The Golden City

She couldn’t sing underwater, but she could hum. Oriana wove a call into the tune to comfort Isabel, using her memories of an old lullaby her father had sung to shape the sound. It was all she had to give.

Isabel’s expression eased, the fear in her eyes fading.

Then she was still.

Oriana’s song faltered to a stop, and soundless sobs shook her body. The water had stolen her ability to cry. She could taste Isabel’s death in the water, the sudden tang of a voided bladder—loss of control along with the loss of life. Oriana tugged the silk mitt off her hand with her teeth and spread her fingers wide, stretching the webbing between them. She could feel the vibration of her own heartbeat.

From Isabel there was nothing.

And then a glow crept across the surface of the table between them, almost like blood flowing from a wound. Letters imprinted on the surface gave off a pallid light, forming words that made no sense to Oriana’s eyes. A ring of words circled the table’s edge. Inside that was another ring of nonsense symbols, shapes she didn’t recognize, and in the center a third ring held a collection of straight lines. The glow crept to the center of the small table and then stopped as if it had hit a wall.

The table had come alive in response to Isabel’s death.

Oriana looked back at her friend. She tried to touch Isabel’s face. Her fingers fell short, so she grasped Isabel’s hand again, as if Isabel could still feel her there. Isabel’s head began to sway loosely with the motion of the water, a single strand of hair floating past her open mouth and snagging against her lips.

Oriana squeezed her eyes shut, unable to look any longer.

She didn’t know how long she stayed like that, trembling against the ropes that bound her. The water continued to rise about her. It swallowed her legs. The cold seeped into her tight-laced shoes.

Then the last of the air slipped out of the room and the whole thing began sinking quickly, some anchor drawing it down. The pressure of the water made the wood groan. Then it came to a stop, far gentler than that first slam into the surface of the water. Now that the room was flooded, they should sink to the bottom of the river, but for some reason they continued to float.

Oriana opened her eyes. At a deeper depth it was even darker, but the table’s surface continued to glow, lighting Isabel’s motionless features. Oriana stared at that tabletop for a long time, those meaningless words and lines burning into her mind.

She felt wrung out and dull, like a chemise whose dye had all seeped away into the wash water. She needed to escape this place, but there was no longer any need to hurry. She had all the time in the world now— now that Isabel was gone.

Someone had put them here to die, but it hadn’t been the Special Police. They would have known a sereia could breathe as easily underwater as above it. No, this was a trap meant for humans. Someone had wanted Isabel to die terrified and helpless.

But that someone had made one mistake.

They hadn’t weighed Oriana Paredes into their equations, no doubt thinking her simply another housemaid. They’d tried to drown a sereia. And she was going to make them pay.

Not for herself. During the year she’d trained to be a spy, she’d been taught that her own life might be forfeit. She’d accepted that possibility. No, she would make someone pay for doing this to Isabel, who had started the day with such great hopes and ended it with terror. She would hunt the murderer down and, one way or another, they would see justice.

* * *

It seemed a long time later that Oriana bowed her head and began to chew at the other rope. Once she got that hand free, she was able to draw her dagger and cut the remaining ropes that bound her to the chair. She pushed herself out of it, lightheaded when her body righted itself.

In the darkness, she touched Isabel’s face, a final farewell. Isabel’s ebony hair had held to its coiffure, save for that one loose lock. It streamed upward now, almost reaching Isabel’s lap, a streak of darkness against her white maid’s apron. Lit by the table’s eerie glow, Isabel was lovely even in death, her face at peace. Tiny bubbles of air worked loose from the shadowy wooden structure about them, glistening in the darkness.

Oriana’s throat ached, but she couldn’t cry. She clasped the unmoving fingers one more time, and then swam to the top of the little room.

She wedged herself next to the fixed chairs, crowding Isabel’s bound feet. She hammered against that floor or ceiling with one hand. Each impact sent uncomfortable vibrations through her webbing, so she wrapped one arm about the base of the table and used her feet to kick at one of the corners instead. After a few good kicks, she felt it give. Nails tore loose from the wood. She slid her hands into that narrow opening and pushed with all her strength.

The boards gave enough for her to squeeze through.

After one last glance at Isabel’s lifeless form, Oriana wriggled through that space. Her skirt caught on a nail, and she had to rip it to get loose.

She was free.

She let herself float there for a moment. Her skirts were heavy, but her natural buoyancy kept her from sinking too quickly.

The river’s surface above her was dark. Before her Oriana saw shapes floating in the water, more traps like the one she’d just escaped. They were twenty feet or so under the surface, trying to float but prevented from rising any higher by thick chains that tethered them to the river’s murky bed below. Why didn’t they sink to the bottom? Oriana kicked away from her prison, trying to grasp the bigger picture of what she was seeing. In the nighttime waters she could make out two neat rows, stretching on for some distance. There must be more than twenty of these prisons under the river’s surface.

It was The City Under the Sea.

Oriana had read of the great work of art being assembled beneath the surface of the Douro. The newspapers often opined about it, ever since the pieces began appearing in the water almost a year ago. Each was a replica of one of the great houses that lined the Street of Flowers, the street of the aristocrats. Shrunk down in scale to no larger than a coach, the replicas were constructed in wood. They were all upside down, enspelled so that they would float, yet chained to the riverbed so they could never escape. They swayed in the grasp of the river’s outbound current, all moving in eerie unison.

Oriana looked back at the house in which she’d been imprisoned. It was a replica of the Amaral mansion, Isabel’s home. To one side was the copy of the Rocha mansion, and on the other the elegant Pereira de Santos house.

Had Isabel been killed merely for the sake of this . . . artwork? Had others awakened in the darkness only to realize, like Isabel, that their death was seeping in about them?

Oriana gasped, drawing in water, and corruption touched her gills. The water tasted foul, reminding her of a shipwreck, bodies left behind in the water for the fish and other creatures to pick clean. Nausea sent a flush of heat through her body. She slapped a hand over her mouth and nose, as if that could protect her from breathing in the death that was all about her. Oriana kicked hard, fighting the weight of her garments. She had to get to the surface, away from this graveyard.

She swam toward a spot of light that must be the moon’s reflection on the water. But when she broke the surface, her head banged against the hull of a small boat, hard enough to disorient her. She instinctively shoved away. The stars spun. In the distance she saw the lights of a city, although she couldn’t tell which one. She let herself slip back under the water, the only safe place. She spread her fingers wide so she would feel in her webbing when the boat moved away.

Instead she sensed someone diving into the water. Oriana kicked back down toward the depths, but her pursuer kept after her. She drew her dagger again, but before she could turn about, a large hand clamped down on her hand. She had no leverage to jerk away, and it took only a second before the man attached to that hand managed to pry the blade loose from her fingers. It spun away down through the water, quickly obscured. The tang of blood floated in the water; the dagger had cut her hand when he’d wrestled it away. The man wrapped an arm about her chest and dragged her back up toward the surface.

When she broke the surface again, a second man dug his hands into her sodden dress while the man in the water pushed her up and over the edge of the boat. She tumbled into the bilge.