by Sarah Porter
She had to drive the water outward. If she could break even one corner of the net, they would all be free to tumble out into the ocean and escape.
A fist of water, bulging and glassy, wrapped around the black sphere, and Luce’s shriek-song rose higher and fiercer as she strained to force the sphere back and snap the net. The water only seethed and eddied around the sleek metal sides, unable to get a grip on it.
Streams of bullets sliced the air again, and at least two more mermaids ruptured around lines of flying blood. Luce knew she couldn’t look, couldn’t gasp; she could only keep singing.
Something like a scroll of living fire moved in the water below her, and Luce heard another voice joining her voice, entering into it and expanding it until the dome of water covering the submarine pulsed white with foam. That net had to be made of something extraordinarily strong, Luce realized, but now she heard it start to creak in shrill protest. There was a whiny snapping noise, and suddenly the sharp wires were dropping away beneath her. The sphere rolled back and downward, its motors snarling, and Luce saw its glass dome implode.
“Everyone, roll!” Luce heard herself screaming. “Roll out of the net! Dive down!”
At least twenty tangled mermaids were spilling from the net with her. The water below them was quick with gray shapes. White spreading teeth were already coming at her, and Luce barely managed to jerk out of the way.
A froth of sharks leaped against them, maddened by all the blood. Luce felt herself jostled by slippery skins. Three sharks fought over a bullet-riddled mermaid, fangs tearing into her tail even as it trembled and turned back into human legs. Luce tried to lunge for the dying girl, to somehow drag her away from the slashing teeth, but something had a grip on her shoulders. She was being dragged rapidly backwards, down and away from the frenzied sharks and the noise of machine gun fire still rattling above the waves.
“Luce, come on! You have to lead them away from this!”
Luce turned and red-gold hair swirled into her face.
Mermaids were squirming free of that scrum of sharks and clouding blood, whipping away into deeper water. But Luce hesitated. What if there were wounded mermaids in that mess who could still be saved? It didn’t seem likely at this point, but—
“Luce, if you don’t call everyone to follow you now, more of them will die!”
Luce looked at Catarina in a daze and then realized that she was right. Her own arms were laced by lines of seeping blood as thin as paper cuts, all stinging horribly from the salt water, and below them the gray forms of hundreds of sharks were lancing upward. They could outswim them, but they’d have to move fast.
“To the bridge!” Luce screamed. “Follow us! To the bridge!”
Her voice echoed through the dark sea, and mermaids who’d scattered began to race back to her. Luce threw herself into movement, her injured tail lashing out behind her. Mermaids streaked around her, their dimly shining arms reaching forward into nothingness, their fins kicking. Luce whipped her tail until it ached, listening all the time for the sound that might save them: the song of the Twice Lost Army. If they were holding a giant wave up right under the Golden Gate Bridge, Luce was almost sure the humans wouldn’t dare to attack them again.
But . . . she heard only silence. Or not even silence, but the sound of air battered by what must be several helicopters now. They must have planned to catch the entire Twice Lost Army in that net and machine gun all of them together.
Maybe she’d asked Imani to do the impossible. Maybe the Twice Lost had dashed away in a hundred random directions, helicopters whirling above and picking them off whenever they came up for air . . .
Maybe nobody would be waiting for them at the bridge, and the wounded remnant that was following her now would find themselves helpless and alone. There were about twenty mermaids racing along with her, twenty-five at most: without the others they wouldn’t be able to raise enough water to create a credible threat.
And without a threat it would be just like Catarina had said: they wouldn’t last an hour. Should she order everyone to turn around and scatter through the ocean? They would if she told them to, Luce knew. They could give up the fight and try to find caves to hide in, at least for a while, at least until the divers tracked them down.
Was that a faint glow in the water up ahead? It might be the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge blurring and fragmenting in the water. But the glow had a green moonish cast that didn’t look like electric light, and it seemed to be stirring in a long curving line, several yards below the surface, spanning most of the Golden Gate.
And then, electric lights could never make a sound like that: a low swell of rising music so sweet and wild that Luce’s heart seemed to expand into infinite space. Even after all the horrors she’d witnessed that night, even with Bex and the others ripped to shreds behind her, Luce was suddenly suffused by an unbearable joy that was also profound grief, and she was singing.
Singing into the other voices even as those voices opened inside the water. Each voice blossomed inside the next, flowers inside flowers, or stars bursting inside other stars. Now Luce could see Yuan racing back and forth, pulling stragglers to fill the empty spaces in the long row of mermaids. Cala was hugging Jo, coaxing her to join the song. It didn’t look like the entire Twice Lost Army, but Luce guessed that at least half of them had assembled there. And there was Imani, her head thrown back, her voice vaulting above the other voices and calling them to rise inside the gleaming wall of water . . .
Water that shuddered, flexed, bowed for a moment as if it might come crashing down again . . . Then stood up in a huge fluctuating ribbon so tall that it brushed against the underside of the Golden Gate Bridge, so long that it stretched across at least two-thirds of the channel. Luce broke through the surface to see it, suddenly utterly unafraid.
A line of stilled headlights needled the dark. All the cars had stopped where they were. People were getting out, standing in small confused clusters against the railings. Luce hoped the music wouldn’t hurt them. But what they were hearing wasn’t the mermaids’ death songs, after all, and Seb had heard her sing to the water without it doing him any harm. He’d even said it had helped him.
Probably they’d be okay.
Ten or twelve helicopters vibrated above, their searchlights swinging wildly across the standing wave-wall, and Luce turned to watch them. All the beams together made her think of a giant spider with legs made of spindly light. Then one searchlight pivoted, raced along the frothing surface, and shone straight into her face. She stared back. The light blinded her and she couldn’t tell where she was looking, but she did her best to aim her gaze into the pilot’s eyes. Would he open fire?
The helicopter chattered on unmoving, and Luce went on singing. Around her more of the mermaids in that long chain kept surfacing, singing with her as they faced the guns above. Luce lifted her arm, still etched by hairline streaks of congealed blood, smiled at the pilot, and waved.
19
The News
Andrew looked at the drugstore’s cash register and sighed. The clerk had turned away, absentmindedly leaving the cash drawer ajar. It would be so easy to take advantage: just one quick forward flick of his wrist and he’d have enough for a few days’ travel. His skin was almost crawling with the desire to reach out, to casually turn and walk away with bills stuffed in his pocket.
Except, well, if he kept on stealing then how was he ever going to make a decent life for Luce, once she was finally human again? And say Kathleen e-mailed him one day and told him that she’d decided to get a divorce? If that happened how was he supposed to be good enough for her? He was almost positive that Luce and Kathleen would be crazy about each other. Luce would read every last one of Kathleen’s books, she’d help out in the garden, she’d grow up and go to college and not waste her potential the way he had.
Because there had to be some way to turn Luce back. He refused even to consider the possibility that there wasn’t.
He balled his hands in
to fists and swung his body out the door. Didn’t even snag a goddamn candy bar. It was such unaccustomed behavior that he found it almost disquieting and he shuffled his feet aggressively to make the feeling go away.
On the opposite side of the drab street a small crowd had gathered in front of an appliance store. It was weird to see people bunched together like that in this drowsy little town. That store must be having a hell of a sale. Not having anything in particular to do, he wandered over to see what was going on.
The crowd seemed to be standing in shocked stillness, watching a scene playing out on a dozen televisions at once. Andrew’s first thought was that it had to be some kind of big-budget Hollywood movie, the kind with incredible special effects, because, well, those screens all showed what appeared to be a huge glassy wave standing upright under the Golden Gate Bridge. That couldn’t be real, simply. But if this was a movie, it was awfully slow paced. The wave fluttered and swayed near its summit, but other than that it didn’t seem to move much. A crowd of people pressed against the bridge’s railings, staring down, backed by rows of cars that weren’t going anywhere either.
There was no sound through the window, but a news ticker scrolled relentlessly along the bottom of the screen: “San Francisco’s standing tsunami, now at hour six. The wave appeared at 3:28 this morning, accompanied by unexplained music. Police have been attempting to evacuate the bridge, but they are meeting with resistance from the crowd. We are awaiting further reports.”
“Is that some kind of joke?” Andrew asked. For some reason, the lingering music that always throbbed on in his head seemed to be getting a little louder. The mermaids’ songs he’d heard that time had made him pass out; it was something about the unbearable way that Luce’s voice had dueled with the strange mermaid’s. But didn’t this look a bit like something he remembered from the moment before he’d lost consciousness?
“It’s real,” a big gray-haired woman said sadly. She didn’t turn her eyes from the screen as she spoke. “It’s real, but nobody knows what’s going on. There was some talk about a lot of people spotted down there in the water, but that doesn’t stand to reason either.”
“Sure doesn’t,” he told her. Unless whoever was in the water weren’t people, or anyway not people in the strict sense of the word.
He had only a few dollars left and he wasn’t about to shame himself by calling Kathleen collect. But he absolutely had to talk to her about this, right away. He had to know what she thought, and as he walked briskly away to hunt for a pay phone, an imaginary conversation was already playing in his mind: “You’re seeing this, Kath? You think that’s them? It’s got to be. I’ve got to get down there!”
And then the words he knew he couldn’t say: “You should come with me. Please come with me. I know I ain’t done right so far with my life, but now . . .”
“Now,” he murmured to himself. It had gotten pretty hard to find pay phones since everybody had a cell these days, but there was one behind the plate glass of that Laundromat down the way. He broke into a run, praying that the lousy thing wasn’t busted and scrounging through all his pockets for quarters.
It wasn’t Kathleen who finally answered, though. “It’s you,” Nick said with rough hostility. “You’ll be proud to hear how meeting you has worked out for Kathleen. A thirty-nine year-old woman with everything to live for doesn’t drown herself that way out of nowhere!”
Andrew couldn’t understand what Nick was talking about.
Who had drowned?
Ben Ellison spent the night trying to pack up his office as calmly as possible. After twenty-three years of devoted service to the FBI, it was hard to accept that he deserved to be fired so abruptly. Heaps of papers slid from the desk and cascaded onto the floor in terrible confusion. Only the images streaming live from his laptop provided any real satisfaction. The government’s efforts to keep Operation Odysseus secret—to keep the very existence of the mermaids secret—had evidently come to a dramatic end. The media was going to be bombarding the White House with impossible questions now. Reporters would strike out and investigate on their own, too. There was no way Moreland would get through this debacle unscathed.
Ellison had been kept in the dark about the maneuvers of the previous night, but it seemed clear from the helicopter gunships wheeling in disorder above the bridge that there had been a major assault on the mermaids. It was also apparent that the attack had failed in spectacular fashion. Looking at that wall of water gleaming in the morning light, Ellison knew he didn’t owe Dorian the promised phone call. Lucette Korchak was alive and free and wreaking havoc.
Ellison observed with relief that these mermaids obviously weren’t trying to kill anyone. A vast crowd of easy victims lined the bridge, mouths agape and eyes staring. This Luce seemed to be too media-savvy—or possibly, possibly she was actually too good-hearted—to allow the mermaids with her to sing all those awed, defenseless humans to their doom. And that was precisely the kind of move on her part that Moreland would have no idea how to handle. It was utterly unpredictable, bold and daring and brilliant.
Bone-tired as he was, Ellison couldn’t keep a hard, brutal grin off his face.
Whose side was he on, anyway?
***
Dorian woke up to Theo shaking his shoulder. “Sorry to bother you before noon, good sir, but the world is ending.”
Theo’s tone was ironic enough that Dorian didn’t immediately feel worried. “Yeah? Somebody release a herd of stampeding dinosaurs or something?”
“Tsunami. Epic scale. If you can call it a tsunami when it just stands there. In San Francisco.”
That made Dorian sit up abruptly, his heart quickening with hope. In the next moment he realized how absurd his idea was. Luce’s ability to control water with her voice was impressive, but he was fairly sure she couldn’t do that. “How big is it?”
“That’s what you want to know?” Theo laughed. “Not something reasonable? Like, oh, ‘How the fuck is that possible?’ It’s big enough to block off everything under the Golden Gate Bridge, is how big it is.”
Dorian was halfway out of bed, hauling on the jeans he’d dropped on the floor the night before.
“It’s on the news?” Dorian was groping for a T-shirt. There was one around somewhere.
“I know it’s crazy, but the media does seem to be finding the event rather noteworthy, yeah. My mom can’t even talk straight, she’s so shocked.”
Dorian was dressed and on his feet, stumbling after Theo down to the den, where Amanda Margulies sat on the green leather sofa in her yoga clothes. She was clutching a cup of coffee with a veil of cold scum on its surface, and drying tears streaked her face. Theo sat down next to his mother and hugged her warmly.
Dorian stared at the huge TV screen: on it there appeared a wall of bright water with fluted, faintly pulsating sides. The delicate rust red curves of the Golden Gate Bridge swanned above the unmoving wave, and in the background he could see the open ocean. Cordons of police boats were keeping a good distance from the bridge, shooing back the various sailboats and kayaks that jostled forward, trying to get closer to the action. And, above the clatter of gathered helicopters and the excited babble of the newscasters, there was a distinct musical thrum, sweet and immense and enthralling . . .
Dorian realized that the music was very much like something he’d heard before, except this sound was incomparably vaster and more complex: a rich, nuanced swell that could only be hundreds of magical voices thrilling together.
“What are those people doing?” Dorian suddenly asked. At the edge of the crowded bridge, a news crew was engaging in some kind of fussy activity involving ropes and pulleys. Whatever they were up to, it looked like a bad idea.
“Looks like they’re lowering that camera guy over the side. Trying to get some kind of close-up? But it’s just going to look like more water . . .”
The cameraperson was strapped into a harness, and his unwieldy camera was secured to his front with various cables. He clambered up o
nto the side of the bridge and then dropped slowly, twitching and kicking twenty feet below the line of spectators. They watched as he adjusted himself and trained his camera on the shimmering wall of water.
For a few minutes nothing else happened. There was only the crowd standing bone-still, enraptured by that unearthly music, the swaying figure of the cameraperson, the fractured diamonds of sunlight all over the water-wall. But nothing new was happening, Dorian told himself. The situation might drag on for hours without any change. So why couldn’t they look away?
Then—then something did happen. A small figure appeared at the wave’s base, arms raised as if it were diving. But the figure was inside the water, bending into strange refractions. Then it twisted, leaped upward . . .
And the figure wasn’t human. Even at this distance that was obvious.
The chattering commentators abruptly fell silent while next to Dorian Theo let out a kind of shrill, astonished moan. Of course they’d all watched the video of Luce—but this was different. No one could even pretend to believe that what they were seeing now was faked.
The leaping body on the screen rippled away into a long, lashing tail. The tailed figure vaulted smoothly up through the wave’s core and came to an unsteady stop just in front of the dangling cameraperson. He reeled against his straps, legs flailing helplessly. Then he stopped kicking, seeming to lapse into mesmerized calm.
The newscasters had started babbling again, but they weren’t making a whole lot of sense. “In just a minute . . . waiting for the feed to come in . . . truly an incredib—more in just a . . . bringing you a closer look at . . .”
The mermaid in the wave had something white in her right hand, and she fluttered it as a gesture of reassurance. Her tail looked more or less the right color: a light, silvery jade green.