Mei was watching the news again. These days, the news was the only thing to watch. The town was still looking out for aftershock quakes, and TV was a fast way to relay warning messages should any be sent out. But a shrill scream escaped when she saw, through the screen door, three black and mucky people approaching. Complete strangers, kidnappers perhaps or murderers, even. She screamed even louder when the three people burst through the door, knocking over her mother’s plants. The pre-teen jumped on the couch and flailed her arms.

“Oh my god!” she yelled. “Who are you? Get out of my house! Don’t eat me! I’ll call the police, I swear!”

“Mei, chill out,” Kyungsoo yelled. “It’s just us. Open the door to the lab, now!”

Not grasping the situation, Mei jumped up and did exactly as she was told. Twisting the hatch and pulling open the door into the oceanography lab, she stepped aside in her panic. The three oil-covered boys ran in, carrying something equally black and oily covered by a tarp. Victoria, who was considerably less oily, walked in after them.

“Into the tub!” Victoria yelled, and the boys followed her orders while she ran over to the corner of the room. She returned to them with buckets, sponges, brushes, and dish soap.

“Start washing her!” she commanded as she switched on the warm water. Yixing grabbed the soap and a sponge. Right away, he poured the warm water over the girl’s face and hair and then pulled the excess oil off, dumping it into one of the buckets. Chanyeol and Kyungsoo did the same, paying attention to the fish tail. The tub turned blacker as the cleaning continued. The girl remained still.

“What is that?” Mei asked, standing over the three cleaning-men with wide eyes. Mei scanned the length of the girl and gasped when she caught sight of the tail. “Is that a mermaid?!” she gasped.

“Mei!” Yixing complained. “Will you please get out of here and do your homework?” The boy then continued cleaning. In time, Yixing was able to clear the oil from her face, and he put himself to work, cleaning her hair and shoulders. Thankfully, her chest was covered in a shimmery, scaly substance that hid her s, saving the three boys from the embarrassment.

“Is she alive?” Mei asked. Yixing rolled his eyes.

“I told you to get out here!” he said. Yixing turned his attention back to the girl, who lay unconscious by his knees. He put his arm under her neck to lift her up, giving him access to scrub away the oil by her shoulder blades. Chanyeol spoke up.

“She’s moving,” he said, his eyes growing wide with surprise.

“Yixing--,” Victoria tried to say, but before anyone else could get a word in between, the girl’s eyes shot open, and her gaze met Yixing’s.

All the noise in the room died into one, high-pitched ringing in her ears. In a flourish of panic, the girl gasped, and then her tail jerked into action, flailing in every direction, flinging oil over the walls and hitting Chanyeol and Kyungsoo as it did. She knocked over the nearby equipment, spilling the buckets of oil and damaging some computers. Sharp tools went flying. Wheeled-tables were overturned. Glass was shattered, people were hit. Yixing, thinking quickly, wrapped his arms around her, trapping her arms between her chest and his, preventing her from lashing out and hitting anyone else.

“The tail! Get on her tail! Kyungsoo!” Victoria yelled, pushing Chanyeol and Kyungsoo forward. The fin jabbed Kyungsoo once in the face before they tried to stop her. The two boys bent over, grabbing a hold of her tail, keeping her from hitting anything or anyone else. Her tail was already made from something slimy, and the soapy water made holding onto her an even bigger challenge.

She was strong. Yixing locked his fingers together to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else in her panicked outburst.

“Victoria, get the damn sedative!” Chanyeol growled as he tried to weight down her tail with his body.

“I’m working on it,” Victoria snapped back, her voice shaky as she grabbed the sedative and a syringe from one of the drawers. Finally filling it, she rushed over to Yixing who still held tightly onto the girl and her arms.

“Hold her still while I put it in!” Victoria said, leaning over the girl.

“I’m trying,” Yixing replied, his voice strained.

“Would you hurry up!” Kyungsoo said, only to be slapped in the face again by the girl’s fin.

Afraid of needles, Yixing moved his face away while Victoria injected the sedative in the girl’s arm. He found himself instead looking the girl in the eye. Her irises were blue. He’d never seen a girl like her with blue eyes before. But they were wide and bloodshot, and he could see just how terrified she was. His heart began to beat louder. He suddenly felt sorry for the girl, whatever she was. She was obviously a long way from where she came from, and she was helpless and terrified. Her struggling and her strength began to dwindle as Victoria finally sedated her. Her blue eyes started to close.

“You’re safe now,” Yixing whispered, and she drifted off to sleep.

Her body became slack again and her fingers, once clenched tightly, finally became limp, letting go of a small oily object. Chanyeol picked it up and washed the oil away from it. With a puzzled expression he held it up for the rest of the group to see.

“Is that a cell phone?” Victoria asked, and Kyungsoo shrugged.

“Well, maybe there’s better reception under water.”

No one really knew how to find the sea witch. The elders simply said “Swim down as deep and as dark as the ocean can get, and the sea witch will find you.” With no other option, that was what the little mermaid did. Clutching the little black rectangle to her chest, she stood at edge of the secret ocean, where the blackness only started to ade. Turning back, she felt heartbroken at leaving her sisters. But her mind was made up. Singing one last song of farewell – whoever might hear it – she turned and swam down into the dark.

It seemed like hours that she swam downwards. The water was colder and she rubbed her arms, hoping for more warmth. There was nothing to comfort her except her prince’s little black rectangle. She slowed herself down, sensing something sinister in the water. Had she arrived? Had she found the place she was looking for? She stretched her arms out to feel where she was, and her finger caught something cold and hard.

She snatched her hand back and swam faster in her panic. Her body only got more and more tangled in the long, hard, circular chains that floated all around her. Her heart started beating faster. The water seemed so much thick here, it was harder to swim. Every movement she made seemed only to slow her down even more. She’d never felt drowning before, but she guessed that it must have felt similar to this.

Opening , she sang a song of panic and fear, not even caring that no one might hear her. Just the sound of her voice made her sure that was still okay. She did not expect to hear an answer. It was an echo at first; she shivered hearing her own voice repeated to her. But suddenly, the scared little mermaid felt something stirring in the black waters beside her. The song was twisted and warped and sounded nothing like any other mermaid song. It sounded like teeth and slithering.

Terrified, she clamped her eyes shut, and she heard the voice beside her. “The siren,” it whispered, the coldness of the voice pressing to her neck. “Such an honor.”

The mermaid opened her eyes slightly, and found herself no more in the pitch black. Instead, she was at the ocean floor, in the middle of a field of undersea volcanoes. It was still dark; the only light given off was the hot red glow of the perpetually churning volcanoes surrounding her. The once freezing water became almost boiling hot.

“You’re a long way from home,” the chilling voice said. The mermaid looked all around her, but couldn’t see anyone.

“Who… who are you?” she whispered. She whipped her head all around, searching for who it might be. Something slimy and grey suddenly wrapped itself around her tail. Panicking, she swam away, only to find herself caught in the ashy dust created by one of the eruptions. Flinging her arms, she made her way to the center again, where the red glowing lit her up from all directions.

“I’m looking for the sea witch,” she said, feeling herself about to burst from fear. The shadowy silhouette of the grey slithery thing cast itself over the red light once again, and there was another and another, one in nearly every direction she could look. The little mermaid twisted all around, searching for a way out if need be. But when she turned back around, the red glow was gone, and replaced instead with a large, pale white face.

The little mermaid felt the color draining form her face. The face in front of her was big, larger even than her whole body. It was whiter than the moon, with two black slits for eyes, and a large mouth with red lips and sharp teeth. The head was connected to a body, which looked like a mermaid body, but was bigger and in proportion to the head. Instead of a tail, she had a body like a snake. Even to the little mermaid, who was the runt of her litter, the sea witch was bigger than any sea creature she’d seen.

“The sea witch finds you,” the large white face spoke without moving its lips. The little mermaid looked up at the sea witch. Beneath the black slits, she could still see the trademark blue eyes; the sea witch had once been a mermaid, as well. The mermaid remembered vaguely the elders’ stories about her. She had been a mermaid once, too. In fact, she used to be a siren, as well. But when she started using her siren song to kill humans and mermaids, alike, she was banished and she fled down to the darkness where her magic kept her alive. But how had she grown so large? What had happened to her?

The questions caused a shiver down the mermaid’s spine, and she held the rectangle to her chest as she shook with fear. The sea witch lifted one hand and ran a webbed finger over the scales of the mermaid’s fin, admiring its shiny glint.

“The gold-tailed siren,” she said and the mermaid shivered again. Swimming backwards, she felt her hitting the sea witch’s palm, which felt like a tongue. “Why should you be looking for me?” her voice was erse and very slow as she spoke. Pushing aside her fear, the mermaid held out her hand, the black rectangle resting in her palm.

“I want to be human,” she whispered, choking back a song for help. The sea witch stared at the black object for a while, before a sinister smile stretch across her entire face. She lifted her other hand and wrapped it around the mermaid’s, her fist as big as the merprincess’s entire body. The mermaid felt a chill passing through her.

The sea witch’s disturbing smile caught her. “You will be human,” she said, and she ran one spindly finger around the mermaid’s neck. “But there’s a price.”

“How’s it look?” Kyungsoo asked, taking the ice pack away from his face and turning his eye back to Chanyeol. The taller boy inspected Kyungsoo’s black eye and shrugged, turning back to his ramen.

“It’s black and bruised,” he answered, slurping up more noodles.

“It’s looks tough, huh?” Kyungsoo said, putting the ice back on his black eye. “Looks like I got into a fight.”

“In reality, you got -slapped by a mermaid.”

“Mermaid?” Yixing said, looking up from his own bowl of noodles. Chanyeol finished chewing and turned to him.

“Well, she doesn’t look like a sea otter and she doesn’t look like anything else in the catalog. So I’m taking a wild guess and saying she’s a mermaid. What do you think she is?”

“Her tail looks like a goldfish,” Kyungsoo answered, and then cradled his bruised eye once again. “But she hits like a heavyweight.”

Yixing shrugged. “I just don’t think we should jump to mythical conclusions that fast,” he said. “What if she’s like… a mutant or something?”

Chanyeol stared at the boy, not amused. “And mutant is more plausible than my mermaid theory?” he asked. He put his chopsticks down. “She’s a mermaid, okay? You saw it, I saw it, and we all saw it. She’s a girl who’s got a fish tail. So what does that make her? That makes her a mermaid. Kyungsoo got slapped in the face. He can tell you all about her tail and how real and solid it is.”

“Can we just tell people that I got into a fight, though?” Kyungsoo said, and Chanyeol and Yixing both groaned. The door to the lab opened and closed, and Victoria, still in her bio-suit, walked out.

“I put her back to sleep,” Victoria said. “I put her in the tub with just a little water. You guys did a good job. She’s squeaky-clean now. And she’s fine.”

“What do you mean she’s ‘fine’?” Yixing asked.

“As in, she’s fine. I checked her vital organs, gave her a complete physical inspection, and she’s… healthy, and she’s perfectly fine, as though the oil spill and getting trapped under the bikes didn’t affect her at all. Except for the tail, she’s completely normal.”

“What are we going to do with her, then?” Chanyeol asked, and Victoria shrugged.

“I’d actually love to keep it around,” Victoria said. “Its immune system is pretty fantastic if it can survive such an ordeal. If we study it, we might find some valuable information or some kind of medicinal breakthrough. Plus… we’d have to write her into the species catalog.”

“Well, sorry to put a damper on your science fair project, Victoria, but,” Chanyeol said. “Did you see what she did to Kyungsoo? What if she really is dangerous?”

“But she’s valuable!” Victoria answered. “Think of all the things we can do with a discovery like this! If we report her to the institution--,”

“We can’t report her to the institution,” Yixing asserted, drawing everyone’s attention.

“Yixing,” Victoria said. “It’s part of the contract. We receive funding, but in exchange we have to report our findings--,”

“I mean, not yet,” Yixing said, and something dawned on him. “What if she’s the one they were looking for? Those hazmat workers at the beach today?”

“All the more reason to report her,” Kyungsoo said.

“Who’s going to believe us, anyway?” Chanyeol offered. “You don’t just waltz out into public and announce that you’ve caught a fish that doesn’t exist.”

“Well, she looks pretty existent to me,” Kyungsoo said.

“No,” answered Yixing, not quite grasping why the idea of giving the mermaid over to the scientific authority of the land sat so unwell with him. “My parents don’t even know she’s here yet. Let’s wait ‘til they get back and then we’ll decide. But we can’t report her yet. They’d take her away from us.”

Yixing wasn’t sure what to do with the mermaid, either. But he knew for sure that he didn’t want to report her to any institution. Mermaid or not, she was still half-human. And all he could think about was that moment when he held her while Victoria gave her the shot. He’d caught her eye amidst the chaos of the moment and saw the same emotion that he’d experienced so many times before: fear. And her fear was human. He wanted to keep her here for a little while, until the oil spill was cleaned, at least or until they could figure out what they were going to do.

Inside the lab, the little mermaid had her head propped up against the side of the tub. Her eyes were moving beneath her lids as she dreamed. She felt weak and tired, like she’d been swimming against the current for hours. She dreamt about the sea witch, and the pact she’d made, the potion she drank. She remembered the way she felt, like swords were passing through her body, like she was burning up and dying from the inside out. She had to get to the surface. The transformation would happen soon. Mermaids could hold their breaths for several days, but human could drown in mere minutes.

Clutching the black object, she had raced toward the surface, closing her eyes and not caring where she ended up. She dreamt about the black substance she got caught in, its foul smell and taste, how burned, and how she struggled against the black muck.

She dreamt about the humans who kidnapped her and took her into a white room. She remembered fighting them, struggling against the strong grip of the human who held her. She felt her tail – the transformation wasn’t complete, yet. And she remembered the voice, and the face of the one who held her. He told her she was safe. She didn’t feel safe, yet. Outside, she heard voices, but she couldn’t move.

In the darkness of the room, the first of her scales withered and fell to the tiles. The transformation was beginning.