“Okay,” Anais muttered.
“Okay? You’ll do a nice, thorough job of destroying Andrew Korchak’s mind? Not one speck of sanity left?”
“I said okay, already!”
She was hunched in the water, her sky blue tail coiled tightly and her arms wrapped around her chest. Moreland regarded her for a sustained moment, one hand lazily tracing the outline of her head and shoulders on the glass. “I’ll have him brought in, then. You’ll be able to . . . enjoy yourself . . . for as long as necessary. Though I think you should be able to accomplish the job fairly quickly, don’t you?”
Anais didn’t answer, didn’t look up at him. After a moment he gave up waiting for a reaction and left the pale, soundproof room. When Moreland returned there were two guards with him leading a man in shackles and a black hood. They plopped him on a plain wooden chair and fastened him to it with a few deft adjustments. “So,” Moreland said. He positioned himself directly behind the captive. “So, Anais. You were complaining that you don’t get to see them properly? We can fix that for you.” Moreland tugged off the hood and dropped it to the floor, letting Andrew Korchak stare straight at Anais, her azure eyes suddenly lifted to meet his. “Better? The shock system in your tank will be switched off in precisely two minutes.”
Then Moreland and the guards stalked out of the room.
He could observe the proceedings through live video, for once, even if he couldn’t listen. He could witness on Andrew’s face the same expression that had floated on his own on the hateful day when he’d put those earphones on, when he’d heard her and his mind had given itself to new configurations, the dark intestinal corkscrewing of relentless song.
This was the happiest he’d been in months.
Then Anais was left alone, facing the shabby, helpless man strapped to the chair. He had short-cropped, grayish brown hair, stubble, and a look somewhere between bleak and oddly whimsical as he regarded her. One cheek was swollen by a large greenish bruise. “Heya. That guy said your name’s Anais?”
Anais couldn’t help noticing that he didn’t seem even slightly surprised to see a mermaid in a tank.
“What if it is?” she asked sullenly.
“Did you know my Lucette? Sweet girl, short dark hair, light green tail? I was trying to swim out to see her when they bust- ed me.”
Anais hesitated for a moment. But it was a relief to have someone speak to her so simply after all Moreland’s sadistic verbal contortions. “I knew her.” She pouted. “So? It’s not like Luce is going to get me out of here!”
She watched while the man in the chair nodded thoughtfully. “They’re holding you against your will? Yeah, well. Luce doesn’t even know we’re in here. Doesn’t look like there’s much she can do for either of us. But maybe we could help each other out.”
There was a shocked pause while Anais took this in. Her tightly coiled tail started to loosen and trail deeper in her tank. “Like how?”
“Well, maybe if I ever get out of here, I could let people know you’re trapped. Does anybody even know about this? How they’ve got you stuck in here?”
Anais gave a small yelp of surprise. This guy really was dumb enough to be Luce’s dad. “They’re never going to let you out! Are you stupid? They won’t let you out, unless . . .”
“What have they got in mind for me, Anais? They must have a pretty big reason for leaving me here with you like this.”
Anais looked at him, watching his wry cinnamon eyes and scruffy intensity. He should have seemed utterly contemptible, a bum and a lowlife, but Anais found that she didn’t quite see him that way. “You don’t actually look much like Luce.”
“Lucky for her, right?” the man asked. He grinned back at her. It was strange how relaxed he seemed in spite of his immobilized legs, his arms bound behind his back. “Yeah, Luce always looked like her mom, Alyssa. About as beautiful a girl as I ever saw. Before she went mermaid, Luce looked a little more—like, a quieter kind of pretty than her mom was. How about you?”
Anais jerked back a little. “What do you mean?”
“Who do you take after more? I mean, you had human parents and everything, right?”
He’d asked in the same casual, warm tone he’d used ever since they’d dragged him in here, but Anais couldn’t escape the feeling that the question was some kind of trick. “I don’t know!” Her voice came out in a thin squeal.
“You don’t know?” He considered that gravely. “You don’t know what your parents looked like, then?”
Anais didn’t answer. It wasn’t like she normally disliked thinking about her parents—they’d been rich and adoring, after all—but somehow now it bothered her to be reminded of them. Was her own father’s skeleton still clanking along the blue carpet of his office in their long-submerged yacht?
“How about Kathleen Lambert?” the man asked. His voice suddenly sounded flatter, as if he was suppressing his emotions. Anais felt an almost physical discomfort, as if the water of her tank was charged by a cold, jagged energy. “Did you come across her somehow? Like—” He stared at Anais then glanced searchingly around her tank. “Say, did you ever sing her any songs, maybe?”
Anais decided not to look at him anymore, and her mouth twitched up into an awkward smirk. Those two minutes were definitely up by now.
Even with her eyes averted, she could feel the man regarding her somberly. “That’s how it went down, then?” he asked. “They made you kill Kathleen, and now you’re supposed to do me, too? Not that I can get to an ocean too easy, tied up like this . . .”
“He doesn’t want you to drown.” Anais was surprised to hear herself mutter the words. “He wants you to go crazy.”
“Crazy, you say? So just don’t do it, Anais. You don’t really want to, do you? Look, I promise you I can fake crazy just fine. Then once I’m out I’ll tell everyone you’re in here. I’ll get you help. How ’bout that?”
“I have to do what he says,” Anais whispered. “If I don’t do it he’ll kill me, like he’ll drain my tank, or they’ll electrocute me, or . . .”
“You don’t have to. We can trick him.”
“I—” Anais was astounded by the words that had formed in her head. She didn’t want to say them, but they kept repeating in her thoughts, aching and clamorous. “I—but you won’t be able to tell Luce anything! You’ll just be a vegetable, like, too retarded to even talk!”
“I loved Kathleen. I want you to remember that forever, all right? I loved her.”
Anais couldn’t keep those insistent words quiet anymore—and they wouldn’t make any difference anyway. No one would ever know she’d said them. “Uh, tell Luce I’m sorry about this.”
Anais sang.
26 Lost Humans
Luce was secretly dismayed to see how quickly Nausicaa mastered singing to the water. Nausicaa was an amazing singer, but Luce had hoped that she might have trouble picking up this particular skill. Within three days Nausicaa was lifting waves big enough to curl over her head, and she’d already started training Opal, the blond metaskaza who’d traveled with her from Hawaii. Luce tried to focus on her work, on helping to train new arrivals and keeping up morale, but she couldn’t completely fight off a sneaking depression as she realized how soon Nausicaa would be leaving her.
On the fourth day after Nausicaa’s arrival, Luce woke in the late afternoon to find Imani next to her, looking concerned. “Hey, Luce? I’m afraid you’re going to be upset about this.”