The Twice Lost (45 page)

“He’s farther along, Luce. Around the next bend, on the ocean side. We tried to pick a spot where you could have a little more privacy, but it’s still pretty crowded.”

Luce dipped again. On the bridge’s far side was a hill with strange bunkerlike buildings and terraces set into its slope. The singing human crowd had grown big enough now to submerge the bunkers in a tide of bodies: people sat and stood on the decks and rooftops, their candles sending pitching waves of light across their faces. The shore here was paved in cement, defined by a row of large rocks mortared together.

And at the base of one building, very near the water’s edge, was an empty doorway. And poised in that doorway . . .

Her father, but also—not her father. Her father with everything that made him who he was somehow missing. His face and body looked slack and empty, and another man—a thickset, strong-looking man with tan skin and neat silver hair—was holding him firmly upright. Luce swam closer, a strange paralysis gripping her heart, her eyes helplessly drawn by the awful vacancy of her father’s face. To think that she’d blamed him for not trying to see her . . . Even when he’d been snarled in the spirits’ enchantment on that lost island, he hadn’t seemed as profoundly injured as he did now. His body was like a shell for the void.

Even worse, she could
hear
the strange shapeless emptiness that was waiting for her behind his cinnamon eyes.

Even worse, the void was
singing.

Luce was gripping the shore before she even knew what she was doing. Some of the people on the roof had started calling to her, crying out her name. The silver-haired man stepped out of his doorway, Andrew Korchak’s vacant body still sagging against him, and half turned to silence the crowd with a single imperious hand. “General Luce isn’t here for you,” he announced, sharply. “She’s here to see her father, and he’s not well. Please respect that.” He kept on staring into the faces above until they quieted, then he nodded with a certain curt efficiency and carefully lowered Andrew until he was sitting loosely cross-legged just behind the row of rocks that separated him from his daughter. By stretching her arm through a gap between two rocks Luce was able to catch his hand and hold it tight, and all the time she was listening to the void’s slow, musical purr, attuning herself to its thrum and its cadence. To fight it she had to become its intimate, as familiar to it as its own echo.

Who had
done
this to him?

The silver-haired man sat down too, watching her intensely. Luce didn’t look at him or at Yuan, who’d swum up beside her. Imani was there too, Luce realized dimly, and Graciela, waiting in silence to see what Luce would do. Nothing mattered, though, but the yawning devastation in her father’s eyes. He was so close to her, but his gaze never alighted on her. That gaze went everywhere and nowhere as if it saw everything undifferentiated, as facets of a single complex sound.

“General Luce?” the silver-haired man tried. “I’m sorry that you have to see this, especially after everything that happened earlier. But I thought you should see your father as soon as possible, in case time is a factor in . . . in your ability to effect a cure. Assuming a cure is
feasible.
The effects of a malicious, deliberate assault by mermaid song . . . well. Dorian insists that you have the ability to heal this kind of damage, although I have to say that seems like a great deal to hope for.”

Dorian’s name was enough to make Luce glance up sharply at the silver-haired man, but only for an instant. Almost immediately her eyes went back to her father’s face, to his head fallen over at a steep angle and his wandering gaze. But looking up, even so briefly, reminded Luce of the crowd watching raptly from above as if they were in some kind of bizarre theater built from night and sea. “I can try,” Luce breathed out. “I can
try
to heal him. But I’m going to have to sing to do it. I mean sing in ways that might not be safe for the people here. Hearing me—I don’t know what that will do to everyone. They should leave.”

In the corner of her eye, the strange man nodded thoughtfully. But for some reason he didn’t get up and go.

Yuan began swimming back and forth under the pallid bunkers, calling up, “General Luce needs to sing. It could be dangerous. You should leave for your own safety, okay? Everybody please leave!”

Some people started climbing down from the roofs and vanishing behind the buildings. But far too many lingered where they were, and Yuan’s voice began rising in frustration. “We’re trying to be responsible here! We’re asking all of you to GET— AWAY—NOW! Why don’t you all get moving? This is serious business!”

“We just want to listen,” a young woman in a red parka answered from a curving cement roof. “We won’t bother you.”

“It’s dangerous!” Yuan yelled back. “Don’t be stupid! This isn’t a rock concert!”

“I’ll take my chances!”

Yuan wheeled around to look at Luce and raised her hands helplessly. Luce groaned. Her father was as hollow as an open wound, and these stubborn, reckless humans wouldn’t get out of her way and let her help him. Luce gave her father’s unresponsive hand a quick squeeze and swirled back a few feet to look up at the crowd. Her tail coiled around her. “Please,
please
leave! Now! I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I can’t just keep waiting!”

“General Luce?” It was the man who’d brought her father. “The way you need to sing to your father—it must be a way of singing that’s meant to help, not harm. Isn’t that correct? You won’t actually be singing in a way that would persuade the people here to drown themselves.”

“I don’t think anybody will
drown,
” Luce agreed. “But I can’t
tell;
it might hurt them in other ways. I just don’t know, and there’s already been—so many horrible things have happened already—and if anyone
else
gets hurt because of me—” She closed her eyes in despair. Maybe she should just seize hold of her father and drag him away from here, across the bay. Maybe she could take him to Alcatraz.

“It’s
really
going to be fine, Luce,” someone said. The voice ached inside her, as warm and reassuring as her own blood, but somehow she couldn’t place it at first. “You can sing without hurting anyone. I know that for a fact. Mr. Ellison? Can we get him closer to her, like on the other side of the rocks?”

Now she knew who was there. Luce looked up again, her vision scattered and silvery with tears. Dorian appeared at the center of a web of light. He was helping the strange man to maneuver her father’s limp body over the line of rocks and into the shallow lapping water where Luce waited.

It was all too much, too painful. Luce closed her eyes again, trying to squeeze the darkness so close that it would never leave her. She caught her father’s lolling head between her hands and held on gently, keeping him from sliding down into the water. And then she heard him trying to speak. The word came out as a lowing, broken note. “Lu . . .” her father half groaned, half sang. “Lu . . . ssss.”

And very softly, very delicately, Luce began singing back to him.

Her voice spread through her father’s mind. He was full of a trilling emptiness, yes—but that void didn’t possess
all
of him. Instead he was fragmented, torn apart by that darkness. Aspects of him shone far apart in that vacancy like suns separated by the immensity of space. Luce’s voice reached through his strange internal night and gathered pieces of his consciousness, until those suns weren’t scattered but instead hung like apples from a single blazing tree.

Luce heard herself singing slow, high notes that traveled along sweeping curves, touching everything in her father’s mind that had gotten lost. She sang the webs, the reconnections, but her own voice sounded to her like the deepest possible silence. There was still the endless thrum of mermaid voices under the bridge. There was the subtle breathing of the wind. But even in concert with those sounds the silence was perfect, just as actively present as any music. It rose in
harmony
with the music.

In that silence her father would hear his own thoughts again.

In it he would recognize himself again. And the world, which had been washed away by some uncanny, destructive flood of sound, would come back to him with its sky and its ground and its trees. Those things would seem real to him again, without any music.

By the time Luce let her voice softly die away, she knew that he wasn’t completely cured—but also that he was much, much better.

And so was she. At least she was well enough now to open her eyes and face the world outside her own private darkness.

The people on the hillside were crying silently, each one consumed by a lifetime’s worth of emotions all streaming into wild release at once. None of them spoke.

Dorian was sitting cross-legged only five feet away from her. His cheeks were tear-streaked and his ochre gaze seemed to cradle her face. She looked away from him, suddenly embarrassed.

And her father—he still swayed uncertainly. He looked weak and sleepy. But he also looked like a person and not like a shell filled with yawning night, and his eyes met hers with dreamy recognition. “Hi there, Luce,” he whispered. “I was trying to get to you. I wanted to explain . . .”

Luce hugged him, trying not to break down and sob. “Explain later. You need to go somewhere warm now. You need to get in dry clothes and then sleep for a long time. Okay?”

“That sounds about right,” Andrew Korchak agreed vaguely. He lifted his hand from the water and watched with perplexity the drops falling from his fingers. “How did I get here, Luce? I was just trying . . . I saw you in the water, and I tried to swim out to you. And after that . . . there was that room made out of glass, and I was talking to your friend.”

He was still half-crazy, Luce thought: still shaken and disoriented. “Tell me everything later. And if you need me to I’ll sing to you again, and soon, soon you’ll be
okay.
” Andrew Korchak nodded hazily, then stood up and clambered over the rocks. He curled in a ball on the pavement and sighed. Maybe he was already asleep.

Luce looked toward the silver-haired man. Like everyone else, he was gleaming with tears that seemed to illuminate something deep inside him. It was only now that Luce realized how much this unknown man had done for her. “I haven’t thanked you yet. For bringing my dad here. And I don’t know your name.”

“I’m Ben Ellison.” He smiled at her sadly. “I’m glad to finally meet you, general. Dorian always speaks of you . . . very lovingly. And now I truly understand why.”

Luce’s eyes went wide as the realization hit her. How could she have forgotten? Ellison, Ben Ellison: this was the same FBI agent who’d tried to make Dorian betray her. Even without meeting Ben Ellison she’d always hated him, always regarded him as an implacable enemy.

But he’d helped save her father, and she couldn’t hate him anymore.

“Hi, Mr. Ellison,” Luce said a bit awkwardly. “It’s nice . . . to meet you, too. I really,
really
appreciate your helping my dad this way. Can you please take him somewhere safe now? I think I shouldn’t try any more tonight.”

“I have a hotel room waiting for him,” Ben Ellison assured her. “General, I’d very much like . . . to speak with you again soon. Your old acquaintance Anais did this to your father”—Luce jolted, stunned to realize that Nausicaa had been right
again,
and that Anais had in fact survived the massacre of their old tribe—“and her current whereabouts are unknown. Obviously she could be extremely dangerous.”

Luce nodded, but she was so overwhelmed that she could barely take it in. Anais was still causing extraordinary harm; Anais was still out there somewhere . . .

“Luce?” Dorian whispered. But she couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

“Dorian, are you coming with us?” Ben Ellison asked. “We’re leaving now.” He tried to lift Andrew from the ground, and a few people from the crowd came down to help. In a moment a group of half a dozen was carrying her father, probably to a waiting car. He’d be safe, Luce thought, and eventually he’d recover completely.

“I’ll come later,” Dorian called. Even without glancing at him, Luce knew his stare hadn’t once shifted away from her face. “Luce, I know you must be really mad at me, and you’ve gone through hell, and I don’t blame you if you hate me. But—”

“Not
now,
Dorian.” The voice was Yuan’s, coming from just behind Luce’s left shoulder. “We all know you love her, okay? And I’ve been really impressed by your whole Twice Lost Humans thing. But this is not the time. It’s not fair to ask Luce
anything
tonight.”

It was strange, Luce thought. But somehow now that she heard Yuan say it she knew it was true: Dorian
did
still love her. What she didn’t know was how she felt about that.

Dorian tilted his head toward Yuan. “Who are you?”

“I’m Yuan.” There was a brief pause. “And I’m pretty sure I want the same things you do for Luce. I think we’re on the same side. But everything’s changed since you knew her.”

Dorian gave a kind of abrupt, wheezing laugh. “Yeah. Changed. Yeah, it has. You have no idea, Yuan. While we were on the plane coming here Ben Ellison told me something that’s going to change
everything.
”

Even Luce looked toward Dorian now. He sat like some wounded prince at the edge of a battlefield, his skin golden and his bronze-blond hair overgrown and knotted.

Yuan stared at him. “Dorian? What are you talking about? Are they ready . . . are they going to end the war?”

“I don’t know about that,” Dorian said wearily. “I hope so. It’s something else—about you guys. About mermaids. You can change back into humans if you want. They’ve found a way. You can all change back, and it won’t kill you.”

Yuan let out a shriek of pure amazement, and an answering outcry poured down from the hill.

At first Luce thought it was a cry of surprise, maybe even of joy, provoked by what Dorian had said. The storm of voices kept getting louder, growing and booming. The sky seemed to thunder with human shouts, and Luce realized that the uproar had spread to the mass of people lining the Golden Gate Bridge, to the hills above them, maybe even to the far shore of Sausalito.