Hal knew where Crown would be the second they saw the news. The woman on TV had fear-wide eyes and a steady voice, but Hal could only look at the monster behind her. A mouldering wreck as tall as a building, heaped up on the shoreline like a continent’s worth of plastic bags. Rotting blubber folded over sharp curves of bone, like a whale, but too many limbs and too many eyes.
Hal ran the whole way despite the rain. It wasn’t far. Crown had wanted to live close to the ocean.
The journalist was still wrapping up her report when they got there. “…there is a giant, rotting corpse off the Bay,” she said. “And nobody knows what it is.”
Not quite nobody.
Crown of Thorns stood by the hastily-erected security cordon, exactly where Hal knew she’d be. Her long hair was pushed back from her face, eyes bright as she admired her creation. Hal’s spitfire lover, transformed into a mad scientist out of the old films.
Hal took her arm. “This is a step up from mice with six legs.”
She smiled at them, then turned back to the corpse with a sigh. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Hal looked up at the hulking carcass, a deflated, rubbery tower of death. It was hard to see beauty in the rot. “Was it ever alive, or did you design it as a dramatic corpse?”
Crown’s gaze dropped. “I couldn’t manage to get its body plan sustainable.”
Hal squeezed her arm but let go before they squeezed too tight. “What the hell was your plan? Now it just sits there, rotting pollution into the sea?”
Crown shook her head. “It’s biodegradable,” she said.
Hal stepped in front of her, forcing her to meet their eyes. “Crown of Thorns Jones!” they growled. “Take this seriously.”
She did look at them properly now.. A shadow of what might be regret passed over her face. About as close to regret as this monster was to a whale. “I didn’t know it would bother you, Halifax.”
Hal stepped back to look at the carcass instead of her. Thankfully, the beast’s huge eyes were all closed, no gaunt sockets to haunt Hal’s dreams. Fleshy bulbs dangled from its jaw and bobbed in the water. Once-blue skin was greyed over with rot. The spine and six flippers were dotted with globs of more translucent flesh, jelly-like, that glowed a soft and slowly fading red.
Just last night everything had still been perfect. Hal had cooked dinner and gotten the balance of spices wrong like always. Crown had laughed and said she’d be happy to eat Hal’s salty spaghetti forever. Said ‘forever’ like she meant it. And all this time she’d been keeping a secret the size of a leviathan.
Crown’s voice went serious. “This will make them pay attention to the health of the ocean if anything does.” She waved up at her genetically engineered edifice. “Something like this rising up? People will finally ask questions about the oxygen levels, clean out the waste—”
“Is this the whole reason we moved to the coast?” Hal said in a voice that wavered. “Why you moved in with me at all?”
Crown looked at them mutely and took their hand. Rain fell on the beast’s sloping sides, sirens wailing as the city tried to decide what kind of emergency this even was.
“You were the other reason,” she said.
Hal tilted their face up toward the rain and the dead monster Crown built. Perhaps buried in that corpseflesh there was a tiny seed of life, doomed genes spelling out hope. A thin hope, but with her hand in theirs, they could believe it.
