The more I tried to stop thinking about it, the more my mind replayed the scene. My ears still rang with the shouting crowd, clashing weapons, and splintering boat, which seemed to grow louder as time passed. The smell of blood and iron lingered in my nose. I saw the swinging keel, the red clouds in the water.
It was the Massacre all over again, except this time I was on the other side of the surface. Somehow, I’d thought the merpeople would be reluctant to attack. Had I expected everyone to be like Lysi? Instead, they’d moved in to kill those humans without hesitation. They even seemed to enjoy it.
“You’re all … prickly,” said Lysi, bringing me out of the memory.
“Thinking about the boat,” I mumbled.
I could feel her looking at me. I kept staring ahead. Swimming in silence through the open ocean, its emptiness felt absolute. We’d stopped to gorge on a school of fish, but since then, there was no sign that anything besides the two of us existed.
“They were doing what they’ve been taught,” said Lysi.
“Weren’t you taught to do that, too?”
“Yes, but I have you.”
“So? What if you hadn’t met me? Would you be into killing and, and—?” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.
“Mee, our kind has spent years hearing how humans are worthless, and how we own the water and humans have no right to be here.”
“And they believe it?”
“Adaro promised to unite the seas under one crown. He’s doing that by uniting everyone with a common enemy.”
It was working. Hate and fear were powerful enough to build a kingdom on. Thinking about Adaro’s strategy made my pulse race with anger. He had trained an entire generation of merpeople to believe humans needed to be extinguished.
Desperation cinched my chest, pulling me northwards as if by a rope. The sooner we found Adaro, the sooner we could end all of this.
Lysi made a sound as though she were about to say more. I glanced at her, but she closed her mouth.
“What?” I said.
She shook her head.
“Lysi.”
She cast me a sideways glance. “Well, is it any different from how you were raised?”
I looked away, taking a minute to squash the surge of outrage. My face grew hot. She was right. Everyone on Eriana Kwai believed mermaids were an invasive species that needed to be pushed back to the Atlantic. The whole purpose of the Massacres was to force them away from our home.
War was not one-sided. For centuries, humans had been overfishing anything edible, capturing and tagging anything intelligent, and killing everything else. We had made it easy for merpeople to treat us as the enemy.
“They teach us that feeding on humans is no worse than fish,” Lysi said gently. “Both are made of meat. Both are a relative.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. The idea was beyond argument.
Lysi took my hand. “He doesn’t understand the most important part of existence. The mind, the soul, everything that makes us feel.”
Her touch calmed me, and I squeezed her fingers. I had to remember that Adaro’s concept of the relationship between humans and merpeople was that we were all just part of the food chain. But I knew love, and I had those in my life who returned it. That we were made of flesh and bone was the smallest part of what it meant to be alive.
“Do you think anyone else feels the same?” I said.
“I think lots do. They’re just afraid to say it.”
We pressed on through the bluish murk, the world vacant on all sides.
Some time later, ripples told me something big was swimming towards us. I stopped. We hadn’t encountered anything other than fish since leaving Deiopea and the captives.
“Lysi?”
She felt it out for about two seconds before saying, “It’s fine.”
I hesitated, and then hurried to catch up. “You sure? It feels huge.”
“She’s a basking shark.”
“Shark?!”
Lysi chuckled. “I promise it’s fine.”
I took her word for it, but stuck close beside her.
Sure enough, when the thing materialised from the blue, I let out a small scream. Its mouth was open wide enough to swallow both of us whole, the white and grey insides resembling a cavernous ribcage.
Lysi grabbed me before I could jet away. “They eat krill and plankton, Mee. Look. No teeth.”
We watched it drift past us and continue down the current, mouth gaping as if letting out a long and silent scream.
Teeth or not, the last time I’d seen the inside of a mouth that big was when the leviathan tried to eat us. The memory didn’t ease my nerves.
“How are you supposed to tell if something’s going to attack you or not?” I said, crossing my arms.
“It’ll take practice. Try and feel her energy.”
I concentrated, but felt only the vague aura of an animal and ripples as it coasted by. How could Lysi even tell it was female? Would I ever be able to read auras as well as her?
As the sun sank, we pushed harder, agreeing it would be better to find the Reinas than to stop and spend the night alone. My body was ready to crumple with exhaustion. The only thing keeping me moving was the will to survive.
As we reached the Aleutian Islands, Lysi said with enthusiasm I could tell was forced, “The Bering Sea is just over the trench.”
Each time we breached and I saw those billowing volcanoes, a familiar, grim feeling closed over me. It was a hollow sadness, like the Aanil Uusha was hovering overhead, waiting to claim someone. I’d felt the god of Death every day on the Massacre, as I stood on the deck of the Bloodhound staring at those islands.
I found refuge each time we submerged. It was as though the underwater world pushed new life into me. I thought of the green ribbons I’d hung in my bedroom as a kid and wondered, not for the first time, if I’d always been destined to be a mermaid. I was in love with the sea.
I kept my feelers out for signs of the Reinas as we wove between the landmasses, determined to find something other than a basking shark before sundown.
Running aground must have been common near the Aleutian Islands, because we found two shipwrecks within an hour of each other. The first was a small battleship of sorts, resembling a block of concrete and definitely uninhabited. The second was more industrial and eerie, with the crumbling appearance of having been smashed against the seafloor. Its hull was shattered, the deck cracked. I could see the life preservers still fastened aboard. Plant life and barnacles covered the ship to such extent that it blended into the landscape, and I couldn’t find a name painted on the side. Judging by the undisturbed wildlife, though, I guessed the ship had never been inhabited by merpeople.
One thing we did find was an excess of sharks—and not the basking kind. Lysi assured me the sharks wouldn’t bother us as long as they didn’t smell blood. Still, they had powerful, predatory auras, and I couldn’t help feeling nervous as we passed by.
Continuing through the cascade of volcanoes, we glided silently over a dark trench, the depths of which might have plunged to the centre of the earth, for all I knew.
We passed another ship—this one half submerged and leaning against the shore of a small island. The waves crashed into it, sending sprays high over the rusted frame.
As the sun touched the horizon, we came upon a fourth wreck. It was wooden, a more traditional structure with two masts and a bowsprit.
“This isn’t it,” said Lysi. “I’m sure we’re looking for a trawler.”
I swam low over the deck, scanning the webs of ropes and splintered masts. The mainmast had crumbled sideways so it leaned against the foremast. This was a brig—slightly different from the Bloodhound in its rigging, but the skeleton was similar enough to send a shiver through me. On the Massacre, our loyal ship had barely survived long enough to bring us home. The thought of dying in a shipwreck in the iciest part of the ocean still haunted me.
My skin prickled, stinging faintly.
“What is that?” I said, rubbing a hand over my arm.
I turned to find Lysi a few reluctant lengths behind.
“Iron. The wood’s probably laced with it.”
I had a terrible, constricted feeling in my chest. Had this been one of our own Massacre ships? What if the crew had been killed, and this ship had been left to float away until it hit the islands and sank?
I scanned the side for a name, but found nothing.
A soft hand wrapped around my arm. “Come on. Don’t swim so close.”
“I want to poke around a bit.”
“No,” said Lysi firmly.
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Mee, there’s iron everywhere.”
“I’ll be careful.”
She pulled hard, forcing me to look at her. “All it takes is an accidental brush across your skin and you’re burned forever.”
I shut my mouth, ashamed for being so tactless. Of course Lysi knew what it felt like to be burned by iron. The enormous scar across her waist was there because of me. I looked away.
“Let’s keep moving north,” she said.
I followed, keeping close to her tail. Lysi was right. Poking around here would be needlessly reckless.
“Should we follow the curve of the islands?” I said. “Won’t there be more shipwrecks closer to land?”
“Yes, but I’m sure Kori Maru is further north.”
We left the Aleutian Islands behind. The Bering Sea was cold and wild, the waves overhead more violent than anything I’d experienced. I was glad for the safety of travelling far below the surface.
Having not slept the night before, we grew sluggish. My concentration waned and every part of me felt heavy. The sky darkened to a deep navy blue. It must have been at least midnight.
“There’s a wreck over there,” said Lysi, “but it’s wooden. Feel the texture on the current?”
“Sure,” I said, too tired to bother. “Where’d you learn about all these wrecks, anyway?”
“It was part of our geography and navigation lessons. You have to learn these things if you want to find your way around. But it isn’t proving very helpful, apparently.”
“It’s okay. I learned a lot of things in elementary school that I can’t remember. Long division. Outer space. The British Empire.”
“Why do humans need to learn about outer space if they don’t need to keep track of tides?”
“Huh?”
“The cycles of the moon.”
“Oh,” I said. “No, we learned more about planets and stuff.”
“What do planets affect?”
“Um. Nothing.”
Lysi cast me a sidelong glance.
I laughed. “We don’t learn about that stuff because it affects everyday life. It’s more for the sake of, just, knowledge. Understanding the universe.”
“Did learning about the planets help you understand the universe?”
I considered, thinking about our place on this blue dot hurtling through space among all those other planets and stars. I thought about how small we were in the middle of a war, and how small the war was in the context of space.
Then I looked at Lysi swimming beside me, and I decided that as long as she was there, I didn’t care how miniscule we all were.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it did.”
We passed beneath a raft of wood and plastic. Strands of seaweed and ropes dangled several lengths deep. Small fish darted in and out, plucking off algae and burrowing inside.
“Let’s stop,” said Lysi. “We might not find another good spot and I don’t want to be up all night again.”
Every part of me was sore, but I wrinkled my nose at the idea of stopping.
“You know, we could just go straight to the Atlantic instead of searching all over the Bering,” said Lysi.
I glared. She didn’t need to tell me how hopeless this search seemed. But I maintained that it was more productive than leaving the Pacific Ocean altogether.
Lysi hoisted herself onto the raft.
I rubbed my burning eyes. “All right. Sleep.”
I pulled myself up next to her and felt suddenly grateful that mermaids didn’t suffer seasickness, because something told me the bobbing raft would have made me queasy at one time.
The storm had calmed, but the waves were still enormous, each one taking several seconds to rise and fall. The movement lulled me into sleepiness. I lay on my side and pulled a tangle of seaweed over me like a blanket—not out of necessity, but out of habit. The first night I’d done it, Lysi laughed at me, but now she helped arrange it over my tail.
“Warm?” she said teasingly.
“How long do you think before I forget what it was like to sleep with a quilt and a pillow?”
She kissed my cheek and lay facing me so our noses touched. I breathed in her sweet scent, hoping to bring her with me into my dreams.
“I hope you never forget that part of you,” she said.
“What part?”
“Your humanity.”
I offered a smile.
“Look around,” said Lysi.
Perplexed, I raised my head off the raft. I let out a gasp. The sea glowed, flecked with what looked like brilliant, sapphire stars.
“Who needs outer space?” said Lysi.
I dipped my hand into the water. The blue dots glimmered, bright as lanterns, where I stirred them.
“What are they?”
“Plankton.”
I met Lysi’s eyes, finding sapphires more brilliant than those below us.
“Have I mentioned how much I love the ocean?” I said.
She smiled.
We fell asleep with our arms wrapped around each other, tails entwined, lulled by the motion and sound of the waves.
I dreamt I was human, on a tiny sailboat in the middle of the ocean. There was no wind so I was trying to use my hands to paddle back to Eriana Kwai.
Annith appeared wearing a sombrero and told me there was no point. The war was over and this was everything left in the world—empty water and nothing, nothing, nothing.
I awoke with a start. The sky was indigo, overcast. Lysi was asleep beside me. The waves lapped against our raft, a few wisps of plankton lingering nearby.
There was an uneven glop. I sat up, wincing as every muscle tightened.
Ripples spread across the water beside us. Something—or someone—had just been here. That must have been what woke me.
Rubbing my neck, I looked down at Lysi. She slept quietly, face relaxed.
I dipped my hand in the water and felt movement on the current. I concentrated harder, closing my eyes. An aura tickled beneath my skin. It was a mermaid. She was swimming away.
After congratulating myself for being able to identify her, I frowned. What was she doing way out here? Why was she alone?
She moved quickly. Without pausing to consider, I slid into the inky depths before I could lose track of her. Maybe she was a Reina. Maybe she could help us find Kori Maru.
As soon as I hit the water, the mermaid sped up. I put on a burst of speed, throwing caution aside.
“Wait!”
She didn’t slow down.
“I just want to know if you can help me!”
It took every effort to keep up. My body protested with each beat of my tail.
I chased her for at least a couple of minutes before she gave up and stopped.
I caught up to find a small blonde with a northern appearance like Lysi and me. She wasn’t a Reina. The iron scars across her body led me to believe she’d endured many of Adaro’s battles against humans.
She held out a spear with a stone tip, stopping me from coming closer. She was in demon mode, ready for a fight.
I raised my palms in a gesture of surrender. “Do you know where I can find Kori Maru?”
The mermaid backed off more. I wondered if asking for directions to a shipwreck was a strange thing for a mermaid to do.
“Half-tide that way.”
She pointed northwards, a little further west than we’d been heading, and made to leave again.
“Wait.” Half-tide? What did that mean? I knew tides worked in day-long cycles, but then there were high tides and low tides—so did a half-tide mean twelve hours, or six? Why hadn’t I asked Lysi about this?
The mermaid stared like I was something foreign. Which, to be fair, I kind of was.
But I couldn’t let her leave yet. This was the first non-threatening mermaid we’d come across. Given that she had a spear pointed at my face, that was saying something about the last few days.
Several questions occurred to me at once. Desperate to keep her from leaving, I blurted the first thing that came to mind. “Where did you come from?”
The mermaid narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“We’ve been travelling and haven’t heard any news about the war.”
Her face hardened. “Find someone else to ask about that.”
“Please.” I moved closer. She kept me at the end of her spear. “You were looking for a place to sleep, right?”
She didn’t answer.
“You can share the raft with us, if you could just answer my questions.”
We hovered for a moment in the blackness. I hoped I came across as honest and not completely desperate.
“I’m coming from Japan,” she said eventually.
“Why are you leaving?”
She hesitated. “I’m going back to Utopia.”
“But were you following Adaro’s orders to attack?”
“What do you mean?”
“Were you in battle against humans over there?”
“Obviously—”
Something moved below, and the mermaid jerked, redirecting her spear. Even I could tell it was a fish.
I was getting a rising impression she wasn’t supposed to be here.
“Where’s Adaro now?” I said.
Her head snapped up at this, aura darkening. “Who wants to know?”
I hesitated. Even if my suspicions were right and she had deserted the army, that didn’t necessarily mean she would take well to someone planning to kill her king.
“Never mind,” said the mermaid, backing away. “I don’t need a place to sleep.”
As she made to turn away, I shot forwards and grabbed her wrist, my teeth sharpening so quickly they cut my bottom lip. The mermaid cried out and swung her spear at my head.
I grabbed the spear with my other hand before it could hit me.
“Tell me where Adaro is.”
“I don’t know!”
Something about her racing pulse, or maybe the way her aura seemed to cloud over, told me she was lying. She knew.
I snarled. “This is important. I need to find him—”
She slammed me in the gut with her tail. I grunted, a bubble erupting from my mouth. Next thing I knew, her arm had torn from my grip and her weapon slid through my other hand, spearhead catching on my palm.
Ignoring the stinging cut, I lunged after her as she took off like a bolt. I cursed, knowing I was too stiff and exhausted to catch her.
A moment passed, and the world fell back into silence. I looked down, examining my webbed fingers, then closed my eyes and forced my appearance back to normal. The threatening approach had been a total failure. I was glad Lysi hadn’t been there to see it.
Then again, if she’d been awake we might not have followed the mermaid at all. She would have told me I was being reckless, I thought, remembering when my curiosity had almost led me inside an iron-infested ship.
At least we had directions to Kori Maru, now. That was something.
I headed back to the raft, wondering what time it was. Behind the clouds, the sky was still indigo—but this far north during the summer, I supposed the sky never got darker than twilight.
Ahead, something stirred. I froze for a minute, and then shut my eyes and groaned.
“Meela!”
Lysi was in full panic.
“I’m here,” I called, hurrying in the direction of her voice.
The chaotic ripples paused, and then Lysi shot towards me out of the darkness.
“Mee, where—?”
“I ran into a mermaid,” I said before she could get angry. “I mean, swam into. Is that an expression here?”
Lysi opened and closed her mouth. Then she glanced down at my hand, which oozed a ribbon of blood. I crossed my arms.
“Anyway, it’s that way to the Reinas,” I said, nodding in the direction the mermaid had indicated. “Half-tide further—ouch!”
Lysi punched my shoulder. “Don’t leave like that! What if you’d gotten lost, or eaten, or attacked?”
“Thank you so much for your confidence in me.”
She huffed, expelling a jet of bubbles. I shrugged and rose to the surface, Lysi hesitating before I felt her follow behind, grumbling about keeping track of me.
We hauled ourselves back onto the raft and I told her what had happened, glossing over the part where the mermaid had fled because I threatened her.
“At least we know which direction to go,” said Lysi.
“You’re welcome.”
“I still think that was stupid.”
I shrugged. Stupid or not, it was worth it.
We slept another couple of hours and departed at dawn. Breakfast was a school of mackerel, which we shared with a pod of Pacific white-sided dolphins.
A short while later, the water shifted from Pacific to Arctic. The waves grew even choppier and took on an icy blue tinge, and the wildlife became a lot more blubber-y.
“Ugh, no wonder they’re meeting out here,” said Lysi, watching the waves thrash overhead. “I thought the trek to the South Pacific was bad. Adaro wouldn’t waste time sending an army through this.”
“What about the mermen stationed at the Northwest Passage—I mean, the Ice Channel?”
“They wouldn’t get there by travelling this far out. They’d stick closer to the shallows where it isn’t so miserable.”
“I don’t think it’s miserable,” I said, admiring the way the waves looked as they frothed and churned overhead.
Admittedly, the chaotic swells made it harder to breach, and I worried about what sleeping arrangements we would have to make if we went another day without finding Kori Maru. We wouldn’t be able to stay on a raft in seas as violent as this. We would need to get to land. But if my geography was right, we were about as close to Alaska as we were to Russia.
We kept swimming. Lysi didn’t project any fear, and I trusted her instincts more than my own.
“I was thinking,” said Lysi, breaking an hour-long silence, “maybe whenever we have time—when this is all over, or if we have free time before the Reinas execute whatever plan they have—”
“Free time? We’d better not. If we have any free time once we get there, I’m going to spend it trying to come up with a faster plan.”
Lysi said nothing. A moment passed before I realised how obtuse I was being.
“I’m sorry.”
She cast me a sidelong glance.
I poked her ribs. “What were you going to say?”
“I thought maybe …” She blushed. “Maybe we could go on a date.”
My stomach gave a swoop, and every thought I had about finding the Reinas dissipated. I couldn’t stop the grin breaking across my face.
“You’re asking me out?”
She laughed.
“What do mermaids do on a date?” I said.
“Well,” she said, brightening, “we could go for dinner, or watch a play, or go to a sports game—”
“Whoa. Hold up. A play? Sports? Dinner—like a restaurant? Mermaids have all this?”
“Of course! You think we hunt every meal? You think we do nothing for entertainment?”
“So you go to a restaurant and people bring you—I mean, mermaids—bring you food?”
“Uh, yeah. That’s the idea.”
“And plays?”
“We can go watch a show. Spio and I used to go and heckle. We got escorted out a lot, but it was worth it to see …”
Her smile faded at the memory of her friend.
“Hey,” I said, grabbing her hand. “He’s still out there. We’ll find him.”
She gave me a sad smile.
“What about the sports?” I prompted.
“There are a few different ones we could watch. My favourite is rings.”
“Rings?”
“It’s played with dolphins. They make rings of bubbles and push them around with their noses. Two teams of four merpeople have to chuck a stone through the moving rings while the dolphins pass them around.”
I tried to wrap my head around all of this.
“Honestly, Mee, did you think we lived like fish?”
“I … Of course not.”
But I felt myself go a bit hot with shame for thinking otherwise. I was like one of those people who assumed everyone in Canada lived in igloos.
“Let’s go to a rings game,” I said. “My brother used to let me watch him and his friends play basketball. I even joined in a few times.”
A strange look crossed Lysi’s face. She let go of my hand, but I’d already felt her pulse quicken.
“What?”
She hesitated.
“What is it?”
“Okay. Mee, there’s something I need to tell you.”
I slowed down, my mind jumping to a million possibilities at once.
“Was it the battlefront? Did something happen? Is it Spio?”
“What? No!”
With the air of someone steeling herself for an eruption, she said, “You can’t get mad at me for not telling you. There’s been so much going on and I didn’t want to overwhelm you. I haven’t found the right moment, but I’m starting to think there will never—”
“Lysi. What is it?”
She rubbed a hand across her eyes. “Okay, so I told you the guys from the rebellion each had a connection to humans, right? That was what brought them together; Adaro was victimising former humans who were close to them.”
I scowled.
“In one guy’s case, he took things more personally.” She looked up at me. “Because he actually was a former human.”
“All right,” I said slowly, not sure what she was getting at.
But Lysi abruptly stopped swimming, her mouth agape. Fear washed over me before I even sensed the movements in the distance.
“Army?” I said, barely a whisper.
Lysi shook her head. She squinted ahead for a long moment. “Mee, I think this is it.”
Could it be? Half a day must have passed since we left the raft. I stayed quiet, not wanting to break Lysi’s concentration.
Suddenly, my heart leapt. It was distant, but its frame was so enormous and out of place that it left me without doubt. Somewhere beyond the cloudy blue water sat the ghost of a trawler. It had sunk overtop of a narrow canyon, forming a sort of eerie bridge. I felt the impurity of iron in its frame, prickling my skin like an itchy wool blanket, and the thick layer of wildlife growing over every surface.
Hundreds of bodies stirred in the canyon beneath the ship. When I concentrated, I could distinguish an assortment of fish, predators, and merpeople.
Lysi looked at me, blue eyes wide in excitement, a smile pulling at her lips.
We’d made it to Kori Maru.