The mermaid queen

The search begins

The introduction did not come as quickly as Eva had hoped.

‎Wealth, she learned in those first weeks as Isabela, moved at its own unhurried pace. The men she dined with — old money, older names, the kind of fortunes that had stopped needing to prove themselves generations ago — did not simply hand over the location of a private collection to a woman they'd known for a fortnight, however tragic her story or however charming her borrowed smile. They dropped names the way children dropped crumbs, never quite leading anywhere on their own.

‎So Eva did what she had done as queen of the Vale when a single approach failed: she widened the search.

‎She began with the public museums first, reasoning that whoever had bought Emily might have moved her through more legitimate channels before she vanished into a private home — a natural history museum two hours inland, its marine wing dim and echoing, tanks of ordinary fish circling behind glass that made Eva's chest ache with a homesickness she hadn't expected. She walked every hall of it, trailing her borrowed fingers along glass tanks, searching for a face she would have known anywhere, and found nothing but grouper and reef sharks and a bored teenage guide who kept trying to flirt with her.

‎She tried the aquarium in the capital next, then a smaller, stranger collection two towns over — a rich eccentric's private zoo, rumored to house creatures no zoning board would have approved, though when Eva finally talked her way past the gate with Isabela's borrowed name, she found only overfed crocodiles and a moth-eaten stuffed creature that someone had dressed up as a mermaid for the tourists. She stood in front of the fraud for a long moment, feeling something in her chest twist tight enough to hurt, before she made herself walk away.

‎Each failed visit cost her something. The potion's hold on her was not permanent — Ferrin had been clear about that — and every day she spent chasing empty leads was a day closer to the moment her legs might, without warning, become a tail again in the middle of a crowded room. She began to ration her hours the way a soldier rationed water on a long march, and began, too, to feel the particular exhaustion of a body unused to walking, standing, sitting in chairs that pressed uncomfortably against a spine that had never needed to hold itself upright before.

‎It was in the fourth week, at a charity gala thrown by one of the shipping families she'd cultivated through the president's connections, that she finally heard the name spoken plainly.

‎"The Callahans," said a woman beside her — a socialite half-drunk on champagne and eager to gossip with the president's newly resurfaced daughter — "have the strangest collection out at their estate. Old man Callahan started it decades ago. His son's expanded it since he took over the business. Half of what they've got out there isn't even legal to own, if you ask me, but who's going to tell a family with that much money what they can and can't keep in a tank?"

‎Eva kept her expression carefully arranged into polite curiosity, the way she had practiced in the mirror of her borrowed bedroom until it no longer felt like a performance. "It sounds fascinating," she said. "I'd love to see it sometime."

‎"Oh, they don't just let anyone in." The woman laughed, waving her glass. "It's all very exclusive. You'd need an invitation from the son himself — Marcus Callahan. Or from that daytime charity thing his family runs. They open the exhibition twice a year for donors."

‎"When's the next one?"

‎The woman considered, swaying slightly. "Few weeks, I think. There's always a dinner beforehand. Marcus does love an audience."

‎Eva committed the name to memory the way she once committed tidal charts and battle formations — with the sharp, total focus of a mind that did not intend to let a single detail slip. Marcus Callahan. An exhibition. A dinner beforehand, and a man who loved an audience.

‎She smiled at the socialite, thanked her for the wine and the conversation, and excused herself early, already working out, in the quiet, calculating part of her mind that had ruled the Vale for twenty years, exactly how a dead president's daughter might come to be standing at Marcus Callahan's dinner table within the month.

‎Somewhere behind a glass wall she had not yet found, she let herself believe, her daughter was still waiting. Eva intended to be worth the wait.

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