As he expected, the sky blue tail reared up from behind her barricade of cushions and flung off a few sullen drops.
The blue of her scales, the blue of the water, interacted strangely with his eyes, scraping them with a distinct electric pain. “Yesterday, Anais.” Blue and gold swished lazily through the water, and he grinned. The tank wasn’t so big; in an instant she was almost at the glass.
“Why can’t you just let me sleep?” Anais spoke these words in a faintly musical whine; almost musical enough to trigger a shock, Moreland suspected. Certainly musical enough to be tantalizing. “If you need to bug me, why can’t you do it later?”
Even sulking and not outstandingly bright, Anais was still enchanting. For an instant he lost track of what he was planning to say. “One salient feature of owning you,” Moreland observed, “is that you talk at my convenience, my dear.” The mermaids’ voices continually prodding at his mind had been keeping him from sleeping. Even when he did drop off, the endless song seemed to scrape all the peace out of his body, leaving him hollow and exhausted. It was better to come here and stare through the glass at the root of the problem: his distasteful, transfixing little pet, his vile beauty.
Her fins were switching. He’d been around her enough to recognize that as a sign of acute irritation. He smiled. “Tell me something. Do you consider yourself—a person, Anais?”
She looked confused, and Moreland enjoyed that as well. “Sure.”
“‘Sure, Mr. Secretary’ or ‘Sure, sir’,” Moreland corrected. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to? The barest inkling?”
She didn’t answer that, but her tail was flipping faster. They stared at each other. There was something searing and unnatural about the azure of her eyes, something that was more than just blue.
“So you’re not more than a person, or less than a person?” Moreland pursued after a moment. “Just an ordinary girl after all? Despite your many unseemly attributes?”
“I’m not ordinary!” Anais reared back in offense. “Duh.”
“More than a person, then?”
“I guess more.” Anais considered the question with uncharacteristic seriousness. “More. I mean, if I weren’t locked up in this stupid place and people could see me, I’d be a huge star! You said that even Luce . . .”
“Has become an Internet sensation? She has. Before that video of her got out, only idiots and fanatics could have bought into the idea of mermaids existing. And even now any self-respecting adult should be convinced that the video is a hoax, but”—Moreland gritted his teeth— “there aren’t enough adults out there who deserve that label.”
“But—isn’t it real? It looks just like her!”
Moreland ignored that. “The problem is the more. That little something extra you tails take on with your transformation. The more is what’s making people believe that the video is authentic. Even passive magic is worse, is more disgracefully violent, than a bomb. All the mental signals that make up a decent, regular, hard-working life are disrupted. You’re left with nothing but noise, buzzing and whining . . .”
Anais stared, too perplexed for the moment to attempt an answer.
He’d never talked to anyone this way before. He was glad no human being could hear him coming off so half-cocked, like some kind of poet . . . He couldn’t stop himself, though.
“The same more is what makes your kind subhuman, though. The same more that turns grown men into whimpering fools. Do you know what that video proves, Anais?”
For the first time, she looked genuinely frightened. Moreland found it delightful. He glared at her expectantly, his eyes demanding a reply.
“What?” Anais whispered at last. “I mean, what does it prove?’
“What, sir?” Moreland prompted.
“‘What, sir?’” Anais muttered. Her tail was thrashing and she’d backed away from the glass. But she didn’t quite have the nerve to swim back behind her cushions, much as he knew she wanted to.
“Ah.” Moreland grinned. “The video proves that even if, by some untoward miracle, your kind learned to resist their murderous urges tomorrow—even if the mermaids never sang to a human again—well.”
Anais’s eyes were wide. Another first. She was truly anxious to hear what he had to say. Her golden hair spread out in an enormous, shining web behind her shoulders.
Moreland waited another few seconds. “It’s not the singing that proves mermaids have to die, Anais,” he finally crooned. “It’s not the evil in all of you, or even the threat you pose to commerce. It’s the more. It’s what we see in that video, the quality that makes human minds collapse into imbecility. You little abominations don’t have to do anything to commit violence. You just have to be your charming selves. You do see my point, don’t you, tadpole?”
“Just because Luce was stupid enough to let some humans tape her, doesn’t—”
He cut her off. “It’s not just Luce, tadpole. It’s all of you. I’d rather,” Moreland lied, “have both my legs blown off than watch that video again. Do you understand me? It’s only my duty to my country that makes me endure, for one instant, the fact that you tails persist on the same planet.”
Every word he spoke, it seemed to him, followed the contours of the mermaids’ song in his thoughts. Even railing against the mermaids only served to provide their melodies with unexpected lyrics.
He wanted his mind back. That was all. His mind intact and determined, unfurrowed by their awful music. But maybe that was impossible.
Maybe one day he’d open his mouth, in the middle of a speech or an interview on TV, and that hateful song would scroll out in place of language.
“Are you going to kill me?” Anais asked. From her shell-shocked gaze it was clear that this possibility hadn’t occurred to her before. “You—Secretary Moreland, I’m trying so hard to help you! It’s not my fault!”
Moreland amused himself by scowling brutally at her. She cowered. Even if Anais and the others could be restored to human form, wouldn’t they still be tainted to the core? The possibility might be worth pursuing, though, if only for strategic reasons.
After a moment he relented, reversing his scowl into a broad, affectionate smile. “Of course we won’t kill you, tadpole. You’ve become—very special—to everyone in the know. We practically consider you a mascot.”
Anais turned her smile back on, but her eyes still looked worried.
“You haven’t killed her yet?” Anais’s question, reverberating from the speakers, came as an unwelcome disturbance. “Luce?”
“We’ll get her soon enough,” Moreland snapped. “It’s a long coast, tadpole. Doing electromagnetic surveys of the whole damn thing, identifying likely caves—it’s not quick, and it’s not cheap. It’s work.”
“You mean you don’t even know where she is?” Her voice was almost pitiful. Captivity, it struck Moreland, was starting to wear on her.
“We’ll find your little friend soon,” Moreland sighed. In fact, there’d been no sign of Lucette Korchak since she’d interrupted that raid fifteen days before, killing another operative in the process and taking that tribe’s last surviving mermaid away with her. It rankled him to think that she might slip past the Mexican border and escape from him for good.