“Your new wardrobe.” He picked up the suit, letting it dangle from his fingers, as he gave her an icy smile. “I call it the Normalizing Suit. It interfaces with your biological modifications and… suppresses them. Temporarily, of course. We wouldn’t want to damage the merchandise.”
Ice flooded her veins.
“Suppresses them?”
“Your gills will close.” He studied her face as he listed the modifications. “Your skin will dim. Your enhanced lung capacity will be reduced to human-normal levels. And that lovely little trick you do with your voice—the ‘Song,’ I believe you call it—will be completely silenced.”
No!
“You’ll look perfectly human. The modifications are impressive from a scientific standpoint, but visually? I find them distasteful.” He gave a faint disdainful sneer. “It’s much better to hide them behind a civilized facade.”
“You can’t?—”
“I can do whatever I want.” His voice sharpened. “You ran from me, Ariella. You destroyed my announcement. You made me look foolish in front of the entire village.” He stepped closer, and for the first time, she saw the rage beneath his polished exterior. “No one makes me look foolish.”
The mercenaries tightened their grip on her arms.
“Put it on her.”
“No!” She thrashed desperately, fighting with everything she had.
A needle pierced her neck, and the world went soft and hazy around the edges. A sedative, some distant part of her brain identified. She was still conscious—barely—but her muscles refused to obey her commands. The mercenaries lowered her to the examination table, and she watched through glazed eyes as they began to strip away her borrowed clothes.
“Carefully,” Merrick instructed, studying her naked body with that icy, detached gaze. “I want her to be aware when the suit activates. I want her to feel every moment of it.”
The suit slid over her body like wet slime, and then the activation sequence began. The collar-band hummed to life first, nodes glowing green as they pressed against her skin. Something happened in her gills—a pressure, like fingers squeezing shut passages that were meant to be open.
She tried to gasp, but no air came.
“Throat closure confirmed.” One of Merrick’s technicians checked a readout on his tablet. “Gill function reduced to three percent. Switching to pulmonary-only respiration.”
Her lungs burned. Her body screamed for water, for the familiar embrace of the sea, for the ability to breathe in ways humans couldn’t understand. But the suit was shutting it all down, sealing away the parts of her that made her special. The parts that made her her.
“Excellent.” Merrick watched with clinical interest. “Continue.”
The bands at her wrists and ankles activated next and her skin went dim. The warm glow that had been her constant companion since childhood faded to nothing, like stars winking out one by one. She couldn’t see herself, but she knew what was happening. The light was dying.
I’m dying,she thought wildly.He’s killing me.
“Patch suppression at ninety-two percent.” The technician nodded. “Within normal human parameters.”
“And the Song?”
A final pulse from the collar, and something in her throat changed. The resonance chambers that allowed her to produce those impossible frequencies, the biological sonar that let her navigate the darkest depths, went silent. Dead. Like someone had reached inside her and ripped out her voice. She opened her mouth to scream, but only a whisper came out.
“Perfect.” Merrick’s smile was terrible. “Absolutely perfect.”
The sedative was wearing off. Her muscles were beginning to respond again, her mind sharpening despite the agony that pulsed through every nerve. She tried to sit up, to fight, to do something?—
“Ah-ah.” Merrick pushed her back down with a single finger on her chest. “We’re not quite done. Your father has something he’d like to say.”
Her father entered the room looking like he’d aged a decade overnight. His grey hair was wild and uncombed. His lab coat was stained and wrinkled. His hands shook as he approached the examination table, and his eyes—those anxious, brilliant eyes that had always looked at her with a mixture of pride and guilt—were red-rimmed and wet.
“Ariella.” His voice cracked. “I’m so sorry.”
“Father.” The word came out rough, painful. Without her Song, without the resonance chambers that gave her voice its power, even ordinary speech hurt. “Why?”
“The contract I signed.” He couldn’t meet her eyes. “I didn’t read it carefully enough. Merrick owns everything. The lab. The research. The treatments.” His voice broke. “You.”
