by Sarah Porter
Gigi thought of the astonishing face that had suddenly appeared next to hers in the water; it had belonged to a girl whose skin gleamed with subtle golden glow and whose body coiled away into a pinkish gold tail. The girl had looked distinctly pissed off, and she’d hesitated for several long seconds as bubbles oozed from Gigi’s lips, staring at her as they descended together. Then with a sudden angry shake the mermaid had grabbed her and dragged her back to the surface, glaring furiously at the other mermaids who still trilled their incantations to the sinking crowd.
“Queen Yuan?” one of them had called out, more bewildered than indignant. “What are you doing?”
The mermaid called Queen Yuan hadn’t answered, just taken off swimming with Gigi clutched in her arms. Gigi had gagged up salt water and wrenched her neck to take in as much as she could of the mermaid’s impossibly lovely face. The music still throbbed through her, and it didn’t even occur to her that her mother was dying.
Three of the mermaids followed them, calling to Yuan in coaxing voices. “Yuan, come on! You know we don’t want to expel you!” And: “Yuan, she’s just human! Please, please let us drown her. Do it for me?”
Yuan never answered them, just surged on through the waves with a bitter, stubborn expression, her black hair fanning through the pearl gray water. How long had they gone on like that before Yuan shoved her roughly onto a sandy shore, beating Gigi with her tail to make her get up? The golden fins smacked at her face, then her legs, while Yuan snarled, “Run! Stupid human, run! Inland! Now!”
Get up on this Internet and say so . . .
“I’ll never live it down,” Gigi argued back. “I’ll spend the rest of my life being that dumb girl who will make up any whacked-out thing to get attention. Mike will probably break up with me. And, seriously, you think that’s going to help me get into graduate school?”
What price had Queen Yuan paid for rescuing her, though?
Gigi wiped the tears from her face and picked up the camera, balancing it on her knees and staring at the empty black lens. She inhaled slowly twice then tapped a button, gritting her teeth as a small red light blinked on. “Hi. I’m Gigi Garcia-Chang and I’m here to answer Andrew Korchak’s call for testimony from people whose lives were saved by mermaids . . .”
It got a little easier after that.
18
Kraken Rising
Luce woke up at sunset, when a young mermaid whose name she didn’t know stopped by Catarina’s hammock to give them a small heap of oysters she’d brought back from deeper in the bay. Yuan had given the job of collecting shellfish to crews of the smaller girls, who went foraging every day with scraps of net slung over their shoulders and then came back to distribute their hauls. Cat fell back asleep as soon she’d finished eating, but Luce slipped out from under the warehouse to watch the sun sinking behind the hills and jagged factories of the city. She didn’t know why she felt so sad. Training was going remarkably well, and everyone seemed happier and less anxious. Behind her an encampment that now held well over two hundred mermaids drowsed and chatted and wove more hammocks to accommodate all the new arrivals, and there were many more members of the Twice Lost Army scattered around the bay. Luce couldn’t help realizing how much most of them trusted her. Somehow without even knowing what she was doing, she’d found a kind of destiny.
Luce hadn’t told them what Seb had said about that video she’d accidentally starred in. It seemed like too much to explain, but Luce had to admit to herself that it might be an important development. In fact, she still hadn’t told anyone except Imani about Seb at all.
Millions of people had watched her swimming out from under that dock. They’d seen her hesitate as she considered trying to get a message to her father and then turn back to the sea as she rejected the idea. But maybe, just maybe, her father was one of the millions who’d seen the video. Maybe she’d managed to let him know she was alive after all.
Maybe someone whose name Luce refused even to think had seen it too. He’d know that all his scheming to get her murdered had failed, and maybe he’d remember what it had felt like to kiss her and brush his hands around her face.
Maybe he’d feel sorry for what he’d done.
The problem with entertaining these fantasies, even briefly, was that they made her miss him. It was disgusting to realize that she could miss someone like that, but all at once his scent and warmth and glance came back to her like sensual wraiths. He’d seemed so tender sometimes; it was still hard to believe that he could bring himself to inform on her.
He must have, Luce reminded herself sternly. How else could the government have learned so much about her?
Even as she wondered about Dorian Luce’s eyes kept reflexively scanning the bay. White houses spilled down the clefts between yellow hills on the far side. Bridges crossed the horizon, rusty cranes shaped like skeletal horses loomed, and a few small boats puttered on water lacquered gold and violet by the evening sky. The noise of their engines reverberated faintly while the gulls cried above. Certainly there was nothing out there that resembled the black silent boats used by the divers, but somehow she wasn’t reassured.
They’d been incredibly lucky so far, Luce thought. The only real question was how long their luck would hold.
∗ ∗ ∗
It was after midnight when Yuan sent her messengers darting out to all the secret mermaid camps around the bay to assemble them for that night’s training. Luce smiled as she watched Yuan slipping among the pilings, quick and efficient, giving everyone their instructions. Yuan seemed so much more hopeful now that she had a job to do, and she was impressively good at it. “Yuan?” Luce called.
Yuan swirled to a halt in front of her, black hair swinging in the water, and saluted with a touch of comic exaggeration. Only a touch, though. “Hey, general-girl! Whazzup?”
Suddenly they were both giggling. “Um, snap to, lieutenant-babe.” Luce felt a little self-conscious; she’d never really been this silly with anyone before except for maybe her father. But she found herself enjoying it. “Yeah, girl, I got some orders for you. You better jump!”
Yuan whipped her tail and spiraled straight up out of the water, knocking her head against the underside of the pier. “Ow! Oh, jeez . . .”
“Are you okay?” Luce asked.
“Oh, sure.” But the blow had knocked Yuan’s exuberance out of her. “What do you need me to do?”
For a few seconds there Luce had felt so young; she already missed it. “I think we need to start posting sentinels during training. A big circle of them, pretty far out.”
Yuan was rubbing her head, and she suddenly looked very serious. “I was wondering if I should suggest that, yeah. We should assign a different division to guard duty every night so everyone still gets to practice singing.”
“Good idea,” Luce agreed. She was vaguely impressed that Yuan had started calling the groups “divisions” too. “And Yuan? Not all the guards should stay on the surface.”
Yuan looked surprised. “How do you mean? We’ll see the boats coming from far enough away to get everyone out of there.”
“But . . . I don’t know what they could do, Yuan, but what if they sent a submarine or something? We need a ring of guards on the surface and another ring maybe, well, twenty yards down? Just in case they come at us from below.” Like orcas, Luce thought. Like what Seb said the navy would do if the kraken was rising.
Yuan considered that. “It seems like if they got close enough to do that we would notice.”
“Maybe we would, but just in case?” Sometimes Luce experienced a kind of tidal sense that Nausicaa was there with her. She felt that way now. It seemed to her that she was following the advice Nausicaa would give her in this situation.
Yuan shrugged. “You’re the general, Luce. And, hey, should we figure out a special alarm-call?”
They talked that over for a few minutes. Neither of them was sure anyone would notice the windy call mermaids usually used as an alarm over the sound of the e
ntire Twice Lost Army singing together, and they settled on a series of piercing trills instead. Bex joined them, along with several other girls Luce barely recognized, though Yuan clearly did. Luce still couldn’t get used to the nervous, admiring way a lot of the Twice Lost looked at her.
“It’s getting late,” Yuan said. Her voice was uncharacteristically soft. “Shouldn’t we be heading out, Luce?”
Luce glanced back into the dimness and realized that dozens of mermaids were flicking expectantly in the water. They dived, all staying near the bottom to keep out of sight, and headed into deeper waters: first under the Bay Bridge then around downtown and a tall hill topped by a single cylindrical tower. When they skimmed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge its starry lights draped like countless tangled ribbons on the fluctuating ceiling above them. It took them another twenty minutes to find the rest of the Twice Lost, already gathered and waiting to the south. They could just see the lights of the Cliff House beaming from the shore, but the waves on all sides were steep and dark.
With the new arrivals there must have been at least five hundred mermaids huddling together, their faces and shoulders forming a dimly phosphorescent raft that curved with the passing swells. Luce was startled, again, to see how much her army had grown. Yuan called the former queens together and explained the new system. Only Catarina was nowhere to be seen. “Lieutenant Cala, everyone in your division already has a pretty good handle on their water-singing, right? Okay, I’m going to assign you to lead guard duty tonight. Ten mermaids on the surface, ten mermaids twenty yards below, changing off at about half-hour intervals. Have you got that? And you’ll need a signal for when it’s time to switch positions that’s really different from the alarm-call Luce and I worked out. It’s like this.” Yuan demonstrated, her voice piercing against the low roar of the sea and the dim chatter of the assembled girls. “Everybody? You’ve got to get this right, because you’ll each be in charge of teaching it to your division.”
Suddenly the night shuddered with the unearthly, metallic trilling of the alarm as everyone tried it. Luce floated, feeling almost irrelevant with Yuan working so efficiently to keep things organized. She kept staring around. The Pacific looked almost too vacant, the sky too cavernous.
“Did you guys notice anything?” Luce asked suddenly as the harsh cries died away. “I mean, before we got here?”
“There’ve been a few more boats than usual, I think, General Luce.” It was the auburn-haired mermaid Yuan had addressed as Lieutenant Cala. Her dark turquoise tail flurried just under the surface, pale green iridescence flashing on her scales. “Just yachts, but they came close enough that we got kind of nervous. We just hung out below the surface for a while and they all went away again. I think we’re cool.”
“Okay,” Luce said, but then she realized she didn’t mean it.
“Can we start practice?” Bex asked eagerly. “You know, I thought I loved singing when we did it to drown people. But the way we sing now—it’s so, so, completely great and amazing! I never want to stop.”
“Get the guards in place first,” Luce said, and then flinched a little at the grim, paranoid tone of her own voice. What was wrong with her tonight? “And—sorry. You should just go ahead and start without me.”
“Luce?” Yuan was looking at her worriedly. “Is something, like, wrong? You’ve been acting kind of jumpy all evening.”
“Probably everything’s fine,” Luce said. Her voice sounded even worse this time: strained and phony. “I just—I don’t know why, but I feel like we need to start being extra careful. I’ll be back soon.”
“You’d better come back! I mean, where are you going?” There was a shadow in Yuan’s gaze that contradicted her sassy tone.
“Down.”
“Just down?” Yuan tried to sound like she was kidding. “Send us a postcard, okay?”
“Please—just get the guards in place. Right now.” Luce looked around at her lieutenants. Most of them seemed vaguely shocked by her strange behavior, but Cala saluted crisply and she didn’t even look like she was doing it as a joke.
Luce dived.
She could see in the dark, but in this darkness there was nothing much to see except for jellyfish and a few small bored-looking sharks. To her right she noticed one of the mermaid guards dropping and then hovering head downward, held in place by the steady rotation of her fins. Luce waved to her and kept going.
Above her the first voices leaped into fluid harmonies, and for a few seconds Luce was towed sharply backwards as the water streamed upward in thrall to the music. She fought her way to the side of the strange ascending current and kept swimming straight down. Her hands spread out in front of her as if she could feel the immensity of the space still opening below.
Shadow on shadow, tangled night on charcoal deeps. She was at least fifty yards below the surface now, maybe seventy. The water’s weight pressed in on her. It was easy to start imagining things, to think that there were blots in that darkness that were somehow a little denser or a little darker than the rest. Of course there might be sea lions out hunting, and there were definitely more sharks gliding by. But here and there Luce began to think that there were dark shapes that weren’t moving at all, and that seemed . . .
Well, that seemed wrong. Luce thought she detected black balls of shadow spaced far apart from one another. They were almost invisible against the blackness beyond and hovered with uncanny stillness.
Then her own rapid downward movement began to make it look like the shapes were rising just as fast as she was plunging.
No. They really were rising. In the nothingness below her Luce’s outstretched palm was suddenly crisscrossed by inexplicable lines of pain as fine as cutting wires.
Then Luce was reeling backwards, her tail whipping and balling up around her as those razor filaments cut at her fins. A piercing, ululating cry burst from her throat. She shrieked the alarm-call without pause as she lashed her way back toward the surface, those black spheres rocketing up around her just as fast as she could propel herself. Her frantic call reverberated through the water, breaking and echoing into a dozen different voices—or, no, those were the guards she’d posted below the surface, picking up the alarm like a relay.
Again and again the lashing of her tail sent traces of sharp pain through her fins. There was something sharp and impossible to see below her: some kind of cutting mesh. And it was rising as quickly as those dark spheres on all sides, jetting up so fast that even a mermaid couldn’t outrace it.
The spheres were pulling it up.
There were four of them, positioned at the corners of an enormous square.
The song above her collapsed into confused quiet; only a few mermaids still seemed to be singing. Luce could just make out the shimmer of tails flashing wildly away in all directions, radiating outward like blurry fireworks still far above her head. Shock waves slammed her down again as the city of towering waves above dropped abruptly back into the sea. The blade-sharp mesh raked her fins even as Luce jerked her tail up in a coil around her body, and her alarm-call turned into a sustained scream. She couldn’t swim up quickly enough to escape from the mesh, not with so much water pummeling down on her. She couldn’t . . .
A few mermaids were still so consumed by their song of rising water that they remained oblivious to the chaos. Luce could hear the song reverberating just to her left. Without fully understanding what she was doing she flung herself in that direction, her scales goaded by those knifing wires.
Then the current spinning upward in the song caught her, and Luce was hurtling straight up, still screaming. Her body burst past the startled singers and up into midnight air. Suddenly Luce was turning far above the surface, watching hundreds of panicked mermaids scattering in widening circles like the ripples around a dropped stone. Huge waves released by all that falling water rode outward, sweeping away even the mermaids who were still too confused to swim. Just in time, because those awful black spheres were almost at the surface now, lifting their cruel
net with them.
Most of the mermaids were outside the area enclosed by the spheres. Only a few dozen were caught, their song breaking into shrieks with the first touch of the mesh as it rose below them. In those brief moments while she rotated in space, Luce understood: the mesh was meant to drive the mermaids to the surface and trap them there, while—
She heard the beat of helicopter blades above her, and now she was plummeting right into the center of the net. Mermaids flopped strangely, stretched out on the surface of the water in their struggle not to graze those wires. Every tiny movement lacerated their fins, the skin of their backs, their faces. Luce saw her followers gasping and crazed, their bodies covered in a delicate tracery of trickling blood.
Most of the ones who’d escaped from the net had disappeared below the water, but some of the bravest fought their way back through the outracing waves and hovered nearby, gaping in horror while they wondered how to help their trapped comrades. As she crashed down into the net’s center, Luce noticed Imani staring at her in desperation.
“Imani! To the bridge! Lead everyone back to the bridge!”
In the split second that followed, Luce saw Imani hesitate.
She saw how much Imani wanted to ignore the order and try to help Luce instead. In that moment Luce felt nothing but a single explosive wish: that Imani would abandon her.
Then she saw Imani nod in assent, her eyes wide and stunned.
“Start the blockade! Now! Imani, go!”
There was a rattling noise, and Luce turned in time to see the first blast of machine gun fire cut through Bex in a line that began at her shoulder and slanted straight across her heart. A dozen jets of blood sprayed from Bex’s opening chest, and her shoulders tipped away from her torso as if they were hinged. Luce saw pale eyes watching through the domed window of a round black machine.
Those sleek, compact submarines would be harder to knock out of the way with waves than a boat would, Luce realized. They were designed to travel through buffeting undersea currents, to resist the water’s force. The mermaids around her were screaming in shock, and the helicopter was swooping down again.