Underwater

Part 15

Ten hours is a long time to be stuck on a bus in the best of circumstances, but it really sucks when you think you’ve been double-crossed. I’ve been running every phone call, every favor I’ve asked Sasha for through my head, trying to figure out what he could have been doing behind my back.  Is that how the men in black found us that night at the pond in Garfield Park? They’d never caught up to me before, but they’d been on Lusi’s trail for a while. Then again, she told me they’d never gotten that close before. And if they were using me to get to her, then they wouldn’t have even bothered trying to catch up to me until I was with her. The whole thing is making me dizzy. Or maybe that’s car sickness. I hate buses.

Lusi is folding the corner of the letter in on itself over and over, then unfolding it and starting again. It’s annoying the crap out of me, but I don’t have it in me to ask her to stop.

“Okay,” I say, out of the blue, “so maybe Sasha sold us out. But why? To who? How would the humans get anyone from Pavlo to cooperate with them, let alone our cousin, and a member of the royal family?”

“There are some connections between the human government and ours,” Lusi says, chewing on her fingernail. “You know, like how Sasha was always bragging that he could find stuff out from them. He always made it sound like our people just got themselves into important agencies or whatever, and didn’t tell anyone who they were, but… how do we know that’s true? Maybe things were going both ways. Maybe some of them had to give other information back. For what they wanted to know.”

I frown. “That kind of sounds like Sasha, actually. I mean, he was really into it, getting information out of them. I always thought he was just good at spy stuff or something. But it makes more sense, what you’re saying. He probably thought he was outsmarting them, getting stuff out of them that he wanted to know. But maybe he was telling them stuff, too.”

Takumi looks pissed again. “So we have no idea what he’s said or to whom he has said it. He could have passed on any number of critical pieces of information. This is not a good situation.”

Lusi and I look at each other and laugh. “Uh, yeah,” she says. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“How can you laugh? This is very serious,” he says, looking almost offended.

I smother my snort of laughter. “I’m sorry. It is. It’s just… you’re funny, that’s all.”

“I’m not trying to make a joke.” He folds his arms across his chest.

“No, we know,” Lusi says, taking a sip of water from the bottle she had in her purse. “You just can’t help it. You talk funny.”

Takumi glares at us. “English is not my native language, you know.”

“We know,” I nod, trying not to laugh again. “It’s kind of cute.”

“Cute?” Takumi looks back and forth between me and Lusi. “Cute is not a word that I would use to describe a man who has killed four men with his bare hands earlier in the day.”

“Well of course you wouldn’t,” Lusi scoffs. “You’re not gay.”

Takumi throws his hands up in the air and gives up, refusing to speak.  Lusi and I giggle again a little, but then I look down at the envelope in my hands and see the fish, and the laughter dies in my throat. Lusi sees where I’m looking and quiets, too.

“So,” I say, peeling my gaze from the fish and looking up at Lusi and Takumi, “we can’t trust Sasha, we don’t know what he’s told the humans about us, and we don’t know if our mother is still safe.”

“Yeah, that about sums it up.” Lusi pulls her feet up on her seat with her head on her knees and her arms around her legs. “But on the bright side, I hear they have awesome beignets in New Orleans.”

Takumi shakes his head. “Beignets are disgusting. How can you eat fried food? It doesn’t make you sick?”

Lusi shrugs. “Whatever. It tastes good on the way down.”

“Girls.” Takumi shudders. “Well, aside from the culinary horrors that await us, I want to take issue with something you said, Thessa.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“You said that we don’t know what Sasha has told the humans. But your mother did not mention anything about humans.”

“What do you mean?” Lusi picks up the letter and unfolds it again and we all look it over.

“You see?” Takumi points to the second paragraph. “She says there are those that are loyal to you and those who will pretend to be. She’s talking about merfolk. Not humans. She doesn’t mention them anywhere.”

“But…” Lusi drops the letter into my lap and rubs her eyes. “It’s humans who’ve been following me all along. The men in black. They’re humans. That’s who we have to stay away from.”

“Yes,” Takumi agrees. “The men who are trying to capture you are humans. But they are the arms of the monster, not the brains.”

“Eew.” I can’t help myself – it’s a pretty gross analogy.

“Sorry.” Takumi looks amused. “But you see what I mean. Your mother’s letter has told us something important. You cannot trust someone that you thought you could trust. That means we have to assume that you cannot trust anyone. And it also means that you have to stop making assumptions. Whatever is happening here, it is not what you thought was happening.”

My head is starting to hurt, but I can’t argue with him. “But she told us not to try to find her. And that’s the whole reason we were out here in the first place. And we can’t go home, either. So what do we do now?”

 Lusi looks like she’s about to say something, but Takumi beats her to it. “We find the brains of the monster.”