No.
This isn't supposed to be the shape of it.
The joy I taught him was foam on a wave, was a rainbow after rain, was the bite of something good when you're hungry. It was not supposed to be a man on fire smiling so the woman he saved doesn't have to watch him die without a face she'd know.
Tears smear the corridor. Something is squeezing my chest with both hands.
I don't let him die like this.
I get up. I run.
The seawall flood-valve is in a control room at the end of the west corridor — a dumb, fat, red-painted wheel, marked EMERGENCY FLOOD, plumbed straight from the lab's seawater intake to a separate dump array of overhead nozzles, the dead-stupid backup the architects built for a day when nothing else worked. It's there for fires the suppression system can't catch. It's there for a day like this.
I throw the door open. I find the wheel.
Behind me, in the burning lab, I can hear Kovacs and a Strand man screaming. They are on the wrong side of every fire door in the building. They are getting what they earned.
I crank the wheel with both hands. It squeals and gives.
In the pipes the ocean comes alive.
I run back to the lab. The fire door is warped, the metal blistered, but it opens when I shove. White steam blasts out at me — the seawater is hitting the fire from above, broadside, every backup line opening at once. The Pacific is coming in through the ceiling.
The flames are dying. They die in a hiss like a thousand cats.
I wade in. The water is at my shins. The lab is a black smear of melted plastic and twisted steel.
He is in the trough.
He is collapsed half over the rim. The blue tail is a charred stump of a thing, ridged like driftwood pulled from a beach fire, the scales gone, the long beautiful line of him a cinder.
His eyes are closed. His chest barely moves.
"Lir —"
I drop on my knees in the seawater beside him. I want to put my hands on him and I can't, anywhere I touch him is a wound.
I press my face to the side of his head, where there's a strip of skin still whole, behind the ear.
"I'm sorry," I'm saying. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry —"
I don't know how many times.
This is on me. If I had not pulled him up out of the dark — if I had clipped one scale and let him go — he would be in the deep right now, doing slow circles in the dark, doing nothing but being himself, the cold magnificent king of nothing.
A wave of feeling rolls up in me that I have never held before. Bigger than the grief. Bigger than the guilt. Something on fire from the inside out.
What is that.
What is that.
I am holding his ruined face in my hands. Saltwater is dripping off my chin onto his forehead.
"Lir, wake up."
"Please. Don't go —"
"I love you —"
It is out of my mouth before I know I've thought it.
I freeze.
Love?
Lir? Me? Love?
Under my hands, the dying body twitches.
His eyelashes move. His eyes open, slow. The gold is not focused, and then it is. He looks at me. There is curiosity in there, of all things. Like he just got handed a new word.
He lifts a hand. I think he means to touch my cheek. He doesn't make it.
"This taste —"
His voice is a thread.
"Different. From all the others."
"Warm — full — full —"
He doesn't finish.
A faint blue light crawls up out of his skin.
It is everywhere on him at once — under the burns, inside the ribs, threading along the wrecked tail. It brightens. It eats up the edges of the room. It is on me too, in my hair, on the backs of my hands.
The burns are closing. I can see it happen. New skin sealing the splits. Pink first, then his color again.
The black stump of a tail is moving. The scorched outline of it loosens and breaks and flakes off in dust, and underneath the structure is changing. Bone reorganizing. Muscle re-laying. The single line splits.
Two legs.
The light fades.
The thing in my arms is no longer the merman. It is a man. Long-limbed, naked, smelling of seawater and burnt copper, with the same impossible face and the same gold eyes. He looks down at himself, at the legs he didn't have a minute ago, with a brief, mild interest, the way you'd look at a new pair of shoes.
Then he sits up and pulls me hard against his chest.
His arms are warm. They are warm and wet and stronger than they have any right to be.
"So," he says, into my hair. He sounds — pleased.
"That's the best one."
"From now on, that one is mine."
"You feel it for me. No one else."
He has legs.
He has actual legs.
He is sitting in the wreckage of the lab with his arms around me, naked and unembarrassed, and I am staring at his knee like it's an alien artifact, which it is.
"Your tail."
"Mm. Gone."
He says it the way you'd say I left the umbrella at the office.
He looks down at me. The gold is amused.
"You said you love me."
It is not a question.
My face goes nuclear. In the middle of a literal fire, with two coworkers cooked in the next room, with sirens starting up somewhere on the far side of the seawall, I am about to die of being twenty-nine and embarrassed.
"I — that was —"
"What does it feel like?"
He cuts in, eager, like a kid about to learn a card trick.
"It —"
I have nothing. How do you explain love to a creature whose first emotional vocabulary was salt and no salt.
"It's good," he tells me, helpful.
He flicks his tongue out and tastes the corner of my mouth, where a tear has dried.
"Better than every other one."
He is not even being lewd. He is doing field research. My pulse skips one anyway.
Sirens, closer.
"We have to go."
I push at his chest. He holds on tighter.
"Where."
"Off this island. The ocean. It's where you live."
He goes quiet for a second.
"And you."
"I —"
I stop. I've blown up a corporate facility and killed a senior PI and a Strand principal. I am the headline of the worst week of the FBI's quarter.
He reads my face.
"You can't stay."
He stands up. He scoops me up off the wet floor like I'm two pounds. First time on legs and he doesn't wobble. Of course he doesn't.
"They will hurt you."
It isn't an opinion.
"Come."
I press my face against his shoulder. His heart is going steady, slower than mine.
"Kovacs," I say. "He doesn't get to walk away just because he died."
I want him buried. I want all of them buried. I want what they did written down where someone has to read it.
"Evidence," Lir says.
"What evidence."
"His office."
He carries me through the wreck of the wet wing, stepping cleanly over melted cabinets and warped rebar. Kovacs's office is on the east side, behind a fire door that auto-dropped during the alarm. The fire never reached it. It is sealed clean.
The door is locked.
Lir looks at the maglock for a beat, lifts a foot, and kicks.
The composite slab gives like cardboard. The frame around the lock comes out with the bolt.
I:
I love him very much. I also forgot for a second that he can disassemble a holding tank when he's bored.
He sets me on Kovacs's leather chair and walks to the safe in the corner.
"How are you going to —"
"I heard him do it."
He starts spinning the dial.
"His pulse changed at each digit."
"…You're a human polygraph plus a sonic decoder."
"I'm efficient."
I do not reply.
The safe opens. It is not full of cash. It is full of hard drives, banded paper, a row of color-coded SD cards. He pulls them all out and stuffs them into a sealed dry-bag he finds in the bottom of the safe — Kovacs uses one for his diving gear; of course he does — and zips it.
"What is all of this?"
"His trades. With other men. And —"
He stops.
"Recordings of things that should not exist."
I don't ask. I will, later. Right now I do not have the room.
He turns around. He has found a pair of Kovacs's running pants and a hoodie in the closet.
"Clothing for the human world, yes?"
"Yes," I say, weakly. "Yes, that. Good."
He dresses fast. The hoodie is two sizes too tight across the chest. He is the most attractive arsonist's accomplice in the Pacific Northwest.
He picks me up again.
"Where."
"The seawater intake," I say. "Service shaft, level three. It runs straight out under the seawall. Drops into open water past the breakwater."
I'd mapped it the first week of access, just in case. Just in case is here.
The shaft is cold and tight. He goes down it ahead of me with the dry-bag clamped between his teeth. Salt smell rises up at us.
We come out in open ocean a hundred meters off the rocks, in the dark. I gasp on the cold, and he turns me in the water and starts swimming, fast, toward deeper water.
When I look back, the island is small already. The lab is a pillar of orange smoke against the night. On the seawall, red-and-blue lights are going off in silent strobes, like a film with no sound.
We are gone.