SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

"It’s a pity I didn’t get to see them both," Yan-yan said, scraping fried bacon and eggs onto plates. "Too bad I had that meeting Tuesday night!"

"You were supposed to come see them since last week," Fennel said as Yan-yan set a plate in front of her.

Yan-yan froze. "What’s that?"

"Nothing."

Yan-yan turned away to put the frying pan in the sink. When she turned back to Fennel the smile had returned to her face. "Let’s do it tonight. I’ll go over to your place after work. I want to see the last krakenmaid before it dies."

She laughed at the expression her words drew up on Fennel’s face. "Well, if one’s gone, what’s to say the other won’t?" She sat down. "I’ll be there around eight at night. Okay?"

Fennel pushed at sunny side-up on her plate. It slid around, unappetisingly wet with grease, rubber-like surface trembling.

"Okay?" Yan-yan repeated.

Fennel nodded. Yan-yan leaned across the table and kissed her on the cheek. "That’s great. We’ll see each other tonight then."

Fennel turned down Yan-yan’s offer of a lift to work and chose instead a hot, rumbly bus that needed forty-five minutes to reach its destination. This time, she would turn up after the scientists had arrived.

The entrance to the research institute was clogged with protesters, as it had been for the past two weeks. Students and retirees with signs and flyers and slogans, calling the scientists murderers and monsters, invoking Sook Ching and the Holocaust. Ariel’s death had given them the ammunition they needed. Two of them, dressed in tentacle suits, lay chained and gagged on the ground, framed by chalk lines. Men from the press crawled all over the scene with their cameras and microphones.

A boy with hair striped blue and green lunged at her, sign in hand. "There’s blood on your hands," he accused.

Flecks of his saliva speckled her face. His breath was closer and louder than she’d like. "Leave me alone," she said, trying to get past. "I only work here."

"You chose your job," he shouted, shaking the sign at her. She walked away from him as fast as she could, gritting her teeth. The work day had barely started, and she was already in a bad mood.

Indoors it seemed a different world from the heat and chaos outside. The tank chamber’s wetsalt smell had become formaldehyde-suffused, clinging deep to the back of her throat. In the fifty-thousand-gallon tank Ursula swam back and forth, still alive. The krakenmaid watched Fennel as she descended the metal stairs to the lower floor. There, working with gloves and masks over Ariel’s corpse, was Prof Lam and his assistant.

Prof Lam greeted her, gloved hands busy and dripping. "You’re late. Slept in?"

She nodded. She didn’t feel like talking now: The encounter with the sign-boy had left a long shadow of irritation, and she felt that if she opened her mouth, only that irritation would pour out like black smoke. Prof Lam was dissecting Ariel’s body, putting her viscera into separate labelled jars. Fennel tried not to look at the cut-open torso, the skin grey with exsanguination and chill; she tried to ignore the face with its half-lidded, rolled-up eyes, and slack-lipped jaws.

Prof Lam was the one who had given the krakenmaids their names. The institute was just ten minutes away from Disneyland, and one corner of Prof Lam’s office was filled with round cuddly character plushes. He always said, "It’s my daughter, she’s a big fan of Disney," but the careful way he stacked the plushes said otherwise. He was meticulous, Prof Lam, and that extended to his precise filing of Ariel’s organs into neatly labelled jars. Heart. Liver. Ovaries. Lungs.

In the tank Ursula swam in circles, her throat working as she sang her mournful song, a sound powerful to transmit through foot-thick glass. A language expert at HKU was working to decipher the vocalisations they had recorded, but it might take years. Fennel wondered what was going through Ursula’s mind, watching her companion being cut to pieces by strange land-bound men. No-one knew what the relationship between them was. Were they mother and daughter? Relatives in the same pod? Prof Lam had decided that Ursula was in her late thirties or early forties, while Ariel had been in her early twenties. Fennel couldn’t help but match those age ranges that of Yan-yan’s and her own.

Ursula’s gaze, focused laser-like on Fennel, unnerved her. The krakenmaid would often ignore the two PhD students who were observing her, but Fennel was clearly an object of constant interest. "She likes you," one of the grad students had said to her the day before. It hadn’t entirely been a joke.

Fennel turned away. She spent the day cleaning tanks and tending to the other animals housed in the institute while the researchers grad students were all distracted. Some days it was good to be a lowly research assistant. A blessing not to have made it as a scientist.

Prof Lam was second-last to leave that evening. Ariel was back in the morgue freezer; tomorrow they would begin preserving the main part of her body. "I’ll leave you lock up," he said, by way of good evening to Fennel. "Don’t stay too late, alright?"

Fennel nodded, and settled in for a long wait. She kept in the office area, a floor up and encased in concrete, away from the tanks. Yet she imagined she could still hear Ursula’s song coming through the walls, like the single notes of a distant foghorn.

Yan-yan showed up at eight forty-five, nearly nine. The protesters outside were still at it, the sound of their chants wafting in as Fennel let Yan-yan slip in through a side door. "How was your day?" Fennel asked.

"As expected, won’t bore you with the details." She gave Fennel a quick kiss on the cheek. "Come, come, where is this amazing creature?" Without invitation she marched down the fluorescent-lit corridors of the institute, Fennel trailing her.

A sound of surprise and delight escaped her as she entered the main tank chamber. "Wow, this is wild," she exclaimed, tapping the side of the tank all the way down the curved metal staircase. Ursula watched her, warily, her tentacles at pause. "Look," she said, grabbing Fennel’s arm and pointing, "she’s looking at me! It’s almost like a monkey or a trained dolphin. Can they talk?"

"We don’t know."

"She looks so human. Look at her face!" Yan-yan pointed, and pointed, and then laughed, a wicked sound. "Those tentacles, though. Do you think they use them during—?"

"We don’t know."

Yan-yan scoffed. "What do you know, then?" She looked around. "What did you do with the other one?"

Fennel banished images of Ariel sliced up like livestock, lying in a dark freezer box. "Prof Lam is studying the remains."

"Can I see?"

"I don’t think you should."

Yan-yan made an irritated noise. "You’re never any fun."

Ursula had swum close to the glass where they were standing. "Look, she is watching us. How coy."

Playfulness tugged at the corner of her lips, and Fennel knew what was coming next. A messy, tongue-filled kiss found its way into her mouth. Yan-yan pulled away, looked at Ursula in the tank and laughed. "I think she likes it."

Yan-yan’s blouse smelled of strange perfume. As her mouth left wet marks on jawline and neck Fennel had the strange feeling that Yan-yan was repeating actions that she had performed earlier that day. Yan-yan tried to get Fennel down onto the floor, the sticky floor that formaldehyde and krakenmaid innards had been dripped on. Fennel shook her head and pointed to the metal stairs.

The stairs made no sound of protest as Yan-yan got to work on Fennel. The unforgiving, rough press of them against Fennel’s bare skin should have been enough to stop her cold, but there was something about the situation that turned her insides molten. The brazenness of it, the salt-smell in the air, the way the noises she made echoed in the vastness of the room. The girlfriend between her legs, who had probably been between some other woman’s legs at some point earlier. On the other side there was Ursula, watching, fingertips pressed to the glass. As Fennel’s legs shook and her hands clamped on stair-edge she tilted her head back as far as it would go and let sound out through her open throat.