Page 4 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

“That so?” The kraken lobsterman lifts a brow and a tentacle lifts, reaching his earlobe.

“It’s my favorite fact in the world that isn’t about space.”

The lobsterman, whose name turns out to be Earl, has opinions about space, the government, and a documentary about black holes that kept him up two nights running. I get comfortable, because this is my favorite kind of conversation, the kind where two complete strangers can just join minds and discuss freely for the pure joy of it. We get through the rather complex politics of lobster fishing. We get through whether the moon landing was real. It’s a good ten minutes.

Then Earl squints past me at the horizon, and his face does something I don’t like.

“You’re crossing today?” he says.

“This morning. Out to Marlin Island.”

“Hm,” says Earl.

There’s a whole novel in that hm. He works his jaw, looks at the sky to the southeast, which to me looks like sky, and goes back to his trap.

“The air pressure has been dropping since dawn,” he says, mostly to the trap. “Faster than the radio says.”

The forecast this morning said a storm system is coming through tonight, well after we’d all be toasting under AETHER’s dome, safe and sound. I checked it twice, once last night and once before getting in my car.

“The forecast said tonight,” I say.

“Ayuh,” Earl says, in the tone of a man who has outlived a great many forecasts. “My left knee is never wrong about that. I’d want to be somewhere with a roof by mid-afternoon, me. A storm’s coming in, no matter what those fancy people on the weather channel say.”

And that puts a little cold spot right between my shoulder blades, I’ll be honest. But we’ve got a ceremony to prepare, a boat with decades on this run, and a captain who does this for a living. I know the difference between caution and fearmongering. Mostly.

“I’ll ask the captain about it,” I tell Earl, and I mean it. I collect Carl and shake Earl’s hand and wish him a good day.

Captain Fergus Williamson is on the back deck of the Belle looking like a thundercloud that learned to coil rope. He is a selkie, beige fur covering his skin, a belly he wears like cargo, and an expression that says the morning has personally wronged him. The harbor office warned me he was, quote, “a miserable old seal.”

I’ve spent ten years befriending review committees. A miserable old seal is a Tuesday.

“Buenos días! You must be Captain Williamson. I love your boat.”

It takes three boat questions and one line about how a hull that wide must sit like a church in a swell, and then it happens, the magic point where a grump finally breaks out: the laugh. It comes up out of him like something surfacing from very deep water, and it hits the whole harbor at once. Gulls take off. Earl, a hundred yards away, doesn’t even look up.

“A church in a swell!” Fergus roars, thumping the rail. “Hah! I’m stealing that one. Aboard, then, come aboard. Mind Mr. Sagan on the gunwale.”

“He’s been through worse. We’ve been to Comic-Con.”

The laugh again. Good. I now have an ally. I hand Carl across and Fergus receives him like visiting royalty and lashes him to the wheelhouse.

I cast a glance at Earl, who’s now standing next to his cages.

“Fella down the dock says the pressure is dropping fast,” I say, keeping it light. “Says he’d want a roof by mid-afternoon. Anything to it?”

Fergus doesn’t even pause his knot.

“Earl’s famous left knee,” he says, with vast contempt for the knee in question. “That knee’s been forecasting the end of the world since Reagan. System comes through tonight, you’ll be sleeping under a solid roof long before. I’ve run this water forty years, professor. Crossed in worse than anything today’s got in it, and that’s a promise.”

Forty years. A promise. The cold spot between my shoulders files a minority opinion, and I overrule it, because that is what you do when the person with four decades of local knowledge tells you things are safe. I’ve sat on enough panels to know you don’t overrule the expert in the room.

“Then I’ll stop worrying and start carrying,” I say, and hand my duffel across, and step aboard the boat.

And that’s when I see her.

She’s set up on the bench under the wheelhouse overhang, laptop open, garment bag laid over the seat beside her with the flat precision of a crime scene. Turquoise hair, real turquoise, the color the Gulf Stream thinks about being on its best day, wound up into a bun so tight it looks structural. Black blazer. Sensible shoes. She’s typing like the keyboard owes her data.

Dr. Nerissa Marsh. I know the name a lot better than the face, which tells you everything about what kind of chair I’ve been this year: her biosignature paper came through my desk with the inauguration program, and it was the best thing I read all spring. Apparently in the same building I work in, some floors down, this amazing woman has been doing incredible research while I’ve been in budget meetings developing a personal relationship with a spreadsheet.