The Twice Lost

by Sarah Porter

  Luce sighed. The Twice Lost Army had swelled with the addition of refugees and drifters attracted by their fame, and a large mermaid encampment had sprung up under the wharves of the abandoned naval shipyards at Mare Island far in the north bay. The last thing Luce felt like doing was swimming that far, especially when it might mean another argument. But Imani was right: if Luce cared about Catarina’s feelings, she should do something to show it. “Okay. I’ll go. Imani . . .”

  Imani only smiled silently, the silver water lapping around her dark shoulders.

  “Thank you for . . . for reminding me to do the right thing. You always do.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Luce knew more or less where to find the Mare Island camp, but she hadn’t actually been there before. When she surfaced fifty yards from its shore she was bewildered by the sweep and confusion of the island’s waterfront: rusty cranes painted mustard and navy and dusty green crisscrossed the sky, a row of collapsing barracks stood deep in swaying yellow grass, and graffiti mottled the scaling white warehouses with names densely layered in ruby and silver scrawl. Bridges arched everywhere behind the island, their iron beams a complicated geometric lace against the mist covering the hills. Swallows dipped overhead. It was as lonely in its way as the distant coast of Alaska had been. In that whole decrepit expanse she didn’t see a single human being.

  But somewhere under the water, Mare Island wasn’t deserted at all. Luce dived again, skimming along the jagged piers that rambled out into the bay. She could hear voices licking through the water but so bent and trembling that it was hard to tell quite where they were coming from. She was swimming away from the tangle of cranes and desolate buildings, out to where a broad dark pier glowered just above the water’s surface. A charred, half-fallen shed leaned at its end, and as Luce approached it girls’ voices seemed to drift closer to her.

  “General Luce! You came to see us!” It was the tan-skinned mermaid who’d sung beside Luce through the night after that shocking murder. “Um, do you remember me?”

  “Of course I remember you. I was so sad that night, and hearing you sing—it helped keep me going.” Luce hesitated. “But I don’t know your name?”

  “Thanks. I’m Elva.” She suddenly sounded shy. “Did you swim up here for a reason?”

  “I have to find Catarina,” Luce said softly.

  Elva’s expression darkened as she pointed into the deep shadows under the pier. “She’s back there, all the way at the shore. Look, if she gives you a hard time . . .”

  Luce tried to smile, but her insides were tense with dread. “It’ll be okay.” She dived, dipping and weaving her way through a forest of swaying fins. There were even more mermaids here than in the encampment near Hunter’s Point. The low dark space was densely webbed with nets and hammocks. Mermaids curled half-submerged, dreaming or whispering.

  Luce found her former queen slumped on her side on the gritty pebble shore. The pier formed a ceiling less than a foot above their heads, its rotting beams glittering with condensation and grubby with soot. Catarina’s arm stretched up the beach, her pale hand emerging from her pooling red-gold hair; she turned her head just enough to glance sullenly at Luce, then buried her face in the fiery tangles again. Luce reached out and lightly touched her shoulder. “Hey, Cat?”

  Catarina pivoted her head again. “Hello, generalissima. You seem to have gone out of your way for once.”

  Luce suppressed an impulse to snap back at her. “Cat, things shouldn’t be like this with us! I don’t really understand why you’re so angry with me, but—”

  “Angry?” Catarina raised herself slightly. Her stunning face was oddly blotchy and streaked with black dust. “Is that what I am, Lucette? Angry that you’re still so childish that you can’t see through Nausicaa and her ridiculous flattery? Is that what you think?”

  It took an effort, but Luce kept her voice level. “I really didn’t come here to fight with you, Cat.” She paused, wondering if she should ask the next question, not sure she wanted to know the answer. “What do you have against Nausicaa, anyway? You said something about her and Queen Marina . . .” Queen Marina, whom Catarina had adored and followed and lost when the queen left the sea out of love for a human and died on the shore. Luce couldn’t quite believe that Nausicaa would have done anything truly wrong to Marina, though.

  “Indeed.” Catarina exhaled sharply. “Indeed, just as Nausicaa is doing now with you, Lucette. She appeared out of nowhere, telling her preposterous stories of living with the first mermaids, of spending thousands of years in the sea and escaping death again and again. And Marina believed all of it, blindly enchanted with her. For three months Marina completely forgot the rest of us. She behaved like the tide chasing after the moon.”

  Catarina was just jealous, then. “If that’s all that happened, you shouldn’t have made everybody think that Nausicaa did something untrustworthy! Cat, those things you said when Nausicaa came, I mean, all of that really wasn’t fair.”

  Catarina glowered. “Nausicaa is untrustworthy. She abandoned Marina in the night, with no explanation, no goodbye. For so great a queen as Marina, to have her devotion discarded so callously . . . She never fully recovered her former strength of mind, Lucette. She was half-broken, remote. And it was not long afterward that Marina sought consolation by throwing herself into the arms of that human. If it hadn’t been for Nausicaa’s heartlessness . . .”

  Luce flinched, thinking of how recently she’d woken up to find that Nausicaa had vanished. And then, Catarina . . . “But you left me without saying goodbye, Cat. Don’t you remember? Up in Alaska I came back to the cave and you were just gone. I don’t see why it’s so different when Nausicaa does the same thing.”

  “I had no choice!” Catarina snarled. She moved to sit up, but the filthy planks above stopped her. “For Nausicaa everything is a choice. Anyone who cares for her is simply a temporary amusement, Lucette. As you will certainly discover! But I had real responsibilities. I had to do whatever I could to save our tribe from that sika Anais. The only possibility open to me was to leave you, and to trust that you would behave with honor and become their queen!” Catarina laughed bitterly. “I gave you too much credit, it seems. Queen is too trivial a title to tempt you. You require much more than that!”

  For a moment Luce was distracted by anger at Catarina’s insinuations. Her tail thrashed the murky water into froth and she looked away into the dimness, fighting to compose herself. Then it hit her: “that sika”? Luce was certain she’d never heard Catarina use that word before: the word for a mermaid who’d lost her humanity not through suffering like the rest of them, but simply through her own essential coldness, her utter inability to feel or to love.

  Luce had learned that Anais was a sika from Nausicaa, in fact, along with everything a sika’s nature implied. But Catarina had never even mentioned it as a possibility.

  “You knew Anais was a sika?” Luce asked. Her voice came out thin and high and oddly detached from her, a rag of sound brushing through the shadows. “Did you know that all along?”

  The dim glow of Catarina’s face showed the flickering shifts of her expression all too clearly: surprise, an instantaneous blink of something like alarm, then a slight self-conscious smirk. Streams of copper-shining hair obscured one of her moon gray eyes. “Well . . . I knew there was nothing to see, of course, in the indication that surrounded her. Nothing like a story to be captured with a sideways glance, as I can still observe the story of what your uncle did to you. But as for what that meant . . . I suppose I knew that Anais might be one of such mermaids as I had heard described some years before, a sika.”

  “But if you knew,” Luce began, her voice still that thin strange scrap drifting on the air between them. “Cat, if you knew you should have warned everyone as soon as Anais joined us! Why didn’t you . . . we could have thrown her out of the tribe before . . .” Before so many people died, before the tribe went crazy sinking all those ships, before she killed those larval mermaids. Befo
re she tried to murder Dana and Violet and me, Luce thought.

  Catarina looked away, and all at once Luce knew exactly why she hadn’t taken action to prevent Anais from worming her way into the tribe and destroying it.

  “Had you learned what a sika was from Nausicaa, Cat? And because you just didn’t want to believe Nausicaa was right about anything . . . you pretended everything was fine with Anais until most of the girls in our tribe were on her side, and it was too late?” Luce stopped talking. She felt as if all the air had been ripped from her lungs, as if her heart was seized in a vice that squeezed all the blood from it and kept it from beating.

  Cat still wouldn’t meet her eyes, and Luce knew it was true. Catarina had actually allowed Anais to take over the tribe out of the spite and envy she felt toward Nausicaa. She’d willfully ignored the warnings she’d heard years before Anais was even born.

  “Cat?” Luce’s voice came out jagged, accusatory. “Cat, is that what happened? You should have driven Anais away the second she showed up, and you just didn’t do it? And then you left me alone to deal with your mess?”

  Catarina glanced at her for just a fraction of a second. The gray shine of her eyes stabbed through the shadows, flashed away again. “I suppose the question seems so easy to you, Lucette. You would never doubt anything Nausicaa told you, not even the most outrageous lies. After all, if you did, you would also have to doubt the sincerity of her friendship for you. But Nausicaa never told me lies too charming to question. So why would I believe a single word she said?”

  Anais’s out-of-control attacks on ships had provoked the humans to the point of slaughtering their old tribe. Luce closed her eyes and saw girls’ faces veiled by water stained ruby; she saw throats gashed wide and bubbling with blood.

  “You should have believed Nausicaa because she was right! She was always telling the truth! You just didn’t want to listen . . .” Luce moaned.

  Anais’s actions had helped bring on the war.

  “Of course you take Nausicaa’s side! I knew you would, Lucette.”

  “I am not taking Nausicaa’s side, Cat!” Luce’s voice was high and sharp enough that other mermaids under the pier turned to look at them. “You’re the one who wants to make everything be about Nausicaa and how much you hate her. I’m taking the mermaids’ side.”

  The silence went on so long that it seemed to flex and coil like a snake. Catarina drew herself up, her beautiful face stiff and haughty, and gazed at Luce with regal disdain. “Luce, do you dare to suggest that I am not on the mermaids’ side?” she hissed at last. “You accuse me of this, when you love humans so much that you degrade not only yourself for their sake, but you even lead your followers into the same degradation? When you would accept any humiliation from that human boy of yours if only he would pretend to care for you!”

  A cold, airless rage choked Luce’s heart, clotted in her throat and eyes. There was nothing she could say in the face of such despicable cruelty, especially coming from Catarina. Between the low planks and the beach darkness waited, like some heavy, compressed substance. Something about that darkness felt to Luce like contempt made visible.

  She wouldn’t answer Catarina. She would never answer her again.

  “I have no place here, in this absurd army of yours. I should leave,” Catarina murmured at last.

  Do you think I’ll beg you not to go? Luce thought bitterly. After what you just said?

  “Does it mean nothing to you, Luce? If I leave here? We may never see each other again.” Catarina’s voice was veering up the scale, wild and plaintive.

  Luce finally turned to look at her. Catarina’s gray eyes met hers with a shocked, scattered brilliance. Cat’s cheeks were bone white, and as she saw the look on Luce’s face she visibly recoiled. Her recoil transformed into a sudden, violent rippling like a flame in the wind, and she vanished under the water. Luce could just see the golden shimmer of her tail streaking away.

  For half a second, Luce felt nothing but a kind of savage relief that Cat was gone. Then something in Luce’s stifled heart burst free, and she gave a trembling cry and dived after her.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Luce had forgotten what an exceptional swimmer Catarina was, how extraordinarily quick and fluid she was even for a mermaid. The water of the north bay was murkier than she was used to, beige and unpleasantly brackish; Catarina’s golden fins showed only as a kind of bright disturbance far ahead. “Cat!” Luce called into the opaque water. “Cat, I’m sorry!” She knew how well sound traveled through water; surely Catarina must hear her?

  Then Luce couldn’t catch even a glimmer of distant fins anymore, even as she drove herself faster. When she surfaced for a breath there was nothing around but the lonely shore with its scattered palm trees and rusty metal huts leaning in auburn grass. Bridges like the skeletons of snakes were slung across the pale sky.

  But if Catarina was determined to leave she could be going in only one direction: back toward the Golden Gate and the wild deep sea beyond. Luce gathered her strength and dived again, her tail lashing behind her. Once Cat reached the open ocean, Luce would lose all hope of finding her. A black slash of wings broke the water just in front of her, startling her into reeling abruptly sideways, before she saw the cormorant sweep toward the surface again with a silver fish in its beak.

  Still, Catarina was nowhere, not even when the city loomed ahead again, not even when Luce came up to see the dull red curves of the Golden Gate Bridge not too far away. Mermaid song vibrated through the water, stroking Luce’s fins with tremulous music, and the wave beneath the bridge still shone like a wall formed from millions of shivering crystals. The sun burned through a fine haze, and light like grainy brush strokes danced around her. “Catarina?” Luce called, but the air suddenly pulsed with a loud, disturbing noise that drowned out her voice.

  Luce looked up to see the helicopter whizzing overhead. Of course there were always helicopters around the bay now, sent by different news channels as well as by the military, but they never came this close. The military ones usually just circled high above the bridge, watching the mermaids below.

  This one was darkly drab, heavy but sleekly formed, menacing: definitely the same as the ones that had attacked them before. And it was swinging rapidly lower. Something Luce couldn’t quite make out swagged from the helicopter’s base until it was almost skimming the water. Then with an agitated rippling the surface broke and whatever that dangling thing was dipped into the bay, slicing deeper as it neared the bridge with disquieting speed. Luce raced ahead. The glassy sides of the towering wave juddered with the pounding air from the propeller. She heard screams unraveling from the human crowd lining the bridge, saw people shift and jostle and slam one another in a panic as the helicopter rushed toward them, its blades ripping so close to their gathered faces that Luce feared they would be slashed to bits.

  At the last possible moment the helicopter changed course, pulling steeply straight upward. Luce had a brief moment to feel relieved.

  Then she recognized what the helicopter was dragging with it, out of the bay and up into the gusting wind.

  A net. That thing hanging from its bottom was a net.

  And now it wasn’t empty.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The helicopter rose, its blades hacking at the air. Below it a tangle of mermaids—ten? a dozen?—jerked and thrashed against the net’s strands. Luce flung herself across the water even as she stared in desperation. Netted arms bent randomly around rippling, translucent fins in subtle shades of bronze and celadon and smoky peach; ribbons of long hair tumbled through the mesh; dark and pale hands wrenched at the strands, trying frantically to tear their way free. Then the helicopter stopped its ascent and simply hovered high in space: higher than the bridge, higher than any wave the mermaids could hope to command.

  Didn’t the humans understand that—

  “They’ll die!” Luce heard herself screaming into the sky. “You have to put them back in the water! They’ll die!”

/>   If the helicopter’s crew heard her, they gave no sign of it. But other mermaids did. In a moment Luce was surrounded by clamoring girls: “Luce, what are they doing? Aren’t they afraid we’ll let the wave go?” “What are we supposed to do?” “You have to make them stop, Luce! You have to!”

  The standing wave still shone in the misty, smoldering sunlight, but Luce saw that it was starting to dip and wobble a little. Too many singers were abandoning their places, racing out to see what was happening.

  “We have to keep singing!” Luce yelled. “No matter what! Everyone, get back in the line!”

  Luce saw reluctance, even anger, in the faces around her. “They’re killing our friends!” Eileen snarled back at her. “We’ll go back to singing once they let everyone out of that net. How’s that for a compromise?”

  “And what about all those humans onshore? What about the ones who are just there to help us? Are you going to let them drown?” Luce’s voice was savage as she wheeled on Eileen. “Get back to your place, Eileen. What if one of those humans is that person you keep waiting for?”

  Eileen’s face blanched and she swirled back a few feet under the impact of Luce’s glare. “Fine. I guess you have a point.” She crooked her strawberry-blond head at the other undecided mermaids. “Come on, everyone. You heard the general.”

  Eileen was just turning to go when two appalling sounds called her back.

  The first was a thin, strangely pale-sounding scream from the net above. It prickled on the air like a million motes of galvanized dust.

  The second was a loudspeaker. A rough, staticky voice boomed down through the treble of that scream. “You have three minutes to lower the wave completely and end the blockade. Repeat, you have three minutes only. If you do not comply, the captive mermaids will be allowed to die. Release the wave now, and the captives will be released.”

  It was so insane that for an instant Luce could only stare up at the helicopter, flabbergasted. They must realize the impossibility of safely lowering so much water in such a short time. If she obeyed them, she’d unleash a tsunami. A speeding field of water would crush the city, and thousands of people would certainly die.