“Your result, Marty. Your result is right there. You need replication, external review—”

“Yes, yes, of course. Which is why I’m having Pip send samples to three labs in London tomorrow morning. When they confirm—”

“There will still be skeptics,” she interrupted. “Scientists, academics, they’ll call it another Piltdown Man. Especially given—” She stopped herself.

“Especially given, what, Elsa?” His eyes darkened. “Especially given my involvement with the Netflix documentary? Well, double fuck that! This is different. If they can’t see that, fuck them too! All of them.”

Elsa took a step backward, surprised and a little frightened by his vitriol.

Marty softened immediately. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. I just feel—” He shook his head. “I just feel… Well, you’re right. There will always be skeptics. No matter what I publish, no matter my evidence, there will always be skeptics. I’ll always be the goddamned Merdoc, won’t I?”

Suddenly he seemed older, tired, a beat-down scientist who had been kicked one too many times.

“Will you be sailing back to Colombo?” she asked, to change the topic.

He blinked. “Sailing back to Colombo? Good Lord, no! My work here is just beginning. Tomorrow I’m going to attempt to hunt down the skipper that piloted the boat that hooked the great white.”

Elsa frowned. “Whatever for?”

“Like us, merfolk are social creatures, or so I presume. Where there is one, there are likely many. Ergo, where the shark ate one seems like an ideal place to start looking for a live specimen.”

“You’re planning to look for a live merfolk?” She couldn’t hide her surprise.

“Naturally. What do you think I built this boat for in the first place? Pip and I have been searching for a live specimen out here for nearly three years. Up until now, rather blindly, I admit. But if we can narrow in on where the shark ate the merfolk…”

“It’s a good spot to start looking,” she agreed. “If the great white hung around the same location after eating the merfolk. Because it could have eaten it half an ocean away from where it was eventually hooked on the fishing line.”

“It could have, but I don’t think it did. Ask yourself why there was only a skull in its gut? Why not a body? Where did that go…?”

Elsa did ask herself this—and the answer came immediately. A great white’s stomach lining is peppered with secretory cells, some of which produce hydrochloric acid, so it’s capable of breaking down bone. But animals that have a high bone-and-muscle to fat ratio, such as humans, are simply too much work to metabolize for too little caloric benefit. That’s why almost all great white attacks on humans are exploratory bites: the sharks realize right away that humans are not worth eating. If it is assumed that merfolk are physiologically similar to humans, then the great white likely voided the merfolk from its stomach within twenty-four hours of swallowing it.

“The great white threw it up,” she said. “And it was still in the process of throwing up the skull when it was caught.”