I'm a postdoctoral marine biologist. On a deep dive off the Olympic coast, I caught a creature out of legend.
He was beautiful in a way nothing alive should be. He was also cold — a thousand-year cold, the kind that has never warmed for anything.
For research, I tried to clip a scale sample. My glove brushed the iridescent blue of his tail.
He went off like a flare. The tail looped around me and snapped me up against him, and his gold eyes had no curiosity left in them, only intent to kill.
"Human. You broke a law."
I thought he was going to kill me.
Instead he pressed his forehead to mine, and his voice came in low and patient, the way a chef talks to a new dish.
"Your feelings taste good. As your sentence — from today, you will feel something for me. Every day."
"Joy. Anger. Grief. Wanting. Each one. I want to taste them all."
"Begin."
The word comes through six inches of cast acrylic, flattened, slightly out of phase. It still raises the hair on the back of my neck.
I take a breath, and I tap play on the laptop balanced on the rolling cart.
A Mel Brooks movie starts up on the wall. Young Frankenstein. It's the gentlest, broadest comedy I could find on short notice. This is day three of my career as a merman feeder.
My name is Sloane Hayes. Two years out of my PhD, postdoc on the cryptid project at Mira Vita Marine Sciences, twenty-mile boat ride off the Olympic Peninsula, full sky no signal. Three days ago I dragged him up out of nine hundred meters of black water. Subject ID A-001. The team logbook calls him "the asset." I haven't given him a name.
Now I am his hired meal.
Onscreen, Gene Wilder is doing the bit with the candlestick. I make myself laugh. I push the laughter up into my chest and try to widen it, the way a singer opens a vowel.
In the tank, he hangs in the water and doesn't watch the screen. He watches me. The gold eyes don't blink for thirty seconds at a time.
He closes them, like he's chewing.
A few seconds pass. He opens them.
"Thin."
"Like soup with no salt in it."
The smile dies on my face.
That's the highest grade he's given me. Day one was flavorless. Day two was watery.
"I am trying," I say. It comes out smaller than I meant.
"Trying to laugh isn't joy."
He says it the way you'd correct a child mispronouncing a word.
"What you're feeling is shallow. Like the foam on top of standing water."
I shut the laptop. My face is hot.
"Then what do you want," I say, and I hear the ugly note in it. "What does a thing that doesn't have feelings know about mine?"
The words are out before I think.
The water in the tank changes. It goes from still to moving in a single beat. His tail snaps out and slams the acrylic with a sound like a struck bell, dull and large.
My heart kicks.
The gold eyes are very cold.
"Human. Watch your tongue."
"Or do you want to know what fear tastes like?"
I shut up.
The lab door beeps and rolls back. Trent Kovacs walks in, latte in one hand, key-card lanyard around his neck, the bored, expensive walk of a man who reviews other people's grant lines.
"Hayes. Talking to your boyfriend again?"
His eyes go past me to the tank. They stick there. He looks at Lir the way you look at an entree you ordered.
"It's not your project, Kovacs."
I step to the side without thinking, putting my body between him and the glass.
He laughs once, through his nose.
"Don't get attached. It's livestock."
"Vandermeer's view, by the way. We need usable data this week. The big one — why he doesn't age. Why he doesn't die."
His voice has the easy authority of someone reading from a slide.
"Sloane." He pivots my first name out of nowhere, the way they teach you in a manager seminar. "If we don't see yield, your line item gets cut. And the asset goes onto the necropsy schedule. They've got the freezer space."
My palms go cold.
He claps me on the shoulder. Hard enough to make me step.
"Be smart."
The door beeps and closes behind him. The lab goes quiet, except for the filtration whisper.
I look at the tank. He's looking at me.
The fear and the rage Kovacs left in my chest haven't drained.
"That one," he says.
"That one's good. Hot. Like fire."
I stare at him.
He means the anger. He means the fear.
"More," he says.
It's an order.
I start to understand him.
Manufactured feelings — feelings I press out of myself like flexing for a mirror — taste like nothing to him. He wants the real ones. The ones with their own weight.
So that night I queue up The Salt Coast.
It's a small 2007 movie my parents loved. They'd watched it the night before they shipped out on the Aleutian Daughter, fifteen miles off Adak, where a rogue wave and a bad weld broke the boat in half and the official report ended with a comma. I have not played that film since I was twenty-two.
The opening chord lands in the dark of the lab.
I tell myself I'm working. I tell myself I'm dosing the subject. I'm not.
By the scene where the woman walks out into the rain to say a thing she will never get to take back, I'm already gone. The sound goes underwater. My chest gets tight and stays tight. Tears come out without sound and don't stop. I don't think about my parents — I have not let myself think about my parents in years — and that is exactly why every held thing comes up at once.
I sit down on the floor against the cart. I put my face in my knees.
I don't know how long.
His voice comes from above me, careful.
"This taste."
A long pause. Like he's looking for a word.
"Bitter."
"I don't like it."
I lift my head. He blurs through the water and through my eyes both. He looks the same as always, cold and still, but there's something in the gold I haven't seen — a flicker I can only name as confusion.
He doesn't know what grief is.
He only knows this one isn't good.
Like a kid the first time they bite into a Brussels sprout.
Something in me goes quiet and sad and a little tender. He isn't cruel. He's a blank page.
"Hey."
He's calling me. He has never called me anything.
"Don't give me that one again."
I wipe my face on my sleeve.
"Why?"
He lifts one long finger and taps the water in front of his sternum.
"Here. It's uncomfortable."
It's the first thing he has ever told me about himself.
I look at him. I think, very stupidly: Lir. It comes from a half-remembered course on Celtic seafloor myths, the old sea god who walks on the floor of the world. He needs a name. I need to call him something other than the asset.
"I'm going to call you Lir," I say.
He considers this.
"All right."
The next weeks become a kind of performance art.
I cue up an Australian found-footage horror to give him fear; he calls it cold, like rust on iron. I play him a Rachmaninoff concerto when I'm in a mood for something big; he says hot, the way melted rock would taste, if it had a taste. The morning a paper of mine clears peer review I dance, alone, around the lab, ridiculous, and he closes his eyes and says, slow, like he is hunting the right thing —
"Sweet. Like — foam on a wave, in sunlight."
I write it down. Foam on a wave, in sunlight. I underline it twice.
I start to figure out his vocabulary. Under the cold he is a curious thing, a clean thing, with appetites the size of an ocean and no idea what they're for. And I am, somehow, the only brush painting color on his blank page.
It's not nothing.
I start looking forward to feeding time.
Then Vandermeer comes down to the bench level for the first time in five months.
She is in a navy blazer and pearls. Her hair is the shade of blond that costs money to keep. Kovacs is half a step behind her with a face that could not hide a winning hand if he tried.
"Dr. Hayes. Your work has been very interesting."
She is smiling at me the way you smile at an inventory line.
"I hear you and the subject are getting along."
My stomach goes down a flight of stairs.
"Director, he's not a subject. He's a sapient being."
"Sapient," she says, and the smile thins. "Which is exactly why he's the differentiator."
She walks past me, slow, to the tank. Her eyes go bright.
"Eight figures alive. Nine on the table. Sloane — do you understand what we have here? Series-C unlocks at the necropsy. He is a walking treasury."
Kovacs is in my ear. "Director, she's been running movie nights in here. I've watched her run them."
"He hasn't given me anything but a pet to keep."
Vandermeer's smile finishes dying.
"Dr. Hayes. As of today the A-001 program transitions to Dr. Kovacs."
"You're suspended."
"Hand over your key-card and your laptop."
The world gets very tinny.
"No — you can't do this to him —"
I move toward the tank, and two contract security in soft-shell jackets get me by the arms. Kovacs is talking, fast, to Vandermeer, the words vivisection and full panel and cardiac tissue alone falling out of him like dimes.
I look back.
Through the acrylic, Lir's tail is flicking — short, quick, agitated. The gold eyes are locked on me.
His mouth shapes a single word, no sound.
Anger.