“What happened today?” Anais repeated. She was distracted, her thoughts churning behind her eyes as she tried to make sense of everything he was saying. “What do you mean?”
“What you’ll tell the mermaids here is that you’ve just changed form. This very hour. You’ll explain that you saw an attack on the Twice Lost Army on TV immediately before you changed. Tell them that General Luce was captured and tortured to death in front of the cameras. I’d suggest you describe it, my dear, in sickening detail; describe precisely what you’d like to do to Luce yourself. Then tell them that just before she died she cried out the order for the mermaids of the world to release their waves and drown the cruel and treacherous humans.” Moreland tried to smile, but the ache in his chest and the musical throb in his mind sent his lips torquing into a strange sloping curl instead. He knew he looked hideous. “You’ll have to be very persuasive.”
“But . . . did that happen? Did Luce really say—”
“Suppose it happened. As far as you’re concerned, Anais, as far as winning your freedom goes, it absolutely happened. What do you care what the truth is?”
This had to end. Everything had to end; the music had to be stripped from the sea, from his mind, the murmuring enchantment purged, so that he could simply rest. Even prison would be a relief if it could lock out those voices.
But prison wouldn’t be enough. He already knew that.
Anais was still bleary from the drugs. It had the odd effect of making her calculations all the more apparent. Her sly smile advertised her thoughts so distinctly that, had their situation been less desperate, Moreland would have found it comical.
“Okay,” Anais chirped, her smile so oddly heavy that her mouth seemed carved from some impossibly dense stone. “I’ll do it. Exactly what you said.”
“How touching, Anais. I’m moved by your enthusiasm for your work. Whatever our differences, we’ve always come together to serve a greater cause, haven’t we?”
Anais nodded, too carefully, her smile unaltered. “I like being helpful.”
“Oh, I know, tadpole. I have hours of recordings that prove exactly how helpful you’ve been. And if I need to, I can play those recordings through loudspeakers at a very high volume, not just above the harbor in Baltimore but up and down both coasts. You know, in some of our conversations you expressed views that might be perceived as . . . perhaps a touch disloyal . . . to the great General Luce.”
It wasn’t true. He’d given explicit orders that none of his conversations with Anais be recorded—for reasons so obvious that Moreland worried even she might realize he had to be lying. No sane man would tape himself instructing a captive mermaid to commit a series of murders.
Maybe Anais was still under the influence of the sedatives. Or maybe she just didn’t think of him as sane. Either way, her face greened with dismay as the threat sank in. “They’ll tear me apart! If they hear anything—those things I told you—they’ll . . .”
“Ah, but they won’t have the slightest inkling of how you’ve helped me, tadpole. Because you’ll do exactly what I’ve told you to do. I’ll be waiting to see the results of your work. And then”—and then and then and then, darling Anais, you’ll be the one to cure me, to save me—”you’ll report back to me here, as soon as the water recedes enough to make the shore passable. Once you do that I’ll honor our agreement, and you’ll be entirely free of me for the rest of your life. Do you understand?”
She nodded.
Thank heavens, she nodded. And she didn’t even ask him why he wanted to see the Baltimore waterfront destroyed.
To her the urge for destruction must seem self-explanatory, Moreland thought. As natural as waves.
The truck was already parked so that its back end protruded over the harbor. Moreland swung the back door wide open, giving Anais her first view in months of lacquered violet water and star-shattered sky. A hot, humid sigh of late-August air brushed in while in the distance Baltimore’s new standing wave wobbled, starlight pitching on its unstable crest. He was short of breath, and there was an awkward lull as he struggled to heave himself onto the walkway. The steel edge dug into his belly as his legs kicked in midair.
Not that long ago he’d been so strong, so agile, his body swift and unpredictable and deadly. Just as Anais was still. As he righted himself on the platform he saw her glorious form hanging in the blue water like a twist of golden, blue-fringed flame. “Anais,” he said. His hand was on the lever now, poised to set her free.
She watched him with intense interest. “I used to think I hated Luce, sir,” Anais said suddenly. She delivered the word sir with a vehement sneer. Her azure fins switched. “But now maybe I actually like her.”
Anais waited for him to ask why her feelings had changed. He stared at her, breathing heavily, and didn’t oblige her with the question.
“I like her because she’s made you so miserable. And pathetic. And because she’s showed everybody what a loser you are. You’re so messed up and weak now, it’s even better than if Luce had drowned you. Because this way you’ve suffered for longer. And,” Anais added with a smirk, “I’ve gotten to watch it happening. Almost every day I’ve seen you getting more and more wrecked.”
Moreland smiled at her. His face felt slippery and distorted, wet and rotten. “A man can’t be more than a ship, Anais,” he said, without quite knowing what he meant by it. “A ship, a song, and a shore.” The words felt true even if he didn’t understand them. “Remember to take your jewelry and your shirt off. Before you swim out there. Otherwise those other mermaids won’t believe you’ve just changed.”
He grasped the lever tighter, dragging down with all his strength. The glass wall swung outward, disgorging a wild and sudden flood that sparked with the pink and azure of Anais’s racing tail, the gold of her streaking hair.
The violet water leaped as it received her. Moreland gazed down into dim lapping depths and saw nothing. To his left the masts of moored sailboats gouged black lines from the starry sky; he’d parked in a lonely spot near a boat club. Behind him a highway hissed and whispered.
Faintly, faintly, he could hear the mermaids singing. They were singing as they always did in the rough sealed pit of his mind.
But now they also sang in the sweet dilating sky that knew nothing of him.
32 Catarina Ivanovna Smekhov
The room had bars covering its single window, but apart from that it could have been a room in a hospital. The sky beyond the bars was the blue of late evening. She was lying in a plain, clean, very white bed, wearing some sort of equally white nightgown. The dry powdery feeling of the sheet covering her was horrible, but she didn’t move to throw it off. What would be revealed would surely be even worse than the revolting sensation of cloth on skin. Apart from the bed there was a night table and a chrome armchair with olive cushions. A half-opened door showed a small bathroom. And of course there was another door near the foot of the bed. That one was closed, naturally. It would be locked.
Just in case, though, she should check. The question was whether she could reach it without glimpsing the horror concealed by the sheet, without sensing more of its configuration than she absolutely had to. Catarina inhaled deeply, reaching for courage.