Near + Far Read Free

popular one year, Mama Fig said.
    But the scientist, he wasn't that good, or that thorough. Or maybe he didn't understand all the implications of the DNA he was using. Some people said he did it deliberately.
    Because mermaids lay eggs, hundreds at a time, at least that kind did. And the natural-born ones, they didn't have human minds guiding them. They were like sharks—they ate, they killed, they ate. Most of the original human mermaids had gotten out when they found out that the seas were full of chemicals, or that instead of whale songs down there, they heard submarine sonar and boat signals. When the last few discovered that they were spawning whether they liked it or not, they got out too. Supposedly one or two stayed, and now they live in the sea with their children, twice as mean as any of them.
    After a while, I said, "Watch the display for me" and went up on deck. The sun was rising, slivers of gold and pink and blue in the east. It played over the gouges in the Mary Magdalena 's railing where I'd picked at it with a knife, like smallpox marks along the boat's face.
    Niko was watching the water. Light danced over it, intense and dazzling. Spray rode the wind, stinging the eyes. I licked salt from my drying lips.
    "Where are you seeing them?" I asked.
    He pointed, but I didn't see anything at first. It took several moments to spot a flick of fins, the intercepted shadow as a wave rose and fell.
    "You see them out this deep all the time," I said. Niko hadn't been out on the boat much. He got nauseous anywhere out past ten meters, but Jorge Felipe had enlisted him to coax me into cooperating, had supplied him with fancy anti-nausea patches. I looked sideways. One glistened like a chalky gill on the side of his neck.
    "Yeah?" he said, staring at the water. He wasn't watching me, so I looked at his face, trying to commit the details to memory. Trying to imagine him as a photograph. His jaw was a smooth line, shadowed with stubble. The hairs in front of his ears tangled in curls, started to corkscrew, blunted by sleep. He had long eyelashes, longer than mine. The sun tilted further up and the dazzle of light grew brighter, till it made my eyes hurt.
    "Put on a hat," I said to Niko. "Going to be hot and bad today."
    He nodded but stayed where he was. I started to say more, but shrugged and went back in. It was all the same to me. Still, when I saw his straw hat on the floor, I nudged it over to Jorge Felipe and said, "Take this out to Niko when you go."

    Looking out over the railing, I spotted the three corp ships long before we got to the Lump. For a moment I wondered why they were so spread out, and then I realized the Lump's size. It was huge—kilometers wide. The ships were gathered around it, and their buzz boats were resting, wings spread out to recharge the solar panels.
    They must have seen us around the same time. A buzz boat folded its wings, shadows spider-webbed with silver, and approached us. As it neared, I saw the Novagen logo on its side, on its occupant's mirrored helmet.
    "This is claimed salvage," the logo-ed loudspeaker said.
    I cupped my hands to shout back, "Salvage's not claimed till you've got tethers on it. Unless you're pulling in the whole thing, we've got a right to chew on it, too."
    "Claimed salvage," the pilot repeated. He looked the Mary Magdalena up and down and curled his lip. Most of the time I liked her shitty, rundown look, but pride bristled briefly. "You want to be careful, kid. Accidents happen out here when freelancers get in the way."
    I knew they did. Corp ships liked to sink the competition, and they had a dozen different underhanded ways to do it.
    Jorge Felipe said at my elbow, "Gonna let them chase us off?"
    "No," I said, but I nodded at the pilot and said, " Mary Magdalena , back us off."
    We moved round to the other side.
    "What are you going to do?" Niko asked.
    "We're going to cut the engines and let the currents creating the Lump pull us into it," I said. "They're