Page 66 of Midnightsong
“They sold them to two research labs, one all the way in New York. Got half a million for each of them. They’re going to pay off my student loans!”
“Wow, good for you. Maybe I should tell my family to step it up.”
Hushed laughter, and sick to her stomach, Angie crept away before they had any inkling she was lurking.
She pulled up her phone and tapped her news app, Emerald City Newsday, and glanced at the headlines as she walked back to her own cubicle.
Three merfolk discovered on
Western Alaska’s shoreline.
Bile rose to her throat as she clicked the link. Two mermaids and a merman were shot and killed near the Aleutians, and by their descriptions, they were patrolling sentinels.
Her mind blurred when she sat back down, and she sipped her thermos filled with jasmine green tea. The heavenly floral scents never failed to calm her, but today, it did nothing to quell her anxiety.
She wasn’t going to get any studying done, so she shut her laptop, slipping it into her backpack and leaving the now-stifling library.
The moisture-laden, chilly, mid-February air whipped across her cheeks and nose as she exited. She pulled her hood over her head as speckles of raindrops fell from the broken clouds overhead, and she picked up her pace until she was back in her car.
She opened her group chat with Leo, Reesa, and Dr. Williams, firing off a lengthy text message after she turned the ignition and waited for the heat to kick on, explaining the situation with getting the governor’s attention.
All three started replying at once.
Reesa: What do you need help with?
Leo: Let us know. We need to get him to talk to the Mer-Queen.
Dr. Williams: What about setting up a meeting with the marine biology department? I can see about getting some of my coworkers and higher-ups from SMOSA to attend.
Reesa: I’ll ask our classmates if they want to join.
Angie responded.
Sounds like a great idea. I can talk to my supervisor at the aquarium, too.
Leo: Cool
Dr. Williams: Let’s aim to have the meeting tomorrow, okay? We don’t want to keep the Mer-Queen waiting.
Not for the first time, all tension released from Angie’s body and she pressed her fingers to her smiling lips. For all their help, she would have to buy them something when this was over as a token of her gratitude.
Before she drove home, she sent a message to Grayson at the aquarium, letting him know she was on the way over, and she had a plan to approach him about joining their department meeting tomorrow.
Angie’s heart was never fuller than when she arrived at PGU’s life science department’s circular auditorium the next evening.
It was full of her classmates, the marine biology and biology faculty, Grayson, and many others she didn’t recognize, but it gladdened her that they were here. Though Leo wasn’t standing at the front to present with her, he was sitting front and center and gave her a wave when she passed him. Dr. Williams and Reesa stood at the front, waving her over, and she rushed to join them.
“Okay, we have a plan?” Angie asked as soon as she was within earshot.
“We’re going to present these topics here.” Dr. Williams pointed to a sheet of paper on the lectern. “To give them a background of why we asked them to come. Angie, this is where you speak.” He referred to a section on the paper that he had drawn a rectangle around. “After that, Reesa and I will go down the list of possible solutions, one by one, and get a response from the audience.”
Angie craned her neck to look at the solutions they had come up with:
-Petition,
-Video with experts in the field speaking,
-Social media posts on PGU and the aquarium’s pages and tag the governor,
