The drab man nodded sharply. “Mr. Hackett? Fetch us another one.”
The words jarred through Charlie Hackett; his shoulders heaved up and his voice came out as a yelp. “Excuse me?”
“We have to ascertain that this larva lived through the transition because of the new drugs. Until we can replicate our results with a second larva, there’s nothing to indicate your Snowy’s survival wasn’t just a fluke like that mermaid in San Francisco we’ve been hearing about. It might be rare, but apparently in exceptional cases mermaids do survive the transition without the benefit of medical intervention. There’s no room for doubt here. Another one, please.”
Hackett stared, outraged and breathless. Snowy bawled in the woman’s arms. “I do have other responsibilities,” he managed at last. “It’s after six, and I haven’t had a chance yet to feed the larvae their dinner, and I haven’t seen Anais in hours.”
The lab-coated man’s bland affect was punctured by sincere surprise. “Anais?”
“I’m responsible for making sure her needs are met, not just for being your errand boy! She’s been kept in solitary confinement for months now, and the potential damage to her mental health is—”
“Anais isn’t here anymore, Mr. Hackett. I assumed you’d been informed.”
“Anais isn’t . . . Of course she’s still right where I . . . She couldn’t just get up and walk.” Had his golden beauty escaped through the plumbing somehow or used some unfathomable magic to melt a tunnel to the sea? But then . . . wouldn’t she have asked him to come with her?
“Secretary Moreland ordered her prepared for transport two hours ago. I personally saw her being loaded into the special tank truck that was used to bring her here. She was on a gurney, much like—” here the drab doctor allowed his face to show just a flutter of malice—“much like this one you used to bring us Snowy. Larger, of course.”
“But didn’t she—” He couldn’t ask if she’d cried, if she’d begged to at least be allowed to say goodbye to him. “Didn’t she say anything?”
“She appeared to be heavily sedated. Presumably as a precaution against singing, although the men moving her were also wearing protective helmets.”
Sedated. His Anais drugged, unable to cry out for her one true friend, her champion. If he had only been here, he would have torn her from that gurney with his hands suddenly gleaming like gilt steel and run with her in his arms all the way to the sea. And with her by his side the cold, compounding waves would be no obstacle. But instead he’d been sent out of the way on purpose, to guarantee that no one would defend her. His rare beauty, his strange jewel . . .
“You do realize we’re at war,” the gray man said. His voice came as a terrible violation of Hackett’s thoughts. “I am not a sadist, Mr. Hackett. I don’t enjoy torturing . . . creatures of ambiguous status . . . especially when they happen to resemble human children. But changing mermaids back successfully will mean the end of the war. They’ll abandon the Twice Lost Army in droves once we can offer them a different, better life. You’d agree that that’s a noble objective, wouldn’t you?”
How stupid Moreland had been. So distracted, so unhinged by Anais’s mere presence that he hadn’t even considered what Hackett might do for love of her. But he was Anais’s one true friend, and he’d taken what precautions he could on her behalf. If anyone ever brought any accusations against her—accusations concerning the deaths of Kathleen Lambert or General Prudowski, for example—he could prove that Anais had been cruelly exploited, forced to act against her will.
“Another one, please, Mr. Hackett. Then we can all go home. Believe me, I’m every bit as tired and hungry as you are.”
Anais hadn’t wanted to do those things any more than he wanted to go pluck another sacrificial larva from the tank.
The thought consoled him as he gripped the gurney’s cold metal handle and—obediently, miserably, with all the rebellion sapped from his body—turned and rolled it out the door.
Somehow it was the squeak of the wheels that changed everything for him.
Somehow, in that moment, his own obedience became unendurable.
A man lay on the pavement of an alley in Washington, DC. He was humming a melody that seemed to trace drowsy circles in the dusky air around his head. He hadn’t understood before, he hadn’t understood, but now he knew that the only true language was music. Even his thoughts no longer took the form of words but instead were transcribed as elaborately coded blurts of sound. He knew what words were, of course, when he heard them: they were the unmusic, squawks not bright or rare or beautiful enough to mean anything.
He only wanted to join with the songs and the world they revealed. That world had contours of impossible purity. Its empty spaces fell from resonant claps of the moon. Sometimes he was in the music. Sometimes he was what it sang, his being summed by the sequence of its tones. But more often his body got in the way. He could understand that. Flesh and bone were bulky; they annoyed the music with their intractable mass.
He was lying on the pavement now, very still, in the hope that the music might forget that he still had his body with him. He stared up, face to face with the extreme blue that showed between two brick walls. In a dim way he knew that the car had left him here some days before—an octave or more of days, each one full of light like the slap of a bird’s wing against his eyes. Perhaps he’d been expected to go somewhere else, but he heard the world so clearly here that movement seemed wasteful, even absurd.
One of the back doors along the alley vented food smells. A woman opened it and leaned out, searching, then spotted him. She set a paper plate full of eggs and toast down on the cement and let out three sharp cymballine hisses—tss, tss, tss—as if she was calling a cat. The door clicked shut.
He didn’t go in pursuit of the food. Perhaps later. At the moment he’d almost coaxed the music into rendering him in its true voice again, making him the substance of its melody. It sat on his chest, considering him. Two round lights parted the alley like shining throats. The music rumbled thoughtfully and then ground to a stop.
“They left him here,” a voice said. “I wasn’t supposed to know. I wasn’t supposed to know anything. It’s funny that I know everything, then, isn’t it? Except the only thing that really matters, where she is . . .”
“I’m truly sorry,” someone answered gently—and those words, strangely, did seem meaningful. They carried a certain familiar warmth that was in itself a form of unexpected music. “I do hope you’ll make the decision to take your information public. To expose the way Anais has been used. Of course I’ve been aware for months now that they were holding her and that she’d been providing information, but it never occurred to me that even someone like Moreland might use her as a weapon!” The voice tipped across space with each word: there was the face, swinging like a lantern in a car’s open window. “Andrew’s probably long gone, of course. But I’ll get out and search, just in case.”
Andrew. That was surprising. That was a sound that formed a skin, and inside the skin there was a person . . .
“I want Moreland dead,” the first voice moaned. “Whatever is the worst nightmare he could have, the worst torture, for taking her from me . . . She’s been through so much, and she’s fragile, and he has no idea how to care for her.”