The rumors were metastasizing. No longer a diver from a kelp farm. A mermaid, now. An avatar of Kali. Some said she spoke in tongues; others, that the tongue was only English. There were stories of altercations, violence. The mermaid had made enemies. The mermaid had made friends. The mermaid had been attacked, and had left her assailants in pieces on the shore. Perreault smiled skeptically; a banana slug was more prone to violence than a Stripper.

The mermaid lurked in the foul waters offshore. The sharks did her bidding; at night she would come onto land and steal children to feed to her minions. Someone had foretold her coming, or perhaps merely recognized it; a prophet, some said. Or maybe just a man almost as insane as the woman he ranted about. His name was Amitav.

Somehow, none of these events had been seen by the local botflies. That alone made Perreault discount ninety percent of them. She began to wonder how much her own questions had been feeding the mill. Information, she'd read once, became self-propagating past a certain threshold.

Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake.

One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around.

CORPSE

It was no big deal, of course. Someone died every half-second, according to the stats. Some of them had to die on his shift. So what? On any given day, Achilles Desjardins saved ten people for every one he killed. Anybody who wanted to complain about those kind of stats could go fuck themselves.

Actually, that was pretty much what he wanted to do just then. If only the clientele wasn't so bloody TwenCen.

Pickering's Pile was a cylinder inside a cube, sunk fifty meters into the scoured granite of the Canadian Shield. The cube had been built as a repository for nuclear waste just before the permafrost had started melting; NIMBY and the northward spread of civilization had denied it that destiny. The same factors, however, had made it a profitable site for a subterranean drink'n'drug. The Pile had been constructed within a transparent three-story acrylic tube suspended in the main chamber; the space beyond had been flooded and stacked with lightsticks mimicking the cobalt glow of spent fuel rods. Iridescent butterflies flittered about, their wings bouncing data back and forth in pinpoint sparkles. Poison-arrow frogs clambered wetly in little tanks at each table, tiny glistening jigsaws of emerald and ruby and petroleum-black.

It was peaceful down there. The Pile was an inside-out aquarium, a cool green grotto. Desjardins descended into its depths whenever he needed a lift. Now he sat at the circular bar on the second level and wondered how to avoid sex with the woman at his elbow.