The Twice Lost (38 page)

Anais’s out-of-control attacks on ships had provoked the humans to the point of slaughtering their old tribe. Luce closed her eyes and saw girls’ faces veiled by water stained ruby; she saw throats gashed wide and bubbling with blood.

“You should have believed Nausicaa because she was
right!
She was always telling the truth! You just didn’t want to listen . . .” Luce moaned.

Anais’s actions had helped bring on the
war.

“Of course you take Nausicaa’s side! I knew you would, Lucette.”

“I am
not
taking Nausicaa’s side, Cat!” Luce’s voice was high and sharp enough that other mermaids under the pier turned to look at them. “You’re the one who wants to make everything be about
Nausicaa
and how much you hate her. I’m taking the
mermaids’
side.”

The silence went on so long that it seemed to flex and coil like a snake. Catarina drew herself up, her beautiful face stiff and haughty, and gazed at Luce with regal disdain. “Luce, do you dare to suggest that I am
not
on the mermaids’ side?” she hissed at last. “You accuse me of this, when you love
humans
so much that you degrade not only yourself for their sake, but you even lead your followers into the same degradation? When you would accept any humiliation from that human
boy
of yours if only he would pretend to care for you!”

A cold, airless rage choked Luce’s heart, clotted in her throat and eyes. There was nothing she could say in the face of such despicable cruelty, especially coming from Catarina. Between the low planks and the beach darkness waited, like some heavy, compressed substance. Something about that darkness felt to Luce like contempt made visible.

She wouldn’t answer Catarina. She would never answer her again.

“I have no place here, in this absurd army of yours. I should leave,” Catarina murmured at last.

Do you think I’ll beg you
not
to go?
Luce thought bitterly.
After what you just said?

“Does it mean nothing to you, Luce? If I leave here? We may never see each other again.” Catarina’s voice was veering up the scale, wild and plaintive.

Luce finally turned to look at her. Catarina’s gray eyes met hers with a shocked, scattered brilliance. Cat’s cheeks were bone white, and as she saw the look on Luce’s face she visibly recoiled. Her recoil transformed into a sudden, violent rippling like a flame in the wind, and she vanished under the water. Luce could just see the golden shimmer of her tail streaking away.

For half a second, Luce felt nothing but a kind of savage relief that Cat was gone. Then something in Luce’s stifled heart burst free, and she gave a trembling cry and dived after her.

***

Luce had forgotten what an exceptional swimmer Catarina was, how extraordinarily quick and fluid she was even for a mermaid. The water of the north bay was murkier than she was used to, beige and unpleasantly brackish; Catarina’s golden fins showed only as a kind of bright disturbance far ahead. “Cat!” Luce called into the opaque water. “Cat, I’m sorry!” She knew how well sound traveled through water; surely Catarina must hear her?

Then Luce couldn’t catch even a glimmer of distant fins anymore, even as she drove herself faster. When she surfaced for a breath there was nothing around but the lonely shore with its scattered palm trees and rusty metal huts leaning in auburn grass. Bridges like the skeletons of snakes were slung across the pale sky.

But if Catarina was determined to leave she could be going in only one direction: back toward the Golden Gate and the wild deep sea beyond. Luce gathered her strength and dived again, her tail lashing behind her. Once Cat reached the open ocean, Luce would lose all hope of finding her. A black slash of wings broke the water just in front of her, startling her into reeling abruptly sideways, before she saw the cormorant sweep toward the surface again with a silver fish in its beak.

Still, Catarina was nowhere, not even when the city loomed ahead again, not even when Luce came up to see the dull red curves of the Golden Gate Bridge not too far away. Mermaid song vibrated through the water, stroking Luce’s fins with tremulous music, and the wave beneath the bridge still shone like a wall formed from millions of shivering crystals. The sun burned through a fine haze, and light like grainy brush strokes danced around her. “Catarina?” Luce called, but the air suddenly pulsed with a loud, disturbing noise that drowned out her voice.

Luce looked up to see the helicopter whizzing overhead. Of course there were always helicopters around the bay now, sent by different news channels as well as by the military, but they never came this
close.
The military ones usually just circled high above the bridge, watching the mermaids below.

This one was darkly drab, heavy but sleekly formed, menacing: definitely the same as the ones that had attacked them before. And it was swinging rapidly lower. Something Luce couldn’t quite make out swagged from the helicopter’s base until it was almost skimming the water. Then with an agitated rippling the surface broke and whatever that dangling thing was dipped into the bay, slicing deeper as it neared the bridge with disquieting speed. Luce raced ahead. The glassy sides of the towering wave juddered with the pounding air from the propeller. She heard screams unraveling from the human crowd lining the bridge, saw people shift and jostle and slam one another in a panic as the helicopter rushed toward them, its blades ripping so close to their gathered faces that Luce feared they would be slashed to bits.

At the last possible moment the helicopter changed course, pulling steeply straight upward. Luce had a brief moment to feel relieved.

Then she recognized what the helicopter was dragging with it, out of the bay and up into the gusting wind.

A net. That thing hanging from its bottom was a
net.

And now it wasn’t empty.

The helicopter rose, its blades hacking at the air. Below it a tangle of mermaids—ten? a dozen?—jerked and thrashed against the net’s strands. Luce flung herself across the water even as she stared in desperation. Netted arms bent randomly around rippling, translucent fins in subtle shades of bronze and celadon and smoky peach; ribbons of long hair tumbled through the mesh; dark and pale hands wrenched at the strands, trying frantically to tear their way free. Then the helicopter stopped its ascent and simply hovered high in space: higher than the bridge, higher than any wave the mermaids could hope to command.

Didn’t the humans understand that—

“They’ll die!” Luce heard herself screaming into the sky. “You have to put them back in the water! They’ll die!”

If the helicopter’s crew heard her, they gave no sign of it. But other mermaids did. In a moment Luce was surrounded by clamoring girls: “Luce, what are they
doing?
Aren’t they afraid we’ll let the wave go?” “What are we supposed to do?” “You have to make them stop, Luce! You
have
to!”

The standing wave still shone in the misty, smoldering sunlight, but Luce saw that it was starting to dip and wobble a little. Too many singers were abandoning their places, racing out to see what was happening.

“We have to keep singing!” Luce yelled. “No matter what! Everyone,
get back
in the line!”

Luce saw reluctance, even anger, in the faces around her. “They’re killing our friends!” Eileen snarled back at her. “We’ll go back to singing once they let everyone out of that net. How’s
that
for a compromise?”

“And what about all those humans onshore? What about the ones who are just there to help us? Are you going to let
them
drown?” Luce’s voice was savage as she wheeled on Eileen. “Get
back
to your place, Eileen. What if one of those humans is that person you keep waiting for?”

Eileen’s face blanched and she swirled back a few feet under the impact of Luce’s glare. “Fine. I guess you have a point.” She crooked her strawberry-blond head at the other undecided mermaids. “Come on, everyone. You heard the
general.
”

Eileen was just turning to go when two appalling sounds called her back.

The first was a thin, strangely pale-sounding scream from the net above. It prickled on the air like a million motes of galvanized dust.

The second was a loudspeaker. A rough, staticky voice boomed down through the treble of that scream.
“You have three minutes to lower the wave completely and end the blockade. Repeat, you have three minutes only. If you do not comply, the captive mermaids will be allowed to die. Release the wave now, and the captives will be released.”

It was so insane that for an instant Luce could only stare up at the helicopter, flabbergasted. They must realize the impossibility of safely lowering so much water in such a short time. If she obeyed them, she’d unleash a tsunami. A speeding field of water would crush the city, and thousands of people would certainly die.

The humans in that helicopter were
ordering
her to destroy San Francisco.

The air shook with another high, sustained scream, and then another. The mermaids in the net were starting to go into convulsions as their tails began to dry out. The net rocked and heaved in the air high above until it looked like a single shapeless, tortured animal.

For a few seconds there was nothing Luce could say. Around her other mermaids gaped with the same staggered hopelessness she felt herself; beside them the standing water-wall buckled a little more, and odd blobs and sashes of water began to tumble down its brilliant flank.

“Luce,” Jo begged beside her, “just tell everyone to stop singing! Just let the wave go! Even
you
said we could kill to save other mermaids! You
said
so! And we don’t have any choice, not when they’re . . . when we’re . . .”

The mermaids were being
tested,
Luce realized.

Whoever was ordering them to release the wave understood perfectly well what the consequences would be. For some strange reason, the humans in that helicopter
wanted
the Twice Lost Army to kill—to kill as many people as possible.

“Hold the line!” Luce screamed. “It’s a trick! They
want
us to kill everyone!”

Yuan was there, but closer to the bridge—thank God Yuan was suddenly there, gazing at her with a look of appalled understanding—and Luce saw her nod sharply once before she dived, pulling two other mermaids with her. Luce could hear Yuan shouting down the line, “It’s a trick!
Defy
them! Get back in your places and
sing!
No brave mermaid would ever take orders from a human! Show them that!
Defy
them!”

Oh, Yuan. No one is like you. No one else could be so strong.

“But Luce . . .”

It was Jo, pointing up now with one wild white arm, biting at her other hand until droplets of ruby blood burst through the skin.

“Hold the line! Keep singing!” Luce shrieked again. At least
some
of the mermaids nearby seemed to be singing to the water again, dipping under the bridge as they sang, though the wave was tilting now and fissured at its top into uneven, jutting swags.

Luce’s head throbbed with the shivering screams of the mermaids above her. Her face was slick with tears as she turned to join the mermaids singing under the bridge. No matter what, they
couldn’t
let the wave collapse. Not even if those mermaids in the net had to die—to save thousands of human lives.

Jo grabbed her arm, jerking Luce back so sharply that she gasped.

“You now have exactly two minutes. Lower the wave completely within that time or the captives will all die.”

There wasn’t even a way Luce could offer herself in their place. She could scream until her throat ruptured; the helicopter’s crew would never hear her.

“Luce!” Jo shouted in her ear. “They’ve got Catarina!”

The net jarred again, and suddenly Luce saw red-gold hair like a rivulet of liquid fire pouring through its holes. One of the frenzied, shrieking voices far above suddenly brightened and clarified, catching Luce’s heart in a shining net of its own. Jo was right. That could
only
be Catarina, tangled and quaking with the other captives.

If Luce didn’t order the Twice Lost to unleash the tsunami, Catarina would die in agonizing pain within minutes.

And she would die believing that Luce hated her.

***

Luce couldn’t move. The bay might as well have locked up completely, become an endless sheet of ice gripping her. All she could do was gaze from that fiery trace of Catarina’s hair dangling against the white sky, to the soaring water-wall under the bridge, to the ragged skyline of San Francisco. On the shore some people were fighting to crush their way onto the already dangerously overcrowded bridge or to run up the hill—though if the wave was released, they would certainly never manage to run far or fast enough to save themselves. A few humans were taking advantage of the confusion to dive into the bay. Luce could see their arms splashing up through the salt water as they swam doggedly toward the mermaids, though they were still quite far away. They would drown, too. The air around Luce’s head pulsated with screams and the violent percussion of helicopter blades—and there seemed to be more helicopters now, including some that were whirling rapidly toward the one carrying the net.

The mermaids in the net shrieked and spasmed. Luce knew exactly what they were feeling: a white pain like needles made of pure sun drilling in on all sides, pain so piercing and terrible that thought and hope and breath were all extinguished. But it was still in Luce’s power to save them. They were still
alive.

“This is your final warning. Release the wave now.”

Yuan’s human friend, Gigi, was alive too, though, probably on the shore nearby. So was the man who’d spread his jacket over the murdered mermaid. So were countless humans whose hearts Luce couldn’t guess at: hearts that would vanish forever under an onslaught of water strong enough to lift trucks and level buildings—
if
Luce gave in and obeyed the helicopter’s insane command.