She was. Intense, passionate, all-consuming. Curiosity.
She squeezed Martin's hand across the table and headed toward her office. It was almost a half-hour until her shift began, but nobody on the circuit minded if she started early. She slid into her seat—a favored antique with flared arms and a skin of real leather—and was reaching for her headset when her husband's hand fell lightly onto her shoulder.
"Why does she matter so much?" he asked. It was the first time he'd come into her office since the breakdown.
"Marty, I've got to go to work."
He waited.
She sighed and swiveled her chair to face him. "I don't know. It's—it's a mystery, I guess. Something to solve."
"It's more than that."
"Why? Why does it have to be?" She heard the exasperation in her own voice, saw its effect on her husband. She took a breath and tried again. "I don't know. It's just—you wouldn't think a single person could count for much, but—she's making an impression, you know? At least on the Strip. She matters, somehow …"
Martin shook his head. "Is that what she is to you? A role model?"
"I didn't say—"
"She could be something else, Sou. What if she's a fugitive?"
"What?"
"It must have crossed your mind. Someone from N'Am—or I don't know, not your standard refugee, anyway. Why's she staying out on the Strip? Why doesn't she want to go home? What's she hiding from?"
"I don't know. That's what makes it a mystery."
"She could be dangerous."
"What, to me? She's way out on the coast! She doesn't even know I exist!"
"Still. You should report it."
"Maybe." Perreault swiveled deliberately back to her desk. "I really have to work now, Martin."
He wouldn't have let her off so easily before, of course. But he knew his assigned role, he'd been coached by a half-dozen well-meaning authorities. Your wife has just come through a very traumatic experience. She's fragile. Let her move at her own pace.
Don't push.
So he didn't. A little piece of Sou-Hon felt guilty for taking advantage of that restraint. The rest was reveling in the cradling embrace of the headset around her skull, the sudden pinpoint control over what was and wasn't perceived, the—
"Semen-sucking savior," she whispered.
The alert was flashing all over the left side of her visual field. One of the botflies had got a nibble. More than a nibble; a big predatory bite. It was hovering less than three meters off-target.
Not Amitav either, this time. A marriage of flesh and machinery. One woman, with clockwork.
Deep night, beneath an endless cloudbank. Across the black water, floodlights and heaters smudged distant light along the Strip. Perreault triggered the photoamps.
The mermaid crouched directly ahead on a jagged reef, a hundred-fifty meters from shore. The ocean, sparkling with microbial phosphorescence, tried to dislodge her. Between waves, the reef jutted a meter above the waterline, myriad tiny waterfalls draining down its sides; when the water crested the mermaid became a round black boulder herself, barely visible in the luminous foam.
She climbed to her feet. The surge rose above her knees; she staggered, but stayed upright. Her face was a pale oval painted onto a black body. Her eyes were paler ovals painted onto her face. They panned past the hovering botfly.
They did not seem to notice it.
Her face tilted down, stared directly ahead. One slick ebony arm reached forward, the fingers extended; a blind woman, reaching for something she couldn't see. Clarke's mouth moved. Any words were lost in the roar of the surf. Perreault slid filters past critical thresholds. Ocean sounds squelched into silence. Now only the shriek of distant gulls and a few syllables:
"No. Not—ain."
Perreault squelched the high frequencies as well. Now the mermaid stood in an utterly silent tableau, the Pacific crashing soundlessly on all sides.
"You never did," she said. Tide surged silently between her legs. The mermaid's reaching fingers closed around empty space. She seemed surprised.
Another wave swept the reef. The mermaid staggered, recovered. Perreault noticed that both of her hands were balled into fists.
"Dad." Almost a whisper.
"Ms. Clarke," Perreault said. The mermaid did not respond.
Right. The surf. Perreault increased the volume, tried again: "Ms. Clarke."
The mermaid's head jerked up. "You! What is it?"
"Ms. Clarke, I've been—"
"Something in the food? Some sort of psychoactive? Is that what this is?"
"Ms. Clarke, I don't know what—"
The mermaid smiled, a hideous baring of teeth beneath cold white eyespots. "Fine. I can take it. Do your worst."
"Ms. Clarke—"
"This is fucking nothing. You just wait."
The Pacific surged silently up from behind her, swept her from the reef in the blink of an eye. The cameras caught a last freeze-framed moment: A fist, raised briefly above the boiling water. Gone.
This is fucking nothing. You just wait.
Sou-Hon Perreault didn't know that she could.
Remora
The lock groaned open like the gates of an iron cathedral. Earthquakes lived in that sound, twisting metal, skyscrapers torqued painfully on their axes. Slow surge pushed flotsam from great doors that stirred the ocean.
Rising within that sound, another one: triple screws, cavitating.
She'd placed herself a few hundred meters offshore, in the center of a dredged scar leading to deep water. Gray's Harbor's commercial traffic passed directly overhead. By now she'd had enough practice to make it work. She rose a few meters off the bottom; the drag from the new backpack slowed her a bit, but she was getting used to it. Echosounding pulses from the approaching vessel tapped against her implants. The murky water went suddenly, ominously dark—first to her right, then directly overhead. The water pushed her backwards. An instant later a black wall, studded with rivets, rushed obliquely out of the murk and streamed past, filling the ocean. The hiss of approaching screws filled the water.
She'd counted herself lucky, so far, that none of the ships had smashed into her. She knew those odds were low—bow waves pushed water and flotsam aside—but such reassuring insights always occurred during quiet moments on the bottom. Now, with a cliff of motion-blurred metal within touching distance, she could only think of fly-swatters.
She broke the surface; the cliff shimmered into sudden sharp focus, black and rusty-red, a great concave overhang eclipsing three-quarters of the sky. An ice-wrangler. She turned to face the approaching stern. Racing toward her, edge-on, a metal fin angled down and out from the hull just above the waterline. Foam boiled where its distal end cut the water.
A trim tab. It could give her a free ride, or take off her head. If she floated along the surface—just past the point where the metal slashed the sea—the tip of the fin would pass beneath her. There'd be a split-second to grab at the leading edge.
Maybe ten seconds to get into position.
She almost made it.
Her right hand hooked the fin; the left slid off, confounded by turbulence. In an instant the tab was past, taking Clarke's hand with it. Everything went bowstring-taut in an instant. Her right shoulder popped from its socket. Clarke tried to scream. Her flooded amphibian body drowned the sound at conception.