The mermaid queen

A failed rescue

‎The invitation to tour Marcus's private collection came sooner than Eva expected — a handwritten note delivered to her estate only four days after the gala, inviting her to a "small evening among friends" at the exhibition center. Eva read it twice, memorized the time, and spent the hours before it forcing herself to eat, to rest, to steady hands that had not shaken like this even in battle.

‎The exhibition center turned out to be a separate building on the estate grounds, low and windowless from the outside, disguised as something between a private aquarium and a museum wing. Marcus led her through it himself, past tanks holding creatures Eva recognized with a distant, clinical horror — a sea serpent pup too young to have been taken from its mother, some kind of luminous kelp-spirit pressed flat against glass far too small for it — until they reached the final chamber, and Eva's whole careful composure very nearly shattered on the spot.

‎Emily was there.

‎Her daughter floated in a tank three times the size of the others, lit from below in a way clearly designed to show her off rather than to comfort her, her tail — Emily's beautiful, familiar tail, the one Eva had watched grow from a guppy's fin into a young woman's — curled beneath her as she drifted, listless, against the glass. She looked thinner than Eva remembered. Paler. Her eyes, when they found Eva's through the glass, went wide with a shock that Emily, thank the tides, had the presence of mind to swallow before it became recognition.

‎"She's remarkable, isn't she," Marcus said, watching Eva's face rather than the tank, mistaking her stricken expression for simple awe. "We've had her for weeks now. Still won't eat properly. My father thinks she needs more of her natural habitat recreated — coral, that sort of thing — but I think she just misses the sea."

‎"She looks unwell," Eva said, and was proud of how steady her voice came out, even as every instinct screamed at her to put her fist through the glass.

‎"She'll adjust. They always do, eventually." Marcus said it easily, carelessly, the way a man discusses furniture, and Eva understood in that moment exactly how little her daughter's suffering meant to him — not cruelty, precisely, just the vast, comfortable indifference of a man who had never once had to consider that the things in his collection might have mothers.

‎She catalogued everything as he walked her through the rest of the tour: the location of the exits, the placement of the guards — fewer than she expected, mostly stationed near the main doors rather than the tanks themselves — the thick reinforced glass of Emily's tank, and, most usefully, a maintenance door at the rear of the chamber that Marcus mentioned only in passing, meant for staff moving equipment rather than guests.

‎That night, after the household had gone quiet and Marcus had retired to whatever wing of the mansion he called his own, Eva slipped from her guest room and made her way back toward the exhibition center on legs gone steady with purpose.

‎The maintenance door was unlocked, exactly as she'd hoped — but the moment she stepped through it, a soft chime sounded somewhere above her, too quiet for a human ear tuned to ordinary sound, but sharp as a struck bell to instincts honed by twenty years of guarding a throne room. A silent alarm. She had perhaps ninety seconds before someone came to check it.

‎She ran for Emily's tank, pressing both palms flat against the reinforced glass, feeling for the seam where the panel might be forced. "Emily," she whispered, and her daughter surged toward the glass, hands slapping against it from the other side, mouth shaping her mother's name in a language of bubbles no human guard would ever hear.

‎The glass didn't budge. Eva threw her weight against it, searched for a catch, a release, anything — and found nothing but smooth, seamless reinforced panel built by men who had clearly planned for exactly this kind of desperate mother.

‎Footsteps, then, echoing down the corridor behind her — fast, more than one set, radios crackling. Eva had seconds left, and no way through the glass, and every second she stayed cost her the element of surprise she would need to try again.

‎She pressed her palm one last time to the glass, over her daughter's matching palm on the other side, and mouthed three words she prayed Emily could read on her lips — I will return — before she turned and ran, back through the maintenance door, into the dark grounds, vanishing into the shadows of the estate's gardens just as the first flashlight beam swept across the corridor she'd left behind.

‎She made it back to her guest room breathless, heart pounding, hands shaking now that there was no one left to see them shake, and sat in the dark for a long time listening to distant shouts fade back into silence, grief and fury both sitting so heavy in her chest that she could barely draw breath around them.

‎The rescue had failed. But she had seen her daughter's face, alive, however thin and however frightened — and Eva understood, sitting alone in a dead girl's borrowed bed, that she was not leaving this estate again until Emily left it with her.

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