In the corner of a cramped, storm-crushed tent, a red light starts to blink on the control panel of a comm unit. Ellen Riba crouches over her laptop nearby, clutching her headphones, the tendons in her hands jutting like groynes across a beach. The clicks and chirps and trills of Homo sirenian, her research subjects, loop over and over in her ears.
She slowly unhooks her attention from the audio feed and slips the headphones off. Without them, the storm is deafening. She turns to the comm unit, pouches of plum-colored exhaustion under her eyes. Her shoulder joints crack as she reaches around a box of gas canisters and taps a button, connects the call.
The sudden light from the screen whites out Ellen’s face like thick greasepaint, obliterating her crows’ feet and the bump in her nose. Lukas’s face appears. He scratches nervously at the scraggly hairs on his chin and his voice crackles over the line, barely audible. “Ellen? Power’s back.”
He’s calling from the research station. It lies amongst the fjords of northeastern Greenland, where glacier gives way to scrubby rock and small icebergs drift in the port—it’s warm and well provisioned. Her tent is pitched on lake ice over a hundred miles inland; the sight of the rec room behind him, with its squishy red sofa and radiators, is a glimpse of heaven.
She opens her mouth and licks her lips with a sour, congealed tongue. “I need more time,” she croaks.
Lukas’s shoulders sag. His sigh fizzles over the line as static. “You swore you’d be a few days behind me; it’s been a week. Your father’s gone, Ellen.”
She frowns. Has it really been a whole week? “I can’t leave yet,” she says, shaking her head.
“I know how badly you wanted to find him,” he says gently, warily. “But his signal’s getting weaker every day; his tracker’s battery is at four percent. Plus, the report came through—our data from the selkies wasn’t enough. The whole area’s been cordoned off, permits revoked—the lot.”
This stirs Ellen from her stupor. “¡Qué va! This colony speaks an entirely new dialect—how is that not enough?”
“The government didn’t want us poking around in the first place,” Lukas says with a shrug. “So the Corps is running out of excuses for you still being out there. They’ve chartered a plane to fetch you the day after tomorrow. The storm should have cleared by then.”
“Tell them to hold off,” Ellen snaps. “The matriarch showed me her eggs.”
Static floods the line, a second storm in her ears. Lukas’s face goes so still that Ellen thinks the video’s stuck.
“She . . . she showed you—?” Ellen nods. “Please, please tell me you photographed them. Filmed them. Took samples?”
“I . . . no. I would’ve gone back down there right away but the storm’s kept me stuck in the tent ever since.”
“Are you sure that’s what they are?” Ellen nods again. Lukas sucks in a breath. Wipes a hand over his face, pulling the skin so far it threatens to slip off. “This is huge,” he moans. “I can’t believe you didn’t call.”
“I tried, but the phone was out.”
“I might be able to buy us some time if you can get footage. I’ll contact the Corps, or the Department of Environment and Nature, maybe I can persuade them to—”
“Right.” She touches her headphones, longing to get back to them.
“How are your supplies?”
Her eyes flick around the tent, taking inventory. There’s only enough oxygen left for six hours under the ice, but she still has plenty of nutribars. Her taste buds are sick of their factory-made flavor, but they’ll keep anyone alive in these freezing, frugal conditions. “I’ll manage,” she says.
“Right.” Deep breath. “I’ll check in again soon. Get those pictures.”
His face warps and tears, and disappears. The glottal moan of the wind is all she can hear now, and prismatic shapes pop in the darkness that’s left behind. Wavering, shifting shapes that elongate into ghosts.
Ellen presses the cool heels of her palms against her eyes. She imagines the underside of the lake ice below, with its own ponderous slate-and-snow sky and shafts of ashen light dancing, fading in the quiet deep; the water’s gentle crush. The temptation is maddening—her diving gear is within reach and the air hole’s only ten paces away —
But the storm rages outside, strong enough to sweep her off her feet as soon as she steps outside the tent.
Ellen’s father was here a year ago, investigating rumors of a freshwater colony of Homo sirenian. He came alone, stubbornly ignoring the locals’ warnings that the area was dangerous: the glacier had swallowed many souls over the years, so they said. He managed to report his success to the Corps but failed to check in the following day. Ellen wonders if their mutual subjects entranced him as much as they do her, whether he ventured out against his better judgment for another blissful hour in their midst.
The ice below her creaks, creaks, creaks—footsteps on an old staircase. She shivers, burying herself deeper into her oversized thermal jacket. She replaces her headphones and listens to the colony’s chatter from below. The twist of a dial slows it down, makes it decipherable. Makes language out of noise.
She closes her eyes, leans against her rucksack, and clicks her tongue in near-perfect mimicry.
Sebastián Riba was a man who chased mermaids. A man who, for most of his life, had no fixed address or responsibilities. He jumped on planes the same way people jump on buses, getting by with a collection of well-thumbed phrase books. When a social worker dropped a skinny, umber-eyed child into his life, he was completely bewildered.
“Where is her mother?” he demanded. “Is there nowhere else she can go? What am I supposed to feed her?”
Ellen tucked in her chin and watched Sebastián, taking in his graying beard and temples and the rumpled clothes that made him look like he’d only just sprung out of bed. He argued in rapid Spanish, gesticulating with nut-brown hands. At seven years old, she wasn’t sure she liked her father.
By the time she was ten, he still didn’t seem to like her back.
Every few months—and sometimes, every few weeks—a new country, a new school. From the scattered islands of Orkney to the dry heat of Kiryat Yam and everywhere in between, with never enough time to make real friends. Small hostels and rented rooms, packing and unpacking the same valuables: a figurine of Triton, his shoulders barnacled; a Feejee mermaid replica that reeked of dust and old glue; a painting of Suvannamaccha, bigger than Ellen herself, with every scale rendered in shimmering gold leaf. When Ellen first saw it, she ran her fingertips over the tail.
“¡Para! ” Sebastián snapped, slapping her hand away. “They are not toys!”
She passed time watching cartoons in different languages, copying the sounds until she got them just right. One evening when she was eleven, as she concentrated on a cartoon she’d never seen before, Sebastián pushed the bedroom door open a sliver to hand her a bowl of instant noodles. When he realized what she was watching, he hesitated. The mermaid on the screen tossed back her red hair. Sebastián looked at his daughter and said, “You enjoy this?”
She looked up at him, the bold colors of the cartoon tinting her face like light through a stained glass window. He’d never asked her whether she liked something before. “Sí,” she said tentatively. Sebastián smiled and passed her the bowl; and for the first time, father and daughter ate their dinner together as perfect companions.
Unidentified noises had been recorded in the oceans for years by then, but it wasn’t until the following summer that a global deep-sea expedition was launched, and the world of Homo sirenian revealed.
She and Sebastián watched the first live transmissions together in a tiny hotel room in France. She sat in the bowl of his crossed legs, nibbling the complimentary biscuits, the back of her top turning damp where her father had dried and dressed himself too hastily after his shower. The grainy footage showed entire cities made of rock and whalebone, entombed in black water. The inhabitants themselves looked like they’d got stuck halfway between man and manatee, all whiskers and blubber. “¡Cáspita, I was right!” Sebastián jumped to his feet, upending Ellen onto the carpet. “Different times, different places around the world—I knew it could not be chance!” As he fell to his knees in prayer behind her, she touched the screen in wonder, leaving buttery finger-smears across the strange, indecipherable faces.
Sebastián Riba became credible overnight. He was interviewed on American television, scoffing at the term “selkie” which the Western media had deemed the best fit for these new creatures, with their seal-like appearance. Ellen became fascinated by the selkies’ language, and soon left the cartoons behind.
By her sixteenth birthday, she’d qualified for an apprenticeship with Aquatic Exploration Life Corps—the leading company in the study of selkies—which her father encouraged her to take up. She went on countless research trips, and sat astern with her headphones on and a microphone trailing in the water, watching the crew net specimen after specimen, punching tracker tags through their fins. Their cries made her wince. She liked it best when the boat was moving, when she could listen to the day’s recordings and look out at the endless ocean, the frothing wake.
Through the tagging—and her research—the selkies’ way of life gradually became clear. Colonies a hundred strong migrate seasonally with their livestock: divers’ cameras revealed shoals of fish maneuvered with the help of herding sharks; and nets bulging with pale deep-sea spider crabs, their long legs clacking like finger bones. In warmer, shallow water, other breeds curate gardens of coral and kelp. Coastline-clingers caterwaul on the secluded rocks of Patagonia and the Hebrides, while arctic varieties with distinctive badger stripes harass the fringes of melting sea ice in summer—for years, they’d been mistaken for seals, or porpoises, hiding in plain sight.
However, much of their way of life eluded discovery, particularly their reproductive cycle; their precious eggs. The Corps would pay any price for those.
Ellen runs her thumb across the sharp barnacled shoulders of her father’s Triton figurine. It’s always been her second favorite relic (after the painting of Suvannamaccha), and holding it now keeps her calm while the reinforced tent walls snap from concave to convex around her, and the tent pegs, stapled deep into the ice, strain against the wind.
The comm unit’s control panel blinks again. She’s lain down since the last call from Lukas, so she has to peel herself off the floor to reach the button. When she presses it, a text message appears on the screen.
TRACKER SIGNAL MOVING. BENEATH TENT.—L
Her grip on the figurine tightens.
Sebastián never settled in one place after the discovery of the selkies; if anything, it made him harder to pin down. He preferred to work without supervision, which the Corps tolerated on the condition that he wear a tracker at all times. They’re standard issue for all employees in the field—Ellen keeps hers clipped to her sleeve. After Sebastián disappeared, the signal from his tracker continued to move within a fifty meter radius for months—the main reason why Ellen bullied her way onto this research trip in the first place. The Corps presumed him dead and only wanted Ellen to verify his find. But if the signal is moving, she’d told herself, he must be alive.
It had settled and faded long before she arrived in Greenland; but now it’s moving again—and it’s directly below her.
She adjusts the headphones and turns up the volume. There’s nothing. No sound.
“Papá?” she whispers into the microphone, before realizing how stupid that is. The signal is coming from the depths of a lake and her father had no diving equipment. So she tries something else: she presses her tongue against her soft palate and shapes a velar click. Friend?
It’s not perfect—the matriarch would snort at her attempt. She tries again.
Friend? Rearranges her tongue. Wets her lips to try a low whistle. What moves?
Her relatively feeble grasp of their dialect constrains her, makes it impossible to voice the stream of questions and accusations that boil in her mind. She looks for her suit and gear, reaches for them—
A vicious gust buckles the tent’s alloy frame; and finally shatters it.
From the start, the youngest of the colony—last year’s pups—liked Ellen in particular. They had begun to form the distinctive domed head and bulbous muzzle, and the muddy fur that covered them in babyhood was shedding, leaving them as patchy as old sofas. They darted around her during her first dive, tapping her oxygen cylinders with the bony fingertips that protruded from their webbed hands; they pulled tubes and plucked her wet suit. This drew the attention of an old sow with long whiskers and a wrinkled white underbelly. The pups’ deference to her marked her as the colony’s matriarch and Ellen’s heart drummed in her chest as she was inspected. The matriarch’s eyes were black and unreadable, but eventually she seemed satisfied and glided past Ellen with a bubbly snort.
Greenland, not wanting to give full control to the Corps, insisted on one of their own joining Ellen in the field: Lukas, who specialized in physiology. He took various measurements, collected the selkies’ droppings in order to analyze their diet and digestion and so on; he discovered traces of animal matter in the pups’ feces which indicated the colony’s ability to hunt the musk oxen that roamed the glacier, a behavior that Ellen had witnessed in ocean breeds. He held a stethoscope against any individual that would let him get close enough and listened to their sonorous heartbeats. He was busy with this particular task one night—the selkies had hauled themselves onto the ice to bask in the midnight sun and listen to an old bull tell what sounded like a story. Ellen had set up her equipment to record him. Over the years, she’d internalized enough of the selkies’ language to understand it without much difficulty, but this time her brow was furrowed.
Lukas wrapped up his stethoscope and slowly hunkered down by her. “What’s wrong?” he muttered.
Ellen pursed her lips. She’d grown accustomed to her skill; suddenly she felt like an outsider again, struggling to make sense of cartoons meant for much younger children. “This dialect is new to me,” she replied, when Lukas continued to hover. “Their grammar and phonology must have developed separately from the ocean breeds. I expected it, of course, because they’re so isolated, but. . . . ”
The matriarch pulled herself close, turning her head to peer at Ellen’s oscilloscope. She vocalized quizzically.
“Er. . . . ” Had this been an ocean selkie, Ellen might have been able to communicate, in rudimentary terms, her intentions and the function of the equipment. Here, she was as dumb as a newborn. The matriarch accepted her silence and became fascinated with Ellen’s hair instead, clicking with pleasure when Ellen unraveled her bun. They listened to the remainder of the bull’s story as the pups drifted off to sleep around them, one by one. Ellen took the opportunity to quietly type up a report on her laptop, while the matriarch’s dexterous fingertips twined tiny fish bones into Ellen’s curls. The sensation reminded Ellen of her mamá, plaiting Ellen’s hair for bedtimes long past. . . . Over and over, the matriarch used the same short succession of voiceless trills. Ellen stopped typing to listen, and when she finally flapped her tongue to replicate the sound, the matriarch’s fingertips stilled.
Ellen glanced over her shoulder, expecting to see the matriarch’s delight, but her eye was fixed on Ellen’s laptop instead, which had reverted to its screensaver: a photo Ellen had taken of Sebastián years ago in Copenhagen. She’d caught him mid-turn, mid-speech, probably in the middle of some anecdote about the bronze mermaid monument in the harbor behind him. His face was blurred. It was a bad photo, taken by hands too small to hold the camera, but it had been a good trip, had felt more like a fun holiday than just another stop on their continuous tour of the world.
“You know him,” said Ellen flatly. The matriarch turned away and slid into the dark, silky water.
After that, Ellen was anxious to dive every day; at night, Lukas would wake and see her hunched over the laptop, listening to the headphones and clicking to herself. In the water, she swam farther from the air hole than was wise, in the vague direction of her father’s signal. Once, she tried to map the width and depth of their territory as an excuse to snoop, but the matriarch snapped at her less than thirty feet down.
The Greenlandic government had permitted no more than three weeks of study to minimize human intrusion, and as the designated time came to a close, Ellen proposed that Lukas return to the perimeter and stall.
“They’re more comfortable around me,” she whispered over soup that evening. “They might let me observe them at night, their herding techniques. I might even get blood samples.”
A sore point, since Lukas had tried and failed to do this. “Don’t pretend you want to stay behind to collect more data,” he said. “I’m not stupid.”
Ellen’s spoon clattered against the rim of her bowl. “The matriarch knows something. She recognized Papá. If I could just have a few more days studying their dialect—”
“I think . . . I think your father’s dead, Ellen. Even if he did survive out here in the beginning, there’s no way he’s camped out at the bottom of this lake, waiting to be rescued.”
She set her jaw. He’d misunderstood the reason for her stubbornness. The possibility of Sebastián’s survival might have brought her here, but once they’d landed and the empty, vast terrain became clear, her hope had died, to be replaced with anger. Something was moving his remains, playing with them. . . . The thought nauseated her. Ellen stormed over to her laptop and wrenched it open.
“The government gave us three weeks and three weeks are up,” said Lukas, louder than before, “or do you want to be struck off the Corps?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, loading her latest report. “The Corps wouldn’t strike me off—I’m their best translator.”
Lukas put down his soup. “Well, I can’t leave you here. It’s suicide to dive alone, never mind those reports of missing people—”
“That’s my risk to take.” She pointed at the equipment. “This gives me all the support I need, and with the comm unit hooked up to the station twenty-four-seven, I’m never really alone, am I?”
Lukas looked hurt. Ellen knew that even with machines monitoring her vitals, diving solo was extremely risky, and she opened her mouth to apologize. But Lukas was less experienced, untested in the field. It would be a relief to relinquish responsibility and return to the comfort of the research station and, later, home—she saw it in his face. “Just give me a few days,” she said.
Lukas called a plane and left the following morning. He watched from the window as Ellen dwindled to a speck, insignificant under the weight of all that sky.
With Lukas gone, the selkies grew bolder. The matriarch often pinched Ellen’s waist and clucked like a fussing mother over her skinny frame. She began to bring gifts of food to Ellen’s tent. Ellen unzipped the opening one morning to find a generous pile of arctic char. She didn’t want to cause offense, so under the matriarch’s expectant eye, Ellen reached for a fish and bit into it. The scales splintered and stuck to her lips like sugar shards; bitter fish guts, contaminated by bile, dribbled down her arm—but she swallowed. The matriarch bared a needlepoint smile and reached out her webbed hand and beckoned. Come, Ellen was sure she said. Show. . . .
Ellen yanked her wet suit on and shrugged on diving cylinders, gauges—all the usual thermos-regulating apparatus. She tipped backward into the water and let the matriarch steer her into the lake’s depths. The line that connected Ellen to the surface reached its primary safety limit; she had to tug hard to gain slack. They swam until the light faded completely, until the press of water sucked her down and made it hard to draw breath. The needle of her depth gauge wavered at eighty feet.
She collided belly-first with the lake bed. Sharp jags stabbed her ribs. She felt for the torch at her belt and flicked it on, saw only a white, uneven wilderness before the matriarch shrieked and smacked the torch out of Ellen’s hand. It sank, flickering, into a tiny crevice and was lost.
As the matriarch pulled her along, Ellen ran her hands over the hard, uneven tangle of the lake bed, trying to make sense of what she couldn’t see. They suddenly stopped at the edge of a crater, the lip sharp against Ellen’s fingers. Her heart boomed low in her chest—was she about to find . . . ?
The matriarch trilled. In reply, the gaps in the lake bed glowed.
At first, Ellen didn’t understand. She frowned and reached out a hand to the light, brushing the tips of her fingers against the clusters of gelatinous pearls. They throbbed with faint bioluminescence. Each was the size of her thumbnail, a dark, unformed nucleus wriggling in a jellied shell.
There was a camera incorporated into her mask. It would be so easy to flick it on, to start a live feed to the station via the comm unit. The government would have to bow to the pressure of the Corps, would have to keep this area open for further study. She’d have more time to find the source of her father’s signal—find closure.
But then she met the gaze of the matriarch who’d plaited her hair under the midnight sun. She couldn’t begin to guess what she’d done to gain this trust, and couldn’t bear to break it quite yet. Why are you showing me this? she longed to ask; and as if the matriarch could understand Ellen’s confusion, she reached out and caressed Ellen’s cheek with a single, cold fingertip.
The storm breaks.
Ellen stumbles to her feet, steaming in the crystal-cut air, and looks around at the ruin of the tent and its contents strewn across the ice. She’d managed to deploy a second emergency shelter, a cocoon inside a cocoon, but it had been a close thing.
The world is emptier and grayer than she remembers, except for the slash of flesh-pink cloud on the horizon. The wind makes instruments of the sharp rocks encircling the lake, throats through which old ghosts howl. Scattered across the lake are sparkling studs of cerulean ice; beyond them, the slow-moving smudge of musk oxen. Turning, she finds an offering outside her tent: a lamprey, skewered on a spear of bone driven deep into the ice.
The memory of the raw char makes her retch. The fish bones woven into her hair clink in the wind. Wiping the spit from her chin, she turns away from the lamprey to retrieve the various boxes and bags, and checks the comm unit for damage—it works. She breakfasts on her own rations. The nutribar tastes like rubber and sticks between her teeth; later, she teases it from the gaps with her tongue as she steps into her wet suit, the straps of the cylinders cutting into her collarbones.
The reel of safety line by the air hole is still bolted down. She clips the end to her gear and fixes electrodes to her temples and chest, her hands fluttering like paper. She inserts her regulator, breathes deeply to test it. Her eyes scan the view of the lake one last time, picturing the cranes and laboratories that will crop up like fungi here, before turning on the camera in her mask. The comm unit starts a live broadcast to the research station. She hopes Lukas is watching: Whatever she finds down there, he’ll see it, too.
She falls in backwards. The selkies are usually swimming under the air hole. But this time, the water is an empty, shifting blue. She waits, weightless, for a sign of movement, but all is still.
It’s a second, unguarded chance with the eggs. She dives straight down, unspooling the line. She dives until the dark consumes her, until spatial disorientation threatens to set off her panic response. Her palms hit the lake bed and she drags herself along, searching by touch, but she finds nothing. The selkies’ eyes can cope at these depths, and they have other means of locating their nests; the darkness is so impenetrable that the LED headlamp she’s clipped on in lieu of her torch is almost useless.
She kicks off from the lake bed in frustration and springs up into nothing.
In front of her rises a tiny, wriggling light.
Ellen reaches out, bewildered, and cups the light in her palm. Brings it close.
It’s a hatchling. Homo sirenian in miniature, with fused rear flippers and long feelers that trail like strands of broken spider silk.
She looks up and is surrounded by lights, all refracting and shifting through her tears. The water is so dark, and the hatchlings so bright; for a moment, she is drifting amongst stars.
The matriarch joins her, faintly illuminated by the strange turquoise glow, and smiles. Ellen pulls out her regulator to smile back.
Instead, Ellen flinches and looks down: a thin curl of blood rises like smoke from a bite on her palm. She frowns and tries to replace her regulator, but the matriarch smacks it away. As she does, Ellen notices what’s tucked into the crook of the matriarch’s other arm.
A man’s head.
It’s been preserved in the freezing water, and though it’s as pocked with holes as a caterpillar-riddled leaf, the graying beard and temples remain, and the bump in his nose—exactly like her own. The matriarch reaches inside the fractured skull and draws something out. She unfurls her palm for Ellen to see—a tracker, all but disintegrated, its alarm-light faint and pathetic. The glow of her offspring glitters in her black eyes as she discards the head, letting it fall.
The frayed end of Ellen’s safety line sinks with it.
Scream-bubbles burst from Ellen’s mouth, and the hatchlings dive inside: they burrow under her tongue and make filigree of the soft flesh of her cheeks; they push further—stretching her throat until the skin tears —
Ellen’s eyes bulge, desperately searching for her father’s head. She finds it nestled amongst femurs and jawbones and pelvises gnawed almost beyond recognition. The nest is a graveyard. The detritus of first meals, stretching back decades.
She suddenly understands, too late, the gifts.