"Poachers."
I almost laughed. The word seemed too small.
"They don't only study us. They hunt us."
He said it flat.
"For the blood. For the scales. For the heart."
"The heart of one of mine, in the right hands, is — what is the word — the key to long life."
I tried to picture it. Behind every news cycle about a missing dive expedition, behind every story about an unidentified body washed ashore. A trade. Live ones. Dead ones. Pieces.
"How many."
"Many of mine. They have killed many of mine."
His voice was even. The eyes were not.
"Your mother and your father. They saw something they should not have seen. They were going to put it in front of the world."
"They could not allow that."
"Once it was public, the hunting becomes hard."
It clicked into shape. Why the last seven pages of my mother's notebook had been razored out. Why the Coast Guard finding had been a single sentence. Why Mira Vita had existed at all — a "research" front to legitimize what Strand had been doing in the dark for years.
I had walked into my parents' killers' lab. I had handed them the very thing my parents died trying to expose.
"Lir."
I caught his hand. My fingers were ice.
"What can we do."
I did not want my mother and father's deaths to mean nothing. I did not want his pod to keep dying.
He turned his hand over in mine. His palm was warm.
"Their — base — is a moving thing. A platform on the open sea. International water. Hard to find."
"But."
"Once a year they hold a private auction."
"They sell what they have hunted."
"My kind included."
His voice was as level as before. Underneath the level, an ocean.
"I'm going to that place."
"And I'm going to put it under the water."
"With me."
I said it without thinking.
He frowned.
"It's dangerous."
"They killed my parents. They want my — my partner — for parts. There isn't a version of this where I sit at home."
I looked at him.
"Also," I added. "You are a merman. You can't get an auction invite if you wanted to. You need a human with a passport."
He was quiet.
"All right."
"Together."
He pulled me against him. He held me too tight.
"You promise me one thing."
"Whatever happens — you stay safe. Any negative feeling from you is a torture for me."
"Especially fear. Especially despair."
"I don't want to taste those again."
I pressed my face into his sternum. I nodded into him.
"I promise."
The plan took two weeks.
I had access, through PCOI and some old contacts of my parents', to charter rosters and front-company filings. I tracked the auction's date and rough region. Lir, through his pod, found the rig itself — the moving platform — out where the water turns blue-black and the maps run out.
We built ourselves identities. A new-money couple who had bought into the wrong kind of conservation parties: Adrian and Eleanor Marlowe. Tech, equity, opaque sources. The kind of people whose paperwork is convincing because nobody wants to look closely.
We bought the right clothes. We rehearsed a vague backstory we never let anyone hear too much of. The invitation came through a dummy address in Singapore on watermarked card stock.
The night before we flew, we stood on the apartment balcony. The sea was a black absence in the dark. The wind had salt in it.
"Lir," I said. "When this is done. What do you want."
He was behind me. He hooked his chin over my shoulder.
"You. With me."
"And."
"Your love. Every day. The flavor."
"…Be serious."
He thought.
"Back into the sea."
"And I take you with me."
"In my home, in the deep, there is a bed. The largest one. Made of the softest sea grass. We will lie on it together —"
His voice dropped, deliberately wicked.
"— and live like animals."
I elbowed him in the ribs. He laughed, low, the vibration going through my back.
The bastard. Apparently unlocking love had also unlocked a sense of innuendo.
He kissed the side of my neck.
"Sloane."
"Yeah."
"I love you."
He said it on his own. Not because he wanted to taste anything. Not as a transaction. Just because he wanted me to know.
It hit me in the chest harder than any of the other times. My eyes got hot.
I turned around in his arms. I went up on my toes and kissed him.
"How does that one taste."
"Mm."
He kissed me back, deep.
"Best one yet."
We were going to a place full of monsters. I wasn't afraid. With him beside me I had never been less afraid of anything.
The rig was bigger than I'd imagined.
A decommissioned semi-submersible refit into a floating fortress, four-deck superstructure lit like a luxury hotel, helipads on the upper decks blinking red. Around the waterline, a hard cordon of patrol skiffs. As our chartered helicopter banked in for landing, I counted at least twenty silhouettes with rifles on the upper rail. Strand Maritime's logo — the chained trident — was painted in black on every visible vertical surface.
Lir, in a tailored black suit, was watching the windows of our helicopter without expression.
"How does it feel."
"Loud."
He frowned.
"Greedy. The air smells of greed and want."
"Bad."
The auction house was on the second deck. Crystal chandeliers — actual ones, on a moving platform, ridiculous — hung over a long room set out with paddle stations. The crowd was every kind of expensive: shipping families, oil heirs, a Pacific Rim tech founder I recognized from a magazine cover. They greeted each other with the friendly grimace of people who had hunted together. Above the stage, a Strand Maritime banner: chained trident, black on white.
Lir and I took a table near the back. Two glasses of something expensive arrived without being ordered.
The auction opened. The lots were obscene. The taxidermied last specimen of a species I had thought went extinct in 1971; a chest of gold ingots from a Caribbean galleon that should have been in a museum; a man, alive, wheeled out in a smoked-glass case, who the auctioneer described as having "demonstrated pyrokinetic phenomena." Bidders raised paddles like they were ordering the wine.
I drank water and thought about being sick.
The auctioneer's voice picked up an octave.
"And now — the headline lot of the evening."
"A live specimen of a marine sapient previously believed to be myth."
"A merchild."
A wheeled platform came up through the stage floor.
It was a low acrylic display tank. Inside, curled tight against the back wall, was a girl who looked maybe eight in the way she looked at people. Silver-blue hair flat against her shoulders. Gold eyes wide and frozen. A long open wound on her tail had not been bandaged; it was leaking thin pink threads into the water.
My hand crushed Lir's under the table.
I felt the heat come off him. It was like sitting next to a furnace that had decided.
I squeezed harder. Not yet.
His mouth shaped the word yet, small.
"Bidding starts at one billion."
The room went up like a stadium. The price climbed. Two billion. Three. Four. I watched a man in the front row, paunchy, gray, with a black-trident pin on his lapel, raise his paddle calmly each time and outbid the room.
Halvar Strand. The man my mother had been killed for.
"Going. Going. Sold — five billion — to Mr. Strand."
The applause was the worst sound I have ever heard.
He was already rising from his seat to claim his prize when the rig moved.
It was not a sway. It was a punch from below. The whole platform jolted. Glasses fell off tables. Somebody screamed. The lights flickered.
Klaxons.
A crew man at the far doorway, finger on his earpiece, was shouting into it: "Hostile contact, all sides — what do you mean all sides —"
Lir was already moving.
He pulled me against the flow of the panicking crowd, toward the stage. His pod was here. I could feel it in him, the rightness of it, like a man in his own house.
"My people," he said. Confirmation.
He went over the lip of the stage in one step.
His fist went through the acrylic of the merchild's tank.
The wall shattered. Water and glass came down. He scooped her up out of the wreckage. She was small in his arms, tiny, and when she saw his face she made a sound that hurt me — pure pod recognition — and clamped her arms around his neck.
"Hey. I'm taking you home."
His voice was unrecognizably gentle.
The first guards arrived in our doorway, rifles up.
A whole rank of them. Strand himself was behind them, face purple.
"Take them. Take all of them."
The first volley.
I did not think. I stepped in front of Lir and the child. I put my arms out.
Bullets stopped six inches from me.
Six inches, in the air, in a curtain.
It was water. It was the water from the burst tank, hanging in a sheet between us and them, spinning. He was holding it there with one hand.
His other arm was around the child. His eyes were on me, gold and incandescent.
"What did I tell you."
"You don't get hurt."
The fury in him was not for me. It was for the men.
He put the merchild into my arms. She was warm. She was lighter than I expected. She buried her face in my shoulder.
"Take care of her."
He stepped past me, toward the men.
The rig kicked again, bigger. Through the shattered windows, in the running lights along the waterline, I saw what was hitting it.
It was every shape in the dark sea. Whales. Sharks. A pod of orcas. Things I could not identify. They were ramming the rig in waves, in a coordinated pattern, hammer blow after hammer blow. The lower decks were already groaning. Water was coming up through a stairwell.
Lir lifted his hand.
Every metal object in the room moved.
The chairs. The chandeliers. The auctioneer's brass-rimmed podium. The patrolmen's rifles. The bidder paddles. The black-trident logo plaque off the back wall, the chain wrapping it. They all came off whatever was holding them and lifted into the air, toward the ceiling, where they began to fold.
Steel ran like water. Brass twined like rope. The chain that had wrapped the trident stretched and broke and reordered itself. Something the size of a large car was assembling above us in mid-air, slowly, with the patience of a tide.
A trident.
Long-shafted. Three-pronged. Each prong as long as a man.
Unchained.
The voice that came out of Lir was not a voice from a body. It went through the floor and through the bone.
"By the tide's name."
"Judgment."
The trident dropped.
It went down through Halvar Strand the way a knife goes through paper. He pinned to the deck. He did not have the time to scream.
The rig was sinking.
Lir caught my hand. He took the merchild out of my arms back into one of his, and with the other arm he scooped me up against his chest.
"Out."
We went over the railing of the second deck. We fell, the three of us, into water that was already swallowing the lower decks. He kicked once, hard, away from the dying platform.
When I looked back over his shoulder, the rig was tilting. The lights were blinking out one bank at a time. The chained-trident logo on the bow rotated under the waterline. Then there was only black.
For my mother. For my father. For his kind.
Above us, the first light of morning was hitting the surface, gold on black water.
A new life was starting.
We came back to the small island.
The merchild was met at the cove by her own people. Before they took her, she came up out of the water on her arms and pressed her cheek against my hand for a long second. The thank-you of someone who had never expected to be alive long enough to give one.
Lir's pod came too. They surfaced in a ring around the cove at dusk, a dozen of them, beautiful and quiet and watching me. They did not seem startled that he had chosen a human. They seemed pleased.
An older one — broad shouldered, hair the color of moonlit kelp — came close to the rocks and spoke to me. His voice in English was halting but exact.
"Among us. Only when one of us finds the one true love does the tail give way to legs. Only then can he live on the land. Or take his beloved home, into the deep."
"In a thousand years, your Lir is the first."
"We are happy for him."
"And for you, who he chose."
He bowed his head. So did the others.
"You are our queen."
I went red. I tried to argue. Lir, beside me, did not. He accepted it the way he accepted weather. He told the elder I was the treasure he had paid half a life for, and he liked the word queen on me. The elder smiled.
After Strand sank, the consortium came apart. Every front company unwound in court within six months. The auctioneer turned on his employers. Two senators resigned. Mira Vita's name became a thing they put in textbooks under what not to do.
I quit my contract at PCOI. I sold the apartment. Lir surfaced, somewhere off the Florida Keys, a bag of gold doubloons from a 1715 Spanish wreck — I had honestly stopped asking — and that bought us a small unincorporated island in the inland water, plus the surrounding seas as registered private waterway.
We built a house on it. A clean small cedar one with a long porch and one wall of glass facing the strait. Sea-grass on the rugs. Books on the shelf because he kept buying them. He learned to cook seven things; I learned to be loved by something who had nothing else to do.
I thought that was the ending.
Then one morning I was tired in a way I should not have been, and the smell of seawater suddenly meant home to a part of my brain that had not noticed before, and Lir, putting an arm around me at breakfast, frowned.
"I can't taste you today."
"Excuse me."
"Your feelings. There is a — fog. A curtain. I can almost reach them."
"I do not like this."
He turned me to face him. He went serious in the way that scared me a little.
"Are you sick."
I had a thought.
I took his hand. I put it on my lower stomach, flat.
"Tell me what you feel."
He closed his eyes.
A few seconds. He started to breathe wrong.
His eyes opened. The gold was full of something I had never seen in him. It was not curiosity and it was not appetite. It was awe.
"There's another heartbeat."
"There's another — taste. Coming from inside you. Small."
He looked at my face. He started to grin. He did it badly, the same way he had once smiled in a fire. He had not had a lot of practice yet.
"I'm going to be a father."
"You are."
He did not know what to do with himself. He picked me up. He set me down. He crouched and put his forehead, very carefully, against my belly. He held it there for a long time.
When he straightened up, the gold of his eyes was wet.
"This is the most complicated one I have ever tasted."
"There is joy. There is — being-afraid? Being-careful. Wanting. And love."
"All at once."
"I love you both."
He said both.
Outside the long window, the sun came in across the strait. A pair of dolphins went past in the channel, arcing.
I knew the story was a long way from finished. We were going to add another voice to the house. There would be feelings he had not learned yet. There would be bad ones, and good ones, and the sweet-and-sour ones in between, and he would taste them all and tell us what they were like and we would correct him when he got it wrong.
My merman husband, in the long quiet rest of his life, would be feeding on the most delicate flavor in the world.
Family.
He would be very full.
And we — we were only beginning.