I woke up on a strip of sand.
It was a small cove on a small island, somewhere in the inland water north of the San Juans, judging by the kind of pine and the rock. A ribbon of sun came in through cedar branches and warmed the side of my face. I had a man's flannel shirt over me. It smelled like a thrift store. He'd lifted it from somewhere on the way.
I sat up in the dry mouth of a sea cave. Outside it, on a flat rock, Lir was sitting with his back to me, watching the strait.
He had clothes on. Different clothes. Cargo pants and a sweater, both also from somebody else's house. Silver-blue hair down past his shoulders, gold eyes catching the morning. He looked, at a glance, like a tourist with extreme bone structure. He looked, on a second glance, exactly like what he was.
He turned at the sound.
"You're up."
"Yeah."
I came over and sat on the rock beside him. The water was very flat and very cold-looking.
"Where are we."
"A safe place."
"The drives?"
"Sent."
"Sent — how?"
He pointed at the water.
"My kind."
It clicked. He had a pod. He had always had a pod. The lab had captured one merman; there was a whole society out there that knew exactly how he had ended up in a tank.
"Thank you," I said, and meant it. For getting me out. For taking the drives. For all of it.
He looked at me, sober, the gold cool in the morning light.
"Why are you saying thank you."
"Because you helped me."
"I didn't help you."
He said it without inflection.
"I took back what was mine."
"Your what?"
He reached over and put one finger flat against my sternum, right above the heart.
"This."
"And what comes out of it. Every feeling, every flavor."
"They are mine."
"They were yours when you ate them," I said. "They are mine when I have them."
"You saved me. You belong to me too."
He said it as though it were a property line.
I had nothing for that. You cannot argue with someone who has just learned humans use logic and decided humans use it stupidly.
We lived on that island for a stretch of days. He was insatiably curious about every piece of human stuff in the dry-bag. He took apart my dive watch and put it back together with one extra screw and an opinion. He learned to write his name in the sand with a stick. He brought me fish he had caught in the cove, gutted, cleaned, charred to the precise moment he liked it, and he put a little of it on a flat rock beside me with a faintly disgusted look at the protein bar I was eating.
He learned English at a rate that should have been illegal. By day three he could argue. By day five he could be a smart-ass.
His logic stayed his.
"You're sighing," he'd say, narrowing his eyes. "Is that a 'sad' sigh."
"No, I just — I miss Diet Coke."
"Take it back. I don't like that one."
A gull tried to land on my shoulder once. He gave it a look that promised it could either fly off or be eaten in the next ten seconds. The gull, having no opinions worth dying over, left.
"It was too close," he said. Reasonable.
I started to like it. I started to like being needed like that, completely, in a way that said I see one person in the world.
On day six his pod brought news.
He sat down beside me on the rock and told it like a tide chart. The drives had hit. Anonymous tip, sent to a maritime regulator, three newsrooms, two attorneys general. Mira Vita was raided. Vandermeer in custody. Two of the Strand men named in the wire transfers, indicted. Kovacs publicly listed as deceased in a "research accident." The story had become the story for forty-eight hours.
I had been named, careful and clean, as a victim and a whistleblower. Surviving employee. Possibly under duress. The lawyers had already lined up.
"It's done."
I let out a breath I had not known I was holding for ten days. It was a lightness. A rinsing.
Beside me, Lir closed his eyes for a second.
"Mm."
"That one. I like that one."
"Like wind."
I laughed, surprised. It cracked something in me. I laughed until my eyes watered.
"Lir," I said. "It's over."
I looked at him.
"I think — I think I have to go back."
The peace went off his face like a switch.
"Back."
"Where back."
"To my life. The one I had."
"Your life is me, isn't it."
His brow folded. He looked at me as if he was trying to read a word that did not exist.
"Lir, I'm a human. I have a job. I have an apartment. I have an aunt in Bellingham. I can't live on this rock forever."
The cave got cold.
The gold of his eyes had something in it I had not seen before, and did not want to see.
"So you abandon me."
"It isn't —"
"You don't need me."
"That's not —"
"You don't taste that one for me anymore."
He was up. He was over me. He had moved fast. He had me against the cave wall with a hand on the rock either side of my head, looking down at me, and the gold was wounded and angry both at once, a bad combination.
"I do," I said, fast. "Of course I do."
"Then why."
I looked up at him. I saw it.
He was not being a possessive monster. He was being terrified. The only person in the world who had ever made his world have color was telling him she was leaving. A child afraid of losing a thing they love.
Something in me went soft.
I lifted both hands. I put them on his face.
"Lir. I am not abandoning you."
"I am going home. I'm signing some papers. I'm closing some accounts. I'm telling my aunt I am alive."
I looked at him, steady.
"And then I'm coming back for you."
"Or —"
I tilted my head.
"Do you want to come with me? Do you want to see what the human world looks like, the rest of it?"
He came with me.
The cover story was easier than I'd expected. I told everyone I had an estranged half-brother — Liam Hayes, my mother's son from a relationship before my father, raised on the East Coast, whose ship had gone down in the Bering two years ago, and who had been picked up by a fishing boat and walked off the dock with no memory of who he was. He had drifted west, ended up at the lab during the worst week of my life, and we'd recognized each other through pure improbability. The press loved the angle. The lawyers loved it more — it explained where I'd been the missing month.
I cut his hair. The silver-blue went into a black undercut and I dyed the long top. Brown contact lenses. Plain T-shirts. From the outside he looked like a sullenly handsome man in his late twenties who didn't talk much. I had to keep reminding the part of my brain that screamed MERMAN every time I saw him in the kitchen.
He had not actually become anything other than a merman. He had only acquired a costume.
He followed me everywhere.
I went to the grocery store; he came. I went to a friend's birthday brunch; he sat next to me in the booth like a bouncer with a rigorous review of every man within twelve feet. I had a meeting at my new job — I'd taken a contract with the Pacific Coast Oceanographic Institute, my parents' old place — and he tried to come into the office.
"Lir. This is work."
I held up a hand at the door.
"Wait outside, please."
His mouth set.
"Work is more important than me."
"…No."
I felt my patience leak out of my left ear.
"Then why can't I come."
"Because there is a rule."
"What is a rule."
"A rule is —"
I gave up. I took a different angle. I went up on my toes and kissed him, fast, on the mouth.
"That one," I said. "That's settling down. Did you taste it?"
He blinked.
He touched his own lower lip. His eyes went a little dazzled.
"Sweet."
"Sweeter than joy."
"I like it."
While he was still rolling that flavor around I stepped past him into the office and shut the door.
Cohabiting with him was a long unbroken negotiation. I taught him the microwave. I taught him contactless payment. I taught him not to stare unblinkingly at my coworkers in the rare moments they got past my door.
He, in turn, kept my refrigerator full and my emotional life narrated.
He had a frighteningly fine ear for me. When I came home from a bad meeting tight in the shoulders he would put a glass of cold water in my hand and sit very still next to me and finally say, "irritation. Like Pop Rocks. Pop Rocks is what they're called?"
When I cried at a movie about a boy and a horse, he held me, badly — patting my back like he had read about back-patting in a book — and said into my hair, "sweet and sour. That's a good one. It opens the appetite."
He was no longer the blank page.
My moods had become his curriculum.
And he had become, without me noticing the transition, my favorite kind of inconvenience.
It was on a Tuesday when the call came.
I picked up a number I did not know and Mara Ostrowski said my name. She was an archivist at PCOI. She had been my mother's research partner once. She was the kind of woman who phoned a landline because she did not trust cell signal.
"Sloane. Are you all right."
"I'm fine, Mara."
"Good. Good." A pause. "There is a thing I think you ought to know."
"After the Mira Vita raid, when the federal team cleared the wet wing — they did a structural sweep. Under the slab the holding tank sat on, there was a recess. A void cut into the foundation."
I sat down.
"In it, in a sealed plastic case, they found a leather notebook."
"Sloane. It was your mother's."
I stood up again.
"My mother's notebook?"
"Field notebook. The one she kept on the Aleutian Daughter. They sent it to me to authenticate."
Mara's voice was careful.
"Sloane. Your parents — the wreck — it may not have been a wreck."
"In the last entries she writes about a thing she calls the project, all in lowercase. About something they were tracking. Something to do with — and I quote — 'a thing the old fishermen call the bluetail.' She was scared, Sloane. The last seven pages are torn out. Cleanly. Razor."
"She was getting close to whoever didn't want it found. She thought it was a private interest. She mentions the symbol several times."
"What symbol."
"A black trident wrapped in chain. Sloane — that's Strand Maritime."
I went cold all the way through my hands.
My parents had not died at sea.
They had been killed.
For Lir.
I hung up and sat very still.
Lir came out of the kitchen with an apple in his hand. He saw my face.
He set the apple down. He came and crouched in front of me. He felt my forehead like a cat checking a sick kitten.
"Your feelings are loud."
"There is shock. There is grief. There is — hatred."
The gold went on my face.
"Who is causing the hatred."
"Tell me. I'll go and kill him."
He said it the way you'd say I'll go pick up dinner.
I came back. I caught his hand.
"Lir. It isn't like that."
I told him. All of it. The notebook. The bluetail. The seven torn-out pages. The trident.
He listened, very still.
When I was done, he was quiet a long time.
"This symbol," he said. "What does it look like exactly."
I told him.
The chain wrapping the trident. Black on white.
The temperature came off him like a cold front.
"Them."
"A poacher line."