocking half the screen. The rest…
“Oh, my God,” moaned Alexandra, and turned away, putting a hand over her mouth.
It was definitely a face. It could even have been taken for human, if viewed from a distance, on a dark night. How many mermaid sightings took place during the day? thought Anne, almost frantically, and realized that she didn’t know the answer. Those weren’t the sort of records Imagine had provided when they told her to prep for this job.
There was a nose, of sorts, although it was more a bony outcropping supporting two extended slits than anything that would grace a primate’s countenance. The one visible eye was almost perfectly spherical and glowing from within, bioluminescent green and horror movie black. The mouth was a nightmare of needled teeth set against disturbingly human lips. This was a creature that could pucker up for a kiss right before biting someone’s face off.
Most distressing was the hair. It was black, and swirled around the face in a cloud that obscured the lines of cheek and throat. It seemed slightly too thick for what it appeared to be, and the tips of it were glowing.
“What is that?” demanded Sonja. “What is it?”
“Fascinating.” Peter leaned closer still. “What we’re all interpreting as hair looks like it’s something more akin to the tentacles of the common sea nettle. A large piscean predator—I don’t feel as if I’m jumping to conclusions; with those teeth, it would have to be a predator, especially at such a depth—with adaptations previously thought exclusive to cnidarians. This is going to turn marine classification on its ear. We’ve never encountered anything this complex with cnidocytes.”
“You’ll need a sample to confirm that,” said Sonja, appearing to get herself back under control. “They look like cnidocytes—stinging tentacles,” she added, with a glance back to a grateful Kevin, “but they might be something else. They could be symbiotic, for example. A bottom-dwelling jellyfish that these creatures have co-opted as a form of defense.”
“Wouldn’t that make them at least somewhat intelligent?” asked Anne, snapping out of her brief fugue state. “To be clear, we’re looking at an unknown deep-sea life form with webbed hands, long, flowing hair, and facial features that could conceivably, under the right circumstances, be mistaken for human. You’re the experts here. Are we looking at a mermaid?”
Peter and Sonja exchanged a glance, Peter’s mouth falling slightly open. The woman from Imagine was right—of course she was, the evidence was plain as day, right there on the screen—but somehow, none of them had ever expected to be forced to commit to it on camera. At least not so soon in the voyage.
The depth meter beeped.
“I think that we need further data before we can conclusively say, one way or another, that this creature is, ah, a ‘mermaid,’” said Peter, picking his words with laborious care. “At the same time, I believe I can say that it is not not a mermaid without actually committing to the idea that it is in fact, a mermaid.”
Anne looked politely doubtful. “That sounded like a lot of very careful spin, Professor Harris. As an ichthyologist—a scientist who has devoted his life to the study of fish, including those that live in the deep waters of the Mariana Trench—can you honestly look me in the eye and tell me that we did not just see the first ever recorded image of a genuine mermaid?”
The depth meter beeped.
“I…” Peter stopped and took a deep breath. “It is my opinion, as a scientist and as a scholar, that what we are looking at is a naturally occurring deep-sea creature which has never previously been recorded by science. Whether it is a mermaid or not, I am not yet prepared to say. But I will say this: it very well might be.”
The depth meter beeped a final time, signaling that the camera was within ten feet of the surface. Anton, who was still standing by the rail, gasped. Only the people directly around him heard the sound, which was otherwise drowned out by the waves slapping against the hull. But everyone heard him when he exclaimed, “What the fuck is that thing?”
Then the camera broke the surface, and the naturally occurring deep-sea creature which was still clinging to it for dear life rose along with it. The camera slammed into the winch attached to the side of the ship, nearly dislodging the hissing horror that was wrapped around it.
Seen in the sunlight, the creature was definitely a mermaid: there was nothing else that it could be, no other word that summarized both the humanoid upper body, with its arms and hands and oh-so-nearly human face, and the sinuous, fishy curl of the lower body, which was more like that of an eel than that of a shark. Its tail ended in a pair of ragged vertical flukes, nowhere near as elegantly symmetrical as the neoprene fins of the professional mermaids—these were tattered, functional parts of its body, meant for propelling it through the lightless depths, and not for photo ops or posing on tropical beaches.
That same tail was wrapped twice around the body of the shell that held the camera, holding the mermaid in place. Everyone froze where they were, staring at the mermaid. The mermaid stared back at them, the bioluminescent pinpricks in its hair flashing on and off with dizzying speed.
“Can it see us?” whispered Sonja.
“I don’t know,” said Peter. His voice was filled with an almost childlike wonder. “It wouldn’t need functional eyes that d
eep, but it seemed to see the camera. It may be a species that moves between levels of the water.”
“Are you getting this?” demanded Anne.
“Every second,” said Kevin.
“Oh, thank God.” Imagine was going to shit. The entire corporation was going to shit. She was going to be able to set her own terms from here on out. Anne Stewart, first woman to bring back proof that mermaids existed. Anne Stewart, journalistic hero.
The mermaid continued to cling to the side of the camera. The gills in its neck were flexed as it moved its head, peering at the people on the deck. More people were arriving every second, as the interns rushed to see what all the excitement was. Thus far, the sight of the mermaid had stunned everyone into near-silence, or it would have been a riot. Alexandra looked around uneasily, realizing that the riot was perhaps not so far off. They had been told to look for proof that mermaids were real. None of them had honestly expected that they would find it. Now that they had, there was a whole suite of new questions to be asked. Two of the big ones were, thus far, going ignored. Alexandra just wasn’t sure how to ask them without triggering a panic.
Were mermaids intelligent? And if they were—which they might well be, given the apparent cranial capacity and primate-like upper body of the mermaid that was studying them—were they friendly?
Was there any reason in the world to expect a deep-sea predator with that many teeth to be friendly?
Then Anton laughed. “Oh, wow, good one, Imagine. I sort of assumed there’d be some kind of special effects added in post-production, but this. Man, my hat is off to you people. You got enough footage of us all looking stunned? Great, I’m done playing along. What’s this made of, anyway?” He reached for the mermaid, fingers spread as if to touch the creature’s face.