by M. N. Arzu
Julian lowered himself, placing one knee on the floor. “I promise, you’re not dying. You know how your brothers tease you about your height?” Julian asked. Alex nodded. “And you’ve noticed how you’re catching up to them lately?” A more enthusiastic nod. “Your body is growing too fast, to the point your skin cannot keep up. Your body shifts to scales in order to protect the skin, and when you don’t allow it, the skin breaks into rashes. It’ll take a few days to pass, but this should be the worst of it. All you need to do is spend more time in the water, shifted, and it will go away on its own.”
I thought I was dying… Alex insisted.
Julian extended a hand, “Come here,” he said, and Alex finally moved to get out of the water. “Is it still itching?”
A yellow and green scaled hand reached his, and it slowly went back to skin as Alex tentatively tested it.
“It’s okay. It tingles a little, but nothing too bad,” Alex said as Julian handed him a towel and gave him space to get out of the pool. Just because they couldn’t feel the cold, it didn’t mean they could go dripping all over the house.
“It wouldn’t have happened like an outburst if you hadn’t been hiding from me by avoiding the water for weeks,” Julian said sternly. As smart as his kid was, Alex had completely miscalculated the magnitude of what he’d done.
“I’m sorry,” Alex whispered, looking at the floor.
“I know you are, but that’s not enough. I need to know exactly what happened with Gill, and we’ll take it from there.”
9
Disclosure
Patrick O’Connor was knee deep in his research. Starting with who had originally attacked the merman, and ending with what Brooks Inc. involvement was. Like Kate before him, he’d been mapping several theories regarding Christopher Brooks’s encounter with the merman, or just a general Brooks Inc. encounter with merfolk. And the more Patrick thought about it, the less he liked it.
Brooks Inc. had been around in one way or another for seventy years, but buried deep in its history, they had been making leaps and bounds in technological advances. Some seemed inconsequential—like their ultra-light, ultra-resistant diver’s watch—but others had changed how industries thought about their processes, making their factories far more productive and efficient than those of the competition.
Patrick believed with all his heart that merfolk were an intelligent species. It was the only thing that would explain why they had remained hidden for so long. Ray never woke up, but the fact that his lungs could breathe air meant they were adapted to come to the surface.
And if they could come out to talk, who would they talk to?
Sailors, of course. And Brooks Inc.’s founders had been sailors themselves, starting a boat empire that was constantly threatened with monopoly laws both in Europe and the US. In his more outlandish theories, Patrick had connected the dots that Brooks Inc. and the merfolk had some sort of deal. When that merman had washed up on the beach, they had rushed in to protect him—or make sure he would disappear.
Or both.
On his computer, he opened the file on Christopher Brooks’s search and rescue efforts. Christopher had been lost en route between Nova Scotia and New York, and somehow, one of the richest men in the world had decided that the best medical treatment for his son was in Maine? It didn’t make sense. His son’s recovery had been kept under wraps, and besides a generic “thank you for your concern” note, nothing had ever been said about it.
No, Julian Brooks had been in Maine for another reason: Ray. He’d used Christopher’s “accident” as a smokescreen, and then he had worked around ORCAS and the UN to conceal the merman.
Patrick took his reading glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. You’re letting this get too far-fetched, even if we’re talking about mermaids.
He closed his laptop, grabbed a rubber ball, and started hitting the wall with it. Pac it sounded against the floor, poc against the wall, and silently came back to his hand.
Julian had checked out of the hotel in Maine the day before Ray had been declared dead, but here was the catch: Buried in the videos about the news of the first ORCAS protest, he’d seen in the background a medevac leaving the premises. A medical helicopter was only used to transport injured people, and the only injured person ever reported to be at ORCAS was not even a person.
“So Julian Brooks makes sure to ship off the merman, and then leaves Maine altogether,” Patrick said out loud, hitting the wall with more force than before. “Because he wants to save him or because he wants to protect his investment? Are they friends of the merfolk or are they using them?”
He grabbed the ball one last time and leaned back on the chair, staring at the ceiling. Kate Banes knew something had happened. She’d been chasing after Brooks like the good reporter she was, but then…nothing. Ray had been declared dead, the world had gone in an uproar, and for the next six months…nothing.
And then they went public with Roy Wallace, the merfolk hunter, and no one even knows if the man’s real. Was Veritas Co. capitalizing on their newfound fame as the authority in merfolk news, or was their reporting legit? Judging by how far Kate had gone into the Brooks investigation, he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. It made sense that whatever deal she’d made with Julian Brooks had an exclusivity clause in it.
He exhaled slowly, trying to connect the dots in a coherent thread. He wasn’t even trying to interview Julian Brooks, not with the laughable timeline he had now, and Kate Banes had been more of a shot in the dark than anything else. He’d hoped she would panic—or her editor would panic—and that they would publish something drastic. Something to throw his suspicions off, maybe. But they hadn’t reacted, and no new news of merfolk had hit the airways. Without something concrete happening soon, the trail would go cold. He had enough evidence to know the UN narrative didn’t match reality, but he didn’t have enough to piece together the real story.
He needed to understand what had happened the day Ray had “died.” What had Kate done, where had Julian gone, and what had the UN done afterwards?
“Where are you, Ray? And what did they do to you?”
* * *
Nathan was having an exceptionally good Friday night. Not only did he get to cook dinner with a gorgeous and smart mermaid, he also got to ask questions and actually get answers. If he’d been able to talk to Ray the same way he was able to talk with Diana, things would have gone a whole lot smoother back at ORCAS.
“No, that’s nonsense,” Diana said as she chopped tomatoes and he fried garlic. “You can’t find The City with humanity’s current level of technology. It’s not going to happen. And even if you did find it, the best you could do is a siege, and The City has had a self-imposed siege for the last three thousand years.”
“So, we could bomb it and nothing would happen?”
“It was built to sustain interstellar travel. A nuke would be a laughing matter.”
Sometimes, he forgot Diana’s ancestry came from the stars, mainly because it seemed of such little concern to her. They certainly had enough trouble with the here and now on planet Earth.
“The Pentagon has run scenarios, you know,” Nathan said, as he moved the pasta. “Against an alien invasion?”
She nodded, grabbing a bite of cheese. Dinner was coming up nicely.
“We always lose. Sometimes we last a few days, sometimes we last an hour. They’re painfully aware that a fight with any civilization capable of interstellar travel and invasion plans spells doom for the human race.”
“At least someone’s smart enough to recognize that.”
“Our best chance is guerrilla tactics, though. Low tech can do a lot of harm. You just have to be creative and persistent, until you drive your enemy nuts.”
Diana arched her eyebrows. “Good thing we have no invasion plans, then.”
“Extremely good thing,” he said. “Now we only have to convince the Pentagon of that.”
“Convince them that we want peace, n
ot that we’re not capable of defending ourselves,” she said as she took her tomatoes and mixed them with lettuce and chopped green apples. “If they think we’re weak, then we’re doomed.”
“I love how your mind works,” he said as he opened the sauce can. She smirked. “I am curious, though,” he started, deciding now was a good time to go into lighter topics. “You live rather long lives. Were any of your family members the cause of myths?”
“Oh, I wish I knew. The Council is very tight lipped with us ‘children’. We don’t really get to know anything important until a couple of months before we’re going back. If you’re not planning on going back, they might decide to never tell you. It used to drive my eldest cousin mad. Ace chose not to leave for, like, ten years.”
“But he ended up going?”
“Yeah. He delayed so he could go with his younger sister, but he left so he would get to know the truth. They’re Drake’s kids, but I barely remember them. I must have been like eight or something. I’ve always thought The City must be this incredibly awesome place if they never came back.”
“You never talked to them?”
“No...” She sighed in that way that made Nathan think of stormy, cold nights. “You don’t talk to The City unless it’s an emergency. The Council only contacts them when someone is going back, or when there’s an epic event, like with Ray.”
Ray... One day, Nathan was going to come clean with Diana and tell her he already knew about Christopher Brooks. But he’d decided that if Diana, and the merfolk by extension, wanted him to know, they would tell him on their own time—rather than finding out about it in a bar in Brooklyn from Higgs’s military contacts. It seemed important for him to respect her privacy, and also to avoid jeopardizing Higgs’s allies and any future disclosures.
“So once you go back, you won’t talk with anyone on the surface?”
She smiled then, a sad kind of smile.
“It’s the hardest thing, you know? Choose one world for the other. I mean, sure, nothing says you cannot just turn around and leave the next day, but...no one does that. I mean, no one.”
“Must be something.”
“This is why I really want to set things on the right path before I leave. I want to know Drake is safe with the UN. I want to know you are safe with the US government. You’re taking a huge risk for no good reason.”
He blinked. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I mean, I’m getting to know you, and your people, and—”
“And you might end up in prison. It might be decades before any of this comes to the public eye, and all you’ll have is information you can’t even talk about.”
“It’s not information that matters.” He turned the burner off, and looked at her seriously. “I’m going to die someday knowing I cooked dinner with a mermaid whose parents came from the stars. I’ll sit down at a UN meeting and welcome another species to our world. I’ll write a memoir detailing how a beautiful woman had to fight for the right to know her origins—and won. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’ve made my life richer and wider, and I don’t even know if I deserve your trust.”
She nibbled her lip as she looked at him.
“What are we doing, Nathan? I’m going to leave in less than a year and you’ll never see me again. I won’t come back in your lifetime. You and I—”
“Hey...hey, listen. I’m not talking about a lifetime. I’m talking about now. You’ll leave, so what? I leave on UN missions all the time. Let’s just share the now as two individuals who like each other’s company, and who love to talk about alien invasions while cooking pasta and a salad. That’s it.”
She shook her head with a tiny smile. “That easy, hmm?”
“Well, we could make this whole drama about interspecies relationships, but I think we have our hands full with keeping both sides civil so they can sit down and talk.”
“You have a point.” They both smiled, but then she got serious all of a sudden. “There’s something you should know, off the record.”
“I’m listening.”
“Drake’s leaving tomorrow on a joint test with the Navy for a diving suit prototype. The Council is not happy about it, but it’s our way to repay Major White’s assistance with Wallace.”
“That might create a bias with the UN talks.”
“Maybe. Regardless, I’m leaving tomorrow as well, as a precaution. It’s one thing that Drake talks with White, and an entirely different story that Drake leaves to spend a week with the Navy. My mother practically ordered me to leave New York. I will keep working on the talks, but—”
“It’s okay, Diana. Do whatever you have to do to be safe. Just keep me posted if anything goes wrong, okay? Anything at all.”
“Okay.”
* * *
The clear sky of an autumn midday met Matt’s sleepy eyes. The scene seemed familiar, somehow, and the ups and downs of the yacht in open sea invited him to look at the horizon and think.
Unlike the first time he’d been in this dream, there was far more detail in this second version. He’d just surfaced from a mile-and-a-half-deep dive, and the ache in his tail was bad enough to delay changing it back into legs. With the way his muscles felt, a shift right now would certainly give him cramps.
The Deep C was built with a lower deck than normal boats, precisely to aid merfolk who didn’t want to go up the ladder as soon as they reach the ship. He was so hungry, that for a moment his thoughts wandered to what he had brought for lunch, and whether shifting into legs and suffering minor cramps was worth it.
On his wrist, his watch marked the exact depth he’d reached, a new personal record he couldn’t wait to show Julian. Sure, his father was going to sternly remind him to not dive alone, but on a day like this, sailing alone back to New York, how could he say no?
Someone was on the boat.
And Christopher didn’t want to turn around and look.
Frowning at his brother’s decision, Matthew took a deep breath and willed himself out of Chris’s dream body. On the horizon, the sky turned gray and stormy, but the yacht stopped moving, as if the ocean had suddenly frozen. On the deck, a shadow fell over them, and Matthew guessed that had been the clue Christopher had gotten in real life. Not a sound, but a shadow.
In the dysfunctional way time worked in dreams, Chris remained paralyzed in his spot, while the shadow kept coming. As much as Matt wanted to look, it was physically impossible for him to move his head and see who was about to hit his brother and send the entire merfolk world into the biggest crisis they had ever faced.
Don’t… Christopher whispered in Matt’s mind, afraid of what was behind them. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look…
Chris, come on! Matthew said between his teeth, fighting Chris’s subconscious with all he had. Finally, Matt’s body escaped the dream’s grip, but when he turned, he was met with a long silver tube that was on a collision course with Christopher’s head—and everybody else’s heads in the real world.
Matt stumbled backwards as the tube moved in slow motion, only two inches away from its intended target. As Matt strained to see past the tube, all he was able to see was a silhouette framed by the midday sun. It belonged to a man, all right, but that was the only thing Matt knew before launching himself at Chris. As he reached his brother’s body, he screamed in his ear, “Wake up, Chris! Wake up!”
Matt sat straight up in his bed, swallowing another wake up! shout. It took him two seconds to realize he was back home, the pitch black of his room slowly taking shape as his eyes adjusted to the dark. Breathing hard, he turned around to see that it was 3:31 a.m. This was the second time this week he’d walked into Christopher’s nightmare, but at least he’d spared everyone the accompanying headache.
He laid back and willed himself to breathe normally. He doubted Chris had woken up, because his big brother would have reached out to him to either apologize or make sure he was okay—or both.
&n
bsp; Who was that man? Matt asked himself, staring at the ceiling. Had Christopher turned around and seen just a man against the sunlight? Was that all Chris had seen before being hit? Or maybe the whole thing was just Chris’s way of coping with the event. Maybe in reality he had not seen who’d attacked him at all. Clearly, it had to be a man, because the blow to his head had been powerful.
But if all he saw was that, why would he be so afraid I’d turn? Christopher’s subconscious had been so against it that it had taken everything in Matt to see that much.
Next time he was in that yacht, he would get to the bottom of this.
10
Double Check
Sleep had never been a problem for Drake. He could recall with perfect detail the few times insomnia had visited him, including the first night he’d realized he wanted to leave The City, and the last night he’d spent at his home under the dome. The night he’d found his first son, a century ago, and every single time a new child had slept under his roof. And although decades passed by between one insomniac night and the next, each and every one felt eternal.
White was picking him up in a few hours, and then he would be driven to an undisclosed military location near New York. From there, they would fly to somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean—which was the same as saying the middle of nowhere—to reach the testing area on board of a US Navy vessel. He’d revised the tests and cleared out any potential problems with the major, but as much as Drake went over the plan in his head, something told him to be on guard.
What am I missing?
He wasn’t a nervous person; he was a detail-oriented person, the sort that made mental lists and checked them twice. The only difference between any other time and tomorrow was that he was walking into the hands of the military with his secret out in the open.
His heart accelerated at the thought.
Only a handful of the people aboard the U.S.S. Honos knew his true identity. Everyone else thought of him as a consultant supervising the exercise.
