Page 62 of Ensnaring the Siren

As far as summer days went, it was a good one for hiking. Low eighties, the sun bright and shining, but under the shadowy canopy of pine and birch, the air was almost chill, undercut even further by a crisp sea breeze threading through the trees. The trail hugged the coastline, never leaving the ocean far from sight. Beneath their feet, the ground was at times a soft blanket of fallen needles and moss. Others, a rugged obstacle course of boulders and roots.

“How do you know the way?” Nireed asked, holding onto his arm as they traversed a gnarly patch of roots.

Slowing to a stop, he pointed to a nearby tree trunk. “You see that blue stripe?”

She leaned against him, resting her temple to his shoulder, making his heart squeeze at her casual affection. “That marks the way?”

“Yup. They’re painted at regular intervals.”

“It reminds me of our kelp forest.” She looked up. “The stalks are spaced closer unless we weed them out. But some of them are just as tall as this.” She let go of his arm, carefully picking her way over to the birch tree next to them. She studied its white peeling bark with a gentle touch and drew a finger along the dark trunk beneath.

“How do you find your way?”

“We use rope scavenged from shipwrecks.” She looked at him over her shoulder, expression thoughtful. “There’s a lot we reuse that Surface Dwellers have lost at the sea.”

He’d sometimes wondered at the sheer amount of trash and wreckage at the bottom of the ocean. Graveyard. Junkyard. Landfill. So many things all at once. He wasn’t sure if a community of sea people reclaiming and giving new life to those things made him feel better or worse.

“What’s your greatest treasure?”

She brushed her hand lightly down the trunk, curls of bark catching on her palm. “Food. Family. Safety.” She paused. “But that’s not what you mean. My favorite piece of salvage…it’s, um, something that shows you who you are. What you look like.”

A mirror.

“It shocked me. Jumped and everything. I thought there was another siren in the hull with me. But then I noticed she was moving exactly as I was.” She turned around, pressing her back to the tree. “It was me.”

“Did you keep it?”

“I did. A small piece for myself and Aersila. The rest is mounted on a wall in the city, so others can see and know too.”

“Nireed, that’s really…” Sweet. Meaningful. Selfless. “I wish I could see it. The kelp forest and the city you live in. But I can’t dive that far.” His heart, his stomach, everything plummeted at the thought. Here he was, sharing his world with her, but she might not ever get to do the same. Not because he wasn’t willing, but without the proper training and a work schedule that would allow it, he’d never survive the journey.

In recreational scuba diving, advanced divers could descend to a recommended maximum of 130 feet—a certification he had and jumped through a lot of schedule hoops to maintain every year. Technical divers, with specialized training and equipment, could hit the 170 to 350 feet range, and according to Dr. Lila Branson’s research, the merfolk lived within the topmost portion of that range now, but they’d had also been known to live deep, deep down on the edge of the Mesopelagic Zone. At the shallowest, that was 650 feet from the surface.

“I may never see it,” he whispered, but she heard him regardless, and came over to cup his face in her hands. It was the one-sidedness of it that troubled him the most. Her people, her world, were important. She should get to share what she loved too.

“Lila has told me of cameras that can go deep down. If she has one, I’ll ask if I can take it. If there’s a way for me to show you, I will. I promise.”

That shit had to be wicked expensive. “Maybe you can tell me about it?”

She smiled, hands falling to take his hands. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

They continued onward and along the way Reid learned that their city was carved into the face of an underwater cliff. In the days of old, when ships were made of wood, not metal, the Gulf of Maine merfolk would host other pods around the world for a festival honoring their goddess. It was as much a time for feasting and competitions as it was for trade and diplomacy.

The oceans were quieter and less hazardous then. Oil spills, plastics, and floating trash islands didn’t exist yet, but the modern age made all those things, and lengthy migrations became especially dangerous. Someone always got hurt, or worse, and no festival was worth that risk.

It left whole pods segmented and isolated from each other, including Nireed and Aersila from their mother. “The last time I saw her,” Nireed said, clutching his hand as she navigated a gnarly cluster of roots. “‘Starfish’ was my only name. My memories of her are fuzzy and scarce. But Aersila told me, when I was old enough, that our mother swam to southern waters to visit our aging grandmother and just never made it back. It’s easier to believe she’s stuck out there somewhere with another pod than to admit she might not have survived the journey.”

The sort of open-ended question that might never be answered. “I’m sorry. Not knowing must be hard.”

“It’s harder for Aersila.” Nireed shrugged her shoulder, but her tone was wistful. “She was thirteen when our mother disappeared. She lost the one who raised her. I didn’t. My sister was all I knew.”

“You can still miss someone you’ve never met.”

She thought about this for a moment, then nodded. “That’s true. I would’ve liked to have known her, but when I sing my pleas to the Twenty-Armed Goddess for her return, it’s more for Aersila’s benefit than my own.”

“The Twenty-Armed Goddess?”

“We believe she hears all things in time, as sound is carried to her on the currents.” Letting go of his hand, Nireed crouched to pick up a stick, drawing in the dirt. It was a rudimentary picture, but he got the message loud and clear.

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