The Twice Lost (18 page)

“Imani? I don’t want to interrupt you, but . . .”

A tear rolled down Imani’s blue-gleaming cheek as she opened her eyes. “Why shouldn’t we mourn for them, Luce?”

Luce felt a rush of tenderness for her. “You mean for Pharaoh’s army? In the song?”

“My grampa would always sing that song to me, back when I was really small, and I couldn’t talk well enough yet to make him understand why it made me cry. But maybe those soldiers didn’t even
want
to be in that army.”

Luce realized what Imani was truly thinking about. “We can mourn for them, Imani. And we can change, and not drown anyone again.”

Imani’s looked as if she were half-enchanted by her own singing. “I’ve kept thinking of that song. Ever since I changed into a mermaid and found out what we do, I’ve kept hearing it. I hope we can make this into a war of water and music, but I’m afraid it’s just going to turn into another cycle of death and more death.”

Luce breathed deep, trying to calm herself. “It won’t.”

“If they find us we’ll be able to fight them now, and I guess that’s better than doing nothing, but . . . they’ll die, and we’ll die too. Pharaoh’s army and the Twice Lost Army, we’ll share the same end.”

“We won’t let that happen, Imani.” Luce tried to sound confident. “We’ll find a way to persuade them to agree to peace.”

Luce expected Imani to keep arguing. Instead she closed her eyes again, spinning her tail so that her net rocked harder. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Luce said. She wasn’t completely sure she’d heard right.

“I’ll . . . trust you on this, Luce. But I don’t see how we can persuade them to do anything.”

“It’s going to be really”—
almost impossible,
Luce thought, but she didn’t want to say that—“really hard. Imani, I think I have to go out for a while. If I’m not back in time, could you start leading training without me?”

That knocked Imani out of her waking dream. She looked down at Luce where she hovered in the water, and her gaze was sharper than Luce had ever seen it. “Really? Where are you going?”

Luce hesitated. “I have to talk to someone. If I can even find him.”

Him
gave it away, of course. Luce couldn’t be talking about going to see another mermaid.

“Luce . . .” Imani breathed after a few moments. “About trusting you. Do you know you’re asking a lot?”

They held each other’s eyes, then something shifted and a slight smile seemed to flutter back and forth between them.

“Imani?” But what could Luce say, really? “Thank you.”

***

Above the surface reflected light pleated across the water, and the distant roar of traffic echoed and warped as it flowed along the waves. Below it there was the private night where sleek-finned bodies darted and spun, the glow of mermaids crossing the wings of rays.

Luce swirled along close to the bottom, where rusty bicycles turned their wheels in the current and weeds grew in long reddish ribbons. There were rubbery amber sea cucumbers and so many tiny pink anemones that the rocks seemed to be carpeted in feathery mouths. It wasn’t that long before she saw rotten pilings on her left and the line of a pier slouching down into the water. Luce surfaced to see if she could recognize the spot. There was a warehouse she thought looked familiar, its endless windows staring blankly across the bay. And sitting cross-legged on the pier there was a man, and he was looking straight at her . . .

Luce dropped under the water, down into green depths. “Mermaid?” the man called quietly. “It’s me. Your friend the old ghost.”

He didn’t look the same, though. Luce came cautiously to the surface and stared at him. He was wearing relatively clean clothes in place of his sagging overcoats, though to guess by how badly the new clothes fit him, he’d probably found them in the street. He was cleaner, too, and he’d cut his mouse gray hair. The reek of sweat and alcohol that had clung to him the first time Luce had seen him was gone, and she could tell by the alert way he was looking at her that he wasn’t drunk. She swam a little closer. “Hi.”

“Hi, mermaid.” He was smiling a small careful smile, obviously trying not to scare her away. “Hoped you were gonna come back.”

Now that he was in front of her, Luce wasn’t sure where to start. “You look better.”

“I feel better. You know, I saw my own death that night. Turns out that a good shot of terror was the best medicine for me. And maybe there was something in that unreal voice of yours too.”

“I’m glad . . . it helped,” Luce murmured. He was gazing at her with such powerful curiosity that she was almost overwhelmed by shyness.

“But you don’t actually want to talk to me, do you? I mean— you’re gorgeous and magical and whatever the hell else you are. You didn’t stop by to shoot the . . . the breeze with me. So what
do
you want?”

He was right, of course, but Luce felt obscurely guilty that it was so obvious. “I just wanted . . . I wondered if I could ask you some questions?”

He just stared at her, his pale blue eyes glittering in the faded lamplight. It was hard to keep going. The immense emptiness above them seemed to press on Luce’s shoulders, and a rusty glow hazed across the sky.

“That night, you said you’d been a stevedore?” Luce asked.

“Eight years, after Nam. Unloaded all those ships pulling into the port of Oakland.”

“I was wondering . . . Maybe you know about the Golden Gate. You could tell me . . .” Luce didn’t want to give away too much; there was no way to know for sure if she could trust him. “Well, would it be possible to close it?”

The old man swayed a little from surprise. “
Close
it? The Golden Gate? Who the hell would want to do that?”

“Say, if the government, or the army . . . if they wanted to keep anything from getting through, could they do that?”

He tilted his head, thinking it over. “I guess the navy could do some kind of blockade. If there was a threat from foreign ships, not that this would ever happen, but they could line up their boats and keep ’em out.”

“But . . .” Luce knew she might be saying too much, but she didn’t see any other way. “What about
under
the water?”

“Because a sea serpent was gunning for Frisco, or the kraken was rising?” He laughed, a little too wildly. “Then they’ve got plenty of submarines. And they could plant mines.”

“I was wondering more about, if maybe they could close it down with a giant metal gate? Like, if they wanted to stop things that were smaller than ships or . . . or sea serpents.”

Luce watched understanding open inside his blue eyes, watched his lips purse thoughtfully. “And it’s the U.S. government that you think might be doing this ‘closing down,’ Miss Mermaid? Can’t say I’m their biggest fan.” He grimaced. “I have indeed seen a dab too much to be. Anyhow, I don’t think that’s something you should get yourself in a big tizzy about.”

“Because it’s impossible?” Luce asked hopefully. She was grateful that he wasn’t asking her too many questions.

“Might be
possible,
though it sure wouldn’t be easy. That’s not why they’ll never do it, though. They’d have the shipping companies and God knows who all screaming bloody
murder
if they tried it. One of the busiest ports in the
country?
They’re going to just stop that dead? Don’t think so.”

Luce’s tail had started twitching from excitement even before she consciously understood the implications of what he’d just said to her. “You’re saying they couldn’t afford to let that much business stop? So if it did . . .”

“You know how they say that blood is thicker than water, mermaid? I’ll tell you what’s thicker than blood. Blend up a stack of dollar bills and you’ve got yourself the thickest substance known to man, and it’s the goddamned stickiest!”

Luce was barely listening to him anymore. The Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t visible from here; all the buildings of downtown San Francisco were in the way. But she was gazing in its approximate direction anyway, her tail flicking in narrow loops behind her.

“Step your foot in
that
gunk
,
don’t care what kind of principles you think you’ve got; you’re trapped for life. Like a poor mouse in one of those glue traps, gnawing your own legs.”

No. Her idea was completely insane. It would take so many mermaids, probably thousands more than she had with her, and they’d all have to be so powerful. Luce could control an impressive volume of water, and Imani and some of the others were getting pretty good as well, but what she had in mind—it just wasn’t realistic.

“Hey, Miss Mermaid?”

Luce glanced back at him, though her thoughts were still far away. No matter how much she told herself she was being ridiculous, she was still longing to dash off and find Imani and the others.

“You have any clue how famous you are now?” His pale eyes shone with an expression Luce couldn’t identify, although the word “questing” occurred to her. He was looking for something, she thought. Then what he’d asked hit her, and she reeled a little.

“What are you
talking
about?” Luce demanded. Though actually, maybe she already had an idea . . .

“How about that you’ve gone Hollywood? How about a gigabillion views of that little movie you starred in? I wanted to see if I could learn anything about you after you saved my life. Hit the computers at this community center I go to, and hot damn if it wasn’t the exact same fishtailed Girl Wonder looking back at me from the screen.”

Luce’s mouth opened wordlessly. Of course she’d seen those humans pointing their camera at her, and she knew the government had found out she’d been sighted. But she hadn’t seriously considered the possibility that the video would wind up on the Internet or if it did that anyone would be interested. “You’re saying . . . I saw them holding a camera, but I didn’t really think they’d . . . or that anybody would believe . . .”

“Huge. It’s gotten huge. They put it out there, you better believe it, and now it’s all over the place.”

“Do people think it’s
real?
” Luce asked. How
could
they, though?

The old man shrugged. “If I hadn’t met you personally I wouldn’t have known
what
to think, Miss Mermaid who ought to be friendly enough to tell me her name, already. See, though, what you might want to think about . . .”

Luce was still disoriented by the news he’d just given her. It took her a second to focus. “Um, what?”

“Well, if you’ve got something you’d like to tell all the folks out here in humanland, they’ll probably listen. You’ve already got their attention.”

Luce thought about that. Of course she had a lot of things she wanted to say to the humans: so many that she had no idea where she should start. But she couldn’t take the risk that the divers would find out where she was. If they came looking for her, they’d find everyone else, too.

How much harm had that video
already
done?

“You said you’d help me!” Luce began as the panic hit her. “You said I knew who to ask!”

The old man shook his head, surprised by her vehemence. “I did, sure. And you do. What did I say? How am I not trying to help?”

“No one—this is really, really important, okay?—no one can know I’m here! You can’t tell
anyone!
”

Once again Luce saw understanding crash through his face like a wave. “They’re looking to catch
you,
huh? Not just—to catch things like you? People from the government?”

After a brief pause Luce nodded. He’d already figured out that much.

“Why, though? They want to give you to their scientists? Send electricity through you and whiz you through their machines and find out how you tick?”

That hadn’t occurred to Luce before, but now that he mentioned it that seemed like a possibility. “I guess they might.”

“Good thing about ghosts.” He nodded emphatically, his haphazard gray hair twitching with the movement. “They know how to keep their mouths shut. Or if they do talk it just comes out like ‘whoooo.’” He cracked up laughing wildly, but when Luce didn’t join in he calmed himself just as suddenly. “Nobody listens to me anyway, Miss Mermaid. But I’ll keep quiet. Awright?”

It didn’t seem like she had much choice about trusting him. “Okay.”

“And your name is? Princess Autocrata Waveform? Mermaladia McSea?”

She hesitated again. “Luce Korchak.” Why had she given him her human name, though?

“Plain old Luce Korchak? Huh. And you can call me Seb of the Ghosts.”

Luce had the sense that she was humoring him, but considering how much he knew that seemed like a good idea. “You’re as alive as anybody, though.”

“You’re not the first one to say so, Miss Luce Mermaid. A pack of morons kept on badgering me with words to that effect after I got back from Vietnam. That just goes to show what they knew, doesn’t it?”

Luce couldn’t tell if he was serious. It wasn’t reassuring to think that her only human ally might be totally delusional. “If you’re already dead, then how could you almost drown?”

“Oh, that.” He grinned at her lopsidedly, and his pale eyes gleamed. “I’m not by any stretch suggesting that I won’t have to die again. Now, who ever told you that once was enough? Let me tell you something, Lucy Goosey. People always think that ghosts are spirits, right? But a man’s walking-around body can be a ghost a whole lot easier than his spirit can.”

15

The man on the screen had short-cropped hair, a stubbly chin, and wry cinnamon-colored eyes. Behind him was what appeared to be a sunny, comfortable kitchen with pale yellow cabinets and a large vase full of lilacs. “Hi,” he said, with an odd self-conscious smile. “My name is Andrew Korchak, and I just wanted to say something to anyone out there who’s been watching that video with that green-tailed mermaid swimming out from under the dock. The thing is . . .” He held up a photo, and the camera zoomed shakily in on it until a girl with short, dark, jagged hair and frightened eyes filled the screen. “That mermaid wasn’t always a mermaid. You can all see here it’s the same face, right? This photo here is my daughter, Lucette—Luce—and this is her seventh-grade picture from school.”