by A. L. Knorr
“So, he wanted to know the limits of siren endurance in terms of depth,” I summarized, more for myself to understand what had happened here than for anyone else, “and she eventually just fell asleep?”
“Exactly.” Jozef scratched at his temple. “He forced her into a kind of hibernation, and then, according to the dates in his research and what my father told me before he passed––Loukas got sick and the experiments came to a halt. She’s been here ever since.”
“You have all the notes Loukas left as he increased the pressure.” Emun straightened and looked at Jozef, his eyes intense with hope. “Our best bet is to reverse whatever it was he did exactly. To do anything else might be too risky.”
Jozef was nodding. “That’s what I was thinking as well, but I think the ultimate call has to be Sybellen’s.” He took my Mom’s hand. “This is your friend’s life that hangs in the balance. Loukas believed that changing the pressure too quickly one way or the other might result in organ failure. I don’t know if that’s likely for a siren or not, but…” His mouth opened and closed, as though he was trying to decide whether to add anything to that statement or not. “Well, he seemed to think there was a risk, so I wanted you to know. I could have tried when I first found her, but I was too afraid I’d mess it up. And I also thought that the first thing she should see when she does wake up, is a friendly face. I know I could have told you sooner, when I first saw you in Gdansk, but I didn’t know how you’d react and I didn’t want you to spend several hours on a plane fraught with worry and upset. I hope I didn’t do badly.”
“You did well,” Mom replied quickly, and some of the concern on Jozef’s brow eased away.
Mom’s eyes found ours, one after the other before finally settling on Jozef.
“We’ll do it as Emun suggested,” she said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“You’re sure?” Jozef’s brow crinkled and he looked tired.
Mom nodded, and in contrast, her expression was hopeful and eager. “Let’s get her out of there.”
Seven
“Okay,” Emun said, gesturing to the complicated and dusty dashboard. “This panel looks like something NASA might have used to launch the space shuttle. How do we get her out of there without hurting her?” His eyes flashed to the still, emaciated form drifting peacefully in the tank. “Or killing her.”
Silence stretched out, each face looking as concerned and unsure as the next.
Finally, Antoni reached toward the shelving unit above the computer panel and pulled down a book, looked at it, set it aside, then pulled down another. “There must be something in here that can help us.”
Jozef and Mom began to pull books off the shelf, too, reading titles and scanning a few pages to determine whether the content might be helpful or not.
“I think what we’d be looking for is something in Loukas’s notes,” said Jozef, his eyes ticking back and forth across the pages of another book before setting it aside on the growing stack. “He was meticulous about note-keeping, just as any scientist should be.”
“Ha, yeah, thanks Loukas,” I snarled sarcastically. “Too bad he was about as ethical as Nero.”
“Here’s a notebook with scribbles in it,” Antoni said after fanning the pages of a black, leather-bound book no thicker than a pinky finger. He scanned it quickly and handed it to Jozef. “I don’t think it’s written in English, though. So, good luck.”
He pulled down another notebook, this one thick and brown, also without a title.
“What’s that?” I asked, peering over Antoni’s shoulder as he opened it to where a skinny brown ribbon marked a page.
“More notes, but they may as well be in Urdu for all the sense they make.”
“May I see it?” Mom held out her hand and Antoni gave it to her. She flipped through a few pages, eyes scanning, brows pinching. It looked like she didn’t disagree with Antoni’s sentiments.
“Here, look at this,” Emun said suddenly and shifted to stand beside Jozef. “It’s a graph with a timetable running across the top.”
The five of us crowded around the small book as Emun pressed it flat on the table, open for all of us to see. He flipped through it slowly, the end of his index finger tracing horizontally across the page.
“Look. These numbers look random, but if you flip back to the front of the notebook, a column down the left-hand side denotes everything on this line as PSI.”
“Pounds per square inch.” Even I knew that one.
Emun nodded. “Yep, and this one,” his finger traced down to the next line, “is marked as TDS, which is Total Dissolved Solids.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It’s how you measure salinity,” Emun answered, his eyes flashing up at me and back down to the page. He pointed out the initialism below TDS. “But I’m not sure what this one means.”
“EC,” Mom read aloud.
“Electrical Conductivity,” replied Jozef. In his voice was a tone like a key had unlocked something in his brain. “I think you’ve found something here, Emun. May I see it?”
Emun let Jozef study the other marks on the front left page. “Oxygen, G over KG, that’s the ratio of salt to seawater. PSU, THC…”
“THC?” I couldn’t keep the look of shock from my face. “What’s that need to be measured for?”
“It’s not what you think,” Jozef explained, the dimple in his left cheek making an appearance, though he didn’t fully smile. “THC means Thermohaline Circulation.”
“Oh.”
“What’s PSU?” Mom asked.
“Practical Salinity Unit,” Jozef said, his eyes back on the page. “It’s an extraneous measurement, actually, because it’s a combination of two other measurements he’s already taking.”
Jozef flipped through a few of the pages, then he turned around and faced the panel, looking from the notebook to the panel and back again. Emun peered over one shoulder and Mom peered over the other. Antoni and I squeezed in at the sides.
Jozef jabbed a finger at each marking on the left side of the first page and found a corresponding marking on the paneling in front of us.
“It’s all here,” Mom said, her voice low but thrumming with energy. “If we just do everything that Loukas did to put her in this state, but in reverse…”
“And at exactly the same time intervals,” Emun added.
Jozef was nodding. He looked at my Mom. “She should wake up.”
“How long?” I asked, reaching across Emun and pawing at Jozef’s shoulder. “How long will it take, can you tell that?”
He turned to me and then his eyes flashed back down to the notes and he noticed the time and date of the first entry, then flipped through the book and found the last entry.
“Eight hours, thirty-seven minutes, forty seconds,” he replied, looking back up at me and then to my Mom. “But we’d better be precise. We don’t know what it will do to her if we mess it up.”
“What if the system’s broken?” Mom turned to look at Nike, curled up in the seawater. She put a hand on the glass. “She’s been down here for years. What if in that time something in the computer, or the parts making the pressure don’t work anymore?”
“We can’t worry about that.” Jozef put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll have to do the best we can with the information we have. No one has disturbed this room in a very long time. There’s no reason to think this setup has stopped working. If it had, Nike would probably be dead by now, but she’s not.”
“I think we should write out the instructions and make them really clear,” Antoni suggested, ever the organized project manager. “We have to know exactly what to do and at what time to do it. I can hardly make out some of those handwritten notations.”
Jozef nodded. “I’ll reverse engineer it and put it into a form everyone can read and follow.”
Mom’s eyes were wide and glassy, worried and hopeful. I crossed to her and took her hand.
“She’ll be okay, Mom. Sirens are
bloody tough.”
She smiled and squeezed my hand, then nodded.
One might think that tweaking a bunch of buttons and knobs for a little over eight hours would be an easy job. In actuality, it took all of us rotating on ninety-minute shifts and it was still mentally exhausting. There were eight adjustments to make during the course of Nike’s waking. The adjustments were made frequently and not all at the same time for each metric. Each bit of data had its own reversed timeline and we were collectively terrified of what it might do to Nike if we so much as stepped a half degree or two seconds out of the timeline.
“How did Loukas know what he was doing?” Antoni asked when the two of us were on shift together and nearing the end of the process.
“Maybe Loukas didn’t do it? Maybe he had someone else do it for him, someone who knew more,” I suggested, not really focusing on the answer as I watched the clock. My fingers hovered over the knob marked ‘PSU.’
Antoni went quiet as we counted down the seconds. “Okay. Do it.”
I made the adjustment and we both looked at the timeline, checked off the change, and mentally marked what was next.
“He must have taken actual measurements as he lowered some sensitive device down to the ocean floor where a siren would fall into diapause, and then just mimicked it.” Antoni’s chair creaked as he shifted closer to the panels. He seemed to find the whole thing fascinating.
“He’d have to go at a speed a mermaid would naturally swim down to the bottom, synthesizing the environment and pressure and salt and all that exactly.” I brought my fingers to my temples, where a dull headache had begun to take root just behind my eyes. That was no surprise. I’d been staring at the screens and the timeline taped over the panel for over an hour.
The door creaked on its hinges but neither Antoni nor I turned around.
“Almost time for a shift change.”
I felt Jozef’s presence behind us, but not Mom’s.
“Where’s Mom?” I’d assumed she’d be joining Jozef for his shift as she had previously.
“She’s having a late-night snack.” It was Emun’s voice. “I’ll be Jozef’s co-pilot for this shift.
I heard Antoni’s stomach growl, and my own grumbled to match it.
“What’s she having?” I asked.
“Cheese and crackers and fruit,” Jozef answered, sounding apologetic. “It was all I could put together on short notice.”
“That sounds amazing.” My stomach gurgled in agreement.
All went quiet as Antoni held up a hand with his five fingers out stiff then lowered them one by one in a countdown. At zero, he adjusted the oxygen. There was a responsive burble from the tank. A few minutes later the shift change bell went off, which was just my cell phone set to alarm. Antoni and I passed the seats to Jozef and Emun for the last shift.
My eyes were itchy and my head throbbed. I wanted nothing more than to eat dinner and go to bed. It was closing in on ten in the evening. Still early by my regular routine, but it felt much later to my tired brain.
“Last shift,” I murmured.
There was no way any of us would miss the ending of the last shift, no matter how tired or drained we were.
I glanced at the still form of Nike in the glass tank. The machine had begun to make noises at the third hour, which I’d found unsettling. Bubbling and whooshing noises filled the room as it did whatever it needed to do to adjust the environment inside the tank. I’d gotten used to them, but I’d be happy when I didn’t have to listen to them anymore. Sometimes there were creaks and high-pitched whines, almost whistles, which made me freeze and cringe, thinking that at any moment the whole thing would crack open and Nike would slither out, dead.
Antoni took my hand as we made our way back to the house. The night air smelled sweet and fresh, like rain. We found Mom in the kitchen, perched on top of the counter and guzzling a glass of water.
When Jozef had said cheese and crackers and fruit, I had assumed those cheap orange crackers and some chunks of cheddar, maybe some apple slices. But what had been laid out on two large cutting boards was five different cheeses, sourdough and almond crackers with bits of nuts embedded in them, dried pears, fresh figs and grapes, and quince jelly.
Antoni and I fell on the spread like starving sharks.
“Did Jozef and Emun eat?” I asked through a mouthful of Roquefort and grape. “I forgot to ask them.”
Mom nodded. “After Nike’s awake and we’ve settled her in bed, we can go get more groceries.”
“These dried pears are amazing.” Antoni rolled his eyes with pleasure.
We filled our growling bellies and I went to lie down on the couch in the library until the last shift was over. The headache began to ease and I must have dozed a bit because it seemed in the next moment that Antoni was kissing my cheek and telling me time was up.
We joined Emun and Jozef as the last adjustment was made and we watched the clock count down to zero, all of us on our feet and tense. Eyes on Nike, we held our collective breath and waited. Mom stood the closest, giving Nike a familiar face to see when she woke up.
Nothing happened.
Time passed in agonizing slowness. Mom crouched and brought her face close to Nike’s face. She put her hand on the glass and stared at her friend expectantly. A moment later she tapped her fingernails lightly on the glass.
“Come on, Nike.”
A lump rose in my throat as time went by and there was still no change. Nike’s heartbeat was steady and slow. In fact, now that I was noticing it, it hadn’t changed its pace much during the entire transition.
“Shouldn’t her heart be going faster?” Emun gave voice to my thought.
“Annikephoros,” Mom whispered to the glass.
There was no visible response, but the small echo of her heartbeat did speed up, just a little.
Mom turned her head sharply and looked up at me. “Call her.”
Antoni and Emun’s expressions brightened with hope and they both nodded.
“Call her?” Jozef looked perplexed. “Like…telepathically?”
“I don’t know if I can,” I said to my Mom, surprised at her suggestion. “I think she has to be in the ocean”
“Just try?” Her eyes pleaded. “What have you got to lose?”
I nodded and closed my eyes, working to block out the electronic sounds of the room, the smell of mildew and dust, the creaks and whooshing noises of the tank.
Annikephoros.
The smell of the room seemed to intensify, a deep earth dampness, like a grave.
Annikephoros.
The bubbling of the tank and the breathing of the people around me sounded like they were coming through a microphone placed right beside my head. The beep of Nike’s heartbeat battered against my skull like a cricket bat. My own heartbeat sped up and my eyes screwed shut as I fought to keep the noises and smells out of my line of communication.
It was no good.
I opened my eyes and was not surprised to see that there was no change. I shook my head. “I can’t. But let me go down to the beach. It might not work but it’s worth a shot.”
“I’ll come with you,” Antoni said, making to follow me as I turned away.
I gave him a smile, tremulous at the corners, but still a smile. “Thanks, love, but I’d rather go alone.”
He nodded. “Of course, sorry.”
I kissed him and climbed out of the dank basement, immediately feeling completely different as I took fresh sea air into my lungs. Crossing the yard full of tangled overgrowth, I picked my way across large black boulders. Soon I was standing on a pebbly shore. The sky was as black as velvet. The clouds obscured most of the stars but the moon was a dusty orb, like a giant thumb had smudged ink across a bone-white blob of paint.
Kicking off my sneakers, I stood with my feet in the saltwater. Every deep breath worked to clear my mind like a wind carries away smoke. The throbbing of my temples disappeared. I closed my eyes and let myself reach out to Nike.
Annikephoros.
Almost immediately, an explosion of teal fireworks made of a fine spray of water went off behind my eyes. I couldn’t halt the laugh of delight at the sudden display of beauty.
I’m here.
My heart began to gallop. Never before had I actually ‘heard’ a siren I had called. But her response was unmistakeable. I could only assume our connection was so strong because she was a sorceress. Along with those words were more fireworks, and a warm pulsing presence unlike any other I had sensed. She felt like the first ray of sunlight warming the upper layers of a cool ocean. She felt weightless and sleepy, dreamy and patient. Most surprising of all, it felt like a hug from someone who had been waiting for me for a long time. My pulse fluttered at the feel of her, the energy that didn’t come from physical health, but magic.
You’re awake?
I waited for a response but there was none, not in words anyway. Instead, her whole presence swelled and washed over me.
“She’s awake!”
My eyes flew open and I spun around, my feet grinding into the sand. Antoni’s form was visible in the distance, one arm up and waving. Even in the dim moonlight, his face was open and bright.
I bolted from the beach, leaving my sneakers and leaping over the boulders barefoot. I flew into Antoni’s open arms and he lifted me off the ground and twirled me.
“You did it! She’s awake! It happened such a short time after you left, too.”
He released me and followed me down the stairs and into the room where excited voices talked over one another.
Halting in the doorway, eyes stretched wide, I saw that the tank had been drained, the water released through some pipe or other, and the front panel was open like a door. Emun’s back was to Antoni and me, and a very thin pair of bare legs were draped over his right arm. A long swath of wet hair draped to the floor over his left arm. Mom was bent over and picking the hair up, looping it over itself so it wouldn’t trip Emun. She had tears running down her face but she was smiling. Emun turned to the side, pausing while Jozef put a blanket over the small frame of Nike, before he turned all the way around and faced Antoni and me.
