13. The Imperfect Storm

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE IMPERFECT STORM

The Past: Trick’s Memories

That one summer before Sato obeyed the vangill summons had been three weeks of bliss a million years ago when Trick was still a child.

Utterly forgotten.

And yet, too often when Trick was sleeping alone in his car on the side of some abandoned road, he thought he could remember every single second of it.

If he tried.

Sometimes, to his shame, he did try.

Because it had been a rosy, sand-saturated, salt-encrusted three weeks of perfect teenage romance. He had been incandescently happy in that way that only the young can be happy. Or maybe that was Sato’s magic. Patrick’s best and last protector. His greatest champion.

Trick tried not to remember that one winter break, when Sato came home from vangill training for the last time. When Sato had used his spurs on a human on land. Sato, who had grown up and changed, but was still very much his .

At his worst and most maudlin, Trick might have said his great love . When the hunger gnawed at him, when he thought his family might actually find him, when he thought he’d never make it to the West Coast. The place he needed to get to so desperately for no other reason than it meant that he and Sato would be swimming in the same ocean once again.

But who falls in love forever when they’re fifteen, anyway?

At seventeen Sato got that break from vangill training and came to visit and they twisted around each other in sheets and sand and sea, like there was no better thing than to share thoughts and flesh and dreams.

But after that? Sato did not come back. For all their promises.

Patrick graduated high school top of his class but Sato did not know because Sato did not come for him. He was supposed to be a free merman by then. Done with the vangill. Done with training.

Three years served for his spurs, duty discharged.

Yet Sato did not return.

Sato and Patrick did not get to swim off into the sunrise together as they’d planned. To the East Coast where Patrick had earned a scholarship to a small artsy college. A scholarship Patrick never used and a college he never even visited. They didn’t rent that little off-campus apartment together. Sato didn’t get that job with the Coast Guard. He never cooked his sire’s katsu recipe for Patrick on the weekends.

Patrick got none of the things that meant love continued eternal.

He got empty beaches and the silence of a vast ocean and the mystery of the Deep. His first love had been swallowed whole without a trace.

He got forgotten affection and the bitterness of foolish childish dreams that were doomed never to come true. How had he not been more guarded? Why had he always let Sato be the guarded one and the one to guard?

He waited past the time he should have gone away to college. He waited while Veronica left him to become an electrician (of all things) and his phone left him to become a brick (there was cheesecake involved – don’t ask).

He watched Mr Sato waste away suddenly and rapidly, eaten up from the inside by, as the man said, just a touch of cancer . Patrick knew he had really been eaten away by waiting for his own great love to return, and then for the son he hadn’t wanted but waited for anyway.

Mr Sato got tired of waiting and died.

So Patrick was stuck waiting alone in Mr Sato’s house, full of memories. Until the landlord noticed and claimed it back. Sooner than he’d hoped.

Then he had to wait in his parents’ house. Not very long at all because in a fit of late night horror and self-recrimination, Patrick noticed his family and what they’d been doing. While he’d been distracted by Sato and the sea, cafes and drama clubs, college and impossible futures, his family had moved from trading in moonshine and information to trading in cocaine and antiquities, to trading in heroine and human children.

Which meant Patrick couldn’t wait any longer.

He found himself suddenly in motion, in his old beater of a station wagon that he’d paid for with money earned at the cafe. Money that should have gone to college expenses and a new phone. A station wagon that wasn’t heading to university, filled with his meager belongings and his vast wardrobe and Sato’s sarcastic opinion on the excessive nature of both.

Instead it was filled with scared human children who spoke a language Patrick did not. In the seat next to him sat a teenage girl with terrified dark eyes who spoke a little of both tongues but wasn’t sarcastic at all. A girl who was scared of him because he was male. A girl who wasn’t Sato.

Patrick could no longer afford to wait.

Because Patrick was not Sato’s dad, to measure out his days with the rhythm of a fickle sea, lost to reality.

Sato would have to chase Patrick this time.

But first Patrick would be chased by his own family, three bent cops, and an extremely nasty gang of overly tattooed humans.

Because Patrick had to make his way to places where scared human children would not be turned into profit. Patrick had to learn quickly the right shifters to trust, the right human institutions to consult, and how to escape when his guesses were wrong. Patrick had to learn how to lie. Lie like his family did, lie like he was born to it. Because he was. He had to learn to deceive and avoid trumped-up charges and out-of-state warrants. He had to become slippery like the otter he truly was. He had to survive on his wits and his instincts. Turned out, in the end, he had plenty of both.

He got those kids out.

But Sato didn’t chase him because Sato never found him.

So Patrick worked his way slowly and secretly across the country to LA because that sounded like a good place to get lost. And because LA was truly terrible, he eventually dragged what was left of his car and the very last of his cash up Highway 1, ending up in a bougie little coastal town, slinging coffee for tourists and fish-sauce lattes for locals. Because Patrick, it turned out, only really had two life skills – he was a killer barista and he could survive.

Even though he had made it, finally, to the edge of the correct ocean, Sato still wasn’t there.

So Patrick Inis changed his name to Trick (no last name, no DURPS registration) and stopped waiting. He stopped trusting in the one thing he had trusted completely. And he learned how to be unsafe.

Because no one gets to keep their first love.

Apparently, the merfolk wanted Sato and cared not one jot for what Patrick wanted, or worse, what Patrick loved.

Who was he to fight the ocean?

What the sea decided to keep, it keeps forever.

The Past: Sato in Kealakekua Bay, heading home to Patrick

Sato was destined to remember little of his years spent training to be a vangill, except the very end.

Oddly, he remembered that ending only because of the Navarch. His merman trainer had surprised him. Sato didn’t surprise easily. That austere presence, that strict disciplinarian, had been nothing if not predictable.

The Navarch had been proud of Sato in his way. Because when Sato returned to him after his last visit home, he was not only able to control his spurs, he was able to use those spurs on land. Sato had done something no other vangill did, chosen an anchor for himself.

It meant Sato would be famous among the vangill. The Navarch’s best student. One of the few who could fight on land and sea. Being able to control spurs at all was one thing, but using them in human form? That only happened once a generation.

The Navarch was proud of him.

Sato found that very weird and slightly exhausting. Expectations annoyed him.

But when their training was completed and assignments were passed out, the Navarch’s pride was shaken. It turned out, Sato had more hidden spurs, the kind that cut with words and decisions. The kind that made even a merman like the Navarch bleed.

Because Sato refused his vangill assignment. “Three years the Deep demanded of me. I gave them to you. I am grateful for your expert training, for I am now a danger to all those around me. I always wanted to be dangerous.”

“But you could be the greatest of us.”

“No, thank you.”

The Navarch licked his lips, confused. “Where will you go?”

“Back to my sire’s town. Back to dry land.”

“You like it better there?”

“No. I paid three years of penance specifically so the sea would not reject me. I intend never to be a stranger to any ocean. But what I want isn’t sea-bound.”

“What about the children you could sire? What about the next generation?” There was something funny about the Navarch’s face as he said that.

“What about them?” Sato asked.

“Will you offer stud services? Accept mermaid visitors? For the good of the species?”

Sato sighed, annoyed and tired of hiding this part. It didn’t matter any more. They were all going their separate ways now. He had nothing left to prove.

“No.”

The Navarch shook his head, confused and frustrated. “You intend to be faithful to that human girlfriend the others accused you of having all these years?”

Sato laughed. “The one I talk to on the phone that they have never seen? I half expected Nix to follow me home last time. He was that curious.”

The Navarch was also curious. “So, she exists?”

“Do you need to know?”

“I’m losing my top student. I don’t deserve to know the reason for that? Were you taken in by the idea of human romantic love? You don’t seem the type. Why did you obey the vangill summons, if you never intended to stay with us and fulfill your fated role? Why did you really use us, use me, for training? That’s never happened before. I’ve never trained a vangill only to have him take his skills elsewhere. Let alone to the surface. Who will you protect, if not your own kind? And why do you so desperately want to protect them?”

Three years and someone had finally asked Sato the right question. “There’s this boy. He shines.”

“A boy.” The Navarch did not seem shocked.

“You guessed?”

“You’ve always been very careful with your pronouns.”

Sato fluttered his hands in agreement. “If I can’t have both Patrick and the sea, I choose Patrick.”

“So said with all the confidence of youth.”

Sato recognized something in the Navarch then. A wistful bitterness. The reason the Navarch had seemed to like him from the start. The reason the Navarch had always been on his side. And that was what had surprised Sato. That was what he remembered even years later.

“You never took the risk yourself, did you?” Sato asked.

Silence.

Sato understood. The Navarch hadn’t found his Patrick. “You never had the opportunity.”

The Navarch looked away. “You’re perceptive. I’d never have guessed.”

“Just because I don’t say much doesn’t mean I don’t see anything.” Sato thought maybe he could only see queer in other mermen. Patrick had said Sato had terrible gaydar , but maybe that’s because Sato had the sonar version.

The Navarch flicked his tail behind him, sending a spray into the air, converting water into rainbows. “Like you, it would have been a man.”

“Have you sired children?” Sato wondered.

“That would have been embarrassing for everyone involved.”

“So you hide and pay penance by teaching the next generation of vangill?”

“How did this become a conversation about my past instead of your future?”

Sato fluttered his fins, rising up a little out of the water, a dominance play. Showing the full force of his lineage scales. A luster that he would fail to pass along to the next generation. “Come visit us sometime, Navarch. My Patrick will know everyone in the local scene. He’ll introduce you to a nice boy.” He paused, “Or a not so nice one, if that’s your preference.”

The Navarch actually laughed. “Maybe I’ll do that.”

“You’ll let me go then?”

The Navarch flicked his hands in sharp agreement and dismissal. “I’ll let you go.”

The Navarch was strong enough. One of the few who could have stopped Sato. But they both knew that he was letting Sato go because Sato was going to have the life that he couldn’t. His pride in his best student would have to stretch beyond vangill abilities and into spaces he had never had the courage to go himself. He would stay proud of Sato, but for different reasons.

So it wasn’t the Navarch who kept Sato from returning to Patrick on time.

And it wasn’t the vangill.

And it wasn’t the sea.

In the end, it was the land that thwarted him.

The humans reported it as an earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter Scale. It struck the ocean floor off the Aleutian Islands. Waves traveled across the Pacific at 500 miles an hour, measuring 55 feet high.

Sometimes the earth really could impact the sea.

A local mermaid pod surfed those waves, excited by the opportunity for rapid transit. They also siren-sang a warning from one pod to the next. Faster than the waves. The vangill, who were preparing to depart Hawaii, off to their new assignments, heard about the tsunami shortly before it hit.

“It’s coming for us? Here?” said Nix.

“I’m not battling that current,” said Rus. “Let’s wait it out.”

The Navarch addressed the group, “This is an opportunity. The humans are never prepared for tsunamis. They’re trying, but they won’t be able to evacuate Hilo in time.”

“What’s that to us?” asked Nix.

“Did you forget? Mermen are the liaisons to the human world. You spent years with your sires, learning their cultures. This is why. Local Coast Guard has asked for our help. We’ll be on rescue and retrieval.”

“Seriously?” grumbled Rus.

“They knew we were training here?” asked someone else.

Sato looked out at the ocean. It was deceptively calm.

“They call it humanitarian aid .” The Navarch was openly amused by the term. “We call it a favor owed . The tsunami will be here soon. Take to the Deep and float it out well below the surface. I’ll meet you at the fourth reef break at sunset, when it’s all over.”

Sato said, “I will not be meeting you then or there. I’m leaving.”

The others looked like they would like to follow his lead.

“Stay, please, Sato. You’re the strongest of us.” The Navarch humbled himself.

Sato turned back. “This would satisfy any and all remaining obligations I have to you or the Deep?”

The Navarch looked uncomfortable. “The humans need our help.” But that was not the point.

Sato was persistent. “The Deep will not make demands upon me ever again?”

“You know the Two Recalls that require you to return no matter what?”

They applied to all mermen but specifically to vangill, so of course he knew. “War and natural disaster.”

“Is this not the second?” suggested the Navarch.

“Don’t play games, old fish, that means a disaster affecting mermaids, not humans.”

The Navarch inclined his head. Sato had won that round.

So Sato pressed his luck. “Apart from the Two, I will never be called back after this?”

The Navarch blew out air in a rush, like a whale. “Agreed. You have my word.”

So Sato and the vangill spent three days pulling humans, injured and drowning, out of the brink. Sato pushed himself like he never had before, and thus he rescued the most two-legs. When he could, he took to land to try calling Patrick, but the phones were down or busy or washed away. Disaster conditions, the humans called it. Typical of them, their own infrastructure failed when they needed it most.

Then Sato and the vangill spent two weeks searching the nearby Pacific for sailboats and yachts off course. Sato found an adrift cruise ship. Blights on the ocean caused by the human inability to stick to the land where they belonged. He still couldn’t get hold of Patrick. Or his sire. When he managed to get through on a phone, neither answered. Patrick’s cell rang forever and his sire’s landline said mechanically that it no longer existed. Sire had likely forgotten to pay the bill. Again. It’s possible they both had.

Sato and the vangill spent another week helping with a coastal rebuild and reclamation, pulling out human objects and sparkles and bodies. All things that the humans, for some reason, treasured and wanted back.

Sato stayed because Patrick would have wanted him to help. Patrick cared about such things, and Sato wasn’t a monster, not really. He assumed Patrick would set off on his own, to plan, and Sato would simply catch up. He stayed because the Navarch asked him. He stayed because the humans would owe him forever because of it.

The humans calculated later that the unexpected assistance of thirteen highly trained mermen had probably saved over two hundred human lives, over a dozen ships, and millions in rebuilding costs. That last bit was probably what they valued most.

There was an awards ceremony. Where, exactly, did one pin a metal on a naked merman chest? And what were they supposed to do with their silly little metal medals afterward? (Mermen always went scaled to televised events, which meant the humans had to accommodate them with a pontoon stage. It was awkward for everyone.)

Sato did not attend. Metal? In the sea? Ridiculous. He was missed. He had made a big impression.

The real end result was that the humans owed the merfolk in a big way. And Sato was six weeks late getting back to Patrick.

He wasn’t worried. Patrick would have left his new address with Sato’s sire. Sato would swim back to his sire’s house, say goodbye, and then swim around Florida and up the East Coast to Patrick.

Sato did get back home eventually – if that tiny human delta town could be called home . Only to find his sire dead and Patrick gone. There were strange humans in his sire’s house and no address left behind. There were strange humans in Patrick’s house too, also without an address. Patrick’s family had vanished. Moved on to plague some other delta town.

The neighborhood was sleepy and quiet without them.

Sato went and asked at the cafe about the cute barista who’d once been in charge there. What had happened to him?

Apparently, he’d vanished amidst rumors of human trafficking. Sato had sneered. Who would want to trade in humans? There were so many of them – wasn’t that like trying to sell sand to a mermaid? But it did sound like something Patrick would try to fix. It certainly one-upped his own rescuing of humans from tsunamis. If Patrick hadn’t made it to college like he was supposed to, it would be because he got into trouble and had to run away, just like always.

Sato heard tall tales of old station wagons and black market ill-fated cheesecake. (Why cheesecake, he had absolutely no idea, but that was classic Patrick.) The rumors were rife, as they are wont to be when someone disappears. And then a whole family vanishes. And then three local cops are done for corruption. And the mayor retires amidst scandal.

But no one knew where Patrick had gone.

He called Patrick’s number for months, until it went from unanswered to no longer in service to some stranger’s voice that Sato hated for not being Patrick.

Sato spent four years looking for Patrick and nothing else. Forgetting to eat sometimes. Driven back to the sea only to hunt and swim and search there, in other deltas, along other beaches, for one small otter.

Sato spent a year searching for every week he’d been delayed. Paying penance for having abandoned his lover to all the sewage that rushed to fill Patrick’s life without Sato there to protect him from it.

But Patrick, his Patrick, who sparkled like the sun off scales. His tiny chatterbox with the fathomless gaze. His favorite person. His only person. Patrick had just… vanished. Disappeared into the human world, hidden himself in the dry infinity of the salt-less earth. Patrick was running down dusty pathways that Sato did not understand and going places where Sato could not follow.

Sato had only ever existed on land because Patrick made room for him there. Sato had never understood hugs, only accepted them. Sato had eaten catfish katsu because humans cooked fish, not because he liked it that way. Sato could not wander the world of men asking after the direction of fathomless eyes and chatterbox smiles. There was only nonsense above the waves without Patrick to interpret it for him.

How could he possibly find Patrick, when Patrick had always been his guide?

Still, Sato would have stayed searching, for all he did not know the way to navigate any part of it. Except the only other thing he’d ever cared about called him back to the ocean. And he was so lost and tired and alone by then, he answered the call.

His sister was to become the Paralia of All Seas, the envoy between merfolk and mankind, one of the Soteria of the Deep. She was in need of a vangill. Sato was overqualified for the job. She would be a diplomat, a land-walker, and her brother, who had spurs in both worlds, was the perfect bodyguard.

That brother vowed to use this new role to keep looking for the dobhar-chú he had lost. Keep asking, using any favor he earned as vangill and bodyguard, using all the power his sister allowed him.

But no one he met had ever heard of Patrick Inis. Few even knew the dobhar-chú existed at all.

An otter who does not want to be found, can’t be.

Patrick had been swallowed by the earth as surely as Sato was once swallowed by the sea. They had, somehow, managed to abandon each other.

Sometimes, it turns out, what the land decides to keep, it keeps forever.