Author: Ruth Joffre

Ruth Joffre

Nothing at the bottom of the ocean bothers her. Nothing natural, that is. On a repair job in the Bering Sea last month, she encountered a lost Japanese spider crab hiking back to the Pacific, following a straight line of radiant heat from the subsea fiber-optic cable she had been dispatched to splice together at a break point. As she stripped the cut cables, the spider crab passed overhead in slow motion, its serene, ponderous movements giving her a chance to study the white ridges of its abdomen and the pinched joints of its legs, which towered over her, much longer than she was tall; harder, too, its reddened carapace reminding her of the skeletons of repair robots designed to scuttle into air ducts and reactor cores to perform dangerous maintenance. Her repair jobs usually mean descending to between 5,000 to 10,000 feet below sea-level—at a depth where the extreme water pressure would collapse a human’s lungs. When she dives, her lungs compress, pushing all oxygen into the bloodstream to dissolve. Her gills then open, three delicate slits at the base of her throat opening on each side of her neck to allow seawater to flow over the filaments and oxygenate the blood. Once submerged, her adaptable body temperature and webbed phalanges enable her to live quite comfortably underwater for days or weeks at a time—a capability telecoms were quick to capitalize upon when her species of deep sea dwellers first surfaced about a century ago. Now, Vira jumps at every job opportunity, knowing they will be few and far between.

Her last job was a month ago. Before that, she was living lean off a gig in February.

It’s August now, and tourist season in Alaska is less than a month from closing.

Her mother will be out of work again soon.

On the way to pick her mother up from her seasonal job at Kodiak Gulf Floor Tours, Inc., Vira recalculates her September–May budget: $600 per month for her share of the rent for a small two-bedroom apartment she still shares with her mom, $300 per month in student loan payments, $120 per month on average for cell service and the extra data she’ll need once she goes over their low limits, another $100 per month to help with gas and car insurance, and about $200 per month for groceries to supplement all the fish she caught, dried, or froze for winter. By her calculations, she has less than $400 left over after bills and necessities to splurge on little gifts for herself, but chances are good her mom will burn right through that with something or other—parking tickets, bail, yet another get-rich-quick scheme that will inevitably blow up in her face.

“Maybe Dave will have something for me,” she mutters, pulling into the parking lot.

Once parked, she takes a deep breath, reminding herself, Be nice. You need the money.

Dave picks up after barely one ring. “Well, well, well if it isn’t my favorite mermaid!”

“I prefer the term sirenx,” she reminds him, banging her head inaudibly against the rest.

“Right. Sorry about that.” She can hear him wince in discomfort. “So, what’s up, Vira?”

She tries not to sound desperate. “I was just calling to see if you have any jobs for me.”

He hums, clicking through company portals at his desk to check. “Nothing right now.”

His elongated vowels make her think he is hiding something, so she presses. “What about next month? I heard about the plan to build a diverse fiber line on the north side of the Aleutians. Not sure where that is in the process, but I would be happy to install the branching units, like last time.” Her head tilts into a joking shrug, even though he can’t see her on the phone. “Lord knows they’ll need a bunch of branches to hit all the communities on the chain.”

“Tell me about it.” As a former resident of False Pass, he allows himself a brief moment of bitterness over the delay in extending fiber to his community from the original line festooned on the south side of the Aleutian Chain. “But that project is still in permitting. We’re not planning to lay cables until next spring at the earliest. And that’s probably aggressive. You know how these things go. It could be five years before anything moves forward. Or six months. Who knows?”

Her forehead rests, dejected, on the steering wheel, but she forces herself to sound casual, like someone who doesn’t need this. “I hear ya. Keep me in mind when you do get there, okay?”

“Absolutely. You’re at the top of my list, so it’s good to know you’re interested.”

She swallows a lump in her throat. “Definitely. Just tell me when and where.”

“Will do. And I’ll let you know if anything comes up in the meantime . . . .”

His trailing period makes her think there may be something else, so Vira pauses a second, indulging in the fantasy that he will fill the silence with a job, but she gives up and says goodbye. With a sigh, she hangs up, muttering, “It was a long shot, anyway,” into the blank, shining face of the smartphone. Her mother’s last tour is scheduled to return in about ten minutes, so Vira leaves her phone in the glove compartment and heads down to the docks in her bathing suit. At this time of year, the water temperatures around Kodiak hover at about 55ºF, though they get warmer each passing summer. Most casual swimmers on the shore still wear trunks, but tourists with weighted boots and full-body pressure suits venture farther, with the help of licensed guides, into the frigid depths of the Gulf of Alaska.

Her mother Bárbara is one of the tour guides. Just part sirenx by way of her grandmother on her father’s side, Bárbara cannot dive to the same depths as Vira, whose father, a full-blooded sirenx, passed down his gills and compressible lungs before disappearing back under the surface. On the job, Bárbara wears a supplemental oxygen tank, but none of the high-tech gear her clients require. Her uniform consists of a bikini top and a flowing skirt made from seaweed so that when she swims around, her long hair flows behind her in the current, and the tourists think, “Wow, she looks like a mermaid!” A lot of the online reviews for Kodiak Gulf Floor Tours, Inc. read exactly like that. Every once in a while, someone comments, “Would’ve been better if she wore a tail.”

When Vira arrives, her mother hugs her close and whispers, “This is a testy bunch.”

With a fake smile for the tourists, Vira asks, “Want me to show off a bit?”

“Could you? I want to end the season on a high note.”

Everyone is already looking at Vira by then and pointing their underwater cameras at her. One arm propped on a signpost labeled Gray Whale Watchtower, she asks, “Y’all want a show?” She knows the helmets of their suits have noise-cancelling technology, in order to prevent auditory overstimulation from the engines of cruise ships and recreational boats sailing overhead. Still, the sight of her mouth moving underwater impresses them, and they can tell they are in for a treat. She waves them closer, smiling, then lifts off the gulf floor, twirling and somersaulting like a synchronized swimmer in an Esther Williams movie as their shutters click in unison. Earlier in the season, she might have been joined by gray whales on their migratory path to the Bering Sea. Today, the tourists must settle for some playful sea otters who join her on a lark, their long, sleek bodies corkscrewing through the water.

Sometimes, Vira thinks she has spent her entire life sitting in the audience, waiting, while other people pursue their dreams. As a child, she passed entire summers hanging out on Kodiak’s beaches, scanning the horizon for signs of her father, whose human name was Mateo; her mother never did learn his given name or the location of that underwater city she believes he returned to not long after Vira’s first birthday. “I got the sense that life down there was rather turbulent,” she said once, “and that people back home were expecting him to return and help fix things.” Maybe, once the troubles were resolved, he would return, and they could be a family again—at least, that was what Vira hoped. In her fantasies, her father was a tall, well-insulated man, strong enough to carry her around on his shoulders and yet soft enough to hug her and wish her good luck before a swim meet. In ninth grade, she tried out for the high school swim team, thinking that learning the human swim forms would build her endurance for future trips with her father. But almost as soon as the swim coach spotted her webbed fingers and shuttered gills, all hopes were dashed. It would be unfair, the other parents argued, for their children to compete against a merhuman hybrid. She would always have an advantage, they insisted—just look at those toes! Nevermind that Vira had never swum the butterfly in her life. Only after school, when applying for jobs, were her physical adaptations considered a benefit, not a frightening liability.

Employers love cutting costs. One $15,000 repair job for Vira could easily cost a telecom $400,000 once you account for the cost of dispatching the boats, the fuel, the salaries of the crew members—not to mention the collateral damage to businesses reliant on that connectivity and the environment soaking up all that diesel pollution. How much would you pay a merhuman to solve your problems?

“How would you feel if you paid $1,500 and didn’t even get a selfie?” Her mother’s boss, Benj, flings this question like mud as he follows Bárbara out the front door of the office. All their customers are gone, their tour gear stowed and credit cards charged so they can return to their big cruise ships and luxury hotel rooms, so now Benj and Bárbara are alone but for an administrative assistant blowing bubbles at the desk and Vira, sitting barefoot on the dock, dipping her toes into the gulf. He opens his hand, almost plaintive. “Just think about it from their perspective.”

Bárbara stops halfway down the dock and sighs. “I can’t control the whales, Benj.”

He smiles like someone who has heard this before and had time to fashion a good counter argument for it. “But you do speak their language,” he says, “and you can call to them.”

“That only works if they’re in range.” Her arm sweeps out to point northwest. “Most gray whales are all the way on the other side of the Aleutians by now.”

“That may be true, but you could at least call to them. Give the tourists a show.”

“They won’t be able to hear it, anyway.” She leans toward him, tapping the wet hair right above her left ear. “Noise-cancelling technology, remember?”

“Careful, Barb. You already have two strikes against you.”

“Come on. Be reasonable, Benj. It’s the end of the season.”

“And I’m trying to make sure we’re all still here next season, okay? It’s not like we’re the only tourist trap in town. These richie rich tourists expect us to pull out all the stops now.” Hands on his hips, he shakes his head and turns away from her, scuffing his shoes on the dock. When he spots Vira, he says, “Now here’s someone who knows how to put on a real show. Why don’t you come work for me, Vira?”

“I don’t know, Benj. Will you give me time off for better-paying temp gigs?”

He pushes his lips together and hums disapproval. “Let me think about it.”

Once in the car, her mother says, “Sometimes, this job isn’t worth it.”

Vira waits for a man with sunblock caked on his nose to pass before turning onto the road toward their apartment building. “Pay’s decent. And besides, it’s only a couple more weeks; then you can hunker down for the winter and catch up on your shows.”

“It can’t come quickly enough. I’m so tired of people looking at me. Pointing at me.” She hangs her head in her hands, then rubs her eyelids with her fingertips. For her, the transition from blinking underwater to walking around in the bright sun often causes bad headaches. Her hybrid eyes must adjust to that light and pressure, the spherical black lenses able to process much more information on the periphery than the flat lenses of humans. In the past, the difficulty of the transition had caused several car accidents after work. Now, Vira picks her mother up and listens to her vent about work five days a week (six during peak season). Bárbara leans back and sighs with closed eyes. “Sometimes, I wish I could disappear. Or that Benj would disappear.”

At a stoplight, Vira studies her mother. “I noticed he called you Barb.”

“I hate it when he does that. Like we’re friends.”

Only after they parked did Vira ask, “What did he mean, two strikes?”

“Oh, don’t worry, honey. You know how some men love their power trips.”

Her mother always says “some men” in order to exclude Mateo from critiques. Even after twenty-four years of complete silence, she still considers him beyond reproach. “Your father was unfailingly kind,” she explained once, when Vira asked the fateful question: Why? Why would he leave us? “He wouldn’t disappear without a good reason. I bet he’s out there right now, planning our reunion.” This capacity for selective optimism always surprised Vira, who learned at an early age how to interpret her mother’s moods. After a long day she liked to be the first one inside their apartment, so she could settle down alone, removing her shoes and socks and massaging that tender spot between the toes where the boots pinched the webbing. On days like this, Vira lingers outside, checking the air pressure in the tires, chatting with the elderly lesbians who live upstairs, considering whether she might hike across the Pacific like that Japanese spider crab and what the consequences would be if she did.

Half an hour later, she decides to head inside, and that’s when she finds it: the missed call from Dave, followed by a message saying, Call me back? I think I’ve got a job for you . . . .

Nothing is without risk. Her work is no exception. Once, on a rare multi-week contract to repair fiber-optic spurs off a ring around the North Slope, she dipped under an iceberg floating in the Chukchi Sea and met with the gaping maw of a polar bear hunting in the freezing waters. In a sprint, that sleek white bear was almost as fast, but not nearly as well fed, and she was able to pull away from the mother, whose cub huddled on a nearby iceberg, gnawing at its paws. From a safe distance, Vira watched the mother surface, sopping wet fur hanging low and thin, like the threadbare strands of seaweed in her mother’s work skirt. In emergencies like that, Vira had been instructed to press a gray button in the locator device on her wrist, which served as GPS, beacon, and—if she happened to be in range of a cell tower—a short-range communicator. Some lawyers in tailored suits had devised this precaution to protect her employers from liability, but in reality, such a device was of no use in dangerous situations. A predator could eat, digest, and excrete her before a medevac or rescue crew could reach her. Functionally, the device served one purpose: to alert the company to hire another contractor to complete the job. Thus far, Vira has never pressed that button.

“This job might change that,” Dave warns on a call. “It’s the riskiest gig I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s why you’re paying me triple,” Vira says. She has already signed the contract; this pre-departure check-in is just a formality, a means of assessing her mental fitness before he signs off on the paperwork, authorizing payment of $50,000 on completion of the assignment.

His breaths whistle slightly, like a deflating balloon. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

“You know as well as I do I’m the only one who has a hope of surviving at that depth.”

“Still. 15,000 feet sounds like a lot. I keep picturing you getting crushed or eaten by some deep-sea leviathan.” His voice trembles dramatically, as if narrating the trailer of a black and white B-movie with rudimentary special effects.

“You know my people come from the ocean, right? We’ve lived there for millennia.”

“Technically, we all come from primordial oceans. That’s evolution. But this is 2036.”

“Yeah, and rent’s only getting more expensive. I need this job to pay my internet bill.”

He snorts at the astronomical cost of connectivity in rural Alaska. “Good luck with that.”

“Does that mean I’m cleared?” She crosses her fingers as she waits for him to say yes.

“Plane’ll be there in the morning. 8 AM sharp. It’ll take you as far as Chirikof. After that, you’ll be on your own.” He dwells on this point for longer than she does. “Try to make it back to Kodiak in one piece, okay? I’d hate to have to replace you.”

What she promises him and what she promises her mother and herself are entirely different things. Her mother would like her to take this opportunity to seek information about her father and the mysterious city he called home. Bárbara would have her ask each passing mammal if they’ve seen a merman fitting his description. “About six foot three, brown skin, hair pulled up in a topknot and tied with a ribbon. Once went by the name of Mateo and married a merhuman of mixed Bolivian and white descent—might’ve talked at length about her legs. Ringing any bells?” Nothing would embarrass Vira more. Beyond fixing the break, her plan for this excursion was simple: explore. Familiarize herself with the terrain. Figure out whether she could survive, not just at this depth, but with the creatures who called it home. Would her lungs implode? Would the bioluminescent squid enchant her into making a home underwater?

A part of her longs for it: the quiet, the freedom from human life.

She barely says a word on the flight to Chirikof. She cannot bear it.

Only after the seaplane drops her off and coasts to shore to refuel does she feel safe. Now the hard work can begin. First, she checks her GPS coordinates, noting her latitude and longitude (55°43’58.7”N 155°31’11.1”W). Her target is approximately thirty-five miles south, near the dark mouth of the Aleutian Trench, where a subsea fiber line connecting Seward, Alaska to Hokkaido, Japan had been placed only nine months prior. No wonder the company wants to keep this repair quick and quiet, she thinks, descending into the pitch-black waters of the North Pacific. Here, she wears a full body swimsuit reinforced with Kevlar to protect against shark attacks, a sensor array capable of detecting motion within 150 feet and flashing light at frequencies known to repel apex marine predators, and that all but useless monitor on her wrist, which she continues wearing only because she hates littering and would not leave this trash for her people to clean up.

At no point during the descent does she expect to meet one of her kind.

It comes as a surprise. A flutter of fin on the bottom of her foot. A nibble on her shoulder as she follows the line of broken subsea cable down the jagged slopes of the Aleutian Trench. She flails at the touch and briefly loses her footing. It takes her a moment to calm down.

“Who’s there?” She flicks on the floodlight of her headlamp. “Show yourself.”

On her second survey of the area, she spots a merperson poking her head out from behind a towering rock spire that may once have been a volcanic vent. With her body hidden by the rock and her hair pulled back into a net adorned with a single seashell, she resembles a dreamy singer-songwriter posing for an album cover in the nineties. “Deep apologies for attempting to eat you,” she says. “Your suit makes you look like a seal.”

“No worries. Just don’t try it again, okay?”

“Okay. My English name is Pod. Do you like the sound? Pod.”

“I do,” Vira says, dimming the light, “but it’s not my place to judge your name.”

Pod comes forward to inspect Vira and her lamp. “What name have you chosen?”

“My name was given to me. It’s in honor of Viracocha—an ancient Incan deity.”

“He who rose from the lake and brought the light,” Pod says, as if recalling a textbook.

“How do you know him? I didn’t think that the northern and southern merpeople talked.”

“We rarely do, but my teacher told us all about him.” She circles Vira, studying the straps on her waist, the translucent case of the sensor array that knew before Vira did that Pod was not a predator. She appears to delight in the shortness of Vira’s hair and the way it sways in the waters, like stubby strands of brown kelp. Her eyes flash with revelation. “Have you met my teacher? He spent time on land.”

“Probably not. Most of the merpeople I’ve met work for fisheries, reducing bycatch.”

Pod sulks a bit and then fixes Vira with wide, iridescent eyes. “Can I trust you?”

This is it, Vira thinks. I’m finally going to visit an underwater city. “Yes.”

“Good. Now, turn off your lamp,” Pod says, offering a hand. In the dark, she guides Vira, warning her about the spines of snailfish, the plumes of hydrothermal vents, the red tentacles of a giant squid passing overhead, its angry black eye fixed on something far off in the distance. First, they walk down the slope, tracing the line of cut fiber. Then, when the rock falls away under them in a sharp cliff, the women begin to swim, following the curve of the cable as it disappears into a recessed cave in the wall of the trench. Someone had to have brought the cable there, Vira thinks. Someone cut it on purpose. All concern as to why dissipates after Pod leads her through a tunnel, into the hollowed mountain she calls home. From a ledge, they look out at a gleaming city full of elaborate spires and shimmery sea glass, illuminated with electricity generated by hydrothermal vents. It expands before them for what seems like miles. “Welcome,” Pod says, “to Atxuni.”

In one of the few photographs of her father in existence, Vira is still a newborn. A yellow baby blanket swaddles her, so soft and fuzzy that it makes her look like a baby duck with her feet tucked under her feathers for warmth. Her eyes are open, their mottled irises pointed up at Mateo smiling down at her, his face tilted at an angle she cannot remember. Her only memories of her father have been manufactured from photographs like that, with the camera tilted, the light shifted in her mind, so she can believe she was precious to him. He loved you, her mother always insisted, but even as a child she picked up on the use of the past tense, as if love was like oxygen: essential on land but quick to dissolve once he slipped under the surface. All her life, even during the summers when she waited for him on the beach, she harbored a bitterness toward him, a hard, unyielding part of herself that accepted none of her mother’s high-minded excuses for his sudden departure. His people needed him. He must have been a great leader, or maybe a doctor. Early in the tour of Atxuni, Vira asks Pod if she knows anyone by his description, anyone who mentioned becoming a father on the surface, but Pod says no—to her knowledge, no one has left the city for the surface in more than a generation. “Of course, this is not the only city in the trench. There are dozens of others. You should ask there, too.”

“Maybe I will,” Vira says, knowing this will be a journey for another day.

“Feather might be able to give you a map. Or at least point you in the right direction.”

Feather, thinks Vira, imagining a flying fish. “Has everyone here taken English names?”

“Just Feather’s students. He came here on an exchange program from one of the Southern Water Cities. He used names to teach us other languages and dialects. In our English unit, no one liked the traditional human names he suggested, so we all decided to invent our own.” She rattles off some of the names: Flame. Rattle. Disco. Optic.

“I wonder what I would have picked,” Vira muses, staring up at a winding spire.

“Ooo, let me guess.” Pod considers her for a long moment before saying, “Green tea.”

With a laugh, Vira shakes her head. “I was thinking something like Ice. Or—Iceberg.”

“Iceberg. Like the lettuce.” Vira grimaces, but Pod beams. “Ready to meet Feather?”

Before Vira can respond, Pod parts a curtain of seaweed doubling as a gate and shows her Atxuni’s political province, which stretches out before them for the equivalent of several big city blocks before extending up the face of a cliff in five towers carved directly into the rock. Each of the towers rises a hundred or more stories, recalling the skyscrapers Vira has seen only on screen (Kodiak being a relatively short, modest town in comparison to, say, Chicago). At the base of the third tower, Pod says, “We’ll have to swim to reach my office.” In the water, her body is sinuous and patient, pausing frequently to give Vira time to gaze about in wonder and ask questions, such as: “What are the signs on the sides of the towers?” Pod translates: “These indicate the level and the associated conclave and council. For example, this is the Subduction Refugee and Climate Crisis Conclave. And these next ten levels are the Houses of Grievances and Amends. You might have to visit these to figure out who cut your fiber line and how to fix it.”

Treading water, Vira asks, “Should we go now? Make sure this gets on the docket?”

This word, “docket”, puzzles Pod, and she shakes her head. “No, there is never a line.”

“Oh,” Vira says, with a self-conscious laugh, then follows Pod up to her office within the Conclave of Edification and Inquiry. Nothing inside the building reminds Vira of an office on the surface—those sad gray boxes people fold themselves into day after day, year after year, as if production was the main goal of their one precious life. Where she expects desks, whiteboards, and rolling chairs, she sees glass bubbles large enough to fit two people, each one outfitted with a screen whose liquid surface ripples like plasma. Most lie dormant, but one displays images on it, which she realizes are projected by a device that resembles the horn of a gramophone. From this, she detects a strange, complex hum, never repeating, impossible to predict. Out of curiosity, Vira calls out to Pod, asking, “What is this?”

Helplessness subsumes Pod’s face as she searches for a suitable word. “A . . . telephone?”

“But it sends images,” Vira says. She kneels down to better study the mechanics.

“Yes. It . . . encodes and decodes them.” Pod points to a resonant tube. “Here.”

“Ingenious. It’s like our fiber-optic cable, but with directed sound waves.”

An unfamiliar male voice behind her says, “An apt observation.”

Feather. Pod hugs him and says, “I am glad you are still here. I brought a visitor.”

“Hello,” Feather says, extending a hand to Vira in a motion that feels novel and practiced, like something he learned in a sociology class about surface-dwellers. “Where are you from?”

“Kodiak.” Uncertain if he knows it, she elaborates, “About 200 miles from here.”

“You are practically a local, then. Is this your first time to one of our cities?”

Before Vira can nod, Pod interjects, “I found her near the cut fiber line.”

No part of this startles him, Vira notes. He says, “I figured they would send someone.”

“And here I am.” She flaps her arms at her sides, feeling very ordinary, the exact opposite of magnificent in this remarkably shining city. Now that she’s here, Vira realizes she would have preferred come to Atxuni in her own time, on her own terms, without the logo of a multi-million-dollar business emblazoned on a device on her wrist; but that isn’t the case, and she still has a job to do. She hopes they both understand this. “You wouldn’t happen to know who cut the fiber and why, would you? I only ask because they sent me to fix it, and if I do and it gets cut again they’re going to get mad, and that could be very bad for me and for the secrecy of this place.”

“We are not a secret. We are just too expensive to invade. But your point is taken.”

“So . . . do you know who cut the fiber line?” She suspects he never gets his hands dirty.

“I do. Our team worked with engineers from the Conclave of Machinery and Innovation.” He explains at a high level the desire to explore methods of transmitting data over long distances, such as the many thousands of miles between Atxuni and the Southern Pacific Water Cities. “We expect this capability will be critical when the climate refugee crisis accelerates.”

“And since light travels faster than sound, you want to switch to our fiber technology.”

“No.” He says this in the firm, decisive tone of one who has already secured consensus in that regard and will not reconsider the matter. “But we were glad of the opportunity to study your technology up close. Until recently, most fiber lines avoided this trench, making a controlled and secure study untenable. This new line allowed us to learn much in a short period of time.”

“Does that mean your study is complete? I can repair the line?”

“By all means,” he says, with a slight bow of the head.

“No offense, but: do you have the authority to approve that?”

Feather and Pod exchange quizzical looks. “I am the Primary of the Conclave,” he begins by way of explaining his position. “To you, that would be akin to the head of a major department in your nation’s government.”

“Like the Secretary of Education.”

“Precisely.”

“But you said another conclave was involved?”

“In cases of collaboration and partnership, the one speaks for the whole.”

What she says is, “Okay,” but what she thinks to herself is, That sounds like a really good way to silence dissent and create a false sense of unity. That does not seem to be Feather’s intent, but she is wary of believing Atxuni to be perfect, idealizing a place she has never lived because it appears to have solved problems no one can even be bothered to acknowledge in her society. She sighs at the thought of going back, but it must be done. She has a job to do, but she doesn’t know how to say goodbye. “Well, that solves that. No need to go to the House of Grievances, after all.”

“Oh no.” Pod’s voice deflates with disappointment. “You’re not leaving already?”

“It’s a long swim back. I should probably just fix the line and get going.”

“No, no,” Feather and Pod say in unison. He assures Vira, “We can speak to the Conclave of Transportation about chartering a submarine. It will cut your journey down considerably.”

“Are you sure? That sounds expensive. And it’s really not necessary. I can manage.”

“We insist,” Pod says. “You are our cousin from the surface. You should see the city.”

“And I know a team of engineers who would love to talk to a technician of your caliber.”

“I’m basically a mechanic with strong lungs,” she says, knowing they will protest, feeling perhaps for the first time in her life that she might be more than just a telecom tech, a gig worker, perpetually at the mercy of the economy and the vicissitudes of executive decision making. Here in Atxuni, her unique talents matter more than they ever have before and perhaps ever will again. She agrees to speak with the civic engineers about their plans for longitudinal transmission tubes. Over dinner, they discuss fault lines, hydrothermal capture, the manner in which kelp or seaweed can be processed and extruded into delicate beds of noodles for the raw fish slices served to them on plates of smoothed sea glass. Floating down an alley, marveling at the intricate tile mosaics of squid and spiny dogfish, she finds herself thinking, I could live here, then stopping herself with a familiar question: What about Bárbara?

On the submarine ride to Kodiak, she studies the holographic map Feather gave her of the Northern Pacific Water Cities, which stretch across the vast expanse of the ocean from Tokyo in the west to Panama City in the east, from the Aleutian Trench in the north to the equator dividing north and south. It would take years—decades, even—to search these Water Cities for her father Mateo, and there would be no guarantee of finding him. She could be in the same city as him, rest on a bench as he swims overhead mere feet away, and still miss him. He could be in Atxuni right now, going on with his life without her. Her father, the abandoner. Only after Feather handed her the map Pod promised did Vira realize part of her was invested in the fantasy that Pod was going to accidentally reintroduce her to Mateo; that theirs was to be a narrative of coincidence, reunion, maybe even forgiveness—but that is not this story, she admits. That is just her seeking an answer to a question asked long ago: Why did he leave me?

Her submarine pilot asks a better question: “Are you planning to return to Atxuni?”

“I think so. I’m not sure when, though. I have a lot of things to take care of.”

He hums his understanding. “Is life on the surface very complicated?”

“Very.” Not wanting to think about it, she turns to watch the submarine’s mechanical fins gliding effortlessly though the cold water. Forward and back, forward, back. Unlike human-made submarines, with their tin-can aesthetic, mersubmarines were shaped like humpback whales, with extended pectoral fins and a soft, slumped belly, allowing the sub to curve and to circulate water. Like most mertech, the sub was powered by a combination of trapped hydrothermal energy and a perpetual circulation machine activated by ocean currents. Out of the water, the sub, like the holo map Feather provided, would cease to function. She zooms in again on the Aleutian Trench cities and asks the pilot, “Are all water cities as beautiful as Atxuni?”

“All the ones I’ve been to. Some even more so.”

“Which one would you recommend visiting?”

“For you? Qirz. It’s a domed city with waterfalls and beautiful gardens; their Conclave of Hybridity has done wondrous things marrying mertech and human mechanical engineering.”

“It sounds like they should be overseeing the longitudinal transmission project.”

“Oh, all the trench cities work together. But Atxuni was closest to the fiber.”

“Makes sense,” she says, though she has more questions than time to ask them.

The pilot pulls up in front of Gray Whale Watchtower, and Vira has to say goodbye.

Almost as soon as she sets foot on Kodiak, dread seeps into her heart, heavy and familiar. How will she explain her experience in Atxuni to Bárbara? And should she even try? Her mother cannot survive at such depths. She cannot swim that trench or embark on an endless quest to find Mateo—that gilded, glorious image she manufactured of him so that he could never possibly live up to her expectations. Still, if there was any possibility of reuniting with her long lost lover, Bárbara would have taken it without question. On bad nights when Vira was just a kid and had to peel her mother out of a depression in the couch, Bárbara would sneer, “I shoulda sent you to live at your cousin’s in the Lower 48; then I wouldn’t be in this mess.” This mess meaning the trappings of paying for an apartment and a mouth to feed, plus whatever trouble she had gotten herself into drinking or gambling. If Bárbara knew Vira had a connection to Atxuni, she would try her best to capitalize on it. Arrange submarine tours. Bring back mertech.

No, decides Vira. She will not tell Bárbara what happened.

Before heading home, she stops at Dave’s office to return her locator device and check on throughput post-repair. “Another excellent job, Vira—we’re back up to a total of five terabits per second,” he boasts, pointing to real-time data visualizations on his screen. Hair still dripping over her right shoulder, she watches Dave perform the final tests to confirm satisfactory completion of the job. While he completes the requisite forms, he asks a question for which she has prepared an answer: “So, what do you think did it?”

“Earthquake debris. You know how volatile the Aleutians are. Surprised you built there.”

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged, filing the paperwork away. “That’s above my paygrade.”

With a laugh, she says goodbye with a wave. “Call me next time it breaks.”

He nods and salutes her with two fingers. “You got it.”

Outside, Vira pauses to enjoy the warm sun on her dry clothes and the $50,000 super rush job rate soon to hit her bank account. With that kind of money, she could take the rest of the year off and explore the other trench cities on Feather’s holo map. As she walks home in the perpetual August light she thinks, I just might. Why not? She’s young—just twenty-three going on twenty-four—and she’s grown tired of Kodiak, the high cost of milk, the looks white people in particular give her when they notice her gills. For the first time, she thinks she knows what made her father abandon his new family.

He wasn’t a hero, she realizes. He just wanted to feel like he belonged.