The captain had said not to panic, Imagine had everything in hand, but Imagine didn’t have everything in hand. People had died. People had died before this—Heather and Ray and who knew how many others—but now it had passed some unspeakable threshold, becoming the sort of thing that should drive them back to shore, ceding the ocean to the sirens. They’d have to. They had enough, didn’t they? No one could say mermaids weren’t real after this. No one could say they were making things up. Imagine would be vindicated. Anne would be avenged. Everything would be all right.
