This wreck is unlike any other he has witnessed. Not a ship, but an airplane.

He may be many things, but he is not wasteful. This part of the ocean is cold enough to act as an icebox of sorts. There are sixteen passengers in total, with loose hair and clothes undulating like tendrils of kelp in the deep dark. On the first day he takes the body of a young male, sinking his coral-sharp teeth into the carcass. Chilly, but also slightly charred.

The pilot remains tethered inside her cockpit, its roof now ripped open, as exposed as a creature’s guts. Her eyes are open wide. He gives himself over to the tear of flesh, the crunch of bone and cartilage, but he cannot help feeling watched. A snag in the familiar tune and dance; a dissonance.

When he darts another look at the cockpit, the pilot’s eyes have once again fallen shut.

*     *     *
He works his way through the wreckage at his usual pace. A human carcass every dozen of Earth rotations provides him with more than enough strength to roam the sea. When he’s not feeding, he lounges on his reef, watching the inexorable pull of the waves and combing the coral-red horizon for distant ships to enchant with his ethereal, lethal song.

Not that he needs to call a ship to its doom just yet. The sphere of fire falling across the sky had made him cower in fear at first, but now he can recognize the plane crash for the gods-given gift it is.

He tells himself he’ll save the pilot for last, but the truth is, she unnerves him. Every last scale and feather on his body standing on end, holding its breath.

No other aquatic predator would dare enter his territory and so much as nose at his strange wreck. Yet the pilot is never positioned the same way he left her. Sometimes her head is tilted to the side, as if she’s heard something through her seashell-like headgear and is just about to respond. Or, like she has sensed the wavelets of his approach. Other times her eyelids flutter in tandem with the currents, heedless of the lifeless stiffness that has befallen her plane’s passengers. In his long, solitary existence, he has called countless of ships to wreck upon his shore, has ululated a myriad sea shanties and salt-drenched dithyrambs, but not once has anything like this occurred. He wonders if this means she’s special. If she will taste better than any other creature that has filled his barnacled belly.

Eventually, the food runs out, the airplane as hollow as a whale husk picked clean by clusters of fish. Yet he makes no move to consume her. Not even a small nibble. He swims to the front of the plane, his scaly tail sunk in the grimy ocean floor to support his weight of salt-heavy feathers as he watches her.

The pilot’s uniform—scorched in patches—has turned green and fuzzy with algae. Her eyes have drifted open again; he swears the pupils follow the minute twitching of his pectoral fins. He runs his tongue over his retracting teeth, but it seems like no part of him wishes to bite into any part of her.

When her blue-tinted lips fall open, he almost expects a crab or other crustacean to climb out of them. Only bubbles do.

*     *     *
No historian, bestiarist, or oceanic cartographer can quite agree on how sirens are born, but there are stories. There always are.

First the siren is a ship, then a shipwreck. Amid the flotsam and detritus, sometimes a soul rises in the form of sparkling bubbles. And by the time those bubbles reach the water’s pockmarked surface, the soul is once again changed, transformed.

(Pare a shipwreck and a plane crash down to the bone. They aren’t all that different, are they?)

*     *     *
He lays her down on the flat center of his nest as carefully as if she were priceless pirate’s treasure. Her hair and clothing no longer shift and flow on land like medusa tendrils, but her eyes move rapidly back and forth as she draws in breath, first with the new gills lacerating her down-feathering neck, then with her old pair of waterlogged lungs.

While she coughs up rubbish, small fish, and seafoam, he crouches in his nest of algae and rock, equal parts transfixed and apprehensive.

He has never witnessed the birth of his people—until now. Has never welcomed another being into his nest, either. The vulnerability of it bristles his feathers and scales alike, yet he finds he is no longer averse to the feeling of being seen.

The former pilot locks eyes with him, mimicking his mantling pose.

She opens her mouth again, but this time no water flows out.

Only song.