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somehow.”
    “Are you taking any diving equipment? Will anyone be staying up here to make sure you don’t drown?” They seemed like silly questions, but as Anne asked them, she realized that she really wanted to know. She hadn’t been involved in any of the discussions about bringing professional mermaids aboard, and they were so good at taking care of themselves that she knew very little about how they actually operated.
    “We’re not going deep enough to need equipment,” said Teal. “All of us can hold our breath for at least two minutes, and this is more just about…getting into the water and starting to learn about the currents here than anything else.”
    “We have SCUBA equipment and oxygen tanks for when we need to go deeper,” added the purple-haired woman. “We’re very safety-oriented when we need to be. But right now, we don’t need to be. Right now, we just want to get in the water. Putting a bunch of mermaids on a boat and then keeping us dry for a week is a form of torture.”
    “And on that note, later!” Jessica pushed herself off the lip of the deck. She didn’t kick off, but still somehow turned herself around in midair, falling toward the deep blue sea with her arms pressed out in front of herself like an arrow. She sliced the surface, and she was gone.
    The other mermaids followed her, some of them pushing themselves from a sitting position, as she had, others finding ways to leap, even though their tails weren’t really designed for standing upright. Teal went over the edge backward, her arms spread like a falling angel, twisting at the very last moment to slice into the water like her companions. Anne watched, mouth agape, and it wasn’t until the last mermaid had vanished beneath the surface that she thought to whirl on Kevin and say, “Tell me you got that.”
    “The whole thing,” he said, patting his camera. His eyes were still fixed on the water below. “I tell you what, Anne. If they’re that believable when they’re actually in the water, we’re going home and convincing the whole damn world that mermaids are real.”
    Below them, one of the mermaids broke the surface in a quick flurry of Technicolor fins, and was gone.
     

     
    The first thing most people wanted to know when Alexandra told them that she was a marine chemist was “What the hell does that mean?” As she tried to explain the delicate interplay of chemical traces in the water—how they could be analyzed to understand the pollution level, the health of the sea, and even the condition of the local fish, plant, and sea mammal populations—she would see them start to glaze over, and know that she had lost them. Never mind that marine chemistry was a swiftly growing field, as people the world over began to understand just how many riches were hidden at the bottom of the sea, and how close humanity was to losing those wonders forever. Never mind that there was money to be made in those depths. The pharmaceutical industry was falling over itself for access to the world’s oceans, and since most of those oceans were international waters, that meant they needed scientists who could plumb the depths for treasure, bring it home, and tweak it just enough to make it patentable.
    Alexandra could have been making millions if she’d been willing to sign a contract with Big Pharma, and only the fact that she still wanted to control her own research was keeping that pen out of her hand. As she set her sampling probes on the rail of the Atargatis and checked her portable spectrometer one last time, she was all too aware that she couldn’t avoid having to make that choice forever—not unless she got good results on this voyage, and on others like it. Good results would lead to publication would lead to tenure would lead to a life lived doing science for the sake of science, not following the glimmering trail of profit through the gloom.
    “Too bad no one can guarantee results,” she muttered, and pressed the button