by Sarah Porter
It went upward, and at first it was so narrow that her tail thrashed against the rock. Luce had no trouble seeing in the darkness, but she knew it was utterly lightless. Now and then the fins of the mermaid ahead swished against her face.
Then the crack began to widen and a subtle wash of light refracted through the water. They kept squirming upward, and Luce heard the stranger inhale a few seconds before her own head broke free of the surface. They were in a narrow span of water, smooth as black glass. The crevice kept twisting upward before it ended in a shard of daylight at least a hundred feet above them.
There was no real beach in here, but there were outcroppings and natural shelves where they could at least rest for a while. Luce saw that the other girl’s left fin was sliced by a three-inch gash at its bottom edge, both sections writhing as if they were trying to hold each other. That was why she’d screamed, then. Her face was still taut with pain, her forehead furrowed. She was close to Luce’s age, and she looked at her roughly.
“Are you who I think you are?” the girl asked.
Maybe her tribe had met Nausicaa too. Nausicaa must have talked about Luce all the way down the coast, bizarre as that seemed.
“I’m Luce.”
“Yeah. That wild business you pulled with the water. I should have guessed right away, but I was too . . .” She paused, breathing hard, obviously struggling for self-control. “Luce. My God. Did you hear what they said?”
Luce nodded. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I thought they were just murdering any mermaids they could find, but if they were looking for me, and that’s why . . . your tribe . . .”
“What did you do to get those creeps in that huge of an uproar? They said something . . .”
“They didn’t say the whole thing,” Luce snarled. “They massacred my old tribe. Everyone. Then they were shooting at me. They made it sound like I just attacked them out of nowhere!”
“You did that water thing to them?”
“I smashed their boat into a cliff. Back in Alaska. I was just trying to stop them, really, but I guess a few of them died? But I don’t know . . . I can’t understand how they knew who I was, or my name, or . . .”
Actually, there was one obvious explanation for how they might have gotten their information. Luce just didn’t want to believe it. There was someone who could easily give the authorities the name of the mermaid who knew how to control the water with her singing. She sent a giant wave at your boat? Oh yeah, that was definitely Luce. She’s the only one who could have done that! More than that, he could show them very good drawings of her.
He could also confirm her identity after some people just happened to tape a mermaid. She was heading this way, the soldier had said.
The girl’s eyes were wide, and she was biting her lip. Luce wavered, all the blood rushing away from her head and leaving a stripped, nightmarish shore behind it. Could Dorian really have done that to her?
“I’d heard about you and the whole water-cannon act. You’re getting to be kind of legendary, for sure. But you’ve really got enough power to pick up a boat and crack it in half?” The girl laughed, too wildly, then choked on her own laughter. Her face kept bunching strangely.
Luce gaped at her. She was overwhelmed by the hideous things she’d just realized. “It . . . works better when I’m really upset. I couldn’t always . . .”
“Oh, I think you’re going to get sufficient opportunities to be upset!” Suddenly the girl’s poise crumbled completely, and her face deformed like smashed clay. Sobs racked her, and she doubled and gasped. Luce wasn’t sure what to do at first—the girl seemed too tough and confident to want to be held.
Then Luce didn’t care anymore. She swam over and hugged the weeping mermaid, resting her head on the same rock. Luce didn’t know why she couldn’t cry now. She definitely had enough reasons to. She’d never felt so cold, so utterly poisoned inside. She’d thought that abandoning her would be enough of a betrayal for Dorian, but apparently he’d only be satisfied with getting her murdered. That was what humans were like; that was what happened if you trusted one of them.
Why hadn’t she wanted to kill them, again?
The strange girl’s sobs grew only more violent.
Luce listened to her and thought with icy loathing of the boy she’d once loved so completely. He was responsible for this.
***
It was at least an hour before the strange girl cried herself out. “Queen Luce? We’re going to have to get moving.”
“I know,” Luce said. Another tribe had died because she’d come too late. And after what had happened that morning the divers would be more determined than ever to catch her, and they’d go on killing all the mermaids along her route.
Far from saving them, she’d only ensured their deaths.
“Where are you going, anyway?”
“South. I was trying to warn everyone, but now . . .” Luce shook herself. “I never asked your name?”
“Oh, right. Where are your manners? There we were escaping from a complete bloodbath, and you didn’t give me a proper chance to introduce myself!” There was still an edge of hysteria in the stranger’s voice that made her annoyance sound more serious than she’d probably meant it to. “J’aime.”
“Gem?”
“No. Like Jem. Je-aime. It’s French for ‘I love’.”
Luce looked up at J’aime. Even without peering into the cloud of dark shimmer around the other mermaid’s head Luce was suddenly sure that whoever had hurt J’aime enough to change her into a mermaid hadn’t been her parents. Not if they’d given her a name like that.
Just like it hadn’t been Luce’s parents who’d driven her to the point of losing her humanity. Her father still loved her, Luce knew.
That, Luce thought bleakly, was why she didn’t want to kill humans. Why she still didn’t want to. She didn’t even want to kill those black-suited divers who were hunting her and all the other mermaids they could find.
If she did they might leave daughters behind. Girls who’d only wind up like her and . . .
“Hi, J’aime.”
“You said they killed your tribe, too?” J’aime’s voice was suddenly much softer.
“Yes. My ex-tribe, really. But the divers just slaughtered everybody, and ships weren’t even going anywhere nearby anymore, so it wasn’t like, like really self-defense or . . .”
“Did you see it happen?” J’aime’s eyes were wide in the dimness. Luce knew she was seeing unspeakable things all over again; that, no matter how long she lived, she’d never completely stop seeing them.
“I . . . just found the bodies.” Horrible as that was, Luce understood that it was much worse for J’aime.
“And it’s because of those helmets? Why we can’t just drown them?”
“Yes.”
“You can still kill them, though!” J’aime gave a hacking laugh that showed how close she was to sobbing again, but her voice turned crisp and assertive as she went on talking. “Thank God one of us can! But damn, you’re going to be one busy girl, Luce. You’ll have to kill them for everybody! Smash the hell out of their boats! I’m gonna have to come with you just so I can watch those creeps get what they deserve. After they cut Maya’s throat like that . . .”
“J’aime . . .” Luce didn’t know how to break the news to her, but she realized she was sick of hiding her real feelings. The time for that was long past. “I’m sorry. I won’t kill anyone. Not unless they’re about to kill one of us and there’s really no other way. I’m not about to murder people for revenge, though.”
J’aime stared at her. “You have to! You won’t after . . .”
Luce tried to think of a way to explain it. “It doesn’t help, J’aime. Mermaids have been killing humans for thousands of years, and it hasn’t helped anything. It’s just making them go insane wanting to murder us! And besides . . . weren’t there any humans you loved?”
J’aime was glowering at her. “Sure. My parents. My grandma. They’re dead. So
whether I loved them is no longer particularly relevant, okay?”
“But anyone we kill could be the only person some other girl loves, and then she could wind up . . . in foster care, or with someone a lot worse.”
“Those helmet guys are out to kill all of us! They blasted those spear things at everyone; they spilled their guts—”
“I know that.” Luce’s head was starting to wobble again, and her face felt hot and heavy. J’aime’s fury made her want to weep and scream and hide all at once.
“You will kill them! I don’t care what kind of queen . . . If I have to make you do it myself, every last one of them is going to die for that!”
“No.” Luce braced herself as J’aime glared at her. “J’aime, look, however many of those divers we kill, they’ll just send more of them after us, okay? If I thought I could save the mermaids that way I’d do it, but I know it won’t work!”
“Yeah?” J’aime spat it out. Her raw hatred hurt Luce more than anything that had happened that morning. “What will? ’Cause if you won’t get out there and dispose of the problem, that’s going to be a lot of dead mermaids who you did nothing for!”
“We’ll . . . have to think of something different. Some other way.” Luce knew how pathetic that must sound and stared up at the fragment of blue daylight far above.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Admitting that made Luce wonder if it would be better for everyone if she was dead. If the soldiers wanted her in particular, maybe they’d stop once she was killed?
J’aime shook her head. “I heard you were some kind of great queen. But you’re just sad. All that power—like who’s ever even seen that?—and you won’t do one thing to help.” She turned to go, her torn violet tail snaking awkwardly in the deep water.
“Be really careful, J’aime, please? Keep hidden.”
“Great advice. You stay away from the rest of the tribes out here, okay? If you’re not willing to do anything positive, you’ll just get them killed.”
“But . . . someone has to warn them, J’aime!”
“I’m on it.”
J’aime was gone.
She had a point. And even with her sliced tail she could go faster than Luce now, anyway.
But if Luce was really that useless, so marked and hunted that she’d do more harm than good even by spreading the alarm, then . . .
Then what reason was there for her to live at all?
Someday, dearest Luce, I will find you again . . . The voice in her head was Nausicaa’s, and Luce tensed for a moment before the bright blue patch in the dimness above melted in her tears.
“Nausicaa, please,” Luce said out loud. “Please find me soon.”
Why do you think I left you, Luce? Nausicaa retorted. She hadn’t said those words in real life, though. Why could Luce hear them so clearly? I can only find you once you learn for yourself where you are.
5
Little Girls
On a path high above the ocean a man was walking. His hair was shorn within half an inch of his scalp, stubble covered his face, and a backpack thudded on his shoulders. He walked as if he were in a hurry, but then he would stop, sometimes for several minutes, as if he was searching for something in the long silvery grass. At first the path looked down on a harbor where sea lions sprawled, but after a while it bent back and ascended still higher over open sea. Tall cliffs plunged to knife-sharp rocks and the tumbling slopes of enormous waves.
It had happened somewhere around here. The man half expected a spike of cold anger to let him know when he was passing the exact spot, but all he could feel was the cool spring wind and the feverish determination crowding his thoughts.
He might go to prison for this, of course. Even if they bought his story—and there was no reason to think they would—the law didn’t make allowances for the kind of justice he had in mind. But that was okay with him. It wasn’t like he had anything better planned for the rest of his life. Luce was probably lost to him for good.
After another mile the dusk was dotted with golden squares and oblongs. Shining windows stood out against the blue evening and glowed through the spruce trees on the hillside behind while to the right a rolling silver-blue meadow dropped abruptly down into the waves.
Almost there, now. His heartbeat clattered in his chest like a handful of coins dropped on a hard floor. He climbed the steps up to the back door of a small brown house.
Through a gap in the curtains he could see a grubby pea green kitchen. A patch of bare wood showed where the floor’s linoleum had split and peeled away. Two heavy sock-clad feet were resting on the wood, but that was all the man could make out. It was enough, though.
He knocked. No response. Maybe the jerk had passed out. He knocked louder, sharper, making the loose windowpanes clack in their frames.
A moan, a shuffling noise, a fan of golden light where the door swung open. Eyes on his, blank and bleary. Definitely drunk. “You got a problem?”
“I got a whole bunch of them, as it happens, Peter.”
There was a long pause, a few panting breaths. Then recognition landed like a stone. The man on the outside step couldn’t help grinning as he watched his brother reeling back into the kitchen, too scared and shocked to muster a response at first. After another uncertain moment it came. “You’re dead.”
“Tell me about it. But I’m not half as dead as I used to be, brother. Shoulda seen me a couple months ago.”
“Andrew. You’re not . . . Christ, man, how did . . .”
“Gonna ask me in?”
“Oh. Yeah. Good to . . . good to see you. Didn’t think I’d ever . . .”
Andrew Korchak stepped into the house. It was almost too easy. He shut the door at his back and locked it then dropped his backpack. “Got anything to eat?”
“There are . . . I’ve got some cans in the cupboard. Go ahead and help yourself. Whatever you want. Andrew, how did . . .” Peter’s eyes suddenly turned skittish as if there was something in the room he hoped his brother wouldn’t notice. His body was bloated and saggy, and a web of broken blood vessels reddened his face. A half-empty bottle sat on the table.
Andrew Korchak didn’t move to get the food he’d asked for. Instead he paused in the center of the kitchen, slowly and deliberately looking around. He kept on examining the room, walking back and forth, his face carefully composed into a look of mystification.
“Something missing here, Peter? Feels like you moved some things around.”
“It’s about like when you left.” A pause. “Want a drink? It’s got to be a hell of a story. How you got here and everything.” Peter moved to sit back down at the kitchen table, but once he was sitting he didn’t look comfortable.
“Oh, I’m all right. But thanks. Or maybe someone? Isn’t somebody else supposed to be here?” Andrew was still peering around, down the dim little hallway, into the corners.
Peter’s face was just getting redder. He stared down, obviously straining to pull himself together. “I . . . You mean Luce? About that. I got some bad news.”
“I guess it is Luce I’m missing here, isn’t it? Yeah. How’s my little girl doing? Is she out with friends?”
“Andrew. About that. It’s a terrible thing . . . I don’t know how to break it to you, but . . .”
“She ain’t been doing good in school, or something? I’ll straighten her out.”
“She . . . Andrew, sorry, Luce passed on. To a better worl— She just . . . she got in with a bad crowd, drugs and everything, and she wound up going over the cliff. Got ruled a suicide. I’m real sorry.”
Andrew stopped searching the kitchen and paced over to his brother’s sagging figure. For a long moment he simply stood over him, too close, staring down into Peter’s worried eyes. “Well. That is bad news, Peter. My sweet little Luce a suicide.”
Peter slumped a little deeper with what looked like relief. “I didn’t know how to break it to you,” he agreed.
“I can see it would be a hard thing to say
. But you manned right up and told me the truth. I appreciate that.”
Peter was nodding eagerly. “Had to do it.”
“Yeah. Now it’s my turn. I’ve got some even worse news I need to tell you. I’m afraid it’s gonna hurt.” Andrew was standing even closer to his brother. His arms were swinging lightly.
“I . . . What news?”
“Luce didn’t die.”
A swarm of conflicting expressions buzzed through Peter’s face. At first they were mostly variations on confusion, but as he felt his body heaving out of the chair and crashing backwards onto the floor, there was a lot more terror in the mix. Then Andrew was on top of him, knee on Peter’s chest, fists slamming down into his rubbery cheeks. Andrew punched again, feeling a few teeth break, while Peter’s heavy body flopped and grunted below him. It would have been more satisfying if only Peter had done a better job of defending himself. He tried to swing at Andrew’s head, but his blows were limp and disjointed, slapping like damp frogs.
It should have been a great moment, Andrew knew, making his creep of a brother pay for what he’d done to Luce. He’d been looking forward to it. But somehow in practice it came as a disappointment. His revenge felt as mushy and pathetic as his brother’s doughy flesh jiggling under his knuckles. Andrew hit Peter again, harder, hoping that savagery would help cancel out the disgust he felt. The bridge of Peter’s nose snapped.
In fact, Andrew felt more like vomiting than anything.
He stopped punching and stayed where he was for a minute, half kneeling on his brother’s chest, staring around the room. He’d faked looking for Luce before, but now he searched for her in earnest, desperately wishing she’d walk out of the shadows—walk out, on legs, the way a young girl ought to do—and gently pull him to his feet again. Peter was gasping, struggling uselessly. Andrew toyed with the idea of strangling him. He’d pretty much planned on it. He didn’t doubt that his brother deserved to die, and he didn’t care at all about the consequences. It was just . . .