Dark Waters

Chapter 8

My cell in the council building was spartan but not torturous. I had a bed in the corner and a stone bench jutted out from the wall. I was made comfortable, given regular meals but nothing to break up the horrible monotony, except what little news I got from the guards and daily visits from Aelaria and Tyler. I was thankful that Tyler was left alone, as the remaining council members had decided that his youth cleared him of responsibility. He had merely rode along on the tide of my crime, so they said.  

I was in the cell for seven days.

During much of the time, I sat on my bench, head back, eyes closed, and attempted to riddle things out. I saw perfectly well why I had been imprisoned, and I found no better way to prove my innocence than by not resisting, not making a scene, and trying to reason with my guards when I could. I would ask them questions when they brought me my meals.

“Anything new happen today?” I would inquire, as covered bowls of seafood were passed through the stone bars of my door. And the guard would tell me. Every day it was the same. This many people disappeared last night, and that many conclusions were not come to by the council, and the vanishings had been getting worse since I was locked up, so no one could decide if I was behind it and my accomplices were exacting revenge, or if I was uninvolved.

“What do you think?” I would ask every day. The guard would seal his lips and shake his head, and I would prompt them again. The guard would say “It is not my place to have an opinion, but I don’t think you’re behind it.” And he would swim away to his post again.

Ra’loreh never came to see me. I rehashed the scene of my arrest over and over again in my head. He had been uncharacteristically aggressive. His eyes had been glassy. His lips were faintly blue. His head was tilted a strange way. He had spoken words that he normally would not have spoken. What was wrong with him?

Aelaria brought Tyler to see me every day at lunchtime. They were allowed a half hour to talk to me. The news that they brought with them was far more specific than that of the guards.

Everyone was vanishing. Public officials, civilians, children, the kidnappings were occurring without discrimination. Of the five remaining council members, three disappeared over the course of the week, one every other day. The two that were left were surrounded by security at all times. Even some of Aelaria's close friends were nowhere to be found. It was madness.

Tyler told me very frankly what he thought of the whole ordeal. He believed that if humans were behind the kidnappings, everything would be much flashier than this. They would come down in submarines with nets and every weapon they could muster and take the mermaids all away for study in one fell swoop. Those were his exact words.

Much as no one wanted to admit it, my wise little brother was right, and I knew it. We knew our kind, and they were too infatuated with their self-appointed status of a higher species to be so sneaky about it. They would see their competing species as simple savages to be studied, and overthrown if they were a danger. Humans would come storming down to the sea floor with an armada of marine weapons and take this tiny, peaceful civilization by force. One way or another, humans were not behind this. It was a merperson, or a group of them.

The question was, who?