Chapter 13
Alette
It doesn’t feel real at first.
One second I’m standing in the shallows, washing myself and shivering in my underwear, the water glassy and harmless around my knees.
I was thinking about how cold it is, about how I could go just a little deeper and dunk my whole head, and maybe scrub away the taste of the worm’s tunnel for good.
The next, something grabs me so hard I think it’ll snap my bones, and the world turns upside down.
I don’t even scream. There’s no time. I barely get a breath before I’m yanked under, headfirst, arms pinwheeling, and then the water closes over me like a lid.
It’s so cold it feels like burning.
There’s nothing but blue and black and the rush of bubbles.
I try to twist, to kick free, but the hand around my ankle—no, not a hand, it’s something else, something rough and scaled—drags me deeper, spinning me, until up and down switch places.
My lungs lock up. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from swallowing water.
I try to reach the surface with my eyes, but it’s gone. The sunlight is a smear somewhere above me, too far to matter.
Then, a second hand latches onto my wrist and pins it to my side. I buck, try to punch, but I can’t even feel my arm.
We keep going down. The pressure is a fist on my skull, squeezing. My ears pop. My chest burns. The water is thicker here, almost milkier, with threads of green slime floating in it, tangling in my hair. I start to see spots, orange and gold and sickly.
I claw at the thing holding me, dig my nails into its forearm, but it’s like clutching a wet rock. Nothing gives.
Then I see its face.
It’s a face with a mouth that’s too big, and there are too many eyes, set in a ring around its head, all rimmed with too much white like it’s permanently shocked to see you, and there’s gills on the sides of its face. It grins at me, tongue split down the middle and flickering.
I think it’s smiling. Maybe it’s just hungry.
My body wants to breathe. Every cell is screaming for it.
I try to reach for my dagger, the one awkwardly still at my hip, even in my undergarments, but the creature squeezes my arm so tight the bone flexes.
I yank and twist, desperate, and the sheath shifts just enough for my hand to fumble at the hilt, but the merman’s hand is already there, curling its claws around my wrist and squeezing until I release the blade.
A ring of bubbles explodes from my mouth. My last air.
I’m going to die. It’s not going to be a story or a lesson or anything but me with my arms pinned, legs burning, vision full of teeth and eyes and the blue-black dark, and then nothing.
Unable to stop myself from trying to breathe, I open my mouth and water floods in. I want to cough, but that only makes it worse.
It burns. But not like fire. It’s something colder, sharper, filling me where nothing should be. My chest convulses, trying to force it out, but there’s nowhere for it to go. My lungs seize, then drag in more, desperate and wrong, and the pain spikes so hard my vision flashes white.
I choke. Or try to. My body doesn’t know what to do with this. My throat locks, then spasms, pulling in more water, more cold, more pressure until it feels like I’m splitting open from the inside.
My chest aches. No—screams.
My limbs start to weaken, the frantic strength draining out of them all at once. My kicks slow. My hands lose their grip on him, fingers slipping uselessly against his skin. The world narrows, the edges going dark, everything dimming like a candle guttering in the wind.
Sound disappears first.
Then the panic starts to fade, not because I’m calmer, but because I can’t hold onto it anymore. My thoughts stutter, slow, break apart. The fight leaks out of me with the last of my air.
This is it.
A strange heaviness settles over me, almost peaceful in the most terrifying way. My body stops fighting. My chest still jerks, still tries to breathe, but it feels far away now, like it belongs to someone else.
The creature’s face blurs in front of me, all those eyes watching, that too-wide mouth still curved in something that might be hunger.
Everything is going dark.
I can’t feel my fingers anymore.
I can’t—
The merman jerks me closer, so fast I nearly bite through my tongue.
His lips cover my mouth, and I try to fight, but he’s so strong.
His mouth is colder than the water, and for a second I think he’s going to bite, to take my tongue or my face, but instead he just forces his lips onto mine, and something rushes into me.
Not water. Air. Actual air. Or at least the water feels like air now.
I choke on it, gag, but then my chest works again, and I’m not dying, not yet. He holds me there, mouth to mouth, until the burn in my lungs fades. Then he pulls away, lips and tongue smeared with blood that isn’t his.
I gulp. The next breath is easy. The water goes in and out of my lungs like it’s just air that got a little wet on the way.
I can breathe. Somehow, I can breathe down here.
My heart sprints in place, but my brain starts to work again.
The merman still has me. His grip is unbreakable, but he’s no longer dragging me further down. He just hovers, staring with his halo of eyes, head cocked like a dog waiting for a command.
I say, “Let me go,” and the words come out crisp and clear. Almost normal.
He shakes his head.
I try again, “Let me go. I have to get back. They’ll be looking for me.”
He bares his teeth, all of them. “No.”
The voice is a stone in the river. Heavy. The sound vibrates in my chest, not my ears.
He starts swimming again, and I try to grab for my dagger, but he sees my attempt, so this time he pulls me with both hands.
We move faster than before. I try to keep track of where we’re going, but the water is so full of green and silt and patches of black that I lose all sense of direction.
Every so often, a shaft of light pierces the gloom, but then we’re diving, zigzagging through what must be tunnels in the lake bed, darting past walls covered in slime and things that look like the bones of old fish.
I try to shout, to thrash, but he’s not bothered. I try to get my legs under me and kick off the mud, but I just sink deeper. The merman’s hands never slip.
After a while, he drags me into a bubble of perfect black. Then we pop out in a space so bright I’m blinded. It’s still full of water, but it feels different. Like it’s self-contained.
It’s a room. Or something like a room. The walls are pale stone, smoothed by water, and the ceiling is arched, strung with tattered nets.
The floor is covered in sand, bones, and bits of metal that catch the light and flash.
There’s a table in the center, made from a chunk of sun-bleached coral, and around it are piles and piles of trash containing things like broken cups, twisted wire, a dead bird or two, some things that were probably alive once but aren’t now.
He throws me to the floor, and I actually land there. It’s like we’re in a room full of air instead of water.
I scramble to my feet, but he’s already at the door, blocking it. I look around for exits, for anything, but there’s just him and the walls and the water. And, of course, me in nothing but my bra and underwear, feeling vulnerable and frightened.
He watches me, all of his eyes blinking in slow waves.
“What are you?” I ask, voice shaking.
“Merman,” he answers simply. Like it was obvious.
“You’re not going to kill me,” I say, voice steady. “Are you?”
He grins. “Not yet.”
I edge sideways, trying to get the dagger out of its sheath. He sees, and his smile gets wider. “Don’t bother. You’re too slow.”
“Please,” I say, hating the way it sounds, “let me go. I don’t know what you want from me.”
He points to a pile of bones in the corner. “You clean.”
I blink, thinking I heard wrong.
“Clean,” he says again. “House dirty. Fix.”
I look at the trash, the guts, the bones. “You want me to clean your house?”
He shrugs. “That’s why you’re here.”
My face gets hot.
He swims forward, and I brace for violence, but he just takes a length of chain from a hook on the wall and clamps it around my ankle.
There’s a ball at the other end, like a parody of the stories about prisoners, but it’s heavy enough that I can’t lift my foot more than a few inches off the ground.
He pats my hair, almost gentle. “Stay.”
Then he turns and vanishes through the door, tail lashing behind him.
I stand there, ankle shackled, and for a minute I can’t move. Then the panic kicks in.
I try the chain, yanking with everything I have, but it doesn’t budge. The shackle is tight, but not biting. Just secure. I try to slide the ball closer to the table, hoping for leverage, but the floor is slick with slime and every time I push, it just glides in a circle.
I reach for my dagger, my hands shaking. I get it free, then try to wedge the blade into the lock. It doesn’t fit. I bash at the chain, at the shackle, but the metal just dents under the blade’s onslaught.
I look around for something else like another weapon, a rock, anything. I see a fork in the trash pile, and try to use it to pick the lock, but it just bends and snaps. I grab a chipped cup and smash it, then try to saw at the chain with the broken edge, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface.
I try everything, but nothing works.
After a while, I sit on the floor, clutching the ball, and try to breathe. At least I can do that.
I count my breaths. I focus on the pain in my ankle, on the burn in my lungs, on the cold that never goes away. I refuse to let myself think about the surface, or about the others. I just count.
Then I hear a sound outside the door.
He’s back.
I stand, dagger in my hand, and get ready to fight. But my hands are shaking. And he already knows I’m slow. A human in the kingdom of water.
Except, this time, he doesn’t come back alone.
The shape that drifts into the room after him is even uglier than the merman, if that’s possible.
It’s smaller, lumpy, with a head like a melon and a pair of eyes that flick back and forth, never once stopping on me.
The first merman gives it a push, and it floats to the corner, curling up on a pile of what looks like seaweed but probably isn’t.
It groans, a wet, slobbering sound, then starts chewing on its own hand.
The merman regards me, all his eyes blinking in turn.
He has a necklace on now, several, actually, hung with rings, an old key, and what might be a shriveled human finger.
But it’s the key that draws my attention.
Does it go in the lock around my ankle? It’s fat and brass, which he fingers every few seconds, letting it rest on his chest where I can see it.
“You clean,” he says, and when I just stare at him, he bares his teeth.
He points at the floor, then the table, then the walls. “Make nice. Or else.”
He floats over to me, never moving his tail, just drifting like a dead thing. I get the dagger ready, hiding it behind my thigh, and as soon as he’s close enough, I slash at his face.
He leans back, laughing, and the blade cuts only water. “Slow,” he says again, and then he grabs my wrist and squeezes until I drop the dagger. He kicks the weapon away, and it spins through the room, embedding in a far wall.
He strikes me, and I go down hard, smacking my chin on the edge of the table. There’s blood, red and blooming in the water, and for a second I think he’ll be excited by it, maybe even hungry. Instead, he just watches the blood with bored interest, then spits on the wound.
It stings, but the bleeding stops.
He holds up the chain and wiggles it. “You stay. You work. I go now.”
He drifts to the door, then turns, eyes on me.
“If you good,” he says, “I feed you.” Then he leaves, and the door thuds shut behind him.
The little monster in the corner giggles, a high, stuttering whine, and gnaws a bone clean.
I crawl toward the far wall, but the ball doesn’t quite let me reach the dagger. Nowhere near it in fact. Damn it. How am I supposed to reach my only weapon?
I’m trapped.
It’s hard to fight the urge to scream, but if I open my mouth, the only one who’ll hear it is the idiot in the corner, and he’s too busy drooling on himself. So, I look around the room, hoping for something, anything, I can use to get my dagger back or free myself from the ball and chain.
The sand on the floor hides dozens of rocks and pebbles. I grab a big one and slam it down on the shackle. The sound echoes in the room, a dull, dead thud. The lock doesn’t even dent.
I try to remember everything my father ever said about locks, about chains, about escape.
He used to tell me the only way out of a trap was through the mind of the one who set it.
But there’s nothing in this room that suggests the merman even has a mind.
He’s all hunger and orders, all cruel joy in making me small.
The thing in the corner shuffles closer, eyes flickering. It watches me for a while, then scuttles away. Which is oh so comforting, especially being almost naked. I sit, panting. If I could sweat down here, I would be soaked. My heart beats out a rhythm that sounds in my ears.
I try to brace my feet on the wall and pull the chain as hard as I can, hoping the bolt will come loose. All it does is rip a layer of skin from my ankle, and the pain brings tears to my eyes.
It’s useless.
Collapsing next to the table, my cheek pressed to the sand, I watch the blood swirl from my ankle, curling up into the water until it disappears. Maybe I could wait him out. Maybe I could pretend to play along, make the place spotless, and when he lets his guard down—
But he won’t. There’s no point. That thing isn’t human. I’ll be long dead before it ever lets its guard down.
If I want to get out, I need the key. The one around his neck.
How the hell do I get it though?