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Ilya had been told once that a person could drown in as little as a tablespoon full of water. In Tampa, they were close enough to the beach that people seemed to assume that kids, on breaking up from school for the summer, needed the reminder that they were not invulnerable to the world at large. Ilya hadn’t needed this reminder, and he hadn’t been convinced that it would take as little as a tablespoon, but that summer after he and his mama had moved to Tampa, a kid in his maths class had drowned after being carried out from shore by a riptide. The kid had stolen one of Ilya’s pencils before breaking up - his favourite pencil, which smelt like strawberries when friction was applied - and Ilya never got it back. He’d spent that whole summer wondering if he was a bad person for that being his first thought when he’d heard the news, and then spent the rest of his time after that trying to forget that he’d ever had the thought in the first place.
Ilya learned a lot of things about drowning when he’d been living near the beach. Like the fact the amount of water it took to drown actual varied between people - but it could be only an inch of water, especially for the young. Generally, he read, it could occur in as little as one to two cups of water. He learnt, as well, that it took minutes for the lack of oxygen to damage the brain or cause cardiac arrest, but only a few seconds to inhale enough that it started to affect the lungs. He learnt that drowning could occur when a person’s head was above water. He learnt about dry drowning and secondary drowning. He learnt about the odds of surviving drowning, and had then concluded that his mama - overdosing in a too full bathtub - had probably not stood a chance.
He hadn’t gotten to her in time, though he’d found her. If she’d cried out for him, he hadn’t heard her - and she would’ve known this, even if she’d tried. If Andrei had been home, with his ears that let him hear more than a hissing like the waves against the bluffs and a jumbled, muffled scope of the world like someone holding their head under the water, Irina Rozanova might have lived. But Andrei had not been home, because Andrei had never called Tampa home, still living in Russia with their father, and Irina Rozanova had drowned in the bathtub with Ilya - clueless, ignorant, eleven years old - in the other room.
He’d learned a lot about drowning, before and after. His mama had definitely not stood a chance. He’d learned a lot about drowning - and he had learned enough to know that he was going to die.
It seemed counterintuitive, but Ilya’s favourite place had always been out on the water, far enough that land was nothing more than a dark smear on the horizon, and there was him and the gentle swell of the waves beneath him only. A few lone birds wheeled in the bright sky above him, too far away to be anything more than dark shadows, but Ilya paid them little mind. His attention was fixed on the ocean below him, and the teeming life that he knew was hidden just below the surface.
Troy Barrett tapped Ilya’s elbow, drawing his attention. You ready? he signed. Ilya watched his lips move along with it, his voice little more than the dullest of murmurs as he translated for the rest of their colleagues.
He nodded absently. On your count.
Troy held up ten fingers. Then flicked on down. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two -
Ilya was already tumbling backwards into the endless blue.
They were not doing a big dive today - neither in length nor depth - but there was a cropping of rock that jutted up from the distant ocean floor, covered in a vibrancy of a life matter and the likes, which Ilya had been sent to collect samples of. Of rock, of the things growing on it, of the water around it, and - with the sample tube that Luca Haas had provided him - whatever residual magic was clinging to it. Because the rock formation was not natural at all - that was obvious, given that it had not been there a week ago, and had established itself as though it had been there for hundreds and thousands of years.
Ilya did not have to go down far to reach it, the water parting easily around him as he powered down towards it. His muscles ached but it was a pleasant burn rather than one of screaming exhaustion; Ilya was a strong swimmer, the strongest of his team, and this was why he had been chosen to make the dive. It would be a quick in and out thing. Dive. Collect the samples. Take a few photographs. Note any observations he thought might yield something. Count the fishes or any other creatures if he had time.
He didn’t have time. He’d only just noted the decided lack of any living things (which was eerie and off-putting and made the hairs on the back of his next stand on end) when there was a wrenching pain from his leg, jerking him back even as he propelled himself forward. Ilya could not help the muffled exhalation of pain that escaped - a short, sharp gasp that scraped out his throat. For a moment, he worried that his breathing apparatus had been compromised - but, no, the air was still following as it should.
His gaze travelled down and along the length of his body. There, between a narrow crevice on the rock face, was Ilya’s fucking leg. Blyat. Fuck. Fucking shit. He gave his leg another experimental tug and felt, immediately, that this was a terrible idea. He hadn’t seen the crevice when he’d planted his foot against the rock to push himself forwards, but he was feeling it now.
He looked up, where sunlight filtered weakly down into the ocean where it was slowly being devoured, and saw the wavering shadow of the boat above him. How long would it take them, he wondered, almost idly, uncoupled from his panic by the nerveless distance that was beginning to grow between himself and his body, before they realised that something was wrong? How long, if Ilya let himself sink, would it take before Troy or someone else came diving down to retrieve him?
Ilya pressed the button that opened up a communication channel to the surface. He would not hear any return messages, but it would be good enough to signal to Troy that he needed an extract.
Except - there was a wail of frequency in Ilya’s ear, crackly and discordant and on such a pitch that Ilya could feel the pressure of it, the sharp keenness. His hand jerked away from the button.
Fuck, he thought again. It was broken - why? Faulty equipment? Some other interference? Or -
Fuck, he thought again, feeling hysterical and repetitive even in his own head - but he thought this time it was justified, staring head on with the cause of the electronic failure.
Ilya had never seen a merfolk in the wild before.
He’d seen the pictures, of course, like everyone else on the planet, and he’d heard stories. They were as common as shark attacks - though Ilya had met plenty of people who’d seen sharks or known victims of shark attacks, and could not say the same for merfolk. They were… elusive. Eldritch. Older than most of the other things that survived in the oceans. Vaguely mystical, in the way that no one had been able to concretely explain, but warranted the extra tests in every dive that Ilya had ever done (Luca Haas, with his own arcane abilities, had kept them with a constant supply of mystically reinforced vials for this ever reason) and explained the technical malfunctions. Electronics and magic did not mix very well. This, too, was difficult to explain.
The merfolk probably explained the rock formation as well, he realised. The ocean and all that it touched had always been keen to help her favourite children.
Ilya did not blink. He could not look away. He was pretty sure that this was how he was going to die.
The merfolk drifted closer, almost curious, and Ilya could not help but think, with a sudden and startling clarity, that it - he - was really quite pretty. Broad shouldered, muscular. Dark hair drifted around his head, shifting with invisible currents of the ocean. He had a pair of brown eyes which would have been beautiful, if not for the fact that his dilated pupils swallowed almost all colour and were fixed on Ilya with nerve-wracking intensity. A powerful tale swished behind him, lashing at the water with thunderous force; the colour changed and shifted as it moved - a deep and encompassing black in one light, a dark gold in others. There were freckles across the bridge of his nose; Ilya wondered if the merfolk had ever seen the galaxies wheeling across the sky above his ocean home and drawn the similarities with the stars smattered across his own face. The merfolk smiled, and exposed two rows of needle-like teeth, set one behind the other.
He reached out for Ilya with delicately webbed hands, almost gentle and tender, as if he was reaching for a lover - and Ilya had learned enough to know that he was going to die.
Holy shit, signed Troy, when Ilya managed to pick his eyes up from the grain of the deck as he heaved in lungful after lungful of air. Holy shit holy shit holy shit.
His hands were sloppy as they frantically moved, violent and slashing to try and convey a depth of feeling that Ilya could not hear from the tone of his voice. Signs blurred into one another - the transitions were either jarring enough to be unpleasant or harried and nonexistent enough to be mostly nonsensical. Ilya squinted up at Troy, trying to narrow his focus on his hands, and found that he could not. He was thinking of -
We saw it, said Troy, clearly making a conscious movement to slow his hands. He collapsed onto the deck, shuffling closer to Ilya. On the monitors, right before your camera sparked out.
I know, Ilya replied. He frowned at the noticeable tremor of his hands. A mer. Wow.
A mer? Fuck. Ilya, that wasn’t just a mer. That was a siren.
Troy looked aghast. It took Ilya a moment to parse through his words, hung up on the use of Ilya’s sign name falling from Troy’s fingers. Troy did not often use Ilya’s sign name, because - unlike most spoken conversations - Ilya was the only person that Troy could feasibly be talking to. Seeing it was… strange. His mama had given him it, like she’d given him his name. Sometimes, it did not feel like his own. It always jolted him out of conversations when he saw it, like a shock of cold water. He had been used to seeing it on her fingers alone, and he forgot sometimes that it was no longer a secret that the two of them shared.
Then the meaning clicked. Siren. Spasmodically, Ilya’s hand shot out, fastening around Troy’s wrist and squeezing. Siren.
Still a mer, in most ways that counted. They had the vaguely humanoid appearance, the tail and the webbed hands. They were mystical, in that impossible to define way. Except - there had come a point, maybe, where mer had stayed what they had always been. They did not adapt. They did not evolve. And as the arcane pulled further back and back, away from the encroaching tide of manmade modernity, the merfolk went with it. They were scavengers, opportunistic feeders who gorged themselves contentedly on the fish and the smaller things in the ocean. Some ate the younger of their own species if they happened to stumble across rival clans; Ilya had seen enough photographs of the mangled remains of half-eaten juvenile mer to last him a lifetime
Sirens were different in that they had seen the rise of humans on the seas and fought back, adapted. They’d gotten smart and they’d stayed nasty.
And you didn’t come to help? Ilya signed, pulling an exaggerated face of agitation.
Troy scowled. I would have but -
I couldn’t let him, Brandon Wiebe - Ilya’s academic supervisor and the leader of their research dive - interrupted. His lips moved as he spoke, enunciated well enough for Ilya to half be able to lipread. Troy, cut off, interpreted for Ilya. It was dangerous enough having one person in the water. It would be irresponsible to send more in.
Ilya would have died and they would not have done anything to try and save him. He wondered how long they would have sat there and watched the staticky, shorted out screen before leaving Ilya’s body to be torn apart by the currents and the talons of the thing that had killed him in the first place. Except -
He saved me, he said.
The siren had saved him, and Ilya had surfaced, clawing himself back onto the deck of the boat, and he had not drowned.
Fuck, Wiebe said. We could get such a large research grant if we had proof of that.
Ilya retreated to the same place that he always did when the going got tough. When his mama died, or when they’d fled Moscow for the last time, or when he’d tried on that first st of hearing aids to finally, finally, exist in the same world that his mama did only to realise that he hated it more than anything.
Ilya went to the beach.
It seemed counterintuitive, sat under the shadows of the high bluffs above him, watching as the waves laved and lapped at the sand, letting his eyes trace the silver path that the moon reflected across the surface of the water, but Ilya had never felt at ease anywhere beyond the boundaries of the sea. When his mama had died and it had become clear that Ilya could not be returned to Moscow, and they’d shunted him off to Ottawa where the Drover family had taken him in, Ilya had missed the ocean with a keen fierceness. Sometimes, he had worried that he missed the ocean more than he missed his mama, because it had been the ocean that he had dreamed about most fondly. He had only ever had nightmares about Irina Rozanova - her pale hands drifting limp in the bathtub, the wave of her fine golden hair, the blue tinge to her lips.
Ilya had come haring back to the ocean as soon as he was able to. University, a marine biology degree, research opportunities, the ocean.
And now he was here. Here, because Ilya had given himself to the ocean and - this time - the ocean had tried to keep him. Ilya didn’t know how he felt about that. He’d thought, sometimes, about what it would be like. He knew enough about drowning to know that the process would not be pleasant, but it was not the process that interested him - it was the result. So, Ilya had thought about it. And then it had nearly happened, and it had not, and Ilya was still thinking about it.
He watched the waves creep further up the shore and imagined himself under them. He imitated the sound that they made, when the breakers roared into the cliffs, and pressed a hand to the hollow of his throat, amused by the way that it trembled under his touch, a mockery of sound.
Ilya could not hear much - and silence was not one of the things that he could hear. There was a constant of noise in his head - the whining high of tinnitus that ebbed and flowed, the muffled sound of noises that were so close to registering in his mind but never close enough, the constant rushing noise that filled him from top to toe. The hearing aids had been a disaster, but he had used them long enough to cue up beach noises on his teacher’s computer and had listened to the caterwauling of seabirds and the steady sush-sush-sush of the waves. He could still hear the sush-sush-sush of waves; he liked the fact that this had been something that he had heard even before knowing what it was he could be hearing, like some invisible tether binding him to the ocean all along.
It was the sort of thing that he imagined he might have heard drowning. The sort of thing his mama would not have heard drowning, because she had been in a bathtub in their shitty one bed flat and not the ocean. The kid who had stolen his pencil might have heard it though, and that was a thought Ilya didn’t know how to deal with, staring out across the ocean with dark hooded eyes.
In the distance, a light glinted - off the waves, he thought, but then it moved, vanishing beneath them, sinuous and graceful, and appeared again. Vanished, appeared, vanished again; all the while it drew closer and closer to shore.
Ilya stood, brushing the sand off his pair legs and where it clung to the fabric of his sweats, and walked to meet it.
There was an outcropping of rock that jutted further into the ocean than the beach did, and Ilya made his way along that carefully. The rock was slick and treacherous, and his footing slipped, threatening to up end him into the ocean. He’d left his trainers in the sand where he had been sitting; he’d shucked them off the moment that he had began his walk, clinging to them with one hand and let the laces trail and swing. The bare soles of his feet had no grip. His heart hammered in his throat. He looked at the dark water where it churned against the rock, desperately trying to fill an absence of water where there was no absence at all. He felt, in his bones, that if he let the water swallow him that time, there would be no coming back from it at all.
The siren met him at the end of the rock, and he looked just as Ilya remembered him, even outside of the haze of panic that had distorted Ilya’s vision. Stars wheeled in the skies above them, and Ilya thought about what it would feel like to reach out for the siren himself and trace the constellations on his cheek. If he pointed to the stars above, Ilya wondered if the siren would understand what he was trying to say.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus had made his men stopper their ears with wax so that they would not hear the song of the sirens and hurl themselves over the side of their ship to reach them. He had tied himself to the mast of his ship and ordered his men to not to realise him no matter how much he had begged, threatened or ordered. Ilya did not need to do any of this. He wondered what the siren would have sung of to lure him into the water again, what want the creature would dredge up to entice him closer. He wondered if the siren would have sung to him in the voice of his mama.
Ilya knelt, carefully, at the edge of the rock. The mer pushed itself up to meet him, torso splayed on the cold stone as his tail trailed away into the water beneath. His mouth opened, choked around a word that Ilya could not hear, and exposed those terrible rows of needle teeth.
Sirens were mimics, performers. Their song, their faces, their speech - all of it was human, and designed to attract humans. It was how they had adapted to an increasingly human world, how they hunted.
Ilya brought his hands to his ears, shook his head.
The siren frowned. He reached out, up towards Ilya’s face, and Ilya froze, hardly daring to breath. He should run, he knew, far and fast and away from this creature, who was probably plotting the best way to drag Ilya down to the depths of his home and eat him. Except, the siren had saved Ilya. And he had followed Ilya here. And his hands were careful as they reached towards him, settling on Ilya’s cheeks and then over his ears. The siren’s hands were weirdly dry. The membrane between his fingers was ticklish where it brushed Ilya’s bare skin, felt thin and delicate. His nails, sharpened into claws, were biting where they pinched at the lobe of Ilya’s ears - not quite enough to draw blood, but near enough. Ilya reached up and adjusted his hands, certain that the siren had never held a human before.
His mouth opened, a silent noise, and Ilya tapped his ears as he shook his head once more. The siren’s tail lashed in agitation. His mouth opened - and Ilya reached forward, resting his palm against the hollow of the siren’s throat as he moved his mouth like he was speaking. Except, his throat did not move nor warble with speech - it was still and silent and unmoving. Ilya looked at the siren and found that he was looking back, eyes wide and unblinking. The siren’s mouth snapped shut, and Ilya let his thumb brush over the siren’s bottom lip, breath hanging suspended between them.
“Name?” he asked, pointing at the siren, careful to shape the word as he had seen it said so many times before.
Into the rock, the siren wrote SHANE, driving his nail into the stone over and over as he carved away at it, managing to etch a pale chicken scratch name.
Shane, Ilya mouthed, and spelled it on his fingers. Then, after a moment of hesitation, he spelled the S out, before curving it into the ASL sign for sea. The siren - Shane - tilted his head. His hands repeated the motion clumsily, and Ilya modeled it again, pointing to Shane’s chest when he had finished.
Shane, said the siren, a slow dawning of what Ilya could only describe as wonder kindling on his face. Shane Shane Shane.
Ilya rested his hand on his own chest, and signed his name - Ilya, spelt in RSL instead, a homage to a childhood language that he had not spoken for many years, nor knew anyone who would understand him if he tried.
I-L-Y-A, he spelt.
Shane mirrored him - I-L-Y-A-I-L-Y-A-I-L-Y-A - and the movement of his hands, growing in confidence, was as sweet as any song.