In its dreams, the thing they call “Kos” sleeps deep and drowned in the clutch of the ice-cold trenches, where the pressure is a loving clasp around its arms and tail, where it is near-disintegrate, more spirit than substance, more magic than meat.

Then it wakes up in the bathtub.

The deoxygenated water filters tepidly through Kos’s gills. It gasps, coughing through a windpipe and lungs that weren’t meant to be so exercised, even with the “humidifier” that pumps clouds of soft wet air into the bathroom. Irina had set it up the fifth night, when Kos had started coughing lacy bright red sprays of blood.

Kos had to draw a diagram to explain its anatomy with a “bath crayon” on the slick walls. The bath crayon, like the humidifier, was a new implement for Kos. A human thing. Only useful above the water. Where Kos was now. Kos, in the human bathtub, in the human bathroom, in the human apartment that belongs to Irina, who is human.

Kos is pretty sure that Irina is a dark sorceress.

“Irey’s a lifeguard,” Livvy says. “And she’s taking classes at RNCC.”

Livvy sits on the opposite side of the bathroom, in a kid-size chair too small for her, and reads Kos “Am I The Asshole” posts on her phone. Livvy is Irina’s little sister, summer-tan and pockmarked with pustules. She doesn’t have anything to do all day. “School” is out. They don’t have the money for “summer camp.” And Irina has work.

Kos suspects that Livvy is a prison warden. But she talks with Kos, and it’s bored.

What’s a lifeguard? Kos writes, using the scrawly red crayon.

“A lifeguard saves people from drowning.”

“Drowning” is another human thing. Drowning is death-by-water. Kos could never drown. The squids and the monsters in the deep-dark could never drown. The whales and the dolphins and the selkie-girls could drown, Kos supposes, but it’s never seen one dead.

How strange, Kos doesn’t write. “Drowning” never seemed like something that needed saving from. Kos is the thing that drowns people.

Or it was, until Irina dredged Kos up in her net made of alchemical silver and towed Kos to shore. It was the most frightening thing that had ever happened to Kos. First the burn of the alchemical silver against its skin and scales, then the yank upwards into the light, punctuated by its frantic banging against the hull of the fragile dinghy that Irina had been sailing. Irina tied the net to a ring while Kos shoved against the silver and felt burns well up on the palms of its hands and against its delicate fins.

If Kos had remembered to sing, then everything would have turned out differently. But it only hissed in animal pain, and Irina whipped around and spoke in the tone-of-command.

“Quiet,” she said, and Kos choked on its words.

Huddled against the rear of the boat, tail curled protectively, coloration gone pale with fear, Kos tried to speak and all that came out was a quiet wheezing. Kos tried to sing, to lace its words with the tone-of-beguile, and all that it evoked was a rasp.

Irina knelt next to it, the tanned blonde cord of her as fearsome as a shark in its perpetual smile. She grabbed Kos’s chin and tilted its face from side to side. Kos’s eyes darted from her face to the placid sea to the cloudless sky, until Irina forced it to look back at her.

Her eyes were a pale blue like arctic ice. Her mouth was split in an expression caught halfway between grin and grimace.

“Hi, Kos,” she said. “You’re coming home, now.”

She tied it to the “bed” of her “pickup truck” and took it home and Kos was transferred (joints aching from depressurization, head aching from the stress, throat sore from its attempts to sing) to the bathtub, a cup of sea salt dumped in after it, an aerator bubbling merrily away.

Kos doesn’t know how long it’s been since then. It tries to mark time on the wall, but Irina keeps erasing the numbers at night.

Livvy scrolls through her phone and hums.

“The Wikipedia page for drowning is like, super long,” she says.

Go away, Kos writes. I’m tired. I’m trying to sleep.

“I can’t,” Livvy says. “Irey says I gotta watch you. And you gotta watch me, because I can’t be home alone, not after the toaster incident.”

Kos scowls at her. It doesn’t know what a “toaster” is. Livvy ignores it. Pokes at her phone, and then says a little shyly, “Do you want me to read you another “Am I the Asshole” post?”

• • • •

Deathless Koschei hid his soul in a needle and put that needle in an egg, and the egg in a duck, and the duck in a hare, and the hare in a chest, and the chest was buried under an oak tree on an island that disappeared and reappeared in the ocean. Deathless Koschei could only be killed if the island was found, if the chest was unearthed, if the hare was caught, if the duck was captured, and if the egg was cracked.

• • • •

It’s not so much that Kos is trapped in the bathtub as it’s where it sleeps. On the “weekends” sometimes Irina helps Kos flop over the side of the bathtub and onto a towel and then she drags it across the laminate floors over to the carpeted living room, where there’s an oilcloth and a “kiddie pool” set up in front of the couch.

The kiddie pool is made of bright plastic. Kos curls up in it and sulks. Kos used to think about escape, even made a few desperate attempts to crawl out and wriggle across the carpet, but it was as useless as a fish thrashing against the sand. The attempts left Kos with bright red marks across its arms and scraped scales. The scales haven’t grown back. This worries Kos, a little.

More worryingly, all the windows and doors are covered in alchemical silver.

So Kos submits to the torments. It slouches in the kiddie pool while Irina turns on the “television” which is an electric box that tells stories. Kos loves the television, except for the annoying hum it gives off. Irina gets her weaving (another point in favor of Irina being a dark sorceress), and Livvy brings a bowl of “popcorn,” and hands Kos a notepad and a pencil, and they all sit there and watch old episodes of Supernatural. Kos always roots for the monsters.

“My brother used to love this show,” Livvy tells Kos. “We’d watch it every Tuesday when it came out.”

I don’t care about your brother, Kos writes.

“Don’t be an asshole, Kos,” Irina says. And it’s not a spell, but Kos shuts up anyway, scowls, curls up underneath the surface, displaced water surging up and over the oilcloth.

“Kos!” Irina exclaims, but her voice isn’t in the tone-of-command, so Kos ignores her.

“Kos, if you want some popcorn, you have to get your face out of the water,” Livvy sing-speaks.

Livvy’s voice isn’t beautiful yet, but there’s a liquid quality that could someday carry the tone-of-beguile. Kos thinks that Livvy might grow into someone Kos would have drowned for power.

Kos lifts a hand from the water. The air is cold against its skin.

Livvy leans over, her face distorted by the ripples, and places a small handful of popcorn kernels in Kos’s hand.

Kos deigns to lift its face into the air. Breathes through its nose and not through its gills, coughs twice to clear the liquid from the wrong pipes. It puts the popcorn in its mouth and crunches down with sharp teeth. The popcorn dissolves on its tongue in a pool of fat and carbohydrates. Kos is still hungry afterwards. It’s always hungry. What it needs isn’t popcorn.

On the screen, Dean Winchester kills a demon and smiles.

• • • •

Kos doesn’t know why Irina pulled it from the water and hauled it to shore as if Kos was some common fish. It would have understood if she had scraped its scales or hacked off a fin. Had Irina pulled hair from its head or gouged out an eye. Had she slit its wrist or throat and siphoned the blood into a goblet and drank the liquid for temporary immortality. Had she coaxed a song from it and bottled its voice-of-beguile. This would have been understood and accepted. After all, Kos is made of stolen things.

In the ocean, Kos is a foamy filament of magic to which meat and sentience have been self-grafted. Like a caddisfly, or a hermit crab. There are legitimate reasons sorceresses would seek Kos out, all of which involve prying Kos from its casing.

Yet Irina only silenced it, dragged it home, and stuck it in the bathroom. She hasn’t touched Kos since.

It would have been better to be killed. As long as Kos was in running water, there would have been a whisper of magic that could have dissolved into foam and survived after its death. From that whisper Kos could have built itself back again, reconstructed its parts, scavenged and killed and stolen enough to create something that was in the model of itself.

But on land, Kos is drying out. All the magic is dissipating from its skin.

Kos has heard of what happens to the selkie girls when they lose their pelts. They end up wives and mothers. Bound to the dry earth and their husbands and children. Forever searching for their furs. Kos isn’t a selkie girl. But it’s afraid, nonetheless. Kos doesn’t want to be anyone’s wife. It doesn’t know what will be left, when all the magic is washed down the drain.

• • • •

Once upon a time, the queen’s son was born a lindworm. This was mostly not ideal but not an issue until his younger brother wanted to marry. Prince Lindworm demanded a marriage before his younger brother, yet ate all his brides. Eventually a shepherd’s daughter (clever enough to go to a witch) was brought to him, wearing every dress she owned. She demanded that Prince Lindworm shed a skin for every dress she shucked, and he acquiesced, and layer by layer his skins were shed, first the dry dead ones, then the tender scaly ones, then the painful fleshy ones, until there was a man, bloodied and exhausted, who she threw in a milk bath and washed into being human.

Unrelatedly, one day a cowherd fell into a cavern, and in that cavern there was a lindworm that drank from a stream of gold. The cowherd was afraid, but the lindworm seemed friendly, and the cowherd, growing hungry, drank from the gold as well. Thus they passed the time in the dark hole, until a passing stranger poked a hole in the cavern roof. Then the lindworm scrambled for the light, and the cowherd scrambled up the lindworm, and the lindworm was bound by the passing stranger. The cowherd saw the bound lindworm with their savior, the passing stranger, leaning over and felt bad for his scaly friend.

So he took his knife and freed the lindworm.

Then the lindworm ate the stranger.

Then the cowherd went home and discovered he could no longer eat human food.

• • • •

Irina walks into the bathroom. Kos looks at her through fishlid eyes and rolls over, fully submerging its face in the water.

“Ko-os,” Irina sings. Her voice isn’t beautiful and could never hold the tone-of-beguile.

Kos doesn’t move. Irina’s shadow is a curtain of cold as she leans over it.

“Kos,” she says again. “Get up, before I make you.”

Irina knows the tone-of-command. Irina has choked Kos’s throat. Irina saves people from drowning and Kos is the thing that drowns.

Kos surfaces. Water drips from its hair and down its chest. Irina is standing above it with a dagger.

Kos’s coloration pales, its tail writhes as it scrambles back against the wall. It tries to sing, and all that comes out is a rasping scream.

Irina moves her fingers, and the knife separates into two parts.

“Oh, stop that.”

She leans down. Kos doesn’t stop. Kos thinks it’s about to die in this still and stagnant pond, so far from the ocean, in a pale and pathetic death for a siren such as itself. It will never be immortalized in song, its sliver of magic will never sink back down into the ocean.

“Stop that,” Irina says again, using the tone-of-command. Kos freezes against its will. Kos is an unmoving lump of flesh against the tile.

Irina reaches forward and moves Kos’s torso so that it’s leaning forward. So that its unguarded throat is inches from her hands. She straightens the slant of its head. She pulls her fingers through its hair. Kos can’t wince as she pulls through a tangle, because the tone-of-command holds it in iron bands of Irina’s will.

She holds up the double-knife.

“They’re just scissors. I’m just going to give you a haircut,” Irina says. “It won’t hurt.”

Kos can’t respond. Kos doesn’t trust her. Irina moves the “scissors” closer to its head.

The scissors make a quiet metallic noise. Schk-schk. No pain, just a sudden weight being lifted.

A lock of hair drops wetly from Irina’s hands onto the tile. She hesitates, and then grabs another hank of hair and slices again. Schk-schk. And again. Great swathes of hair on the ground. A massacre. A tangle of seaweed. A limp and collapsed pile of black rope.

Kos doesn’t move.

“Sorry,” Irina says, quietly. “I’m trying to make it even.”

Little scattershot drifts. Black fuzz falling. Kos listens to the slice of the scissors so near its ears, the sound of the knives high and keen. If it could move, it’d be shivering, or it’d be grabbing the scissors and stabbing, coaxing Irina’s voice into its own, and then Kos would have her face and her tone-of-command and all the other things that make Irina herself, and Kos would slip back into the ocean and be the envy of every other siren, because no other siren has ever managed to capture a sorceress’s tone-of-command.

“Okay. I’m done.”

The tone-of-command lifts. Easy as bubbles trickling upwards in the dark ocean. Kos shakes its head. It feels curiously weightless. Like its head is going to float away. It runs its hand through its shorn locks. Like a seabird’s wing.

Irina bends down to clean up the shorn hair. Kos stares at her back. It could surge forward and throttle her throat. And Irina would fall to the floor, a piece of meat. And Kos would haul itself out and run into the nets of alchemical silver on all the entrances, and Kos would still die in the bathroom.

So Kos just twists, tail coiling as it shimmies up to lean against the tile, picking up one of the “bath crayons” to write on the wall.

Did you steal it for sorcery? What else are you going to take? Are you going to kill me? Are you going to keep me alive to steal more of my hair? My fingernails? My skin? My scales? My blood? I won’t stay magic if you keep me. Let me go. This is a fucked up cruel thing you’re doing here. let me go. let me go. let me go. let me—

“You know what’s a fucked up cruel thing, Kos?”

Irina’s voice echoes strangely against the tile. Kos turns. Irina’s silhouetted against the light, and it can’t see her face when she speaks again.

“Killing people and stealing their voices.”

Kos puts the bath crayon carefully down. It stares at Irina. He understands now: Kos’s captivity is revenge.

And if this is revenge for a loved one (The missing brother? The missing parents? A missing lover? Kos has drowned many humans in its time. The sliver of magic that is Kos has existed for centuries), then there is no escape. She will starve Kos to death for the sheer cruelty of it.

So Kos won’t try to explain that it was just doing what is in its nature. That Kos is a thing that is magic, and not meat, and that whoever Kos has stolen from Irina lives on inside it now. That Kos cherishes their talents more than they ever could. That Kos is a predator and must kill to survive. It wasn’t personal. All it means is that whoever you loved was special enough for a siren to covet their talents.

Irina steps back. Now Kos can see her expression, and she looks the careful sort of blank that is hiding great emotion. Kos has seen it before, right before he drowns people, when they are still conscious enough to feel. Before the water takes them, and before Kos kisses them and draws their self into their own.

Who of yours did I kill? Kos wants to ask.

So it writes those words carefully on the cool porcelain of the bath. Neat blue letters. Irina reads them. She looks away and picks up a plastic bag full of its hair.

“Kos, you make me so fucking mad sometimes.”

Irina puts the plastic bag in the garbage. She leaves.

Kos waits a long moment. Then it hauls itself over the side of the bath, levers itself weakly against the sink. It leans against the mirror.

Kos looks at its new haircut. It’s neat. It frames its face nicely. Like Irina’s done this before.

• • • •

Once upon a time there were three pauper siblings whose parents were fuckshit bastards and left them alone to fend for themselves as soon as they were old enough to not come mewling back. The siblings didn’t mind the loss of their parents. They had each other, and they had their talents, and they told each other that one day, they’d get out of this stupid shitty apartment, and this stupid shitty beach town, and the stupid shitty visits from the state foster care system, which didn’t think that a barely eighteen-year-old was the best guardian for two teenagers, would someday stop sending Becky Kominsky to their stupid shitty apartment to check on them.

They told themselves that someday the youngest one would have a new laptop and new rollerblades and the middle one would have her degree and millions of dollars and the oldest would be famous and everyone would love him and he wouldn’t have to worry about his kid sisters anymore because they wouldn’t be kids.

They were mostly happy. The youngest, Elizabeta, could charm the pants off of anyone. The middle one, Irina, had a mind like a steel trap. And the oldest, Koschei, had the voice of an angel.

Koschei liked to sing by the water. He would bring his guitar down to the beach late at night, when his two little sisters couldn’t bother him, or tease him about his lyrics. Koschei practiced half-written love songs addressed to no one in particular. Koschei had a clear clarion voice that could carry for miles.

No one had ever warned him that there were things in the water that could hear him from the clutch of their ice-cold trenches.

• • • •

“We got you a wheelchair!” Livvy sings, banging the bathroom door open, tossing away the net of alchemical silver that glitters across the doorway.

Kos jerks awake. Smashes its elbow against the side of the bathtub, smashes its head against the faucet. Makes a startled little sound of pain, before blearily looking up and over the side. It’s been very tired, these days. It wants to go to sleep. It’s pretty sure it’s dying.

Livvy is standing in the middle of the bathroom with a metal chair contraption and a huge smile, and Irina stands behind her with folded arms and no sort of smile at all.

“I still don’t think this is a good idea,” she says.

Livvy shakes her head in a flurry of dark curls.

“You already cut his hair. So we’re going. Kos! Do you know what a wheelchair is?”

Kos shakes its head.

“It’s a chair with wheels.”

Kos nods slowly. It could figure that much out. It’s not stupid.

“It’s so you can come! C’mon. We’re going to the park and we’re going to get ice cream.”

Neither of these words mean anything to Kos. It scowls. The girls ignore it.

Between Irina and Livvy, they manage to haul Kos onto the chair contraption, even though it goes completely limp in protest. The girls persevere. Kos’s tail is coiled and taped under the seat with bandages and duct tape. Irina wets a towel in the sink and puts it over its lap, and Livvy leaves the room and comes back with a blanket, along with a man’s shirt and shoes. The shoes are taped to the chair, and the blanket is taped to the shoes. Kos is instructed to put on the shirt. It does so, begrudgingly. The fabric is soft, at least, as if it had been well-worn. And while its struggling with the armholes, Irina pins down a net of alchemical silver across its lap and where its legs would be. Kos hisses, pulling the shirt down over its neck.

“It’s not touching you, is it?”

Kos nods, just to be contrary.

Irina looks at the netting again, shifts it a bit.

“Liar.”

She tosses the blanket over the net and studies Kos. It spreads its arms sarcastically. Here, the siren tamed. Dressed up in human clothing and bound by alchemical silver. This is ridiculous, it wants to say.

“Fine,” Irina says. “Let’s just go.”

Livvy cheers and pushes Kos out of the bathroom. They go rattling down the hallway and through the living room, and then Irina unhooks the alchemical silver from the front door and then they’re down the rackety elevator and into the shabby lobby, where Livvy puts on her rollerblades, and then Kos is being wheeled into the sunlight.

Kos hisses. Even when it was a free thing in the ocean, it mostly surfaced at night.

Through watering eyes, Kos takes in the bright human world. A black flat expanse of ground on which Irina’s truck, among a number of other human vehicles, is standing. Behind them are other large buildings, which look like they get too much sun and not enough shade. The air smells like the ocean. Kos salivates.

Livvy rolls the wheelchair across the flat black and along the side of the road. They walk on the pale path next to the dark expanse. Livvy gets tired of pushing quickly and shows Kos how to roll the wheels with its hands. Kos does a few experimental turns, then pushes the wheels hard and fast because if it rolls fast enough it might make it to the edge of the water before Irina can catch it, and then Kos’ll tip himself into the blue and never come back again.

Livvy skates behind Kos and grabs the handles, skidding them to a stop. A car rumbles past. It would have run them over.

“Red light,” she says, breathing hard. “Watch the traffic.”

Kos isn’t sure she even registered the escape attempt. Its hands feel raw. It doesn’t have the right calluses.

“I’ll push,” Irina says, jogging up behind them. Kos frowns at her. She smiles, bleakly. “No running off.”

Kos rolls its eyes. It crosses its arms. Its palms sting.

Irina pushes. The scent of the ocean is replaced with the scent of green growing things, with the sweat-scent of human physical exertion, with the bitter smell of the coffee that Irina drinks in the mornings. They pass other humans, who seem decently fooled by the disguise that Irina and Livvy have put together.

Kos doesn’t talk, though Livvy handed it a notepad and pencil, and even though Livvy and Irina talk about Irey’s work and Livvy’s friends and what sort of ice cream they’re going to buy, about the logistics of the good ice cream shop having five steps and no ADA compliance.

They roll to the edge of the park, which is larger than Kos had thought it would be. Half of it is covered in curved stone blocks and monuments. There are humans clambering all over it, on various wheeled devices like Livvy’s skates, and two-wheeled contraptions and things that look like boards with tiny wheels bolted on.

They stop at the edge, between the green space and the concrete. Irina drums her fingers on the handle of the wheelchair.

“You wanted chocolate fudge ripple, and…Kos, I’m getting you the cookie dough. Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone,” Irina says. “Kos, scream if you see Livvy do something stupid.”

Livvy throws a leaf at her. It fails to land. Irina throws the leaf back, and it hits Livvy in the forehead with magical precision. Livvy throws a handful of grass, but Irina is already walking away. Livvy spins on her heels so she’s facing Kos.

“My brother had a skateboard, until he sold it,” she says. “Do you want to do something stupid with me?”

Kos shrugs, though it doesn’t care one way or another. The entirety of its life above water has been stupid. This park is stupid. This disguise is stupid.

Livvy skates around to the back of the wheelchair and grabs the handles. She skates them forward, toward the edge of the curve.

“You can say no. Scream if you want me to slow down. Last chance to stop me.”

Kos is silent. Kos leans back in the chair and sees the barest edge of Livvy’s face. The white enamel of her teeth as she smiles. Her eyes dancing. They speed up. Kos grips the side of the wheelchair tightly. Livvy heads for the sharp slope down into the earth. The world is blurring around them. The air feels almost like cold water streaming against Kos’s skin. Its heart is beating very fast. Kos realizes it’s smiling.

“Hold on,” Livvy says, and then they hit the edge and the drop, and oh, it feels like flying. It feels like zipping through the sea. The world smears at the edges, and Livvy is laughing behind Kos and Kos feels a buzzing in its chest and it realizes that it’s also laughing, and then they’re across the deep bowl and up the ramp on the other side, and they’re hitting the curve too fast, and Livvy is screaming half-delight-half-terror and they’re up, the chair is up, Kos is flying up and out of the chair and the duct tape is ripping off its scales and its tail is uncoiling and its flailing with its arms and the chair is tumbling and Kos is tumbling and then the next thing it knows, it’s lying on the ground, the net of alchemical silver across its tail.

Kos lies there for a second, burning. It tests its limbs. Its tail twitches. Its fingers all move. It hurts all over. It gets up on its elbows and looks around. The wheelchair is lying on its side, dented. Livvy is in an odd crumple. Kos tries to call for her, and there’s no sound.

Kos starts wriggling over. Its tail is a useless writhing coil, burning against the alchemical silver. Its arms are scraped, lacerated by gravel, and they weep blood. It hears snatches of strangers’ speech as it crawls, but no one touches it.

“Mermaid—”

“—that a fucking siren?”

Livvy, Kos tries to say, and it comes out just a quiet hissing of air. Livvy lifts her head. She scrambles to her feet, wincing visibly. Her rollerblades are all scuffed. She’s bleeding from a big scrape down her arm and from a big cut on her cheek. Kos is filled with a powerful, unexpected sense of relief. She kneels down beside it, hastily pulling away the net of alchemical silver.

“I’m fine! Kos, we gotta—”

Kos nods and grabs Livvy’s forearms and lets her drag it back to the chair, wincing at the scrape of the concrete against its tail.

It’s too late, though. A ring of humans begins to surround them, whispering, murmuring, pulling out phones. Kos feels like it and Livvy are a pair of hapless fish being circled by a pod of orcas, the ones who kill for sport and not for sustenance.

Then Irina comes wedging her way through the crowd, looking like she wants to kill them both. She’s carrying a tray of ice creams. On the cup of cookie dough, there’s a little plastic stick that reads: HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

• • • •

TO LEAVE A MESSAGE AFTER THE TONE, PRESS POUND.

BEEP

Hi Koschei, this is Becky, from Child Protective Services. I hope you’re having a nice summer, and that you and your sisters are well. This isn’t a formal check-in, but someone called in about Elizabeta having a facial laceration and bruises, and some sort of incident at the park? Just let us know if you need any support, or if there’s been any issues at home. Give me a call back when you have a chance, thanks!

BEEP

• • • •

Kos and Livvy are both “grounded.” Kos doesn’t know what the word means. Livvy explains that grounded means that you aren’t allowed outside, and you don’t get your phone or electronics except for your summer homework assignments. Kos doesn’t know how that differs from its usual life, trapped in the bath.

Kos learns that it means it is alone. No visits. Just the drip of water from the faucet, the play of light across the small cell as morning turns to night. It tracks the days with the yellow bath crayon, since Irina hasn’t come to erase the time from the walls.

Kos is content to lie at the bottom of the pool, nursing its wounds. The bruises and scrapes aren’t healing. There’s a long scratch down its tail now, and large patches of scales missing. This should worry it. Maybe it would, if it could think better, if it wasn’t so tired.

On the third day, the door opens.

“Do you want to explain what the hell you were thinking,” Irina says.

Kos cracks one fishlid eye open. Irina flicks the bathroom light on and Kos squints at the sudden brightness. She stomps over to the bathtub and thrusts a phone above its face.

“Get out of the water. Listen to this.”

Kos doesn’t get out of the water. Irina presses something on the phone anyway, and a tinny message reverberates oddly but audibly across the wet tile. Kos stares uncomprehending at Irina.

“CPS called you,” Irina says. “Cause of the stupid shit you and Livvy did, and now they’re going to come investigate, and they’re going to find out we’ve been lying about Kos taking care of us and they’re going to find you and then they’ll take Livvy away and, Kos, what the hell were you thinking?”

Kos doesn’t move. Kos doesn’t know what CPS is, or why they knew the name that Irina and Livvy call it. Kos doesn’t know what it was thinking. It wasn’t thinking at all. Kos is a thing that mostly only operates out of instinct. It was thinking it might make Livvy happy, to say yes, that the speed was a good feeling. It shrugs.

“Fuck you,” Irina says. “You’re supposed to be the grown-up! You’re supposed to be the one dealing with all of this, not me!”

Her voice breaks in the middle of her sentence.

Clarity. Kos understands now. It lifts its head out of the water, followed by the rest of its torso. It picks up the yellow bath crayon. It writes across the tile, with an underline for emphasis.

I’m not your brother.

“Fuck you,” Irina says again. “I know that.”

Kos is dead. Kos died the moment he heard my voice and followed it into the sea. You don’t get him back if you keep me or kill me. I took his face and voice. I am not him. Let me go. You don’t get him back.

Irina sits down on the bathmat. This way, Kos is taller than her. Irina draws up her knees and hugs them to her chest. She stares at Kos. It stares back.

Irina breaks first. She wipes her eyes on her sleeve.

“Do you think I like this? I don’t like this.”

They sit in silence for a little. Kos has never lost anything. Kos is the thing that drowns, not the thing that is drowned. Kos erases its previous words. It writes over them in the bath crayon.

Do you want to hear how he died?

“Shut up, Kos.”

• • • •

The thing in the water speaks in the tone of beguile. The thing in the water has beautiful hair and beautiful eyes and Koschei is hypnotized on the shore.

“Hi,” the siren says, low and musical, sliding out of the surf and leaning its head against their palm and smiling. “You sound so lovely. Don’t you think that I’m pretty?”

“Yes,” Koschei says, eyes fixed on the pretty eyes, the pretty face, the pretty voice that echoes in his head.

“I’ll tell your future,” the siren says, its tone wrapped with silver beguile. “Just sing me something in return. Won’t you come closer?”

“No,” Kos says, because the echoes in his head are bouncing in and around his thoughts. He has to get home. He has work in the morning. Livvy needs a ride to school. Irina needs someone to review her college application essays.

“Then play the guitar, and I’ll sing,” the siren says.

And the siren has such pretty eyes, and such a pretty mouth, and Koschei is worried all the time, about his family, about himself, about his future. And it’s just a song.

So Koschei plays. Koschei plays sweet and clear and the thing in the water smiles big and bright and beautiful, hums along to the notes and sings along with him, replacing the lyrics from Koschei’s unwritten music with Koschei’s future.

“You’ll get out of this town, someday,” the siren sings.

Koschei takes a step down the sand.

“Someday you’ll live somewhere bright and beautiful,” the siren sings.

Koschei wades into the water.

“Someday your sisters won’t need you anymore,” the siren sings.

Koschei falls into the siren’s arms, and it pulls him down, down, down.

Don’t think too badly of Koschei. He was just a man, and the thing in the water was a patchwork monster.

• • • •

The door cracks open, inch by inch, letting in a widening sliver of moonlight followed by Livvy, who curls her way around the door.

Kos is awake. Kos had been drawing on the walls with the last nub of the yellow crayon. Great swirling patterns and stylized deep-sea monsters. Kos looks up, the moonlight flashing against the tapetum lucidum behind its eyes.

“Hi, Kos,” Livvy whispers.

Kos erases a patch of the drawing and writes: Hi Livvy.

It leans against the side of the bathtub so it can get a better look at her. There’s a bandage on her face, and a larger bandage up the side of her arm, but she doesn’t look otherwise hurt. Kos identifies the feeling in its chest as relief. It collapses back into the bath. Pillows its head on its forearms. It’s too much work to stay upright.

She pulls the kiddie chair closer to the bathtub and sits down.

“Are you okay?”

Kos nods. It’s holding in a stable pattern.

Livvy picks at her bandage.

“I’m sorry.”

Kos cocks its head.

“For getting you hurt! And for getting you in trouble. I lost control of the wheelchair.”

Kos shrugs. Livvy frowns.

“If you want,” Livvy says, pausing, and then speaking in a great rush of words. “I’ll sneak you out, if you want to go home. I’m getting my learner’s permit in two weeks. If you sit in the front seat, then we can pretend you’re supervising me if the cops pull us over. If I get you to the beach, you can get away from there, right?”

Kos’s first reaction is a limbic shiver of a NO! that glitters its way across its nerves. Its second is a stutter of incredulity. Why the refusal? Kos writes slowly as its mind mills the question over.

Aren’t you grounded?

“Irina can’t really ground me. She’s not my brother—and you’re older than her, so she can’t ground you.”

Kos doesn’t have a good reason to say no. Kos pictures Livvy in the front seat of a car. Kos pictures Livvy running into traffic. Kos frowns.

It shakes its head.

“Kos, I got you really hurt. Let me help you. Please.”

Kos remembers how Livvy looked on the ground. How she seemed small, and less like a person and more like a crumpled piece of cloth and hair. How Kos had struggled toward her, rather than any more sensible direction. It wants to go home, but it doesn’t want Livvy to help. It doesn’t know how to stop Livvy. It wants Livvy to get out of the bathroom.

I’m not your brother, Kos writes.

“I know,” Livvy says, and doesn’t leave.

I’m not sorry I killed him.

“I know,” Livvy whispers, and doesn’t leave.

Kos is out of words. The yellow bath crayon is worn down to a nub. Kos twists around to find another crayon. In the moonlight, all the colors look the same.

“We didn’t really used to do this sort of stuff,” Livvy says, quietly. “You were always busy. Work. And I think you thought I was kind of, like, a burden or something? Your kid sister that Mom and Dad dropped on you. And you kind of always made me feel like if Irey was older, or if I didn’t exist, you could’ve just like, gotten on with your life. So. Thanks for hanging out with me, all summer. So. Let me help you?”

Kos thinks about the way the body felt, being dragged out of the air and into the water. How it thrashed. How it shivered. How it was afraid, and what it was afraid of was leaving everyone it loved behind. How it had no choice but to be drowned.

Kos shakes its head. It understands now. Livvy is not the prison warden. Livvy is the prison.

No, it writes on the side of the bath, and underlines the word twice. Then Kos puts the bath crayon down, and submerges, because it doesn’t want to listen to Livvy talk about her brother anymore, and it doesn’t want to explain itself. It’s tired. It wants to sleep.

• • • •

Koschei was like, fine. Koschei was, according to pretty much everyone, a good guy. Koschei was a young man with too many responsibilities and sometimes felt like he was cutting away at pieces of himself to feed everyone else.

Koschei hid himself in a lot of places, so he could give everyone else his smiles and reliability. Koschei hid his worry in the television because it was easier to worry about killing fictional monsters rather than about his real life and CPS and why his parents had turned into fuckshit bastards. He hid his anger in his skateboard, until he sold it, and then he hid his anger in long runs on the beach and throwing rocks into the water. He hid his sadness in his songs, and also his love, and probably some other things too, but he’s dead now and can’t tell us about them.

• • • •

Things return to routine. Kos sits in the bathtub except when it sits in the kiddie pool. Livvy reads it “Am I The Asshole” posts and tells it about her day and doesn’t mention sneaking it out again. Her bandages get taken off and she stops wincing when she puts weight on her left foot.

None of Kos’s injuries are healing. Little ribbons of bright, oxygenated blood spurt from its cuts and the scrapes across its scales when he presses near them. When Kos wakes, the bathtub is always filled with dark water. Oxidized blood that Kos rinses down the drain before filling the tub up again so the girls won’t notice. Kos should be dead by now from the blood loss alone, but Kos isn’t a thing that would die so easy.

It’s getting harder to wake up, though. Some mornings Kos doesn’t stir until it hears the sound of the television turning on. And Kos gets dizzy, now. It feels like its skull is on a wobbly stick. It spends most of its time curled up under the water.

Kos gets the feeling it should care about this. The girls have been looking at Kos with worried eyes. They talk in whispers. One night, it’s dozing in the kiddie pool while they argue, only rousing when Livvy stamps her feet.

They both look over when Kos pokes its head out of the water.

“Go back to sleep, Kos,” Irina says.

“He’s dying,” Livvy says. “Look at him!”

“He’s not dying,” Irina says. “Right?”

Her voice wavers on the last word. A slight harmonic hesitation.

Kos shrugs. It’s never died before. It knows that in the ocean, it never bled. It knows that in the ocean, it was a thing that was magic, but now it mostly feels like a rotten piece of fish flesh, laid out in the sun. It’s not their brother. It’s no one’s brother.

“Go brush your teeth, Livvy,” Irina says. “Kos, time for bed.”

“We are not done talking about this,” Livvy hisses, and stomps over to the kitchen sink.

Irina helps Kos into the dented wheelchair. Kos lets it happen.

“You’re as ba’ as ’e is,” Livvy calls after them, through a mouthful of toothpaste. “’Illing ’eople!”

Irina pushes Kos down the hall and into the bathroom. She helps Kos into the bath, and Kos falls into the water soundlessly, like Kos and the liquid are made of the same substance. Kos curls around so that it’s comfortable. The tip of its tail pokes out of the bath. It looks up at Irina. It raises its eyebrows. Irina presses her lips together. She looks away.

“It doesn’t bring him back, right? If you die. This isn’t like, one of those things. You kill the monster and all the victims come back to life.”

Kos shakes its head. It doesn’t work that way. Whatever is left of Koschei is in Kos, now.

“Are you dying?”

Kos shrugs.

“Becky called again,” Irina says. “Would you kill me if I lifted the tone-of-command? So you could call her back and tell her that things are okay and she can stop by, if she’d like, but you might be at work?”

Kos thinks for a moment. The correct answer would be to lie. Kos is good at lying. It could lie, and Irina would lift the tone-of-command and Kos could sing Irina into letting Kos go. Kos could sing Irina into slitting her own throat.

It nods. Kos would try to kill her: This is in its nature.

Kos knows that this is the wrong answer. It braces itself.

Irina runs her hand through her hair. She doesn’t reach for a knife. She doesn’t speak in the tone-of-command and tell Kos to bash its head against the tile.

“Can you tell me how Kos died?”

Kos blinks.

How did Kos die? Ungracefully. His body thrashed violently as he fell into the siren’s clutches, as he was dragged into the water. Silently. It was a clean death, in many ways, because drowning is quiet, once you’re below the surface. Beautifully, because Kos remembers the soft, weightless feel of the body. The voice coaxed from the throat. The last few lingering thoughts, of his family, of how tired he was, of how he had regrets. How he wanted to go home.

Kos gets up. It reaches out of the water for a bath crayon.

He was sorry he came to the beach that night. I don’t think he felt any pain. He wanted to go home. He missed you and Livvy. He didn’t miss his parents. He was sorry about . . . he was just sorry.

Kos doesn’t know how to articulate the way it felt, to take Koschei’s self into its own. How Koschei’s voice had felt like cool quenching ice on its throat. He had been special. But Kos doesn’t say that. Kos remembers what Koschei was to his sisters. It wasn’t his voice they cared about.

“Okay,” Irina says. “Okay.”

She stands. She brushes invisible dirt from her knees. She still doesn’t look at Kos.

“I’m taking you back in the morning. I don’t want to be this sort of person anymore.”

Kos understands now. Irina can’t kill something that looks like her brother. That is her brother.

She turns to leave. She looks back. Her eyes are bright.

“You’re really really not Kos, right?”

Kos shakes its head.

• • • •

Once upon a time there was a little mermaid who wanted to walk on dry land. She went to the sea-witch in the darkest depths of the ocean and asked for something that would make her human.

The sea-witch said, “Kos, I’m tired, can’t you read to your sisters?”

And the mermaid said, “Mommy, but I want you to read it.”

And the sea-witch said, “Kos, sweetheart, Irey and Livvy want you to read.”

And then Kos said, “Once upon a time there was a little mermaid who wanted to walk on dry land. But that was stupid, because she had a cool tail and she could breathe underwater and she could drown people with her voice, and if she was on land then all that she’d get is kissing.”

And Irey said, “Kos, tell it right!”

• • • •

Kos levers itself clumsily out of the bath. It wriggles across the cold tile floor, shedding scales. It twists itself to the bathroom cabinet. It clings to the cold porcelain sink and with trembling arms manages to get upright. Its tail is a useless piece of meat. It uses its chin to clumsily wedge open the mirror cabinet, then clings to the faucet with one hand while using the other to knock down all the contents. Band-Aids, medicines, tampons, strange girl products. A vial of something bitter-smelling explodes all over the floor.

Kos waits for a moment. No one comes. It takes the scissors, the nail scissors, the razor, the nail clippers. It goes and slides painfully back into the bathtub.

It looks down at itself. A torso punctured across with scrapes and fine burns from the alchemical silver netting. A long laceration across its left arm, and alchemical silver burns across the right. A scrape across the left palm, and carved wounds across the meat of its hand. And half its scales have been flayed from its tail, leaving long silvery reams of flesh, punctuated by swathes of alchemical burns, a ragged fin scraped by gravel.

Kos takes a deep breath. It picks up the pink razor and begins to scrape its scales off. The pain is like yanking out handfuls of hair. Tears well in its eyes. A shower of silver falls into the bath. Then Kos picks up the nail clippers and clips its claws. A small pinprick of hurt with each clip. Blood streams from its fingertips. With gritted teeth, Kos picks up the scissors and pulls a fin taut. It closes its eyes. It slices. One sharp pain and then numbness. It opens its eyes again. It repeats the gesture on the other fin.

Blood is flooding the bath now, in great gushing torrents. Kos smells iron and salt. Kos is getting lightheaded. Kos breathes shallowly. It closes its fishlid eyes and picks up the nail scissors with shaking fingers, drawing a thin line of pain across its eyelids, cutting off the translucent film covering its eyes. Kos shudders, quiet sobs, choked gasps. Tears and blood mingle down its face.

Then, with a shaking hand, watching through blurry, red-tinged vision, Kos picks the scissors up and stabs itself where the seam between the legs should be, and pushes it all the way down. Agony. A line of fire down the center of its tail. Kos keens. Its eyes roll back. It passes out. It sleeps.

• • • •

The thing they call “Kos” didn’t have any sisters. It didn’t have any siblings at all, and it didn’t have anything it loved other than itself and the deep blue sea. The piece of meat that had been Koschei had loved the whole damn world except when it didn’t. This is the same ontological difference between a fuckshit bastard and a guy doing their best under bad circumstances. The ontological difference between a siren and a person, in that a siren is the thing that drowns and a person is the thing that does the drowning, in that Koschei was the thing drowned and the thing drowning.

Koschei didn’t tell his sisters this, but he sometimes thought it might be nice to be seafoam. No responsibilities.

• • • •

In the morning, Koschei wakes up, and around him float dull scales and fishskin and brown oxidized blood. It smells like an aquarium, or a fish market. He wrinkles his nose.

He unplugs the drain. He stands on wobbly legs. He rinses flecks of scales from his knees and from his leg hair and from his dick and ass crack. He soaps between his toes and shivers. He stands, and turns on the shower, and washes saltwater from his scalp and down the drain.

Koschei cuts the water. He steps out onto the soft bath mat. He pulls a towel from underneath the sink and scrubs his hair before wrapping it around his waist, shivering. He looks at himself in the bathroom mirror. He looks pale from a lack of sunlight. He looks like he’s made of meat.

He walks, stumbling a little, out of the bathroom, parting the veil of alchemical silver. He’s forgotten how legs work. Down the hallway. Into the sunlit living room and kitchenette.

Livvy is eating cereal. Irey is drinking coffee. They both stare as Koschei walks in.

The kiddie pool looks small and sad in the middle of the living room. Everything looks smaller and sadder from Koschei’s six-foot height. These damn kids. These damn kids who have always been the trap.

“I fell asleep in the bathtub,” Koschei says hoarsely. “Do you know where my phone is?”