Rolling in the Deep (6 page)

If he could just get the captain away from her control room for five minutes, he’d show her how much fun it could be.

And then there was the dummy. Who the hell hired a dude who couldn’t hear to work on a cruise ship? It didn’t make any sense. Bobby figured the guy had been made First Mate out of some sort of weird affirmative action thing—like, he was Mexican or something, and he couldn’t hear, there was
no way
he’d been the best man for the job—and that he’d mostly be confined to the control room, where he couldn’t fuck anything up. As if. The captain kept sending David to go on patrol with Bobby, like
he
was the one who needed supervision.

This sure wasn’t the pleasure cruise he had been planning on. And now there was a weird humming noise coming from the water, which naturally the deaf dude couldn’t hear. “I
said
, there’s a funny noise,” he repeated, louder and more slowly.

The dummy looked at him flatly and shook his head.

“Shit, I thought you could read lips.” Bobby scowled for a moment before pointing to the rail and saying, “Not that you can hear me, but I’m going to go check it out, you useless sack of shit. Okay?”

He turned his back before David could shake his head again, and thus missed it when the other man held up the middle fingers on both hands. Bobby was already moving toward the rail, a puzzled look spreading across his face.

“I really wish you could hear me, asshole, because this shit is
weird
,” he said, as much to hear something besides the humming from the water as for any other reason. He leaned out over the rail. Lights danced off the waves, tinted green by the algae or plankton or whatever it was that could tint light green. “It’s like…a lullaby, or some such shit…”

David tapped his foot. When Bobby didn’t turn back around, he stomped it instead, hard enough that he knew the other man would be able to hear him. Bobby didn’t react.

‘Asshole,’ David signed, and continued on down the deck. Jovanie didn’t require him to do his rounds with another crewman—hadn’t in years—and he’d only agreed to take the new guy because she had asked, very nicely, if he would give the kid another chance. Well, the kid had been given his last chance as far as David was concerned. After he finished checking on their passengers, he was going to go back to the control room and tell the captain that Bobby Warwick needed a sharp kick in the ass.

David turned the corner. He never heard the splash when Bobby hit the water.

By the time anyone came looking for the missing sailor, the blood had long since washed away, leaving only the calm, empty sea.

Morning found the ladies of the Blue Seas mermaid troupe in a standoff with their so-called “cruise director.” Adrian Curran stood in front of the group, blocking them from the portion of the deck that had been reserved for their use. Kevin and Anne stood off to one side, Anne barely managing to smother her yawns behind her hand.

“Shouldn’t have stayed up so late talking to the fish guy,” murmured Kevin.

“I like the fish guy,” she said, and yawned again. “He’s like science grandpa. He’s nice.”

“He had you half convinced that there were monsters at the bottom of the Mariana Trench,” Kevin said.

Anne laughed. “Isn’t that the whole point of this trip? To convince us that there are monsters down there?”

“If the monsters look like them, I might not object too much,” said Kevin, nodding toward the gathered mermaids.

The mermaids were nowhere near as jovial. Sunnie stood with her hands clenched tight on the grips of Jessica’s wheelchair. That may have been the only thing keeping her from taking a swing at the man from Imagine.

“We have a
contract
,” she was saying, voice tight with anger. “We are allowed to go into the water.”

“I am simply reminding you that according to that same contract, you are all risking your payment for this voyage if you are picked up by any of our cameras before we have given you the official go-ahead,” said Curran. He sounded much calmer than she did, probably because he truly felt that he held all the cards. The payment Imagine was offering these women was not inconsiderable, and no one would be foolish enough to risk it for a little morning swim.

He hadn’t counted on the Blue Seas mermaids. Sunnie suddenly smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. “See, here’s the thing. I don’t know if you realized this, but before I became a mermaid, I was a paralegal. We’ve all read our contracts, even the fine print, and according to that fine print, we automatically received the official go-ahead to enter the water as soon as the
Atargatis
reached the Mariana Trench. While Imagine officials are absolutely free to declare us in breach for whatever reasons they like—I bet at least one of your cameramen picked us up when we were sunbathing, for example, and Teal and Jessica were definitely wearing their tails, even if no one else was—once that happens, we are no longer bound by our NDAs.”

Curran’s eyes widened. “I am sure that is not true,” he said.

“It is,” said Jessica brightly. “I ran it by our contracts lawyer before we signed. According to the contract, if we are not paid, we are not bound by any agreements we may have made with Imagine.”

“We already spoke to the Captain about what she would charge if this suddenly became a pleasure trip for us,” said Teal. “She said she would want us to pay for the food we’ve eaten, which is totally reasonable, given the prices she quoted, and that she would be more than happy to take the passage in trade. Something about how she’s been wanting to branch out into mermaid cruises.”

“Bets that the captain only said that because she likes Curran about as much as everyone else does?” whispered Anne.

“No bet,” replied Kevin.

Curran had gone white. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said.

“We might, if you don’t let us go swimming,” said Sunnie. “You all are here to make a television show and get big ratings, and that’s swell. We’re here to get experience swimming in open waters. Now are you going to stand aside, or are we going to break our contract?”

Curran took a deep breath, apparently looking for another objection. He didn’t find it. In the end, he frowned, declared, “You are going to regret this,” and spun on his heel, stomping away down the deck.

“Wow,” said Teal. “Could he have sounded more like a Bond villain if he had
really
tried?”

The rest of the mermaids laughed, and the whole group resumed their passage down the deck, with Anne and Kevin bringing up the rear.

“I still don’t believe you woke me up for this,” moaned Anne. She let her eyes slide half closed as she walked, trusting Kevin to stop her before she could walk into any walls.

“I like the mermaids,” said Kevin reasonably. “Besides, you know you’d have been pissed if you’d missed anything.”

“I hate you,” said Anne.

Kevin chuckled.

Curran had intercepted the mermaids about twenty yards from their designated launching point. They scattered to cover the deck, stripping down to sports bras and bikini tops as they pulled on their tails. This early in the day, most weren’t bothering with the flesh-colored wraps, or with the elaborate seashell “vests” that some of them wore for shallow dives. Anne wound up next to Sunnie, watching as the purple-haired mermaid tugged her fins into position.

Teal and Jessica were already seated on the edge of the ship, waiting for their troupe mates to be ready. Anne nodded toward them and asked, in a low voice, “What’s their story?”

“You mean where are they from, or how did they join the troupe?” Sunnie looked guilelessly at Anne, watching as the other woman’s cheeks slowly reddened. “Ah, I see. You mean ‘why are they always in their tails.’ Well, you may have noticed the wheelchairs.”

“I did,” Anne admitted.

“We’ve found—us as a collective troupe, and Teal and Jess individually—that people talk one way to a woman who doesn’t stand up because she’s a mermaid, and another way to a woman who doesn’t stand up because her legs are not quite up to factory standards,” said Sunnie, checking the seal on her hips as she spoke. “If you want to know more about their individual reasons for using those chairs, you can bring it up with them. As far as we’re concerned, they’re mermaids. If they’re mermaids who don’t walk, and who need a ramp at any venue that wants to hire us, that doesn’t change the most important thing about them.”

“Got it,” said Kevin. He paused before adding, “I think I’d like to talk to you—all of you—when this voyage is over. I think a documentary film about professional mermaids might be a nice thing. It wouldn’t cost much. I could maybe even sell it to Imagine as tie-in programming.”

Sunnie smiled. “I think we’d like that. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” She couldn’t walk in her tail, but she could hop, and hop she did, until she came to the edge of the deck. Then she twisted around and fell backward off the
Atargatis
, dropping like a rock to the waiting ocean below. The rest of the mermaids followed her, some of them yipping or whooping as they fell, others just diving into the deep blue water. In less than a minute, Anne and Kevin were alone on the deck, and the waves were alive with brightly colored fins and the laughter of mermaids.

“I never figured you for a romantic,” said Anne, before yawning again.

Kevin kept aiming his camera at the water. “There’s nothing romantic about appreciating beauty.”

“It’s a bunch of women dressed up like mermaids,” said Anne. “Either you recognize it as make-believe on a grand scale, or you’re being a romantic.”

“What, so you’re not a romantic?” asked Kevin, taking his eye away from the viewfinder long enough to turn and look at her.

“Not before coffee,” said Anne, with another yawn. “Come on. Let’s go get breakfast before I’m expected to be perky.”

Kevin laughed, and followed her away down the deck.

The Pacific was cold, but that was what neoprene was for: the tails were weighted to provide their wearers with better marine buoyancy, but also to enable them to tolerate low temperatures for longer. The slimmer mermaids, like Teal and Andrea, would feel the need to get out of the water before their more well-padded comrades. They’d still be able to tolerate the cold better than someone in a normal swimming suit, and keeping their legs so well-insulated did a great deal to reduce the odds of hypothermia.

While all of them used the classic “mermaid kick” for primary locomotion, they each had their own style of swimming. Jessica mostly pulled herself along with her chest and shoulders, moving through the water like a large, colorful eel. Teal used a modified breaststroke, and was one of the fastest swimmers in the troupe. Her speed enabled her to do partial dolphin-lifts even in open water, and soon, most of the mermaids were emulating her, trying to copy the way she lifted her upper body out of the waves.

Sunnie hung back by the guide rope, watching the rest of the troupe frolic. Their morning exercises were mostly a matter of conditioning and preparation for the more intensive routines ahead. The man from Imagine clearly thought that they were just goofing off, and just as clearly didn’t understand what it
meant
to be a mermaid. If they didn’t practice here, where no one would see them, they would never be able to manage the dives and near-misses described by their contract.

Being a mermaid might seem like all fun and games, but it was a job like any other. If not all the members of the troupe took it as seriously as they should, well, Sunnie would take it seriously enough for all of them. That was her role within the troupe; that was why they had elected her leader and spokesperson for the year. To be honest, she was looking forward to the next restructure, when she could become as carefree and flippant as the rest of them, and someone else could take responsibility for a change.

Jessica was circling at the edge of the group, breathing rapidly in and out through her nose as she prepared for a deep dive. She was hoping to beat her personal best of nineteen feet straight down before it was time to perform for the cameras. There was something about seeing a woman rise up out of the depths that could thaw the skepticism of even the most hardened heart. Once she could get down to twenty-five feet, she thought she’d be ready. Her hair and dorsal scales were dark enough to let her slide into position without being seen, and then? Magic.

She looked down at the water, still breathing rapidly in and out. The sea floor was so far beneath them here that she didn’t need to worry about losing her way. All she needed to do was dive.

And so she did.

She cut through the first ten feet like a guided missile, slowing only when the water began to push back. Her lungs weren’t burning, and she still felt confident in her descent. She spread her arms, pulled herself deeper, and kept going.

When she finally stopped, the depth meter in her watch indicated that she was twenty feet below the surface—almost there. The water was dim around her, turning to twilight in the absence of direct sunlight. She spared a split second to consider diving deeper, and then decided that pushing her luck would be a bad idea. There would be other days, and other dives, before it was important that she be able to perform for the cameras. It was time to go back up.

It was easy to lose track of which way was up and which was down while floating twenty feet beneath the surface, especially with her tail providing neutral buoyancy and preventing her from being pulled in either direction. Jessica looked calmly around, finally identifying the glimmer of light that would lead her to the surface. Then, and only then, she began to swim toward it.

On her wrist, unnoticed, the depth meter dropped from twenty feet to twenty-one, then twenty-three, then twenty-seven. Jessica continued swimming downward, chasing the light, unaware that she was moving in the wrong direction until her lungs began to burn and she realized, with a dull, sinking horror, that she should have reached the surface by now. She raised her hand, intending to check the depth.

When the clawed, webbed hand lashed out of the dark beneath her and locked around her wrist, she didn’t think: she just screamed, the last of her air streaming soundlessly away in a trail of silver bubbles. The hand yanked downward, and Jessica went with it, down, down, down into the bathypelagic depths of the Pacific Ocean.

If any of the remaining mermaids noticed the bubbles of her last breath breaking the surface, they dismissed them. There was no reason to think that Jessica was in distress—not until Sunnie called, “It’s time to go back,” and the others began to realize, slowly at first, and then with dawning horror, that they hadn’t seen Jessica since she made her dive.

They all went down repeatedly, searching the water around the ship; a few of them even swam
under
the ship, ignoring safety protocols and common sense in favor of searching for their missing friend. They didn’t find her. For all intents and purposes, the ocean had simply opened its jaws and swallowed her whole.