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.

Only a moment later, she found herself obliged to breathe again. Her lungs intruded on her consciousness and demanded it.

She became furiously aware of the continuous, repetitive wheezing of breath into her chest, instead of single breaths spaced far apart as they ought to be. With a simple act of will, couldn’t she make her breathing stop? Catarina closed her eyes and pictured the deep green of the Bering Sea crossed by fans of sunlight. She pictured her fingers spreading out, parting the sun into rays; submerged cliffs whipping past beside her; water like streamers in her hair. She could stay here in this glassy airlessness for a long, long time. She simply wouldn’t allow herself to surface, no matter how that aching pressure swelled inside her, no matter—

Catarina gasped, and her eyes flashed wide as breath tore through her again. Her vision of the sea abandoned her, and instead she saw the pale, oppressive walls. She completely forgot the door. If the air kept on invading her in this insulting way, she would never be able to return to the sea. She’d never be able to forget what had happened to her body: this sudden deformity.

Breath was the first thing she had to conquer. Everything else could wait. She squeezed her eyes tight again, pulled a pillow halfway over her face, and dived into her dream of water . . . She’d swim deep, far down where the light turned thick and somber, where a whale might pass within reach of her trailing hand.

There was no need to head for the surface. Not for at least half an hour, at least . . .

“I’m sorry if we’ve been neglecting you,” someone said.

Catarina exhaled with such force that bile rose into her mouth for a moment. Her face was hot and damp, and she was ready to scream from frustration. She didn’t move the pillow to see who had spoken, but she did notice the sound of the door closing again.

“It’s incredible. We have an actual lieutenant from the Twice Lost Army staying with us, and everyone’s so caught up in the drama of the moment that they can’t even come check up on you,” the someone continued. It was a man, probably fairly young. Catarina found his nervous, placating tone distinctly annoying. “I guess the first thing is, can I get you anything to eat? What would you like? I can order delivery from twenty different places, so please don’t hesitate . . .”

Catarina threw the pillow away from her face and sat up slightly. The man stopped talking.

Young but not that young. Perhaps thirty. Moderately good-looking, with light brown skin and neat black hair and a strong, narrow face with prominent bones: not quite what she would consider handsome. Still, he was attractive enough that Catarina couldn’t help thinking that, if circumstances were different, she might enjoy drowning him. “Murderer,” Catarina murmured. “I need nothing from you.”

The man recoiled, wide-eyed. “Of course. You could only think that. But what happened to your . . . companions, the attack with the net, that was completely unauthorized. That’s why everything here is in such chaos. No one understands what happened or where that order to attack came from. There seemed to be two conflicting executive orders given at the same time, but one of them was faked. I have to say, your general showed remarkable strength of character in her response. We were all watching the whole thing on television, expecting the wave to come smashing down at any moment, and we were all stunned when General Luce refused to give in. It made a tremendous impression. She was faced with such a tragic, such an impossible choice . . .”

Catarina leaned her head heavily against the wall. Somehow in the brief time since she’d regained consciousness she hadn’t remembered the other mermaids in the net with her at all: their suffering the same as hers but still impossibly remote; their writhing and dying the same as hers, shared and yet incomprehensible. Their dying: that was what this man was talking about. All of the others must have died. And she, somehow . . . She’d heard that in very rare cases mermaids could survive leaving the water, but she hadn’t quite believed it. And why would she be the exception?

When she’d called this man a murderer she hadn’t been thinking of the other mermaids at all but only of herself. Of those two grotesque, suggestive bulges she could see running down the lower half of the bed . . . Hot shame rose in her face, confused and horrible. Her mouth was full of a strange sensation, something like burning pins.

“The president has already conveyed his apologies to your general for the loss of life. But—you could say that’s only a formality—any talk of tragedy is a formality—but the mermaids aren’t alone in grieving for what happened today. Much of the country is united in mourning for your friends. Catarina, I promise you that . . .”

She couldn’t let herself cry in front of this stranger. A hot, buffeting force was rising inside her, and its unwelcome winds were salty with tears.

“Lieutenant Catarina, I mean. I certainly don’t want you to think I don’t respect your rank.”

“Please leave me.” She could barely manage the words. Her throat felt raw; she’d screamed so long, so wildly.

“I’m . . . not sure you should be left alone, lieutenant.”

“I am not a lieutenant,” Catarina muttered.

“But . . . General Luce introduced you that way. On the news, immediately after the wave first went up. I’m sure I recognize you.”

“Luce was wrong. She is often wrong. Mermaids died today because Luce was wrong.”

The man pursed his lips as if he wanted to start an argument, but then he shook his head. “Just Catarina is good, then?”

“Queen Catarina.”

He’d been standing at the foot of her bed the whole time, but somehow her reply moved him to walk closer—it was almost unbearable to see those stalklike legs scissoring along, to think of her own body—then pulled the olive chair to her bedside and sat down, watching her with focused speculation. “I’m Rafe Naimier. Honestly I’d probably be more comfortable just calling you Catarina. Calling anyone queen doesn’t come too naturally to me. Can you live with that?”

Catarina kept her face turned away from him. The bed was made of white metal bars. Through the bars she could see plaster, also white and covered with small round blobs like bubbles rising in water.

“Can I ask you something? If you don’t think of yourself as a lieutenant, then do you consider Luce a general? I noticed that you called her simply Luce just now, without her title.”

“No. Luce is not my general.” Catarina thought of the net, the astonishing pain in her tail, and the scrape of scales against her back and lips as the mermaids around her shuddered and died. She must have lost consciousness at some point; her memory gave away to dark bewilderment. Now the cold metal of this bed frame was digging into her cheek. “So many of us are dead. To call Luce a general—it doesn’t help the ones who died in that net. The word has no meaning.”

From the corner of her eye Catarina could see him nodding. “So what would you call Luce?”

“What would I call her? A heedless, destructive child! Wild with power, thoughtless of the honor that all mermaids must live by!” The words rolled out as if they didn’t belong to her, drowsy and incantatory.

“You don’t like Luce, then?” Rafe’s voice was soft and curious.

“No, I don’t. I love her.” Catarina rolled her head from side to side, feeling the metal ribs striping her face with their chill. “Luce was a little sister to me. Ungrateful, impossible, but still much beloved. And I was her queen.” Rafe didn’t answer, but somehow his silence had a warm, receptive quality that made Catarina want to tell the story. “I saved her life when she first changed, when she knew nothing of our ways or of what her transformed body could withstand. I followed her into the depths to pull her back, at great risk to my own life! And that was not the only time I rescued her. And after all that, to hear the things she said to Nausicaa!” Catarina reared back and slammed her forehead into the bars. The ache was almost comforting. She reared again.

And then Rafe’s hand was there—his human hand, as warm as earth in sunlight—cradling her forehead with just enough pressure to keep it from hitting the bed frame again.

The heat of his touch entered through her skin, suffusing her face and then brushing deeper. Catarina jerked sharply away from him, glaring into his dark eyes. “I won’t allow you to hurt yourself, Catarina,” Rafe said apologetically. He pulled his hand back and held it out for a moment as if he weren’t sure what to do with it anymore. “I won’t touch you again, unless . . . What did Luce say to . . . Nausicaa—was that the name? Luce said something to Nausicaa that was very hard for you to hear.”

Catarina scowled at him. His touch had woken her to the discomfiting awareness that she’d already said far too much to a strange human; worse, to someone who was holding her as a prisoner. “Why do you ask me such things?”

Rafe held his eyes on hers. “Why? Because I care about the answers.”

“It was wrong of me to speak to you at all. Please leave me now. It is a violation of the timahk for a mermaid to speak with a human. It dishonors me.”

She meant to look away from him again, but somehow her gaze seemed linked into his. His face was very serious as he waited, letting the air hold her words, letting them linger like unwinding smoke. Then he spoke again very quietly. “Are you a mermaid, Catarina?” He let his eyes travel, just for a moment, to the two elongated shapes under the sheet, then turned to look at her face again.

Catarina let out a sharp hiss.

She wanted to sing—to sing him to death—but the fear of what her voice might sound like now gagged her. A sickening silence filled her chest.

Rafe nodded gently, taking her silence as some kind of answer. “You have an accent. It’s subtle, but I keep noticing it. Are you Russian?”

It was a strange change of subject, Catarina thought. But she still felt relieved that he had dropped his earlier, intolerable question. “I was Russian, once. Now I do not belong to any nation in the way a human would.”

“Where were you born?” Rafe’s voice was careful, neutral; Catarina was vaguely aware of how much effort he was putting into controlling his tone. Still, she felt again that inexplicable impulse to answer him.

“A town called Anadyr. On the Bering Sea. Not that this is of any importance to me now, of course.”

“You don’t consider your own life history important, Catarina Ivanovna?”

A bullet made of silence seemed to explode in Catarina’s chest. Airy shards scattered, shocking her with a kind of white pain. Then the silence dissipated, and Catarina’s voice came back to her as a scream. “WHAT did you call me?”

“I believe I’m speaking to Catarina Ivanovna Smekhov, born in Anadyr, Russia, on February fifth, 1961. Reported missing by her parents in January of 1977. Catarina, you have a name that means much more than queen. You have a history—”

Catarina screamed wordlessly. Any words now seemed hideous, an insult to feeling. Without quite thinking she lunged up on the bed—up onto her knees.

Realizing that made her scream again, both hands flailing out into empty air. Those lumpy, bony things holding her up were much too weak. Her legs felt muddy, saggy, teetering; she was already pitching forward, her head swinging helplessly toward the floor.

Rafe caught her by her shoulders, tipping her back onto the bed.

With all her strength Catarina slapped him across the cheek. But even her arms were so much weaker than they used to be. The blow felt sloppy, flimsy. Rafe was standing over her now, holding both her wrists in an oddly light grip, looking at her as if he were staring through a window and into a deepening sky. She waited for him to strike her back, to pulp her face with furious blows. She would welcome a beating; this body she had now deserved no better.

Instead he let go of her wrists and sat back down. “Would you have preferred if I’d let you fall?”

“Can you do anything besides ask questions?” Catarina snarled. She was sitting on her heels in a tangle of sheets, and her new legs were trembling under her. “Only a weak man does that. That way he never has to give an answer!”

“So take a turn doing the asking, Catarina.” Rafe shrugged. “I’ll tell you the truth.”

“You said they reported me missing. So tell me, if you sold a thing—if you sold your watch to the pawnbroker or to some filthy man on the street—would you run and tell the police that it was missing?”

For a moment Rafe just looked blank. Then his eyes altered; all their darkness seemed to be falling to some terrible depth. His lips parted and pinched closed again. “No. I absolutely wouldn’t do that.”

“So you say,” Catarina hissed.

“I also wouldn’t sell something that didn’t belong to me.” Rafe’s breathing came fast and strained.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean you didn’t belong to your parents. You weren’t theirs to sell! You only belonged—you still only belong—to yourself.”

“Then let me leave here.”

Rafe stared. “I don’t think you can even walk. Not yet. You need time to build up your strength. And the idea of you wandering through the streets, Catarina, in the shape you’re in now—”

“I can swim! Only take me to the bay. I can beg Luce, she can try . . . perhaps she can sing me into my proper form again.” Catarina swallowed. “Please, Rafe.”

“I was wondering when you’d finally use my name,” Rafe observed quietly. “Do you think I’m your jailer, Catarina? That it’s up to me if you stay or leave? If I tried to take you out of here we’d both get caught before we reached the elevators. That’s the reality now. I’m not your jailer, so it’s not in my power to free you.”

He was lying, Catarina thought bleakly. For a while there she’d half believed he might be better, different, than the men she’d known in her human life all those years before. She turned away from him, tugging the sheet up around her head.

“I was expecting you to ask me a question,” Rafe said to her back. “I thought you would say, ‘If you’re not my jailer, Rafe, then what are you?’ But now it looks like that might be a misplaced hope. Your only interest in me is what I might be able to do for you. Isn’t that true?”

Was it true? Catarina suddenly wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of telling him so. She stayed curled away from him, shrugging the sheet a bit higher.

“I’m a research psychologist, actually, Catarina. I’ve done studies on the effects of severe trauma: people in war zones, victims of . . . of human trafficking. The Department of Defense brought me in to prepare a report on mermaid psychology. That’s why I have the opportunity to be here with you now. And a colleague of mine here has been working on a database of missing girls who we suspect might have become mermaids; there were only two Catarinas on the list. That’s how I was able to guess your real identity.”

Catarina couldn’t let that go. “You mean that name you said? Smekhov? It has nothing to do with me! Luce might demean herself by using a human name, but even for her that is not her real identity. That identity fell away from her when she changed. And even if I’ve . . . lost my proper body, lost it for now . . . I don’t accept those noises you say are my name! Dogs barking, goats bleating as their throats are slit, are more my name than those! Ivanovna! That you could dare to call me Ivanovna!”

“Your patronymic. ‘Daughter of Ivan.’” Rafe said softly. Then he seemed to realize something. “Oh, Catarina, I’m sorry. I should have thought . . .”

“Surely when that man sold me for cigarettes, he sold my name as well! What right does he have to be called my father?” Catarina rolled over to glare at him.

A tear glittered on Rafe’s cheek. He wasn’t looking at her. “No right at all, Catarina.”

“And you dare to speak of our psychology, as if you knew anything.”

Rafe started laughing bitterly, brushing the tear away with the back of his hand. “I don’t think the Department of Defense is going to be too pleased by my report, honestly. They might be glad to hear your opinion that I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Against her own will, Catarina was curious. For several seconds she struggled to suppress her desire to ask him the question and then failed. “What will you tell them, then?”

“That you’re no different from humans. Psychologically a mermaid is indistinguishable from a human who’s been through a similar degree of trauma. The only real difference is the physical manifestation. Suffering transformed into beauty, into magic. It’s fascinating.”

“I am hardly a human,” Catarina muttered. She felt an impulse to flick her tail—and instead felt bare feet kicking at the white sheet.

“You’re . . . both, I’d say. Human and mermaid. That’s what’s so intriguing about you, Catarina. You have an exceptional richness of experience and identity. I mean, are you a beautiful young girl? Or are you a woman in her early fifties, with a lifetime of struggle and exploration behind her? On paper, of course, you’re the much older version of yourself, born in 1961, and not a teenager at all.”

“I’m sixteen years old!”

“And fifty-two years old. Simultaneously.” For the first time Rafe grinned at her, almost rakishly. “Now, I’ll be the first to admit that you look simply fantastic for your age.”

Hearing him say that made her feel so old, so weary. In a way he was right: she could sense all the long years dragging at her back, years that split the ocean waves with grief and death and pleasure. But Catarina also suspected that Rafe had reasons of his own for wanting to think of her as an adult and as at least somewhat human. She meant to stare at him contemptuously but instead looked down at her hands. She was annoyed to feel herself flushing.

“I’m sorry,” Rafe said after a long moment. “It’s inappropriate for me to tease you.”

Catarina shrugged.

“Can I return to an earlier question? I’ll understand if it’s too private, but I do care . . . about how you see things. About what matters to you.”

Catarina twisted away from him, but her body was tense and her head cocked as she waited for him to speak.

“What was it that Luce said to Nausicaa? That hurt you so much?”

Catarina leaned on one hand, thinking. If he was telling the truth, if he actually cared about the answer, well, nobody else did. Her breath rushed on, much too quickly, filling her lungs and then abandoning her again.

“Luce said—” Catarina paused, feeling her chest rise and fall, curling her unaccustomed toes and then spreading them. “She said to Nausicaa, ‘While you were away, you saved me so many times!’ As if even absent Nausicaa meant more to her than I could while staying faithfully by her side! As if the times I saved her were worthless in comparison!”

Rafe was silent, but his silence had a slow, serious tone to it that Catarina understood as if it were speech. “That sounds extremely painful,” he said after some time. “You’re saying you saved Luce’s life repeatedly, but for some reason she couldn’t acknowledge that, only what Nausicaa did for her. Is that right?”

She wouldn’t look at him, but after a moment she nodded.

“Excuse me for asking you this, Catarina, but . . . am I correct in thinking that you’ve been involved in sinking ships? With the deliberate intention of drowning people?” Rafe was using the same extremely careful tone she’d noticed earlier, his words seemingly placed one by one on velvet.

“I’ve drowned many hundreds,” Catarina answered dully. She was surprised to find that the statement felt strange to her. “Of course I have. The humans are owed our vengeance! It was only this madness of Luce’s that made me cease to kill.”

“And yet what you want most is to be recognized for saving someone, for saving Luce. Catarina, what does that tell you about yourself?”

Catarina looked at him.

“To me it says that you’ll get much more of what you truly want from life if you try approaching it from a different angle.” He grinned again, and his dark eyes sparked with sudden amusement. “It sounds like bringing vengeance isn’t actually all that fulfilling for you.”

“You mean that I should be like Luce is, with her plankton?” Catarina snarled. Rafe just smiled at her, his look calm and warm.

Before she could stop herself Catarina realized that she was smiling sadly back at him, smiling even as her first uncontrollable tears began to flow.