The Twice Lost (24 page)

Bone-tired as he was, Ellison couldn’t keep a hard, brutal grin off his face.

Whose side was he on, anyway?

***

Dorian woke up to Theo shaking his shoulder. “Sorry to bother you before noon, good sir, but the world is ending.”

Theo’s tone was ironic enough that Dorian didn’t immediately feel worried. “Yeah? Somebody release a herd of stampeding dinosaurs or something?”

“Tsunami. Epic scale. If you can call it a tsunami when it just stands there. In San Francisco.”

That made Dorian sit up abruptly, his heart quickening with hope. In the next moment he realized how absurd his idea was. Luce’s ability to control water with her voice was impressive, but he was fairly sure she couldn’t do
that.
“How big is it?”

“
That’s
what you want to know?” Theo laughed. “Not something reasonable? Like, oh, ‘How the fuck is that possible?’ It’s big enough to block off everything under the Golden Gate Bridge, is how big it is.”

Dorian was halfway out of bed, hauling on the jeans he’d dropped on the floor the night before.

“It’s on the news?” Dorian was groping for a T-shirt. There was one around somewhere.

“I know it’s crazy, but the media does seem to be finding the event rather noteworthy, yeah. My mom can’t even talk straight, she’s so shocked.”

Dorian was dressed and on his feet, stumbling after Theo down to the den, where Amanda Margulies sat on the green leather sofa in her yoga clothes. She was clutching a cup of coffee with a veil of cold scum on its surface, and drying tears streaked her face. Theo sat down next to his mother and hugged her warmly.

Dorian stared at the huge TV screen: on it there appeared a wall of bright water with fluted, faintly pulsating sides. The delicate rust red curves of the Golden Gate Bridge swanned above the unmoving wave, and in the background he could see the open ocean. Cordons of police boats were keeping a good distance from the bridge, shooing back the various sailboats and kayaks that jostled forward, trying to get closer to the action. And, above the clatter of gathered helicopters and the excited babble of the newscasters, there was a distinct musical thrum, sweet and immense and enthralling . . .

Dorian realized that the music was very much like something he’d heard before, except this sound was incomparably vaster and more complex: a rich, nuanced swell that could only be hundreds of magical voices thrilling together.

“What are those people doing?” Dorian suddenly asked. At the edge of the crowded bridge, a news crew was engaging in some kind of fussy activity involving ropes and pulleys. Whatever they were up to, it looked like a bad idea.

“Looks like they’re lowering that camera guy over the side. Trying to get some kind of close-up? But it’s just going to look like more water . . .”

The cameraperson was strapped into a harness, and his unwieldy camera was secured to his front with various cables. He clambered up onto the side of the bridge and then dropped slowly, twitching and kicking twenty feet below the line of spectators. They watched as he adjusted himself and trained his camera on the shimmering wall of water.

For a few minutes nothing else happened. There was only the crowd standing bone-still, enraptured by that unearthly music, the swaying figure of the cameraperson, the fractured diamonds of sunlight all over the water-wall. But nothing new was happening, Dorian told himself. The situation might drag on for hours without any change. So why couldn’t they look away?

Then—then something
did
happen. A small figure appeared at the wave’s base, arms raised as if it were diving. But the figure was
inside
the water, bending into strange refractions. Then it twisted, leaped upward . . .

And the figure wasn’t
human.
Even at this distance that was obvious.

The chattering commentators abruptly fell silent while next to Dorian Theo let out a kind of shrill, astonished moan. Of course they’d all watched the video of Luce—but this was different. No one could even pretend to believe that what they were seeing now was faked.

The leaping body on the screen rippled away into a long, lashing tail. The tailed figure vaulted smoothly up through the wave’s core and came to an unsteady stop just in front of the dangling cameraperson. He reeled against his straps, legs flailing helplessly. Then he stopped kicking, seeming to lapse into mesmerized calm.

The newscasters had started babbling again, but they weren’t making a whole lot of sense. “In just a minute . . . waiting for the feed to come in . . . truly an incredib—more in just a . . . bringing you a closer look at . . .”

The mermaid in the wave had something white in her right hand, and she fluttered it as a gesture of reassurance. Her tail looked more or less the right color: a light, silvery jade green.

“Trying to communicate . . . but does that mean . . . does that mean the same thing it would for us? Peaceful intentions?”

The mermaid leaned forward, parting the water in front of her face as if it were a curtain. Dorian’s heart was pulsing so quickly that it felt like some small sick bird spasming in his chest.

Then the image shifted abruptly as the close-up came on. She was wearing a tattered black bikini top; Dorian had never seen her wear human clothes before, only kelp leaves. Her arms and body were crosshatched with razor-fine wounds, there was a scar on her shoulder and a notch missing from her right ear—and she was smiling so sweetly and vividly that Dorian choked.

Luce.

20

Luce sang through the night, holding herself just below the surface with slight rotations of her fins and only pausing when she surfaced for quick inhalations. She was singing as the military helicopters jarring above them were joined by more and more helicopters with the logos of television networks on their sides. She was singing when the immense wave supported by the mermaids’ voices turned into a furling sail of molten gold with the dawn light. Her voice webbed into the enchantment of those hundreds of gathered voices. Sometimes the music came to her like clouds of exalted laughter, sometimes as grief for the dead. But one thing was clear: for tonight at least they had won an astonishing victory. And as she had promised, they had won it without resorting to murder. Luce knew it was strange, but she felt a sense of profound triumph at the thought that the dead of that night were all her own followers, not more random humans.

Even the human soldiers, with the possible exception of that submarine pilot, hadn’t died. Pharaoh’s army would see that the mermaids weren’t just mindless killers. And they’d see as well that the mermaids weren’t about to wait around passively to get slaughtered. She’d turned her enemies into witnesses, and
that
was a victory.

It was well into the morning when Luce was shaken from her entrancement. Yuan’s golden face was shining and determined, and her hand was on Luce’s shoulder. “General Luce? You’re off duty.”

Luce didn’t want to stop singing. The brilliance of her voice surging into everyone else’s voices was too great, too astonishing. She kept the song going, her tone like liquefied sunlight.

Yuan looked a touch annoyed, but she was grinning at the same time. “Give it a rest, general, okay? You can come back soon. Anyway, you’re already late for a strategy meeting with all your lieutenants. Except Cala—I’m leaving her in charge for a little bit.”

Yuan’s words reminded Luce that they weren’t just playing at war. But the song was so overpowering that Luce had to struggle with her voice for a few moments before she could force it into silence. The music stopped and started in quick staccato outbursts before she finally mastered it, and Yuan laughed. “Okay,” Luce managed.

“Yeah? You’re all better now?”

Without the song thrilling through her, Luce was suddenly much too aware of the horror of the previous night. “Yuan? Do we know how many of us . . .”

Yuan reached out and hugged her. “We were at five eighty-three before the attack. Only about three hundred made it to the bridge at first, but a bunch more girls drifted back here during the night. We’re at four twenty-two now. But the problem is—with everyone missing, we can’t tell who died and who just panicked and swam off.”

Luce recoiled a little. “I thought—I only saw a few of us get shot. Bex and maybe three girls I didn’t know. I thought we were almost all okay! Yuan . . .”

Yuan hugged her tighter, her arms strong and comforting. “Most of them are probably okay. I mean, they got really scared, but they’ll come back once they calm down. And you have to remember, Luce, almost everybody would have died last night if you hadn’t guessed—I seriously have
no
idea how you knew those submarines were coming, but I do know for
sure
that you’re the reason so many of us are still alive. Okay?”

“I didn’t know anything,” Luce murmured. “It just
felt
like something was wrong.”

“You can be sad later, okay?” Yuan said, but her voice was very gentle. “This is war. We need you to keep it together.”

“Okay,” Luce said breathlessly. “Okay.” All at once she was struck by a realization that should have been obvious: now that the humans knew about them, that immense wave was the only protection they had.

Now that the wave was standing there, it had to
stay
standing. If there was any lull in the mermaids’ singing, Luce knew they would be massacred almost instantly.

Yuan took her hand and guided her, keeping well below the water, toward a cluster of brick buildings with low docks on the shore of Sausalito.

Twenty of her lieutenants were already waiting in a circle beneath a broad, half-collapsing platform set on pilings. Catarina was there, her blazing hair fanning out across the water and her face blazing even brighter with a kind of exhilarated fury. Imani was beaming, her white lace kerchief tied over her short afro. And there was Graciela, looking almost crazed with joy, next to a freckled strawberry blonde Luce didn’t recognize.

There was a brief pause while they stared at her, and Luce felt a familiar tightening in her stomach. Were they looking at her as if she was a stranger?

In the next instant there was a wild swirl of dozens of fins, and Luce found herself embraced on all sides.

“Luce! You figured it out! We
stopped
them!”

“They would have wiped us out if you hadn’t . . .”

“I was so worried when you told us your plan. I can’t believe it’s working!”

“It’s not just your singing. It’s how you
think,
too. You’re like a
real
general!”

“Hey, I haven’t met you yet, Luce. But I’m ex–Queen Eileen, and that was just
awesome.
”

Luce did her best to hug everyone back, trying not to cry. It was hard not to suspect that they were crazy to trust her this much.

Especially when she hadn’t even been honest with them, really. She hadn’t been lying, but she knew she’d been keeping too many secrets: about Seb, about the video . . .

And especially about what Seb had told her: that if she had anything to say, the humans might be ready to listen to her.

Even now that everything about mermaid life was changing—their whole world upended and the timahk hopelessly shattered—Luce couldn’t quite shake the sense that there were some things a mermaid just shouldn’t admit to doing. Talking to humans and saving them from the consequences of their own stupid behavior were both right at the top of the list. But Luce had never completely forgiven herself for lying to Dana about Dorian. She
couldn’t
make that mistake a second time.

“I’ve got some things I need to tell you,” Luce gasped out. Everyone fell silent almost instantly. Did they really think that what she had to say was so important? Luce told them the whole story: collapsing under that dock and swimming out the next day without caring that she might be seen, then her surprise at noticing a camera pointed at her. Rescuing Seb and everything he’d told her afterward.

There were a few shocked exclamations, a few sharply indrawn breaths, but at least no one told her off for behaving so dishonorably. Luce gazed around at them, wondering what they’d all say to her when the silence finally broke, and found that she could look at everyone except for Catarina. Cat was glaring at her with such obvious disappointment that Luce found it hard to meet her former queen’s eyes.

“Well, everything is different now,” Yuan said at last. “It actually makes sense strategically to try to get some humans on our side, right?” She sounded like she was arguing, though it wasn’t clear whom she was trying to convince.

“If Luce had saved someone who
counted,
I might have to agree with you,” Catarina announced. She spoke in a silky, disdainful tone that Luce hadn’t heard since the days when Cat was queen. “But saving a dirty vagrant like that, only because she felt sorry for him? What possible use is that to us? No, Luce is too
impulsive,
too thoughtless—”

“He made me think about submarines,” Luce pointed out, a little brusquely. “And talking with him gave me the idea about the bridge. You really think he’s supposed to do
more
than that?”

“And he’s why we know about the video too. If a lot of humans are already interested in Luce, then maybe they won’t like it that the government is trying to kill her. Cat, I have this feeling that we’re going to need all the help we can get, if any of us are going to
survive
. . .” Yuan had seemed so calm through all the craziness and violence that Luce was startled to hear the raw emotion surging in her voice.

“Look!” It was the mermaid who’d introduced herself as Eileen, pointing her freckled hand back in the direction of the bridge. “It looks like those humans are sending some guy over the side? What a weird thing to do!”

They all crowded together at the edge of the shadowed zone under the platform, watching while the cameraperson dropped in his harness. Luce realized that the camera would capture a beautiful image: the top of the standing wave leaped and fluttered, delicate wisps of foam spilling from its crest, while sheets of sunlight wavered on its flank.