by Sarah Porter
Then she could tell them. Clusters of unfamiliar faces would gather around her in the water. Sometimes Luce would have to blink, to rub her eyes, to stop herself from seeing different faces shining like movie projections on their wavering bodies. If she didn’t concentrate, she’d start to see Nausicaa, Miriam, Rachel, Catarina, even—horribly—Dorian . . . But maybe it didn’t matter who she saw as long as she remembered to say the right words. “The humans know about us. Soldiers massacred my old tribe, up in Alaska. Singing to them won’t work; they have helmets that block out our songs. And somehow they can find our caves.
“You have to move to new territory. Make sure it’s secret and remote, and stay as hidden as you can. And whatever you do, don’t sink any ships. If you do they’ll know you’re nearby and start hunting you . . .”
Luce was too numb to do much besides repeat the same message. Her voice was urgent, sad, and still distorted and airy with the windy song that never completely died away in her chest. She barely registered their reactions: disbelief or terror or even misplaced fury, as if the coming horror was somehow Luce’s fault. She didn’t care. She had to breathe out her warning to as many mermaids as she could. Once the words had left her, she was done. Empty. Like a tunnel charged with wind, the only thing inside her was movement.
At least, she was empty until she found the next tribe.
Where was she now? Canada somewhere? Or had she already reached the coast of Washington? Luce didn’t ask. The tribe she’d just called to come out to her—it must have been the seventh or eighth after Sedna’s—heard her out quietly, even gently. They seemed to understand that she was caught in some toxic dream, that the words had to finish hissing out of her before anything else could happen.
Luce was already flexing her aching tail, ready to pulse onward. A hand caught her arm, and dark blond hair waved in the corner of her eye. Dorian? Is that . . .
“We know.” The mermaid holding on to her had an unusually sensitive, open face; Luce felt a flutter of unaccustomed hope at the thought that this was their queen. She’d take good care of the girls with her. “We’ve already heard what’s happening.”
Mermaids had said all kinds of wild and desperate things to Luce along her journey, but nothing until now had quite caught her attention. This time she looked up and truly saw the queen in front of her in a way that she hadn’t observed anyone for some time. Her expression was sorrowful, and now Luce realized that the mermaids surrounding her all looked heart-shocked, anxious and pale.
“You . . .”
“We know. Listen . . . the tribe south of us got slaughtered two nights ago. Three of them escaped and made it up here, but they were out when it happened, so they didn’t see anything besides the bodies. We weren’t sure if maybe it was just that one tribe, and this is the first we’ve heard about how the humans are doing it, about the helmets—”
“It’s not just that tribe!” Luce was gasping, and she felt an urge to get away. Waking from the trance of her journey meant feeling more horror and heartbreak than she could stand. “Please . . . you have to hide.”
“And we might know who you are, too, I think. Queen Luce? We’ve heard . . .”
The other problem with stopping like this was that it gave her time to notice how utterly crushed, how nauseous and heavy she felt. Her body felt like lead, bizarrely cold and molten at the same time. Each word she spoke seemed to cost her more effort than the one before. But the fact that this strange girl recognized her—even more, the fact that she addressed Luce as queen—might mean that Luce was getting closer to finding the friend she needed most in the world.
“Nausicaa?” Luce barely breathed. “When?”
“When was she here, you mean? A few months ago.” The blond queen said it in a sympathetic voice that showed she knew this would be unwelcome news. “But she talked about you a lot, Luce. She told us to expect you.”
That didn’t make any sense. “She . . .”
“She said she thought you’d be coming this way sometime. And that we should help you.” A pause. “You look like you could use a good rest. We’ll get you some food first, though.”
“No!” She had to keep going. The hideous truth was just sinking in: the tribe south of this one was already dead. She hadn’t been fast enough.
“I promise we’ll follow your advice, Queen Luce. Okay? But you could sleep while we scout for a new place to live.” She examined Luce, gently critical. “You look like you might be getting sick.”
Luce’s whole body writhed as if she were snarled in a net. It was far more effort than she needed to pull her arm away. “No! I have to . . . There are other tribes. I can’t just stop.”
“You have to rest sometime, though.”
Luce couldn’t understand the icy thrumming of her heart, her clenching stomach, the utter physical terror that possessed her, as if she’d found herself in a closing trap. These mermaids were warm and sincere; they genuinely wanted to help her, look after her. She gazed around the circle, watching their growing perplexity in the face of her panic. “I . . . don’t mean to be rude. I’m sorry. But I have to . . .” Their eyes looked like the unseeing orbs in the faces of the dead girls heaped in her old cave; Luce remembered a head split open so that its staring blue eyes were much too far apart. Talking was simply too hard for her. She had only enough words left inside her to keep repeating her warning.
She gave up trying to explain and dived away. She couldn’t suppress her fright, and she lashed her tail as if she were being chased, though she knew that her fear had nothing to do with reality. But she was so tired. For days now she’d only slept in occasional snatches, her sleep so shaken and wrung out by nightmares that it hardly felt like rest at all. The lozenges of glow in front of her might be only refracted moonlight or they might be shining fish. The rocks were pitching in a way that made them hard to distinguish from the waves, and she could feel her body weaving.
“Dorian,” Luce said to herself. His name was just a sickness, a taunting noise that kept appearing on her lips. She spat to clear it away. He’d forgotten her; he was probably kissing Zoe right now, staring at her with adoration the same way he’d once stared at Luce.
And somewhere men in a locker room might be taking off their complicated black helmets, peeling off slick rubber suits, laughing about that night’s kills. Of course, mermaids had laughed about killing humans too, but knowing that didn’t make Luce any less determined to protect her own kind. They were the lost girls, the ones the humans didn’t want. They were all so broken that Luce couldn’t bear the idea of their breaking again. She imagined fragments of porcelain, stars made of blood on a cold marble floor. Once they died they shifted back into human form; there would be childish feet and legs where their gleaming tails had been . . .
She had a vague idea of stopping to scavenge for shellfish then realized that if she ate she wouldn’t be able to keep the food down.
The thought of all the tribes she had to warn kept her moving. And moving was the only thing that kept her alive.
It was late afternoon, a cool, pearly day with the scent of wildflowers sweetening the breeze. The blackness she saw everywhere, Luce realized, had to be coming from inside her. She lashed her tail recklessly, straining to keep her eyes open, to keep seeing the curved winglike shapes of daylight that flared above her head, to sustain the wind-toned song pouring through her mouth. The light on the waves above her seemed to be blinking out, though. Streaks and coils of pitch darkness appeared scrawled on the surface of the water, as if it were a page where someone was drawing in thick black ink. Strange, Luce thought. She must be starting to see things that weren’t there.
How long had it been since she’d darted away from that last tribe? A few hours? Longer?
Maybe she really did need to find somewhere to sleep, but this wasn’t a good place for it. She’d swung farther out to sea to avoid what looked like a fairly large town with too many boats crisscrossing its waters, and now there was a long row of waterfront h
ouses tucked among the spruce trees. Their windows flashed silvery daylight at her like some kind of signal, and voices carried faintly through the water. Now and then unsuspecting sailboats flew by overhead, and Luce heard people laughing.
To Luce’s relief, the shore grew somewhat wilder, the houses a bit scarcer, and soon there were patches of low cliff and zigzagging rocks that might offer her somewhere to rest. There were still too many boats around, though, for her to risk sleeping on a beach, even a sheltered one. It would have to be a cave. She swam deeper, searching under the waterline for a dark entrance, but the first cave she found was entirely submerged. To sleep, she needed a place where she could keep her tail in the water but her head above the surface. Nothing looked right.
She drove herself, trying to go faster, but she barely seemed to be making any progress at all. Sometimes she caught herself going limp, simply wavering according to the lift and fall of the water. Twilight was coming, and Luce skimmed the low cliffs with an increasing sense of urgency, though there were more houses again. Then up ahead she saw something promising: a dip, a shadow in the rock, just below the dark stained line that marked the lowest tide. As she came closer she knew it was definitely a cave, and from what she could see of its entrance the roof appeared to curve upward inside, probably rising enough that there would be a crucial pocket of air: an ideal mermaids’ home. Gratefully Luce swirled closer, energy surging into her muscles at the prospect of finally collapsing into sleep.
Then the smell hit her. It blasted into her nose, her mouth, and she was gagging, her whole body curving backwards as she fought to pull out of the momentum that was carrying her toward the cave. Blood and decay; the sickly, musty stink of death. Even as she floated in the middle of the water Luce started sobbing at the realization: this was where the murdered tribe had lived. The cave was full of their torn bodies, just the way her own old cave had been. She pulled away through fouled waves, choking and crying. Her stomach heaved repeatedly, but it was so empty that instead of vomiting she only tasted a single sour mouthful of bile. If only she’d realized sooner that the humans were coming after them, if only she’d pushed herself harder, swum faster down the coast, maybe she could have reached this tribe in time.
Luce’s whole body screamed in protest as she drove herself farther out to sea again. She had to get away from here, as far away as she possibly could, no matter how dizzy she felt. She swam on and on, but it was hard to tell if she was still traveling forward or simply drifting in the current. Her tail thrashed awkwardly, its muscles seizing with cramps. How much longer could she keep going like this? The darkness in her head was getting thicker. Now the windows above were shining golden rectangles scattered across a forest like thick blue smoke.
Or maybe the smoke was coming from inside her, too. She was still seeing a line of trees and houses in the dimness, but from the weight pressing in on her she was vaguely aware that she wasn’t at the ocean’s surface anymore but many fathoms below. The houses were far away, but she could still see a crowd of people dancing on a front lawn—was that a lawn?—that sloped down into nothingness. She could see the people, in fact, as if they were very close. Dorian was there, waltzing with a girl whose hair spread out into a kind of floating globe of pink lace, singing a song about the ghosts of lost sailors. The dancers seemed to have their own internal light, but everything else was dark. They weren’t actually on a lawn, though; like her they were suspended in some uncertain middle depth, a half-place inhabited by dreams.
Suddenly the pink-haired girl was no more than a yard away, staring at Luce over her shoulder. She wore a complicated dress of pale lace that frothed up her neck. Dorian had lied, Luce thought, when he’d said Zoe wasn’t especially beautiful. She was snow-colored, glinting, splendid, but also hard to see clearly . . .
Dreamily Luce reminded herself to hate Zoe. But it seemed like too much trouble.
“Luce?” Zoe said. “Isn’t there something you’re supposed to be doing? Something important?”
Probably, Luce thought. She couldn’t speak.
“Then why are you drowning?”
That’s a good question, Luce thought. She didn’t have an answer. Certainly she was very deep under water now. Too deep, even for a mermaid. But her body didn’t seem to be interested in swimming anymore.
Zoe turned to go back to her dancing, and Dorian reached for her with an exaggeratedly formal grace. Then, with no warning, Zoe swung back around and punched Luce hard in the gut, driving her fist up and in so that Luce gagged and doubled. The fist kept plowing into her stomach, forcing her rapidly up through the water . . .
Luce opened her eyes wide—when had they closed?—and found that her body was draped over something crimson, slick, and fleshy. Whatever it was, it was shooting upward through gray-black water. It was carrying her toward the surface, but apparently not because it wanted to. It began to shake and thrash, and Luce tumbled into watery space. Her body was so cramped and weak that she could barely control her movements anymore, but she could still look around at the flashing swarm of animals on all sides.
There were dozens of them. Hundreds. Rocketing shapes, dark in the distance but blood-red where they came close to her, all propelling themselves toward the air Luce needed so desperately. Winglike triangles flapped at one end of each tubular crimson body while at the other end tentacles looped and pulsed. Squids, Luce realized, though some of them were almost as big as she was. A huge one was hurtling toward her, and Luce instinctively threw her arms around it and held on. It was speeding upward so quickly that by the time it managed to shake her free the terrible weight of the water was lessening noticeably. Luce began to feel a slight tremor of hope.
Did she want to live, then? The questioned ached inside her, and Luce ignored it, flinging her body a few yards to one side to grab for the next squid. She could barely swim, and she knew she didn’t have enough air left in her lungs to form even one whispering note, much less to sing the powerful song that controlled the water. But if she could ride enough of the squids toward the surface, she might still be saved from drowning.
The squid turned on her. In an instant Luce was caught in a kind of living net made of two long tentacles that bound her back and shoulders, squeezing her like sticky, raspy fronds. Its shorter arms pawed her, exploring her skin as if it couldn’t quite make out what she was. But even as it grappled with her, the squid was heading toward the surface. Luce tensed against her own urge to fight as the tentacles dragged her closer to the thing’s thick body, as a kind of pale fleshy tube approached her face. In the center of that tube, Luce realized, there was a hooked black beak like a parrot’s, and it was opening.
Luce gritted her teeth, twisting her face as far away from it as she could. A bite wouldn’t kill her. Drowning would. As long as the pressure of the water kept getting lighter, it would be stupid to fight back. The black beak came at her cheek, and Luce fought down a scream as her skin broke and pain shot through her face. The surface wasn’t all that far away now, and adrenaline raced through her until she trembled. Her empty lungs were burning, and Luce couldn’t stop herself from inhaling any longer. Salt water raked down her throat and penetrated her lungs like a mass of frozen nails. Luce’s hands twisted through the web of sucker-covered arms, digging for the squid’s globular eyes. She could feel two slippery balls under her fingers, and she braced herself to claw at them.
The squid bit in again, tearing Luce’s right ear this time, then abruptly flung her away. She gagged and gasped in rolling space, then felt something brush across one flailing hand.
Wind.
Her head was finally free of the water, and she was coughing desperately, water spitting out of her. It felt like her chest was full of cold fists punching their way up through her throat so that she choked and choked again. Even now that the wind caressed her face, she was retching too hard to breathe.
Then at last enough of the water was out, and Luce managed a lungful of air. On all sides of her huge crimson squids whippe
d past, their feeder tentacles swinging out to grab fish that were then pulled in toward their snapping beaks, just the way she had been. A stray tentacle groped at her back for a moment, then curled away. The squids were frenzied by the hunt, and as Luce inhaled again and again she realized that, even if mermaids weren’t their preferred prey, it would probably still be a good idea to get away from them.
Besides, she was bleeding. It was never safe to stay in the open ocean when there was blood in the water. She looked and saw the dark line of the coast framed by a scatter of stars. Now that oxygen was flowing through her body again she felt a little stronger. Slowly, tentatively, Luce began to sing to the water, though her throat rasped with pain. A soft current came in response to her song. It wasn’t very strong, but it was enough that she was now heading toward the shore.
It was horrible to see how flat that shoreline was, how houses still dotted the woods. She’d have the same problem she’d had before, Luce realized: there was no chance of finding a decent cave or even a craggy stretch where she wouldn’t have to worry about humans finding her. She knew she couldn’t keep traveling any farther. It wouldn’t be long before she would lose consciousness again and sink helplessly.
It had been an extremely close call, after all. Just how close was starting to become clear. Only the wildest luck had made that first squid slam into her and knock her back into awareness. She wouldn’t be that lucky a second time.