Waking Storms (41 page)

The water closed around her, but she couldn’t bring herself to speed away. Instead she hovered under the surface just offshore. “LUCE!”

“Hey there.” Dimly Luce could hear the strange man’s whistle of surprise and she knew he’d spotted the crude raft. “You
okay,
man? Looks like you’ve been through a rough patch...”

“LUCE!” her father screamed. His steps splashed in the water, but Luce was sure the strangers were restraining him. “LUCE! Oh, come back!”

“Luce isn’t here, old guy,” the man’s voice soothed. “Just you.”

***

Queen Sedna and the others caught up with Luce twenty minutes later. She was swimming lethargically under the water, her whole body trembling from a mixture of fatigue and heartbreak. She barely registered the presence of the other mermaids as they flocked around her, guiding her to a safe cove on the next island over. Luce drowsed on the beach as the other mermaids ate dinner, their chattering voices mingling with the wash of thickening darkness.

“Don’t you think she needs some food, too?”

“I don’t know, I think we should let her sleep...”

“You think Nausicaa is right about her? Like, of course what she did was incredible, but...”

“I trust Nausicaa more than anyone I’ve ever known.” Luce thought the voice was Sedna’s, but maybe she was already dreaming. “If she calls somebody ‘the future of the mermaids,’ I don’t know, I kind of tend to believe that she knows what she’s talking about.”

“Anyone Anais hates
that
much has to be special at least.”

“I think they’ve lost us. We’re not going to catch them now.”

“She’ll
know. She can show us where they live.”

Luce watched curved shapes like glowing seals in a midnight tide. Her father stepped out of the sea, his hair clean and his beard shaved, and threw back water like a shining cloak. He was safe now, and Luce slept.

Luce woke to another clear morning. She still felt hopelessly weak and drained, but her tail flipped at the thought of getting back to Dorian. Something thwacked on a rock near her head, and Luce opened her eyes to see Sedna offering her a mussel. Luce noticed that three fingers were partly missing on the hand reaching toward her; they looked hacked-off, the stumps oddly angled, though they had clearly healed long ago. Luce and Sedna were alone together, and Luce wondered hazily where the other girls had gone.

“Hey, Luce. How are you feeling?”

“Awful.” Luce smiled at her and sat up, taking the food. She was so hungry that it felt like a kind of illness. “Thank you, Sedna.” They watched each other for a minute: a little warily, but Luce knew they were already friends. “You said you know Nausicaa?” Sudden hope rose in Luce. “How about Violet and Dana?”

“Violet and Dana? I don’t think I’ve heard of them, no.” Luce stifled her disappointment as Sedna went on talking. What had happened to the two fleeing mermaids? “But I’ve known Nausicaa for a
long
time. Like maybe every ten or twenty years she comes through my territory, and she usually stays awhile...”

Luce had assumed that Sedna was a fairly new mermaid, but clearly that wasn’t true. “You’ve been in the water that long?” Luce was still a little wobbly. It took an effort to stay focused.

“Well, not like
Nausicaa
long.” Sedna smiled. “But born-1852 long? Kidnapped-by-sadistic-fur-trappers long? Yeah. And I’ve been queen south of here for at least sixty years.”

It was funny, then, that Sedna’s way of talking was so modern. Probably it was something she did on purpose; maybe she thought it was important to stay up to date. Sedna watched her, black eyes deep and alert, black hair glossy in the fresh sunlight. Her skin was a lush, glowing gold, almost the color of a dawn sky.

“I said, ‘south of here.’ On the far side of the Aleutians, like pretty near Canada even. Most of the tribe is still there now.”

Luce was confused. “Okay.”

“Don’t you want to know why we’re so far out of our territory?”

Luce ran a hand over her face. “I already know. You’re chasing Anais. Maybe the rest of my old tribe, too...” It was coming back to her. “They must have run into you after they migrated down the coast? You said Anais murdered Jessie’s sister.”

“That doesn’t surprise you? Fiona was just a larva, but she and Jessie changed together, and we’d kept Fiona safe for years. You can believe a mermaid—even a
sika
—would do something so outrageous? It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from humans, and not even all of
them
...”

“It doesn’t surprise me at all,” Luce said wearily. It was depressing to be reminded of Anais. “She’s killed larvae before. She probably didn’t care whose sister it was.”

“Oh, she
cared!”
Sedna’s fury was building. “She cared! She did it to get back at us, and she went out of her way to hurt us as much as she could. When we catch her I’m going to expel her myself, and I’m going to make sure there are orcas all around first. Even if I have to personally draw the orcas there with bait, I’ll make sure of it!” Sedna’s tone was grim, and Luce knew this wasn’t an idle threat. “We knew the bitch was
sika,
but we just felt so
sorry
for the mermaids with her. They seemed so scared and miserable, like they were all about to crack up completely, and we made the mistake of taking them in. Those girls are really crazy, though.”

Luce’s head reeled a little. She wanted to think about Dorian and her father, not about whatever awful things Anais had done. But still...“What happened?”

“Well, we’re a strict tribe. We don’t take down more than four or five ships a year, max, and I have a rule about only doing it when there’s a big enough storm that it won’t look suspicious.”

Luce was impressed. Keeping the mermaids’ longing to kill under such tight discipline couldn’t be easy, she knew, even if she wished that they wouldn’t sink ships at all. She looked at Sedna with sudden respect, but Sedna was too furious to meet her eyes.

“So I explained all that to them when they showed up, right? And for a while they were mostly okay. But then they started just ignoring me! Like they weren’t in my territory at all!” Sedna was indignant at the memory. “They were attacking ships in this insane, random way, so I told them to get the hell out. And they did, but before they left—”

“They threw Fiona on shore,” Luce finished. She felt nauseous. It was such a hideous, vicious thing to do, even for Anais. “But why do you think they ran back this way? Wouldn’t it be more likely for them to keep traveling south?”

Sedna shook her head. “A few of the littlest girls snuck back to us. Begged us to let them join our tribe. And they said Anais didn’t want to risk meeting any more tribes that already had queens of their own, so she was just dragging them all back to their old territory. Anais kept talking about all the stuff they’d left in their cave, anyway ... Luce? What’s wrong?”

Luce clung to the shore, greenish lights flashing in her eyes as the blood drained from her head. All her joyful fantasies of peace with the humans suddenly weighed on her in a new way, steely and threatening. “They
can’t
go back!”

“Who else is going to put up with them?” Sedna asked flippantly.

“No—Sedna—no, this is
horrible.
I know Anais deserves it, but the rest of them ... Rachel, Kayley...”

Sedna stared at her, utterly bewildered. “Um, Luce? Want to make sense?”

“It’s not safe for them to go back there. I think—no, I’m
sure
—the human police up there know about us—

“The humans
what?”

Luce gazed back at her numbly. “They know, Sedna. At least a few of them do. We’re not a total secret anymore.”

“You’d better take that back!” Sedna shrieked. Her tail was writhing in midair, ready to strike, and Luce jerked away from her. “You’d better—You
can’t
be right!”

“I saw them plant a camera. Divers. They stuck it to a wall underwater, hidden, right next to the beach where we ate,” Luce insisted. “Sedna,
don’t
bring your mermaids up there!”

“Humans lose cameras all the time!”

“Sedna, please!” Luce yelled. “That camera wasn’t lost. It was planted on purpose. Do you think I’m telling you this so you won’t go punish Anais? After she tried to kill me
and
my closest friends?”

“You might be,” Sedna murmured, but Luce could tell she didn’t believe it. Her black eyes flicked fearfully around the placid silver waves.

“Maybe I am wrong,” Luce groaned. She tried to feel convinced. “Maybe I’m crazy, and everything is just the same as it’s always been. But Sedna, if I’m right about this...”

Luce watched Sedna’s face twisting and suddenly knew that, no matter how much Sedna wanted justice, she wasn’t about to lead her followers into so much potential danger.

“Queen Luce?”

Luce couldn’t answer at first. Instead she watched Sedna fighting to compose herself. Everything was too painful, too out of control. Even if Luce raced desperately to her old tribe and warned them again to get out, they’d be more likely to murder her than to listen to her. But even so...“I should hurry back there, Sedna. I should try to do
something.”

Before it’s too late,
Luce thought.
Before something so terrible happens that we can’t ever fix it.

Sedna exhaled, hard, and looked straight into her eyes. “Goodbye, then, Luce. I really hope we’ll see you...” She trailed off abruptly.

But Sedna didn’t need to say the last word out loud for Luce to know what it was.

Alive.

25

Till Human Voices Wake Us

The journey back took two long, tiring days. Luce’s thoughts flurried on in a dreamlike whirl of images: sometimes Dorian was kissing her, sometimes Anais had a knife at her throat. She’d made up her mind that she was going to do something, anything, to get her old tribe out of danger, but she had no idea how she could actually help. Not when they were all so certain that she was their enemy. Anais would treat anything Luce said as a joke, and the rest of the tribe seemed to be utterly under Anais’s control, too intimidated to even question her. Had they really stood by and let her murder Fiona? Had they
known?

But maybe she had some time to come up with a plan. As long as the tribe didn’t bring down any more ships, maybe the humans wouldn’t realize mermaids were still living near there or maybe the humans wouldn’t do anything to hurt them after all. Luce did her best to find the idea comforting, but when the coastline finally began to bend into familiar cliffs and zigzags she only grew more anxious. It was already late at night, much too late to look for Dorian, and the sky was moody and starless. Luce made her way to the inlet that sheltered her own small cave. She felt entirely depleted, ready to sleep for days. In just a few moments she would be resting with her head on Dorian’s old jacket, and she sighed gratefully as she turned toward the cave’s entrance. The entrance was usually completely submerged, but the tide tonight was exceptionally low: low enough that a sliver of jet emptiness showed above the lapping water.

Then Luce stopped short. Something froze her where she was, some thrum of agitation. It was like a silent noise she couldn’t put a name to, a stiffness in the way the night held itself, an indrawn breath. Luce hovered in the water, her tail barely stirring, and listened.

All she could hear was the savage drumming of her own heart, the light repetitive slosh of waves on rocky walls. But for some reason the quiet did nothing to ease her terror.

She was being irrational, Luce told herself as she backed slowly away from the dark hollow in the rock. Silly and cowardly. She should be ashamed to let her fears control her this way.

Luce skimmed out of the inlet, still insulting herself in her thoughts, but even so she stayed under the surface as she went. She needed to leave a message for Dorian: something simple, something that would make sense only to him. She’d spell out I’M HOME in pebbles on the edge of the dock where he kept the rowboat tied. Then, Luce thought, she’d go sleep in that shallow cave where she used to take him, the one with the fallen tree spanning the water.

That would be almost like being with him again.

***

When Luce woke the sun glared near the center of the sky, so high that she knew it must be noon and also not so long after the spring equinox. It could even be early May. She started. She had no way to guess if this was a school day or a weekend, and Dorian might be waiting for her at the beach already. He could have been sitting there for hours, frustrated and impatient. Luce shook herself, stretching her tired muscles, and sped off without even stopping for breakfast. Worried as she still was about the tribe, she felt that the water was streaked with happiness, and each familiar boulder, each leaning spruce, was a reminder of him. She was so glad to be home.

Dorian wasn’t at the beach, though two small children were playing there, watched over by their mother. Maybe he knew there’d be too many people around, and he was planning to meet her after dark?

Luce went to get something to eat and waited nervously. Maybe Dorian hadn’t found her message? What if he was seriously angry with her for being so late? She knew she had to think up a plan—some way to protect her old tribe—but as the day wore on she just couldn’t concentrate. She watched a pair of sea otters playing not far from her. They were beautiful animals and Luce usually adored them, but today they bothered her. They treated their joy so
casually,
as if it weren’t something rare and precious, something you could lose at any moment.

For the first time it occurred to her that Dorian might have even moved away. How could he let her know?

***

“Hi.” It was early dusk when Dorian finally walked down the beach’s slope, pebbles grinding under his sneakers, his face secretive and unsmiling. Luce’s happiness at seeing him turned into something clammy and unsettled, twisting in her stomach. She lay against the beach, but he didn’t drop to his knees to reach for her, didn’t even come close enough to let her touch him. “You broke your promise. The water’s been pretty clear for a month already.”