Lost Voices

by Sarah Porter

  Everyone except for Anais, that is.

  "That is SO not funny! That disgusting thing was actually tonguing me! Oh God, that was just so gross ...” Anais raised her tail threateningly above the larva, which cowered below her, too afraid to move away. “I should bash its nasty little head in.”

  Do it, Luce thought eagerly. Do it, and then we can finally get rid of you. Then Luce saw the helpless terror on the larva’s face and felt deeply ashamed of her wish to see it injured.

  Samantha threw herself across the expanse of water separating her from Anais, and caught the blue tail in her arms before it could strike. Anais tried to twist free, and rocked sloppily over into deeper water so that she and Samantha landed in a wet heap. Samantha’s pink sunglasses were knocked off one ear and hung at an absurd angle across her face, and Luce could hear the raspy sound of ripping chiffon. The larva finally had the sense to flop back a few feet, but then it stopped and gawked again. It seemed mesmerized by Anais, by her bland golden perfection.

  “Samantha! Why are you trying to stop me from killing that thing? Eeew, we should really kill all of them. If I just had our housekeeper here I’d make her do it. Clean this place up.” Anais sat up, and abruptly seemed to realize that every mermaid there was staring at her in stunned quiet.

  “Anais! I’ve told you! The timahk! If you hurt that larva, Cat will throw you out on your own!” Samantha wailed. She was still clinging to Anais’s tail, sprawled across it and pinning it to the seabed. To talk she had to torque her upper body back and crane her neck, barely holding her mouth above water.

  “Jeez,” Anais said. “It’s not like Catarina’s even here. She wouldn’t have to know about it, would she?” But there was a dubious look on her face as she glanced around at the circle of mermaids watching her. Samantha finally let go of the sky blue tail and pulled herself upright, straightening her sunglasses.

  "You can't hurt larvae, ever,” Kayley finally said. She sounded nervous, and the words clearly cost her tremendous effort. "Maybe there are a few mermaids here who would lie to Catarina about something really important like that, but most of us wouldn't even dream of it.” Luce knew Kayley meant it as a dig at her; she clearly hadn't recovered from her resentment of the time Luce had lied to protect Jenna. Jenna shot Luce a long, contorted, almost hostile look.

  Luce found herself wondering what she was doing with them. Had her idea that she belonged here never been more than a fantasy?

  "So you're saying you'd tattle on me, Kayley?” Anais asked disdainfully. "You would never break one of Catarina's big bad rules, would you?”

  "They're not just Catarina’s rules,” Luce objected, but her sudden discomfort made her voice shrink almost to nothing, and no one seemed to hear her.

  There was a long, disturbing pause; Luce was acutely aware of the silvery diamond patterns flowing across the surface of the water.

  "Want to head back to the yacht?” Dana asked uncomfortably. "I'd like to look around.” No one answered.

  "Who says Catarina gets to be queen, anyway?” Anais snapped after a moment. "Like, how do you guys decide that?” Luce was grateful to see that even Samantha seemed piqued by this. Luce couldn't understand how Anais could ask that question; Catarina was so savage, so strong and elegant. Who could compare to her?

  "Catarina is our best singer! Definitely. You haven't really heard her yet, Anais—“ ike, you were sort of half unconscious when she was singing to you before—but she’s just—she has the most gorgeous voice! And the things she can do with it...” Samantha had begun with enthusiasm but then trailed off enviously and looked away. Anais gazed around at everyone.

  “So what? Like, just being the best singer makes you queen automatically? Shouldn’t it be, I don’t know, something that makes sense? Like, whoever was oldest when they changed?” Kayley shot her another look; they all knew that Anais was almost seventeen, three months older than Catarina had been at her transformation. Luce grimaced at the lack of subtlety. But Kayley’s courage seemed to have exhausted itself. A glance shot around the group, passing from one girl to the next before Miriam finally looked up, and Luce suddenly realized that Miriam almost never talked anymore.

  “Of course it has to be the best singer who’s queen! That’s how it is with all the mermaids in the world. You can recognize the one who has the right to be queen by her song.”

  Anais glared around and seemed to realize that no one disagreed with this. “Okay. You guys say that’s how it is; I guess it must be.” She tipped her golden head and mulled this over. “So, who’s second best here?”

  “Luce.” Miriam said it instantly, as if it were simply unquestionable. “She’s amazing, too. Almost as great as Cat is, really.” Luce could see Anais recoil with a look of mingled surprise and irritation, then flick a contemptuous glance in her direction. “You don’t know that, Anais? Luce was the one who helped Catarina change you. If it wasn’t for her you would have died.” There was a cold edge to Miriam’s voice now.

  "Ooooh!” Anais said. "Then I guess I owe her a huge thank-you.” Luce had never heard anyone sound less sincere. "Luce, I want to thank you very much for being so brave and wonderful and saving my pitiful little life!” She didn't even bother to meet Luce's eyes as she said it, and the stab of queasy alarm Luce had felt the first time she met Anais came back in her stomach.

  Luce wasn't about to answer. She didn't see any reason to play along with one of Anais's games.

  "Luce! What's your problem? You could at least tell Anais 'you're welcome'!” Samantha sniped. So she was back to being Anais's sycophant, Luce thought bitterly. "She said 'thank you,' like, totally nicely! Don't you think her feelings will be hurt if you just blow her off?”

  Luce gaped at Samantha for a second. Did she really believe a single word she was saying?

  "I don't think it's possible to hurt Anais's feelings,” Luce announced flatly. "I don't think she has any.” Several of the girls gasped and Anais crumpled up her face; Luce knew there was going to be another fit of fake sobbing. Even if Luce had belonged here at first, she thought, maybe she didn't anymore; there was no way she could belong in a place where anyone took Anais seriously, admired her, much less let her boss them around. At the same time this was the first place where anyone had ever accepted her, where it had almost seemed she might finally have a home; why did Anais have to ruin everything? She knew, too, that nothing was waiting for her in her own small cave except loneliness, and the fear of what her voice might be able to accomplish.

  Anais started whimpering, pointing at Luce with a trembling finger while she sank her face against Samantha's shoulder. The murmuring got louder, and Luce saw Jenna scowling at her, her forehead crimped from anger, her knuckles pale in her brown hands. Luce decided to get away before anyone could insist that she apologize. She spun out into the open sea, rolling her body over and over to try to shake the anger she felt at everyone. How could they possibly fall for Anais? She was so horribly, transparently phony, so obviously out to take over control of the tribe if she could. Why else was she so interested in what it took to become queen?

  Something long and bright yellow rocked in a sloppy, haphazard way on the surface a short distance ahead, but the quick rippling distorted it so much that Luce wasn’t sure what it was. A large school of fat, bluish fish suddenly stirred the water in front of her, making it hard to see much besides quick winks of color. Still, she was glad to have something distract her from the seething aversion that made her keep thinking about Anais. She swirled up to get a look at the yellow thing: it turned out to be an empty single-seat kayak, tossed on the waves. It was still right-side up, though, and Luce noticed a bottle of water and a bag lunch tucked at the bottom, along with a single gray man’s sneaker. Whoever had been paddling it hadn’t capsized, then. A neon orange life jacket was floating a few yards away, and Luce had the disturbing sense that the kayaker had stripped off the life jacket deliberately before diving overboard. She knew immediately that there’d been something i
n the water he’d wanted more than life itself, something with cream-colored shoulders surrounded by drifting rays of red-gold hair, something with a voice like living flames. He’d sunk down held in the arms of the most perfect beauty he’d ever seen, breathing the bubbles she fed him from her lips, until he didn't breathe anymore...

  It was much too close to the dining beach, Luce thought. Someone could have heard, someone could have swum out to see what was happening. How could Catarina take a risk like that? Impulsively Luce grabbed the kayak and started towing it away. It would be better if none of the other mermaids saw it; that way no one would ask questions. As she swam on dragging the kayak behind her she found herself roiling with anger. It was bad enough that Catarina had just murdered someone, but did she really have to be so stupid about it? Was she trying to get caught? Luce tugged the kayak a full two miles from shore before shoving it away. The awful image of Catarina surrounded by a pack of indignant mermaids kept recurring in Luce's mind: Catarina banished and swimming off into gray emptiness while Luce watched helplessly.

  By the time she got back to her small cave, Luce was in such a foul mood that she didn't even bother to control her own singing. She didn't care if the death song came back, how high and wildly it rose, or where it carried her. She even wanted it. She let her voice stretch out in free, feverish expansion, waiting for that heart-piercing note at the top of the stairs. She waited, but her voice was somewhere lower, smoother. It was the first time she'd deliberately allowed it to do whatever it wanted, and to her amazement it ignored the death song completely. Instead it glossed itself outward, rolled up at the corners...

  And a feather-shaped wave appeared directly in a beam of brilliant sun: a frond of water, golden green, with a star in its heart. It pranced and waved at Luce as if it was overjoyed to see her, then as her voice tightened in on itself, it gave a little gleaming leap and raced at her. Luce tried to make her voice stop but its hold was too strong, and the tiny, shining wave rose taller and straighter, bobbing a little at the tip. It swayed and waited for Luce’s voice to tell it what to do.

  It was real, then. The wave was at her command. It was exactly, exactly like her horrible dream. She must have a secret desire—one she couldn’t even consciously acknowledge—to hurt the people she loved most. She must be just as cruel as Anais, or maybe even worse. Anais had laughed when her father died, but even so, she probably didn’t have dreams about murdering him herself!

  Luce held her tail out of the water long past the point where the pain throttled her song. She kept it up, her fins contracting frantically in the cool air, until a scream ripped out of her throat.

  It took an hour of lying there, promising herself that she would never, ever allow that particular song to escape from her again, before Luce had the courage to try singing at all. Her voice seemed much more docile now, and by the time she’d spun through a long series of airy, haunting trills, Luce began to feel better. There was evil in her voice, and cruelty, but she told herself that as long as she kept practicing she’d eventually learn to control it; she’d make it into something beautiful and even innocent. She’d change what it meant to be a mermaid, and they could all live at peace...

  By the time she left her little cave she was exhausted from so much concentrating, and ravenously hungry. Her thoughts were so completely taken up with the prospect of dinner that she wasn’t paying much attention as she wriggled through the cave's skinny entrance, still humming softly. There was a sudden heave in the water and a splash as if something like a seal had just dove off the rocks right next to her, but when Luce looked toward the disturbance, the thing that had made it was already gone.

  14. Happy Birthday

  Over the next few days Luce kept mostly to herself, but she still noticed that the warmer weather seemed to be bringing more boats into their territory: small cruise ships crossed through the waters not far from their cave, their decks crowded with tourists who leaned eagerly over the railings to gaze at seals and whales, and now and then there was a glossy private yacht like the one that had brought Anais. Those boats were all safe for now, though, Luce thought; Anais’s yacht had sunk not long after the Coast Guard boat, and she knew Catarina would want to hold off for a while, maybe even for a few weeks, so that the number of shipwrecks in their area wouldn’t become too outrageous. Luce thought that it must already seem a bit suspicious to the humans, and she wondered sometimes if anyone on land had recognized a pattern. She couldn’t escape the disquieting sense that some sort of danger was approaching, and she'd finally made up her mind to try and get Catarina on her own and confide her worries about Anais.

  It made her nervous, though. Catarina had become so unpredictable, so moody; she either adored Luce or scowled at her, both for no apparent reason. What if she just got angry? Luce swam slowly back to the main cave, stopping often to drift along submerged, with her face turned up to watch the broken, writhing filaments of sunlight weaving through the water. She was dreading the conversation with Catarina so much that when she finally slipped through the tunnel into the main cave, she lingered at the bottom for a while, reluctant to sweep up and show herself.

  After a minute she realized that there were just a few mermaids in the cave. From her vantage deep in the cave's pool she could see the tips of three tails flicking lazily, their colors dimmed and wavering in the shady green water. One of them definitely flashed red-gold, though, and Luce thought she could make out the very pale, pearly green of Samantha's tail, too. She wasn't sure who the third mermaid was until she heard Anais's brash, piercing voice. The water barely muted it at all.

  "You know, I'm just dying to hear you really sing, Cat. Everyone keeps telling me how fantastic you are. Like, I keep asking them to compare you to some, you know, some famous human singer I've heard, but they say it's impossible. They say it's just too incredible to even describe that way!”

  It took a moment for Catarina to answer, and when she did her voice was weary and smoldering, as if her thoughts had been lost in some other world. "I don't think you can compare any mermaid's singing to a human's, Anais ... Even a mermaid who we’d barely count as a singer is better than any of them.” There was another lull; Catarina seemed to be having trouble focusing. “Haven’t you tried singing yourself yet?”

  “Oh, I’ve just tried a little bit with Samantha,” Anais chirped. “I’m too shy to sing in front of you and Luce, when everybody keeps saying how great you both are.” Luce knew that had to be a lie. She couldn’t imagine Anais having the sensitivity to feel shy about anything.

  “Hey, I have an idea!” It was Samantha’s voice now, and even through the dulling and distortion of the water Luce thought it had a very strange sound. It was too hard and bright and tinny, as if Samantha were rehearsing lines from a play. “Luce has been giving singing lessons to Dana and Rachel, right? Why don’t you ask her to help Anais, too?” Luce squirmed with discomfort at the idea, even as she wondered what could have possibly prompted Samantha to suggest such a thing. She must have noticed that she and Anais couldn’t stand each other.

  “Oh, Samantha, you know Luce doesn’t like me.” Anais had the same peculiar sound now, and Luce began wondering if she and Samantha had composed this scene together in advance. “I don’t know why. I really try as hard as I can to be nice to her, but she always acts like she hates me! The only reason I can think of is that she knows I’ve heard her practicing singing by herself all the time, like maybe she doesn’t want anybody to know about that. But why would she want to keep that such a big secret?” The water around Luce felt colder and darker; there was the sensation of something squeezing her, a giant clammy fist.

  “Luce is always practicing?” Catarina was paying more attention now, but her voice turned flat and metallic, the way it got when she was trying not to let anyone know she was upset.

  "See how weird Luce is?” Samantha shrieked abruptly, with a sudden spasm of her pearly tail. "Like, you're practically her best friend, right, Cat? And she doesn't even tell
you what she's doing. That's totally why she's always going off alone. Yeah, she just sits in her cave and sings to herself all day long. I've heard her, too. I mean, I can't imagine why she feels like she needs to practice so much. Miriam thinks she's already just as amazing as you are.” That wasn't what Miriam said at all, Luce wanted to object; she'd only said that Luce was almost as good. Why was Samantha lying about that?

  "Does Miriam think so?” Catarina wasn't hiding her bitterness anymore. Her voice cut like razors through dead skin. "I haven't heard anyone express the opinion that Luce's singing is equal to mine, but maybe if she's been working so hard on improving she's better now than I realize.” There was a glacial silence, but Luce could see Anais's blue tail rippling from suppressed excitement. When Catarina spoke again, her voice was thick with calculation. "She was remarkably good when we changed you, Anais. I admit I was surprised when I heard her. She was too good, and there was something in the sound of it ... like listening to things I'd forgotten, like hearing my own life whispered to me...” Catarina's voice trailed off dreamily, and Luce remembered all the bewildering accusations Catarina had fired at her that evening and how unhinged she'd seemed. Catarina's tail gave a little flip as she broke from her abstraction, and when she spoke again she sounded harsh and deadly. "I suppose now I know why she was able to do that.” Luce suddenly had a sickening sense of what was coming next.

  "But why on earth?” Anais asked with such fake, cloying innocence that Luce's nails dug into her palms. "I don't get it at all. I don’t understand why Luce wants to work so hard on her singing instead of hanging out with everyone, and I certainly can’t understand why she’d want to hide it from you, Catarina! I just assumed she must have told you even if she’s been keeping it a secret from everyone else.”