by Sarah Porter
With a desperate effort she managed to tilt her body off the hood until her torso dipped into the outflowing sea. The sloping trunks below appeared through the reddish clouds of her spreading blood as she braced herself with both hands, then heaved her tail up and free of the slashing glass and jerked herself violently forward at the same time. Pain raked through her and gouts of blood spurted from wide ragged cuts. Her azure fins shredded as they flopped across the jags again, and she landed screaming in the water: water that was now no more than three feet deep. Bleeding and frantic, Anais swung her lacerated tail. She had to get back across the highway and into the harbor again before the falling water left her stranded.
She hurled herself through the retreating tide as best she could, asphalt and broken bricks and spilled garbage only inches from her face. Behind her blood trailed in crimson plumes. But there, just ahead, the highway shone in a long plane of glittering water interrupted by cars and trucks knocked askew like hundreds of small lacquered islands. And beyond the highway there was a large gymnasium caved in on one side, rows of treadmills heaped in muddy confusion—beyond that, the broken, swaggering masts and boats turned belly-up that promised deep water. If she could get there, at least she wouldn’t have to face that horrible burning in her tail again, that immolation buried in her own flesh . . .
The deep gouges in her tail slowed her movements, sending blades of cold agony through her with every beat of her fins. She was no more than a foot above the pavement now, and as she skimmed across the double yellow lines at the freeway’s midpoint she began to understand that the water below her might run out and leave her floundering before she reached the gleaming green depths on its far side. Terror charged through her muscles, and her tail began to lash in wild defiance of the pain. With every stroke her shredded fins slapped horribly against the coarse pavement and pebbles grated against her raw wounds. But she was close now, so horribly close; already she was crossing the yacht club’s parking lot on a plane of water so shallow that she had to constantly crane her neck to avoid dragging her face across the stones and torn metal thrown everywhere by that enormous wave. The masts now were just ahead, and suddenly instead of skimming above asphalt Anais saw the dark stained beams of the boardwalk that ran out between the ruined boats. In only moments she would plunge into deep water and sink her tail far from the harsh, pursuing sun, the naked air.
Wood slammed into Anais’s belly, and the last cascade of water dashed back to sea without her. Salt water pooled under her flailing tail and then gradually drained away through the cracks between each plank. The harbor glinted. How far away? Was it six feet? Eight? It struck her as impossibly distant. Sunlight fluttered onto her scales like butterflies. Then, as Anais smacked and thudded at the planks, those butterflies burst into penetrating flames.
Something dark squealed as it loomed above her, cutting off the sun. Sharp, repetitive screams burst in her throat like tiny exploding stars. She was filled by fire, and her wounded tail thrashed uncontrollably. Her torn fins caught against rusty nails and ripped again. Everything seemed blinding bright, set alight by pain. A car door slammed close by.
“Aaaah,” a voice groaned. “Aaah, no, no. My Anais . . .” Rough hands shoved and then rolled her like a sloppy, blood-spattered carcass over splintering wood. She couldn’t stop screaming.
Then . . . then the wood came to an end, and Anais dropped through empty air. She landed with a splash in the green harbor. Flotillas of debris bobbed thickly around her. Her tail soaked up the cool, quenching water while she gulped harsh, staccato breaths. Someone was close by. Someone was dropping into the water next to her and binding her shoulders in huge greedy arms . . .
At first the delicious relief of simply being in somewhat less pain was enough to keep her from caring who was gripping her. The fire in her scales was doused, drowned, and even if blood kept on unraveling from her salt-stung wounds she was alive. If she could just make it past Sadie and the others she would still have a chance. Though, come to think of it, she was feeling awfully weak and sleepy. Maybe she should rest before she tried anything like that.
A heavy hand pawed at her cheek and hot, humid breath gusted into her ear.
The sodden wool of a large expensive suit pressed against her side. Two thick legs kicked and then found purchase on a submerged pier. That someone was standing slightly above her now, the water’s surface just reaching the knot of his tie, so that she sagged a little in his grip.
Anais’s relief was replaced by the intensely disagreeable awareness that Secretary Moreland had saved her life. Couldn’t it have been a younger, hotter guy? Someone more like Dorian? Her tail flicked with irritation, but that only made her torn fins burn. Vaguely it occurred to her that she’d lost a lot of blood. She didn’t feel well at all. Clouds of tiny black fish seemed to swim through her head.
“Anais,” Moreland moaned into her ear, “Anais, it’s all over. Everyone knows, everything’s been exposed. But thank God, it’s all over! Oh, Anais . . .”
“I want to be human again,” Anais snapped. It was disgusting to feel him squeezing her this way. It made her feel so cheap. “Like you promised! I want to be human, and I want my house back, and all my parents’ money. And I want to never see you again!” She gave a quick, revolted squirm. “Get off of me!”
It took her a few moments to understand that the high, whining sound in her ear was coming from Moreland’s throat. “Ah, tadpole,” Moreland wheezed out at last. “I’m afraid I can’t accommodate you. It’s much too late for that. The jig, as they say, is up. In the last fifteen minutes or so there’s been simply astounding news blaring over the radio. And it’s all about me and you. It appears that your Charlie Hackett secretly recorded tapes of the two of us talking, and now he’s gone and given everything to the news channels. Everyone knows the little tricks we’ve been getting up to, and they’re not pleased with us at all.”
Anais didn’t understand what he was talking about—and even more, she didn’t want to understand. Too late?
“Anais,” Moreland crooned. “Anais, darling. Sing me to sleep.”
Anais thrashed hard enough that he loosened his grip slightly. She turned to look into his jowly, contorted face. His gray eyes slopped in their sockets like dirty water as he gave her a kind of simpering smile. He reached to stroke her hair. She felt too weak now even to try to shake him off. The water below her looked dark as wine, wrapped by unwinding blood.
“Sing me to sleep, Anais. That’s the only thing I still want. Sing me to sleep, once and for all, and then . . . you’ll be free, free, free to go.”
Her head pitched a little. He should take her to a hospital, Anais thought blearily, not keep jabbering on about singing. And anyway, she didn’t feel like it. “No.”
Now it was Moreland’s turn not to understand. “No?” He stared at her. The front of his white shirt was tinted pink with bloody water. “No? Anais, I’m sure you don’t mean that!” His awful, whimpering laugh disgusted her. “What could possibly make you happier than killing me?”
“I said NO!” Anais whined. She really wasn’t feeling well now. She needed a nice soft bed where she could sleep. “I don’t care about killing you. And I’m sick of doing what you tell me!”
Moreland gaped at her for another long moment. His face seemed oddly blurry and the sunlight was much too bright. Pink-tinged water jostled around their shoulders as his caressing hands slid with a slow, contemplative movement toward her neck. His thumbs brushed her windpipe. “Sing to me, Anais!”
“I already told you no.”
There was just a hint of pressure on her throat now. She thought she might fall asleep right there in his hands.
“You will do what I tell you! Anais, we don’t have much time!” He was trying to stay calm, but his voice lurched into high, trembling notes. He shook her, quick and sharp. “Sing to me now!”
Anais closed her eyes. The sea inside her seemed as red as jam; it was full of layered crimson lights that throbbed lik
e jellyfish. “I don’t care about you,” Anais slurred. His hands were tightening on her throat. It felt awful and constricting, and she made a drowsy effort to pull the hands away, but somehow when she grabbed for his wrists she kept missing. “I don’t care what you do. Whatever.”
She barely heard Moreland’s strained cry as he threw himself from the submerged pier, still choking her, and tried to drive his way deep below the surface. He thrashed down a few feet, keening desperately the whole time, his suit-clad legs kicking wildly at her gashed scales. Anais flopped limply, her closed eyes consumed by that deep red sea. Her mind was dissolving, becoming part of the ruby water. In a remote way she was aware that they weren’t far from the surface. No matter how Moreland thrashed, the two of them formed a buoyant tangle that refused to sink, and Anais’s fins curled like a sail and resisted the water.
Her body floated like a raft, belly up in the harsh summer sun. Moreland flailed and wept and splashed, driving his knees into her stomach to make her sink. They went down and wavered back up into the air again and again. Anais’s golden hair spread into a second sun on the ruby water.
He’d been right, she thought. It was all over. And then even that final drop of awareness poured out to join the sea.
36
Cresting the Wave
Imani’s voice was so soft that Luce didn’t understand at first how effectively her friend was taking charge. “Graciela, you need to swim as fast as you can to the Mare Island camp. Wake up everyone there and tell them it’s time to evacuate. Get everybody here right away, okay? But you need to keep calm so they don’t panic; we don’t know for sure yet that the humans will attack us. And Yuan, I think you’re the best one to go to all the little hidden camps; you know better than anybody where all of them are. We need to get every mermaid in the bay inside the wave or under it, now. That way we’ll all be close to open sea, and the humans won’t be able to trap us in here. Okay?”
Graciela looked at Luce for confirmation of these unexpected orders, and Luce nodded heavily. “I think Imani’s right. That’s the best thing we can do.” It was a good plan—and after everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours it was an immense relief to have someone else assume the work of leadership. Graciela and Yuan saluted and darted off, their quick forms gliding under the water-wall and back into the far recesses of the bay.
“Luce?” Imani murmured. She was gently leading Luce forward. The smooth, ascending wave rippled gracefully, whorls of wandering light caught inside it in glimmering suspension. “I hope you don’t think I was out of line, I mean by giving orders that way? I didn’t mean to act like I was the general. I just did it because, after everything you’ve been through, I thought you probably needed a break.”
All Luce wanted was to lean her head on Imani’s shoulder and forget the world. “Thank you, Imani. You were right.” Luce hesitated, watching the golden curls cast by far-off streetlamps climbing high through the towering water-wall. The sweet vibrato of mermaid song mingled with the disturbing clamor of humans weeping and shouting on the bridge above. Luce had briefly lived in Baltimore years before, and she pictured the city reduced to sea-battered ruins. With the time difference it was probably well after dawn there, and the morning light would sharply expose the full extent of the destruction. “Imani, I don’t think I should be general anymore. I think I’m . . . really broken now. After . . .”
Luce couldn’t finish the sentence, but Imani’s dark eyes flashed with understanding. “If you were broken you wouldn’t be able to heal anyone else, Luce. And you just did.”
Strangely, Imani’s words provoked a kind of rebellious weariness in Luce. Those kind words struck Luce as almost disrespectful, as if they showed that Imani didn’t take Catarina’s death entirely to heart. Imani was still guiding her forward and now the vertical sheets of water gleamed only a few yards ahead.
“Hey, Luce?” Imani asked softly.
Luce turned. The expression of Imani’s mouth was uncharacteristically mischievous, but her usual deep tenderness still glowed in her midnight eyes. “Yes?” Luce asked.
“Are you serious? You want me to give the orders tonight? Because if you mean it, I’ve got an order for you right now.”
Luce tipped her head, feeling weak and incredulous and—in spite of herself—quickened by curiosity. “What is it?”
Imani’s grin widened impishly. She looked lovelier than ever, Luce thought, even if her delight seemed incomprehensible. “That’s what I like to hear! Okay, I don’t want you to sing to the water tonight, Luce. I have a way more important job for you. It’s something only you can do too.”
Luce waited. The vibrancy of Imani’s smile was starting to affect her just a bit, as if flecks of joy dappled the surface of her despondency.
Imani raised one arm and pointed high above. It took Luce a moment to realize that Imani was indicating the raging human mob lined up along the bridge. “Don’t sing to hold up the wave. The rest of us can do that. Sing to them instead.”
Luce swayed from disbelief. “Imani! There’s no way—you can’t mean—” When their situation was so sad and desperate, when the humans might attack at any moment, how could she be so irrepressibly gleeful?
Imani laughed. “For real, Luce? You really thought I wanted you to kill them? Of course not. I want you to sing to them the way you just did to your father. They’re all suffering tonight; can’t you hear it?” Imani paused. She had the exhilarated look of someone who had just made a tremendous discovery. “I want you to heal them.”
Luce stared. “It’s too dangerous, Imani! It’s too much for them, too beautiful for them . . . to absorb.” She was thinking of Dorian, his crazy otherworldly rapture when she used to sing for him—and he had much greater resistance to mermaid song than any human Luce had ever met.
“It didn’t seem like it hurt those people who were listening to you on the bunkers just now,” Imani argued. She was still beaming. “And anyway I need to learn how you do that, and now seems like a fantastic time to get started, right? I’ll come up to the very top of the wave with you and I’ll just listen, and listen, until I can feel exactly what you’re doing.” And then Imani burst into a peal of blissful laughter.
It was too much for Luce. “I don’t understand how you can act so happy, Imani. Even if they won’t attack us as long as we’re in the wave, we still have to sleep sometime. Soon they’ll start searching for our camps. And you’re acting like this isn’t serious at all!” Her voice wavered.
In reply Imani caught Luce’s wrist and spiraled her tail, launching both of them upward through the wave’s glassy core.
They vaulted through a high upward dive, the dancing pane of water across their eyes making the skyscrapers flutter like wings and furl like rising smoke. Even in her grief and fear, Luce was consumed by the beauty in front of her. It didn’t matter if she died, since this splendor would live on without her. And still Imani’s tail was flurrying and still they were shooting higher and higher inside the wave, looking down on houses scattered like confetti across the distant hills and the bay’s variegated shades of smoke and dust and moon all joined into a single rippling symphony.
When they broke through the wave’s crest the girders crossing the bottom of the Golden Gate Bridge loomed only few feet above their heads, and the air popped and reverberated with stamping feet and raspy human cries.
“We loved the mermaids! We trusted them; we marched for them! And we believed them when they told us they’d given up killing, and now—now there are at least ten thousand people missing in Baltimore,” someone howled immediately overhead. “General Luce needs to answer for this!”
She did need to answer for it, Luce realized. But she couldn’t answer with words. They’d never believe her.
Luce and Imani looked at each other. Imani’s dark heart-shaped face had lost its giddiness; instead she was intent, rapt with concentration as she stared into Luce’s eyes. The droplets in her dark hair held the first hints of dawn in a
crown of radiating rose-colored sparks. “Luce?” Imani whispered. “You asked me how I can be so happy now? After so many mermaids died yesterday and now that Baltimore’s flooded and all these people hate us?” Luce nodded slowly, unable to look away. Imani was illuminated by a kind of transcendence that Luce had never seen before. “I’m happy because we’ve won. The Twice Lost have won, and the war is over.”
The madness of Imani’s words left Luce paralyzed, silenced. The water frothed and gurgled around their chests, and they bobbed and fell with each tiny variation of the music swelling below them. “Imani . . .” Luce finally managed. “That’s not true. There’s no way we can win, not now that mermaids have destroyed a human city! They’ll never stop thinking of us as monsters now.”
Imani was unperturbed. She reached out with both hands and squeezed Luce’s shoulders. “No, Luce. I knew we’d won as soon as I heard you singing to your father back there. I knew we can do exactly what it will take. There’s only one way you can answer for what happened and that’s by singing it.”
“Imani . . .”
“Trust me, Luce. You know I’ve always trusted you. I promise you they’ll understand.”
“It seems crazy,” Luce objected. But somehow she’d started smiling. Imani might be out of her mind, but in this strange transported mood she was also magnificent.
“You get started, general. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I have to go give some orders.”
Luce shook herself as Imani streaked back downward. Luce watched Imani’s dusky blue fins flicking away. Above her people stomped and wept and moaned, their voices beating the air into agitated rags.
Luce thought of Dorian: of how he’d fought for her, of how he’d worked to help save her father, and how he’d come here to find her. She thought of how she used to sing to him beneath the undulating green of the aurora while the harsh Alaskan nights lingered on, and the taste of love turned to music on her tongue.