What do you do when the one who's supposed to love you, betrays you? What do you do when the one you trust most yanks your trust out from under your feet with a violence you cannot grasp with your little childish brain? And what if, after all is done and you're finished crying, you're told that it was done in the name of love? How do you continue to function? How do you continue giving, loving, believing? These questions gut me as I watch the blade approaching my throat, tiny air bubbles framing it like gems. I have no answers. The only thing I know is that I have one or two seconds at the most. My eyes bulge in fear. I tighten my muscles and hear the fabric give. Not enough. Try again, yell. Do something! Hum! Scream! Sing! But I can't, so I shut my eyes tightly, not wanting to see this.

"Ailen. Please...forgive me. Forgive me...if...if you can," Hunter's voice trembles between sobs, and then my father voice barges in with its gleeful baritone, full of sick wonder.

"Look, Ailen, look," he says.

I feel my eyelids being pried open, his fingers pulling at my eyelashes. I squint harder, fighting him.

"It's a state of the art procedure; you don't want to miss it." Heavy breathing and soft crying come at me in distorted sound waves.

I have ignited my father's soul back to life but I seem to have failed to make it truly reborn. It must've gone on the wrong circuit, twisting him along the way into a horrendous creature that doesn't know any boundaries in its reign, similar to a child who thinks the center of the world is his navel.

He pinches my cheek hard and I utter an inaudible yelp. My eyes fly open, just in time. I see every single detail of what's being performed like a patient who suddenly woke up from anesthesia in the middle of a surgery and can't quite fathom what, exactly, is happening.

Hunter's hand is inches from my neck, the scalpel held firmly between his fingers with my father's fingers on top of his, in an iron grip. With one sharp shove the tip of the blade is pushed right beneath my chin and traces a vertical line down to the concave spot where my collar bones meet, cutting through remaining cotton layers, smoothly, with a whispering ripping noise. I relax a little, until another swing of the blade slices through my skin and goes deeper into the muscle, as a butcher's knife would make a groove into a chunk of meat. A crunch of parted cartilage rips through my ears. I don't know how deeply the cut goes, and I can't know, because the agony of pain overwhelms me. I spasm and shudder and thrash as much as my binding allows me, screaming a muffled cry. From a long distance—what seems like miles and miles away—Hunter cries, too.

A clear, viscous slime oozes out of the hole in my throat and floats up in a cloud of goo; it looks like a mass of frog eggs. My heart deserts my chest and hikes up to my larynx, pumping madly. This feels similar to when my gills split open into being for the first time, only a thousand times worse. Fingers reach into the cavity, probably Hunter's because they are gentle as they palpate their way around and finally stumble on what must be the tissue around my vocal cords. I can't see what's happening and I can hardly feel anything except the hot pulsing insanity of pain.

Then he touches them. He touches the two protruding nubs at the edge of my glottis—the space between my vocal folds—the very membranes that produce my voice with their vibrations.

At first, nothing happens.

Then, a mini earthquake shakes the trawler. No, it shakes what feels like the entire ocean. It starts with small oscillations and reaches a crescendo with a seismic tremor of water all the way to the sea bottom, making everything around me expand, close to exploding. Surgical instruments fly off the walls and fall to the ground in a succession of metallic clangs. Lights flicker and hiss, threatening to go out completely. The water sloshes out of the tub in rhythm to the boat rocking wildly from side to side. My body turns to liquid as if someone threw a stone deep inside. I'm a circular wave that grows amidst gigantic ripples, rising to the horizon and shimmering in its wake, a tsunami in the making.

Buzz!

The impact is clearly audible.

It must feel, to Hunter, like he just stuck his hand into an electrical socket that's at least 1,000 volts, because he jerks his hand out of the water with a loud yelp, and I hear him collapse to the floor. A weird succession of images percolates in my mind, from a working hairdryer dropped into the water, to lightning striking a solitary figure on the road, to Hunter touching an open wire in the rain. It turns out, a siren is like an electric eel, happy to shock anyone who dares to touch her voice. This explains why my father was so bent on having Hunter do it. Is this why he staged it in the middle of the ocean, because of the destruction it would have caused on land? Another spasm takes over me and blots out all thought.

Chaos ensues.

A mechanical alarm brays its penetrating drone across the trawler. Fluorescent tubes feebly struggle to get back to life, flickering blue one last time and going out. The bright red bulb of an emergency lamp bursts its bright eye above the door, pulsing, making reddish reflections on top of the remaining water I'm buried under.

The space of the room turns from a clean, surgical crispness to a surreal liquidity, almost like a nightclub, with its red light pulsing in unison to the blasting bray of an alarm.

I nearly black out from the sensory overload.

"Get up! I said, get up, you fucking son of a bitch!" This is my father swearing over the mechanical whine of the alarm, his mannerisms gone bye-bye, and his simple, vulgar primitive self, for once, rising to the surface.

Something is happening to my body, but I'm not entirely sure what it is. The sensation is pleasant—it's the touch of the water directly to my core. Chlorinated or not, it's still my life force, and it seeps inside of me through the rupture and fills me with strength. I try to block out the discord of the disaster I caused, to understand what is happening to me and what it means, to look inward and help it if I can.

"Be a man and finish the job! I said, finish it! Did you hear me? Are you deaf?" My father's voice is on the verge of a shriek, coming at me dampened by two feet of water and blaring alarm signals. The water is no longer cold. It heats up on contact with my torn tissues, and the source of the heat is my growing anger.

"Get up, I said! Get up! Now!" There is a kick and a moan, and the shifting of steel and plastic rubble sliding on the floor. Then there's a creaking of wooden boards, and steps pounding somewhere above the ceiling. More kicks, more moans. The pattern repeats. I feel like it's me he's kicking, not Hunter. It's me who hurts, me who wants to cry.

Broken, torn apart, and left to die.

"Get up, you little piece of shit!"

Hunter's words flash through my mind again, the ones he said when we had our joint on my birthday, when he asked me if I ever met a real siren. I joked back, saying, You call this real? I pointed at the marble Ligeia. He said, You know what I mean. Not the mythical kind. No. I'm talking about a real siren. The girl next door. The killer kind. I realize, in retrospect, it was me he was talking about. He meant me, my stubbornness and my ability to move forward on sheer will, when other girls would've given up. I am the killer kind, and it's time to show it.

I'm not a little girl anymore, Papa. You can't do the things you did to me when I was little. You can't just take my voice away by force. It belongs to me and me alone. I'm my own being, capable of living without your constant control, and I'm not a thing to play with. I have a name. My name is Ailen Bright, and I'm a siren. And I'll show you what that means.

Two bodies slam against the side of the tub and it tells me that Hunter is miraculously still fighting against my father.

I'm coming, Hunter, hang on!

With this, I gulp the moisture from the water through my skin, not exactly inhaling it, but absorbing it the way a sponge does, directing it through the cut in my throat. At the same time, I strain to expand, to break from my cotton cocoon, to snap off the chains, to bend open their links and make them fall apart, and wiggle from the gripping belts. Several seconds of my effort amounts only to the sound of metal grinding, and the chains are as rigid as ever. I grunt from the effort; grunting is good, it means I'm starting to produce noise. The chains are good too, at least for the moment. They're holding me in place against the tumultuous swaying of the trawler, as water sloshes left and right out of the tub.

I cease to react to the annoying crimson light, cease to hear what is going on in the lab, or above it. I concentrate on my breath and on the fabric of the straightjacket, picturing the fibers soaking with water, becoming soft and more elastic; at the same time, I tense and make the tissue in my body expand. It works. A few threads tear, then a dozen, and then a hundred. But it's not enough, not nearly enough to break out of this whole thing.

There are heavy footsteps, shouts, and a slamming of the open door. Then, there is more shouting.

I will myself to ignore everything, hanging on to the sensation that's brimming inside of me, quickly escalating into strength. It's now or never; I might not get another chance.

With my eyes closed, I tune in to dissolving the cotton's very atoms into liquid. There is no tub anymore, no lab, no people, no trawler—only this effort. It fills me with the sense of growing a new spine, an anchor for my quiet, concentrated rage. There's nothing left within me but this. It gears me into action.

My skin cells begin regenerating, multiplying at an alarming speed, eating away the fabric like acid while mending and closing my throat, knitting it shut. Within seconds,

I'm fixed, I'm whole, and my voice is back. I hum, sending reverberations up the walls, through the ceiling, past the trawler's deck, and under the stars of what must be a night sky. I don't see it, but I can feel it. The night is full of drizzle and it hears me.

Pounding steps are reaching the tub, and someone leans in. I snake out my arm, now free of cotton, and close my fingers on the neck of my victim, pulling him down into the water. Jimmy. Poor Jimmy utters a cry in a bubble of air and slides out of the water and onto the floor, unconscious. I mentally note not to automatically kill him so I can snack on his soul later.

Though the cotton is gone, the chains still hold me fast.

I'll take care of them later. For now, I keep humming, directing my power upward and into the atmosphere. This is the beauty of sound—it can penetrate the walls. There, in the expanse of velvety darkness, first a few feet and then miles away, droplet to droplet, rain carries my hum all the way into the cloud. Slowly, it begins shrinking, collapsing in on itself like a giant magnet and pulling moisture from miles around into one spot, hanging heavy over the trawler and racing across the sky to follow it. There is a rumble of electricity and a crack of lighting, caused by the force of my voice. I feel like the conductor of a giant orchestra called weather, hushing the background music and bringing out the front line, the heavy artillery, and making it charge.

I hum more, adding intensity.

Something ruptures from above. It has reached a critical mass and water gushes down in one focused stream, similar to those two hundred drops I caught on my tongue when I competed with Hunter, only on a much grander scale. As an overturned shooting geyser, it falls on the roof of the pilothouse first, then slides down and breaks through several feet of deck material, denting it and forcing its steel panels apart, like it's no more than dirty sand packed into a castle by a child on the beach.

I no longer hear Hunter or Papa, or any of the remaining noises. I'm in the zone, humming Rain by Siren Suicides. I pull and nag and coax every single water drop in my vicinity to move, calling on the ocean itself. Now even the rascal glow of the emergency light flickers, the boat careening dangerously to the left and sloshing most of the water out of the tub, together with the first scalpel, before righting itself. The tub must be bolted to the platform it stands on, which is in turn secured to the floor, because neither moves. But the chains slacken from the force of me being jerked around, and I hear the links begin to give.

The red light pulses again, but not with the regular rhythm of a signal, but with the sputtering of a failing electrical circuit. It goes dead and the wail of the alarm breaks into abrupt silence. Something must have malfunctioned above. Darkness is absolute and I can't see anything, relying solely on my hearing.

I feel pressure on the boat's hull, from all sides, as if it's about to be squished between two mighty Greek mythological monsters, Scylla and Charybdis. I imagine their evil faces from the books I've read, opening their toothless mouths, wanting to swallow the trawler in an almighty whirlpool, sucking it to the bottom of the sea. There is loud rumble and fizz, followed by the cracking and groaning of wood and metal before bolts begin shooting out of the walls and the ceiling, landing on top of me like empty bullet shells. Dust from the ceiling's splintering wood covers me in a thin layer of powder. After a few seconds, the trawler seems unable to withstand the enormous force of water pressure. It starts to collapse and I win.

Water spurts through every crevice it finds and begins flooding the room. I can't see it, but I hear it rising quickly, with a deafening determination. I twist around in my chains and manage to break my feet free; I pound them against the tub's end, hoping the friction will let me free the rest of my body. The cotton straightjacket finally falls apart to mere threads, freeing my arms at last. I want to call out Hunter's name but I'm afraid to break my humming, wanting to cause as much damage to the vessel as I can, holding on to the hope that I will have enough time to get out of here, find him, and flee together.

I work my fingers, clenching and unclenching them, and then finding the loop-hooks and breaking them one by one. They're holding me suspended like a floating bridge, about ten inches from the bottom of the tub. I undo every chain hook along my body, starting from my shoulders and getting all the way to my knees, my clumsy fingers slipping and my body sagging into the tub as I go. After unhooking each chain, I yank it, along with its fastening bolt, out of the tub, unceremoniously throwing them on the floor, one by one, until, at last, I'm free.

A loud crack traces the floor above me and water begins falling down in freezing sheets. The first pangs of panic begin to rise and my humming stops at once.

I rip the tape off my face, together with a few hairs tearing from the back of my head. It takes three tries to get off every single layer, until I reach the ball of cotton, now soaked through with my saliva. I grasp it with unbending fingers and pull it out, coughing. I take another few seconds to bend my head down over my knees and retch, buried in a sudden wash of nausea. Whatever juices I have in my body, they hang out of my open mouth; at last, when I force myself to wipe them, I find to my horror that, along with the cotton of the straightjacket, my clothing has also dissolved, leaving shreds of rainproof fabric stuck to my wet skin. I'm stark naked.

I quickly touch my throat, it's as smooth as it's always been, not even the sign of a scar on it.

"Hunter!" I croak, coughing and sputtering water out as I sit up in the tub. "Hunter, where are you? Answer me."

Shaking, still weak, I awkwardly climb over the side of tub. My foot hits something soft and warm, and then I remember. Jimmy lays unconscious, slumped against the tub platform. I consider sucking out his soul quickly and decide against it. It's a pity, but there's no time. I have to find Hunter and get him off this sinking ship before it's too late. And my father...what will I do with him? Leave him to sink? Rescue him too, hauling them both on my back? It's impossible.

I'm momentarily perplexed, remembering the promise I made to myself to find the good in him, to try and revive him all the way. Yet, somehow, I can't find the motivation after what just transpired.

There is, however, one more thing I need to do. I squat next to Jimmy, dipping my hands into several feet of freezing water on the floor, and feel for his jacket and pants, swaying together with the rocking trawler. I try to find a zipper or button of some kind. It seems to take an eternity, but I finally manage to pull both rain boots off of his soggy feet, strip him of his orange overalls and jacket, and drag them over myself. The ensemble is huge on my petite frame and sticks to me with its rubbery coating inside, but I don't mind. It's a thousand times better than being naked.

The boat lurches again and I fly to the other end of the lab, hitting my head hard on one of the protruding hooks, yelping. Jimmy moans as his body slams into the wall next to me. Though his head stays above the water, he won't be able to keep afloat and will soon drown.

With a sigh, I lean over and stick my hands under his stinky armpits, pulling him in front of me and carefully stepping backward and up, because, at this point, the trawler stopped lurching from side to side and is steadily careening in one direction.

"Hunter!" I yell, making my way to what I hope is the door. "Hunter, answer me!"

The door is open, and I can feel the rush of water and air with my back. At the speed it's rising, I think I have ten, maybe twenty minutes before the trawler sinks.

"Hunter!" I try again.

A motor whirls to life somewhere above—must be some sort of an emergency generator. At the same time, the red emergency light turns on again, not to its previous pulsing beat, but to a steady glow this time.

"Hunt—" I begin and bump into someone with my back. I turn around and gawk. "Papa?" I hate myself for uttering this involuntary greeting.

No matter what he does to me, no matter what I decide the night or day before, in the most critical moments—when I think I've lost him—my inner child comes out. For a split second, I'm happy to see him alive. My father's wet face grins in the sinister blood-red glow of the emergency light. He's standing in my path, blocking the doorway and holding on to the frame with his right hand. Hunter is slumped against Papa's left shoulder, half-standing and half-hanging in his one-armed embrace.

We lock eyes and he smiles.

"I thought I might find you here," he says.

"You. What..." I breathe, suppressing the urge to cradle Hunter's face, to call out his name, to ask him if he's okay. This is when I need my siren self to take over.

"Let go of him. Now," I say, squatting, ready to attack.

It takes me a long, painful moment of rapid blinking to believe that what I'm seeing is true, reminding myself that these are not two actors in a movie, but two people from my life. My father holds something in his right hand—something that was hidden behind the doorframe.

It's a gun.

He points it at Hunter's head. It's not the plastic sonic weapon he uses on sirens. No, this is real.

"One more step and your boyfriend dies," he says in a level voice, though I still detect a hint of fear behind it. He knows that time is not to his advantage.

"You wouldn't dare," I whisper, curling my fingers into fists.

"Who are you to tell me what I would or wouldn't dare?" A childish note creeps into his voice, and I have a feeling it's not me he's talking to.

"How dare you talk to your own father like this? How dare you to doubt me." There's an echo of his soul that mixes into the conversation, and I feel it waver. It's uncertain; he doesn't want to do this. I want to reach out to it and hold it, but I don't get the chance.

"What you don't understand is that men and women were made differently. I was made differently." I notice how he switches from his usual generalization of men to talking about himself. I must have cut deeply into his wound.

"I don't hesitate. I control my emotions, I control things. I do things. You must learn from me if you want to live. Move."

Fast as lightning, he straightens out his arm and shoves me to the left, causing me to stumble and lose my hold on Jimmy. He slides out of my grasp and my father shoots him in the head.

"Jimmy!" I lean over him, ignoring the ringing in my ears. When did I decide that saving his life was my responsibility? I don't know, but I failed. "You shot him!"
They say your whole life flashes in front of your eyes, in a split-second, right before you die. A lucid dream composed of moments of love, if you had any. Afterward, you see some sort of a dark tunnel with a light at the end; it's so resplendent, so beckoning, you want to go there and be at peace forever. You take a step—forgetting you have feet, legs—and transcend into a sense of levitation, of complete dissolution, of serenity.
What they don't say is what happens when you watch someone else die a senseless death. It flashes before your eyes in just the same way, only double. Everything held in your memory spills out in a myriad of pictures, silly snapshots of life, making you wonder what it would feel like to be in this person's place. I've killed people before, for food. And I've watched Canosa kill, too. This is different. What my father just did is mindless murder.

I sense the sound of Jimmy's soul moving up and out, toward me. Involuntarily, still bent over, I suck it in, letting the much needed strength course through my chest, to my heart, and throughout my body. I raise my head, wondering if my father knew this soul would feed my strength.

Papa continues to point the gun at Hunter's head. "Do we have an agreement?" he asks, coldly.

"Yes. Yes, please..." I say, sticking out my hands in a protective gesture. My defiance evaporates in an instant. "I'll do whatever you say, just please, don't...don't kill him."

The floor shifts and slides out from under our feet.

I fall forward, on top of my father, and we crash into the corridor, slipping on the wet floor and sliding toward the narrow stepladder—the only way out of this metal beast before it's consumed by the ocean.