The Twice Lost (8 page)

“My understanding is that Andrew Korchak was lost at sea. More than two years ago. But if that’s really who you are . . .”

“That’s who I am. I didn’t stay lost, is all.” He felt tired, and even though he’d washed his hand the night before, he suddenly noticed lines of dried blood still clinging in the grooves of his knuckles. “What’s your business?”

“Then I expect you would know who this is?”

A photo. Zoomed in until it was very close and grainy so that it only showed her face glancing back over her shoulder. The background was bright and blurry, but it looked like shining water. Her cheek was marred, and Andrew’s breath caught as he noticed the notch torn from her ear. “Where did you
get
this?”

“So you do recognize her?”

Andrew couldn’t stand it. He pivoted on his heel and walked to the counter, leaning with his head hanging down, his shoulders heaving. He’d failed to protect Luce again. And for some reason this FBI bastard was asking questions about her, and that might mean . . .

“Mr. Korchak?”

That might mean he knew . . .

“This photo was taken just a few days ago. I’d like to discuss the situation with you, Mr. Korchak, if that would be all right.” Ben Ellison stepped over the threshold and approached. The kettle was whistling out a piercing, horrible note.

“What do you want with her? Look, whatever you’re thinking . . . Luce is still a little girl . . .” His arms were crossed on the counter, leaning heavily, but he was painfully aware that Ben Ellison must have noticed how he was shaking.

“You know, you don’t seem at all surprised. To find out that Luce is still alive.”

Oh. Right. He was supposed to think that Luce had killed herself. It was too late to pretend, though. “I knew she wasn’t dead, is why.”

There was a pause. Andrew looked up to watch Ben Ellison’s face, to observe the thoughts churning just behind his eyes. The guy seemed pretty smart, actually. “And would knowing Luce is alive be somehow connected? To the fact that you didn’t stay lost?”

It was a strange line of reasoning, unless this Ben Ellison knew a lot more than he ought to. “Knowing she’s alive? It’s connected to the fact that I saw her a few weeks back. She wasn’t banged up like that then, though.”

“But I imagine there were
other
changes in her that you might have noticed,” Ben Ellison said. His tone was sardonic, but there was another suggestion in his voice at the same time, a definite hungry sharpness. Was it envy?

“What do you
want
with her?” Andrew’s heart was racing and his knees wavered, but even so he was starting to feel some humor in the situation. Whether your kid got caught swilling vodka in a cemetery or shoplifting or turning into a mermaid, it was all the same. You
still
had to talk to the cops.

Ben Ellison hesitated. “I’d like to help her. I’m afraid it might not be possible, but—”

“Help her how?” Andrew found himself feeling defensive suddenly. “Far as I can see my girl is doing pretty good, considering.”

“She’s wanted for murder.”

“She’s
what?
”

“Arguably it was self-defense.”

“This is garbage. She’s only . . . she’s a kid. A
good
kid.”

“Given her current situation, it’s unlikely that constitutional protections apply, and I doubt anyone will go out of their way to interpret the law in her favor. After all, she technically isn’t even . . .”

“Isn’t even what?” Andrew snapped.

“Human. She isn’t human. Not at the present time.” They were staring fiercely at each other, the kettle still shrieking behind them. “Of course you aren’t surprised to hear this, either.”

“Who cares? Whatever kind of . . . whatever she looks like now, she’s still my
daughter,
and she’s still a . . . barely more than a child, really
.
A juvenile, anyhow. Look. If somebody was trying to hurt her—”

“Can you contact her? Do you know where she’s going? That photo was taken off the coast of Washington, and at the time she was heading south. She was seen the next day not far from the Oregon border.”

“And if I did know that, you think I would
tell
you?”

“There are quite a number of people who are determined to catch her, and they’ll shoot her on sight.” Ben Ellison paused to let that sink in. “If you have some way to communicate with her, you’d be well advised to urge her to surrender before that happens. And if I’m involved in the process, I promise I’ll do whatever I can to ensure her safety.”

“Was it your people who tore up her ear like that? If you did . . .”

“That wasn’t us.” Ben Ellison was looking toward the window now, then abruptly he walked to the stove and snapped the kettle off. His expression was morose. “Mr. Korchak, the fact is that I think Luce has been . . . unfairly singled out. But she’s also been behaving in a way that is guaranteed to attract negative attention when she should be doing whatever she can to keep a low profile. That video, for example.”

“What video?”

“Check the Internet. Search for ‘mermaid.’ You might be the last person in America who
hasn’t
seen it.”

Andrew considered that. Things were starting to make a bit more sense. “So she’s in some video. But then how did you know it was her? You see a mermaid, you don’t go and spontaneously say, ‘Oh, I bet it’s that Lucette Korchak girl who everybody thought jumped off a cliff up in Pittley.’”

Ben Ellison wasn’t looking at him. He kept his eyes pointed at the sea.

“Somebody rat her out, Ben? Who’ve you got?”

No reply.

No reply in a way that told Andrew Korchak exactly what the situation was: not only was there an informer, but it was someone this FBI guy didn’t trust. Someone who was lying up a storm, talking all kinds of smack. Firing off ridiculous accusations, like . . .

“Who you all think Luce
murdered,
anyhow?”

“Five men, actually, in total. Special operations.” Ellison sounded remote, maybe sad.

“A fourteen—fifteen-year-old girl? You think she’s some kind of goddamned ninja?”

“She’s not technically
a girl
at all any longer. As we’ve discussed. And there’s no question at all that she can be dangerous.” Ellison looked away from the sea long enough to gaze bleakly into Andrew’s eyes. “The prevailing opinion is that she—and all the creatures like her—are nothing but monsters. Regardless of the fact that they were human at one time. I realize this isn’t something a parent wants to hear about his child, of course.”

“The ‘prevailing’ opinion,” Andrew growled.

“Yes.”

“Does that mean it’s the one prevailing in your head? ’Cause if it is, that just shows how damned ignorant you are.”

“I’m . . . suspending judgment. About all of them, but about Luce in particular. Clearly there have been situations where she’s made a deliberate choice
not
to kill, and where I’d imagine the temptation must have been intense.” Ben Ellison’s voice was grim and drowsy.

“You said . . . those special operations guys . . . it was self-defense.”
Maybe they’d forced Luce to kill,
Andrew thought.
Maybe.

“They were firing spear guns at her, in fact. And they will again.”

“Can’t blame the girl for that! If she was just trying to survive—”

“Mr. Korchak . . . I’m afraid it’s worse than that. You say you’ve seen Luce quite recently. How much did she tell you about her life after she changed form?”

Not much,
Andrew thought. “Enough.”

“She was a member of a particularly vicious mermaid tribe. It’s possible that she’s had a change of heart since that time, but it’s extremely likely that she was at least complicit in far more deaths than the ones I’ve told you about.”

“Like . . .”

“Hundreds. Probably hundreds. More. One ship last year had almost nine hundred passengers on board when it sank. And Luce was there. That I know for certain.”

“Luce wouldn’t . . . No way I’ll believe . . .”

“Tell her to turn herself in, Mr. Korchak. It’s the best I can do for her. Special Ops are out to avenge their own. If I’m there first, there’s a chance I can get her into some form of safe custody before anyone blasts her to ribbons.”

“Don’t you
talk
about my girl like that! My God, after everything she’s been through . . . me and her mom both gone, my loser brother beating her and— You’re talking about just slashing up a teenage girl like it means
nothing.
”

“I’m trying to prevent precisely that from happening. I sincerely want to help her. Luce rescued someone I care about, and I don’t believe she deserves . . . Can you find her?”

“I
want
to find her. She fished me off that island where I was stranded, but then she just zoomed off and vanished.”

“And? Do you know where to look for her?”

Andrew groaned. He was doing his best not to break down, but it kept getting harder. “I’ve got no clue where to even start.”

6

Now that J’aime had taken over the mission Luce had assigned herself, there wasn’t the same desperate need to rush south as quickly as possible.

But now that she understood how hunted she truly was, there was an acute need for stealth. The black-suited divers probably knew that mermaids tended to cling to the coasts and that they needed air periodically as they swam. Slipping her head out of the water anywhere near the shore would be wildly risky; she’d have to travel uncomfortably far out to sea. Luce didn’t even want to think about how impossible it would be to find anywhere she could sleep.

For a whole day she lingered in J’aime’s narrow hiding place, letting her damaged body start to mend itself, singing low, melting songs to that piece of broken sky high above her. It was the first time in weeks she’d stayed so still and let herself succumb to everything she felt in the quiet. Her song curled around fragments of Dorian’s voice:
If you want to kill me for this, you can. I won’t sing back.
He’d given her a chance to stop him before he’d started trying to make sure the divers disposed of
her.
Maybe he’d decided only one of them could continue to live.

And already so many other mermaids had been slaughtered because of what Dorian had done. Girls lay in rotting heaps deep in their caves while the one in particular Dorian wanted dead somehow lived on, carrying the images of the lost with her. Dreamily Luce pictured herself trailed by ghostly faces, all glowing like jellyfish, all warping with the loft of the waves . . .

Was she sorry, then, that she
hadn’t
drowned him? She’d come so close; she’d forced herself to stop just in time.

But no, she couldn’t regret it. He’d wanted her to kill him, even tried to manipulate her into it, and the only vengeance left to her, feeble and fragile as it was, was to make him live with the knowledge that she was living, too.

***

Luce slept for many hours that night, awkwardly balanced against the cave’s wall on a rocky shelf that wasn’t really long enough for her body. She woke with the heavy conviction that she had to keep heading south no matter the danger. As far as she could tell, Nausicaa had passed this way, and finding her friend was the only real hope she had left at this point. Together maybe they could come up with a plan: some way to stop the slaughter of the mermaids. Maybe even some way to make peace with the humans, as impossible as that seemed. After all, any mermaids who survived these massacres would only hate humans more than ever. The idea that she of all people might somehow manage to persuade them to stop killing, well . . .

It was preposterous. But it was the only idea she had.

Luce set out again at dawn. Swimming was still painful, but the ache in her bruised midriff was starting to dull a bit and her torn ear barely hurt anymore. Risky as it was she paused at a beach and ate as many shellfish as she could manage, constantly scanning the golden waves for any hint of a black boat with silent engines. Then she went on, sweeping at least half a mile from the shore. She didn’t know what kinds of predators she might encounter out here, but she had a feeling they couldn’t be as dangerous as humans firing razor-sharp blades. And at least animal predators wouldn’t be hunting specifically for her.

Still, she kept a close watch for any creature that appeared too big or too hungry. It was strange, though: she didn’t see anything big at all. In fact, as she went on there weren’t even any fish, apart from some jellyfish and unusually thick smears of bright green algae when she surfaced. It didn’t make sense. Luce paused, breathing, wondering why the sea was so oddly empty. There weren’t even any birds.

And, Luce thought, the water felt a little different on her skin, though not in any way she could identify. It didn’t feel like fresh water, but it definitely felt wrong, almost sticky. Or somehow
slow.
Somehow breathless, sad, inert. The morning sun swayed in brilliant flags along the water’s surface, and Luce felt overwhelmed by solitude so immense that it crowded the sky.

Except for, far in the distance, a single dark boat. Luce couldn’t hear an engine.

It was too far away for her to guess if it was the same as the boats that were hunting mermaids, but even so her heart went cold, its rhythm fast and light and whispery. She dived, hurtling deeper than she would ever normally choose to swim, so deep that the water’s gray weight squeezed in on her and the light deadened into a hard slate dusk. She could see the seafloor from here; it must be relatively shallow.

The seafloor looked all wrong. Bone white, with nothing moving, with none of the usual grades and variations of color.

Her instincts told her not to go any deeper than she was already. The pressure was too much, and she’d be too far from the air. Instead she needed to concentrate on going as far as she could at a depth where the boat couldn’t find her.

Luce went down, her better judgment screaming in protest. But there was clearly something very wrong here. The sea had never looked so forlorn. She had to know what was happening here, to understand . . .

There! Something was moving. Luce’s pulse quickened with hope until she saw the limp, lifeless way it drifted. It was something pale, spindly, and complicated, skimming over a plain made of impossibly spiny, whitish stones. A large crab, Luce realized after a second, but it was clearly dead. Its splintered claws trailed over the weird stones of the seabed, clacking softly.