The Twice Lost (44 page)

“I bet Regina’s not even her real name,” Sadie muttered. “Tricia,
listen
. . .”

“To
General Luce?
” Tricia burst out, and Sadie fell silent. Anais could feel the agitation she’d put into her tone moving through Tricia like a transfusion of tainted blood. “Regina, you start talking right now! Who—did they
dare
—our general—we’ll—”

Some of the mermaids began deserting their places in the row to find out what was happening. As the crowd thickened the wave began to totter. Eager, reckless girls pressed in, clamoring with questions, and Tricia’s obvious anxiety danced and dabbled over them like a living, serpentine thing.

Anais allowed herself to shoot Sadie a look of such dark triumph that, if any of the others had seen it, it would have given her away completely. Sadie’s indignant cry was instantly lost in the uproar.

“Everybody shut up!” Tricia yelled. “Just shut up and listen! Our
general,
our great general, she’s—”

“Dead,” Anais moaned dramatically. “General Luce is dead! Whenever she was just about to finally die they would pour some water on her scales and then she would start slowly drying out all over again! They did it live on TV, to send us a
message
they said, and it went on for hours! I’ve never seen anything so, so terrible! And right when she was dying she said that trying to make peace with humans had been a big mistake!”

“A message?” Tricia shrieked. “We’ll send them a
message
right back! We’ll—”

“No we
won’t,
” Sadie snapped. She swirled forward and stopped with her face immediately in front of Tricia’s. “We’ll send someone to find out if
Regina’s
telling the truth. And if she isn’t, and I already know she’s
not
—”

“Find out how?” Paige sneered. “By asking the
humans?
The same humans who just
tortured
General Luce to
death?
”

“We don’t even know Regina! I’d trust a human more than I trust her!”

“Since when do
you
make the decisions here, Sadie?” Tricia was rippling savagely, her dark green fins kicking rhythmically. “What is this? A mutiny?”

Sadie reacted to this by lifting her head and unfurling her gorgeous amber tail to its full length. “It’s only a mutiny,” Sadie announced, “if I disobey my
general,
Tricia. And you know what? That’s not you. Everybody who follows General Luce? We are keeping this wave standing!” Sadie swam backwards, pouring her voice into the song. Anais couldn’t help but notice at once that Sadie was an exceptional singer. Her back was arched and dawn glow lit the swanlike curve of her throat. She fought the immense weight of the water above her, flooding it with her clear ascending voice. The wave above was bent, crumpling, as a few mermaids parted ways with the crowd and rushed to join their voices with Sadie’s song.

Anais’s distress was perfectly genuine now. She watched in anxiety as the Twice Lost mermaids of Baltimore chose sides, each of them using her voice to declare her allegiance to Sadie or to Tricia.

One by one they joined either the ranks of the singers, or the ranks of the silenced.

***

The giant wave above them teetered, bent halfway up its height like some doddering ancient man. Anais watched it from a spot a yard below the surface, gazing at the wave as if through a rippling glass pane. The singers strained to keep the wave up, their voices turning hoarse and wild as they tried desperately to support a volume of water that suddenly seemed to be staggering from its own weary immensity. On the freeway the cars’ windshields flashed bright palms of dawn, and people shrunken by distance walked along a promenade that followed the harbor’s curves. They didn’t seem to realize that anything was wrong.

For several minutes Anais couldn’t guess which side would win. At least two-thirds of the mermaids here had joined her and Tricia in embittered silence, their hearts poisoned by what she’d told them. They waited around her at various levels so that the water flicked with fins and swirled with bright hair. And as she watched the wave slumping farther forward, its crest writhing from the thrust of the mutineers’ frenzied song, Anais began to feel just a trace of the same emotion that had unaccountably possessed her on the day she’d sung to Luce’s father. It was a sensation of hollowness in her chest, as if a delicate creature that lived there had suddenly escaped from her and all she could feel was the brush of its departing wings. Anais didn’t have a name for what she was experiencing. Luce or Yuan or Nausicaa could have told her that it was regret.

But if she told the truth
now,
the timahk would hardly be enough to protect her.

“Sadie’s right,” Anais whispered. Her golden hair spun across her mouth as if it wanted to stifle her, then danced up and blinded her eyes. “I was lying.”

No one reacted to that. They were all transfixed by the sight of that crooked wave, somehow both lurching forward and yet suspended midway through its fall. Maybe they hadn’t heard her at all.

“I was lying!” Anais yelled. “Sadie, I was lying!”

Sadie heard her, and for a moment—for a pause briefer than a heartbeat—astonishment crushed the song in her throat.

34

Luce sang through her shift automatically. Catarina was dead, a dozen other mermaids were dead, but the war was still a living, lashing thing that had to be fed and tended. She was feeding it her own body and her song, just as earlier that day she had fed it her heart. Inexplicable things had happened over the last several hours. The president had denied responsibility for the attack, even sent her an apology, and the crowds onshore kept screaming her name . . . but none of that changed anything. The war was still famished, endlessly demanding, and she was still its unwilling keeper.

For once her song meant nothing to her, though magic still flowed from it. And at midnight when Cala arrived to replace her Luce slipped silently away. No doubt at the encampment there were friends waiting to comfort her. Yuan and Imani would hug her and assure her she’d done the right thing, the only thing, that she’d had no choice . . . and Luce knew she couldn’t bear to hear any of that.

Instead she swam deep, hugging the shore. For at least an hour she wove randomly between black pilings and lightly brushed the pink kiss of the anemones, stared into bone white sea stars draped across rotten beams. She couldn’t face her fellow mermaids, but something was pulling her along, and when at last she came up near a collapsing pier she knew what it was. That hunched figure sitting at the pier’s end was just as heartbroken as she was. Every line of his back showed it.

Seb, Luce thought with surprise, might understand what had happened that day. At least he might understand it
enough.
She dipped low again and came up in front of him.

He didn’t seem surprised to see her and raised a hand in greeting. His worn face looked severe and mournful under his uneven hair. His hideous tie flapped in the wind, and he’d pulled his blazer as tight as it could go. For a human, Luce realized, it was a chilly night—in San Francisco even August offered no guarantee of warmth—and there was nothing she could do for him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” Luce said. “To thank you. You did everything right.”

Seb just looked at her then shook his head. “Well, it’s a real luxury, isn’t it, Miss Luce? When you
can
do the right thing, because there’s one truly right thing to do?”

Luce was suddenly aware of the water cradling her, gently and faithfully. She looked at Seb with gratitude. “Yes. That is . . . a luxury.”

“So maybe I’m the one who should thank you, for giving me such a nice clear-cut
right
thing to do. Helping the mermaid who saved me when that’s not enough for her and she’s gone and set her heart on saving
more
than that? That was an easy one, Miss Luce. I haven’t had so many opportunities in my life to do anything as right as that. I’ve mostly been doing something at least halfway wrong, just fighting to get at one little
speck
of right that was mixed in with it somewhere.” Seb kept on looking at her. For all his tattered absurdity his gaze was as transparent as glass, and grave comprehension shone through it. “And I know you know about that.”

Luce felt something blocky and horrible in her throat. She looked away, unable to answer him, and wrapped her arms around a piling for support. Hoops of apricot light cast by the streetlamps pranced on the water. Luce looked at those beaming rings and thought she might fall through them and plummet into another world. “I killed them, Seb. Mermaids who trusted me.”

“I know you did, Miss Luce. I watched the whole thing on TV, along with practically everybody else on this planet of ours. It was as horrible as anything I ever saw, even in Vietnam, and I’m no slacker where horror’s concerned.”

“I had a choice. I let Catarina die. I
decided
that.”

“You
made
a choice. That’s why everybody here in humanland thinks you’re the big hero tonight. They’re taping your picture in their windows. You’re looking out all over, on all the streets, with those sad eyes of yours. It’s gonna change things for sure, what you did.”

“I’m not a hero,” Luce murmured dully. “I never was. Catarina was right about me.”

“I know you’re no hero,” Seb said seriously. “They set you up so you’d be a monster no matter what you did. And now a monster’s what you are.”

Luce nodded. Far from feeling offended, she was grateful and wildly relieved that Seb understood her so well. She looked at him. He was shivering from cold because he’d thrown away those filthy coats he used to wear—thrown them away so he could look better for his role as her ambassador. “I wish I could help you, Seb. I wish we did have treasure and pearls for you. I’m
sorry
. . .”

“Thanks, Lucy Goose. And I wish you knew that a monster like you is worth twenty heroes.”

Luce leaned her head on the piling and closed her eyes. “Please don’t say that.”

“I’ve known heroes, Miss Luce. Plenty of them. You know I even knew that Secretary of Defense Moreland back when we were both young?
Big
hero, that one. So I’m kind of an authority on this stuff, and I’m going to tell you whatever truth I’ve got in me to tell.”

She swayed in the darkness. Around her hovered empty spaces shaped like her father, Dorian, Nausicaa, Catarina. No wonder everyone always abandoned her. She was a monster made of nothingness; she was ruin and desolation wearing a beautiful mask. Everyone knew that, but no one would admit it—apparently not even Seb, although she’d thought he understood.

“Hey,” Seb said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

It took Luce a long moment to realize that he wasn’t talking to her.

“Oh, God,” Yuan said. “Poor Luce. She just doesn’t get a break.”

Luce cringed—at Yuan’s presence, at her sympathy, at the concerned looks she knew both Yuan and Seb were firing her way.

“She’s got the shadow sitting on her heart tonight,” Seb said as if that were the most rational explanation in the world. “She’s feeling what it is when you have to know exactly what kind of a monster you are, and you can’t look away from that.”

“She’s going to have to,” Yuan said firmly. “Look away, I mean. I didn’t come searching for Luce so I could try to cheer her up. There’s . . . something she has to deal with.”

“Oh, Lord,” Seb said. “Don’t make her do
more
tonight! Just look at her.”

“I see her,” Yuan agreed. Suddenly Luce felt Yuan’s strong, smooth hands on her arms, gently unwrapping them from the piling. “I’d let her stay here if I could, Seb. Really. But this is important. Luce?”

Important,
Luce thought with grim sarcasm. “What’s so important
now?
” She barely muttered the question.

“They could be lying,” Yuan conceded. “But if they’re not—and I
really
don’t believe they are, actually—”

“Yuan,” Luce snapped. “What do I have to do
now?
”

Yuan’s gentleness was gone in a flash. She gripped Luce by both shoulders, spun her savagely around, and gave her such a quick, jarring shake that Luce opened her eyes in exhausted surprise. Yuan’s golden face appeared, fierce and radiant and loving. “You have to come see your father, Luce. He’s by the bridge. And he is
not
okay.”

***

With those words everything changed. The night seemed to inhale, to stretch itself wider and darker in all directions.

Luce gave an apologetic wave while Seb sadly watched them from the pier. Yuan was already towing her away and talking as they swam. “Luce, listen, about your dad: it’s bad. He’s not
physically
hurt, but . . . it might be something a mermaid did to him? And I don’t know, but there’s this nice old guy who brought your dad to the bay, and he keeps saying . . . that maybe you can help somehow? Come
on.
”

They were already swimming under the water. The darkness ran like quicksilver around Luce and also straight through her veins. She was the pulse in the night, the racing surge, and Yuan’s words seemed to signal her from far ahead, bright and strange in the distance. She drove herself on, faster and faster, until Yuan was trailing just behind her. Past the Embarcadero and its shining clock, below the looming hill with its pale tower. As the bridge neared, Luce lunged for the surface, staring frantically at the crowd onshore. Humans were gathered there in greater numbers than ever; they all seemed to be holding candles and their faces floated on the dark like glowing balloons. Instead of jostling they stood quietly with arms around one another’s waists, staring wide-eyed at the brilliant streaks of reflected light playing on the soaring flank of the water-wall. Many of them were weeping quietly. The rush of mermaid song suffused Luce’s mind so completely that it took her a moment to understand that the humans were all singing too, in a long incantatory drone of rising and falling harmonies. It was their best effort to sing along with the mermaids under the bridge, Luce realized. They couldn’t contribute magic to the mermaids’ struggle, but they could offer compassion and the strength of their hearts. Tears swarmed into her eyes. But she didn’t see her father.