by Sarah Porter
Sadie’s sunset-colored tail was lashing in vexation. It reminded Anais that her fins should be flicking, too. “She’s lying,” Sadie hissed. “Paige, I can tell!”
Anais did her best to look wounded. She began rippling her tail so vigorously that her whole body gyrated.
“Why would she lie about something like that!” Paige yelled. “Sadie, nobody would just make that up. Why—if those filthy humans killed General Luce, we’re going to make them pay for that! Come on. You have to explain everything to Lieutenant Tricia. I don’t care how hard it is for you to talk about it!”
Anais went slack in the water, passively letting the two strangers grab her by both arms and drag her toward the glimmering, upright wave. Serene golden light rose like a mist on the horizon, and the wave concentrated the dawn’s glow into brilliant pleats and falling streamers of unbearable purity. Below the wave was the line of mermaids, their hands linked except now and then when one of them broke free and rose to the surface for air. And in the center of the line was a harsh-looking girl with vivid green eyes and ash brown hair who had to be Lieutenant Tricia. There was something in Tricia’s look—something stubborn, furious, and full of raw, unexamined emotion—that made Anais think she might be in luck. She shot Anais a hard, slightly contemptuous look. But for all Tricia’s apparent toughness Anais detected a quiver deep inside it: Tricia was already fighting a continuous undercurrent of panic.
The way to deal with Tricia would be to channel her fear and feed it back to her until it amplified into hysteria.
“So who’s this?” Tricia barked. “The last thing I want now is to get stuck training some sad little newbie!”
“We didn’t ask her name,” Paige groaned. “Tricia, she says—”
Tricia nodded brusquely. “We’ll get to that. What’s your name, new girl?”
Again a tremor of instinct warned Anais in time. “I’m Regina. I—Oh, no, you’ll be so angry when you hear what they did to General Luce, and maybe you’ll blame me for telling you . . .” Anais deliberately sent her voice wavering higher.
“I bet Regina’s not even her real name,” Sadie muttered. “Tricia, listen . . .”
“To General Luce?” Tricia burst out, and Sadie fell silent. Anais could feel the agitation she’d put into her tone moving through Tricia like a transfusion of tainted blood. “Regina, you start talking right now! Who—did they dare—our general—we’ll—”
Some of the mermaids began deserting their places in the row to find out what was happening. As the crowd thickened the wave began to totter. Eager, reckless girls pressed in, clamoring with questions, and Tricia’s obvious anxiety danced and dabbled over them like a living, serpentine thing.
Anais allowed herself to shoot Sadie a look of such dark triumph that, if any of the others had seen it, it would have given her away completely. Sadie’s indignant cry was instantly lost in the uproar.
“Everybody shut up!” Tricia yelled. “Just shut up and listen! Our general, our great general, she’s—”
“Dead,” Anais moaned dramatically. “General Luce is dead! Whenever she was just about to finally die they would pour some water on her scales and then she would start slowly drying out all over again! They did it live on TV, to send us a message they said, and it went on for hours! I’ve never seen anything so, so terrible! And right when she was dying she said that trying to make peace with humans had been a big mistake!”
“A message?” Tricia shrieked. “We’ll send them a message right back! We’ll—”
“No we won’t,” Sadie snapped. She swirled forward and stopped with her face immediately in front of Tricia’s. “We’ll send someone to find out if Regina’s telling the truth. And if she isn’t, and I already know she’s not—”
“Find out how?” Paige sneered. “By asking the humans? The same humans who just tortured General Luce to death?”
“We don’t even know Regina! I’d trust a human more than I trust her!”
“Since when do you make the decisions here, Sadie?” Tricia was rippling savagely, her dark green fins kicking rhythmically. “What is this? A mutiny?”
Sadie reacted to this by lifting her head and unfurling her gorgeous amber tail to its full length. “It’s only a mutiny,” Sadie announced, “if I disobey my general, Tricia. And you know what? That’s not you. Everybody who follows General Luce? We are keeping this wave standing!” Sadie swam backwards, pouring her voice into the song. Anais couldn’t help but notice at once that Sadie was an exceptional singer. Her back was arched and dawn glow lit the swanlike curve of her throat. She fought the immense weight of the water above her, flooding it with her clear ascending voice. The wave above was bent, crumpling, as a few mermaids parted ways with the crowd and rushed to join their voices with Sadie’s song.
Anais’s distress was perfectly genuine now. She watched in anxiety as the Twice Lost mermaids of Baltimore chose sides, each of them using her voice to declare her allegiance to Sadie or to Tricia.
One by one they joined either the ranks of the singers, or the ranks of the silenced.
∗ ∗ ∗
The giant wave above them teetered, bent halfway up its height like some doddering ancient man. Anais watched it from a spot a yard below the surface, gazing at the wave as if through a rippling glass pane. The singers strained to keep the wave up, their voices turning hoarse and wild as they tried desperately to support a volume of water that suddenly seemed to be staggering from its own weary immensity. On the freeway the cars’ windshields flashed bright palms of dawn, and people shrunken by distance walked along a promenade that followed the harbor’s curves. They didn’t seem to realize that anything was wrong.
For several minutes Anais couldn’t guess which side would win. At least two-thirds of the mermaids here had joined her and Tricia in embittered silence, their hearts poisoned by what she’d told them. They waited around her at various levels so that the water flicked with fins and swirled with bright hair. And as she watched the wave slumping farther forward, its crest writhing from the thrust of the mutineers’ frenzied song, Anais began to feel just a trace of the same emotion that had unaccountably possessed her on the day she’d sung to Luce’s father. It was a sensation of hollowness in her chest, as if a delicate creature that lived there had suddenly escaped from her and all she could feel was the brush of its departing wings. Anais didn’t have a name for what she was experiencing. Luce or Yuan or Nausicaa could have told her that it was regret.
But if she told the truth now, the timahk would hardly be enough to protect her.
“Sadie’s right,” Anais whispered. Her golden hair spun across her mouth as if it wanted to stifle her, then danced up and blinded her eyes. “I was lying.”
No one reacted to that. They were all transfixed by the sight of that crooked wave, somehow both lurching forward and yet suspended midway through its fall. Maybe they hadn’t heard her at all.
“I was lying!” Anais yelled. “Sadie, I was lying!”
Sadie heard her, and for a moment—for a pause briefer than a heartbeat—astonishment crushed the song in her throat.
34
Healing
Luce sang through her shift automatically. Catarina was dead, a dozen other mermaids were dead, but the war was still a living, lashing thing that had to be fed and tended. She was feeding it her own body and her song, just as earlier that day she had fed it her heart. Inexplicable things had happened over the last several hours. The president had denied responsibility for the attack, even sent her an apology, and the crowds onshore kept screaming her name . . . but none of that changed anything. The war was still famished, endlessly demanding, and she was still its unwilling keeper.
For once her song meant nothing to her, though magic still flowed from it. And at midnight when Cala arrived to replace her Luce slipped silently away. No doubt at the encampment there were friends waiting to comfort her. Yuan and Imani would hug her and assure her she’d done the right thing, the only thing, that she’d had
no choice . . . and Luce knew she couldn’t bear to hear any of that.
Instead she swam deep, hugging the shore. For at least an hour she wove randomly between black pilings and lightly brushed the pink kiss of the anemones, stared into bone white sea stars draped across rotten beams. She couldn’t face her fellow mermaids, but something was pulling her along, and when at last she came up near a collapsing pier she knew what it was. That hunched figure sitting at the pier’s end was just as heartbroken as she was. Every line of his back showed it.
Seb, Luce thought with surprise, might understand what had happened that day. At least he might understand it enough. She dipped low again and came up in front of him.
He didn’t seem surprised to see her and raised a hand in greeting. His worn face looked severe and mournful under his uneven hair. His hideous tie flapped in the wind, and he’d pulled his blazer as tight as it could go. For a human, Luce realized, it was a chilly night—in San Francisco even August offered no guarantee of warmth—and there was nothing she could do for him.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” Luce said. “To thank you. You did everything right.”
Seb just looked at her then shook his head. “Well, it’s a real luxury, isn’t it, Miss Luce? When you can do the right thing, because there’s one truly right thing to do?”
Luce was suddenly aware of the water cradling her, gently and faithfully. She looked at Seb with gratitude. “Yes. That is . . . a luxury.”
“So maybe I’m the one who should thank you, for giving me such a nice clear-cut right thing to do. Helping the mermaid who saved me when that’s not enough for her and she’s gone and set her heart on saving more than that? That was an easy one, Miss Luce. I haven’t had so many opportunities in my life to do anything as right as that. I’ve mostly been doing something at least halfway wrong, just fighting to get at one little speck of right that was mixed in with it somewhere.” Seb kept on looking at her. For all his tattered absurdity his gaze was as transparent as glass, and grave comprehension shone through it. “And I know you know about that.”
Luce felt something blocky and horrible in her throat. She looked away, unable to answer him, and wrapped her arms around a piling for support. Hoops of apricot light cast by the streetlamps pranced on the water. Luce looked at those beaming rings and thought she might fall through them and plummet into another world. “I killed them, Seb. Mermaids who trusted me.”
“I know you did, Miss Luce. I watched the whole thing on TV, along with practically everybody else on this planet of ours. It was as horrible as anything I ever saw, even in Vietnam, and I’m no slacker where horror’s concerned.”
“I had a choice. I let Catarina die. I decided that.”
“You made a choice. That’s why everybody here in humanland thinks you’re the big hero tonight. They’re taping your picture in their windows. You’re looking out all over, on all the streets, with those sad eyes of yours. It’s gonna change things for sure, what you did.”
“I’m not a hero,” Luce murmured dully. “I never was. Catarina was right about me.”
“I know you’re no hero,” Seb said seriously. “They set you up so you’d be a monster no matter what you did. And now a monster’s what you are.”
Luce nodded. Far from feeling offended, she was grateful and wildly relieved that Seb understood her so well. She looked at him. He was shivering from cold because he’d thrown away those filthy coats he used to wear—thrown them away so he could look better for his role as her ambassador. “I wish I could help you, Seb. I wish we did have treasure and pearls for you. I’m sorry . . .”
“Thanks, Lucy Goose. And I wish you knew that a monster like you is worth twenty heroes.”
Luce leaned her head on the piling and closed her eyes. “Please don’t say that.”
“I’ve known heroes, Miss Luce. Plenty of them. You know I even knew that Secretary of Defense Moreland back when we were both young? Big hero, that one. So I’m kind of an authority on this stuff, and I’m going to tell you whatever truth I’ve got in me to tell.”
She swayed in the darkness. Around her hovered empty spaces shaped like her father, Dorian, Nausicaa, Catarina. No wonder everyone always abandoned her. She was a monster made of nothingness; she was ruin and desolation wearing a beautiful mask. Everyone knew that, but no one would admit it—apparently not even Seb, although she’d thought he understood.
“Hey,” Seb said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
It took Luce a long moment to realize that he wasn’t talking to her.
“Oh, God,” Yuan said. “Poor Luce. She just doesn’t get a break.”
Luce cringed—at Yuan’s presence, at her sympathy, at the concerned looks she knew both Yuan and Seb were firing her way.
“She’s got the shadow sitting on her heart tonight,” Seb said as if that were the most rational explanation in the world. “She’s feeling what it is when you have to know exactly what kind of a monster you are, and you can’t look away from that.”
“She’s going to have to,” Yuan said firmly. “Look away, I mean. I didn’t come searching for Luce so I could try to cheer her up. There’s . . . something she has to deal with.”
“Oh, Lord,” Seb said. “Don’t make her do more tonight! Just look at her.”
“I see her,” Yuan agreed. Suddenly Luce felt Yuan’s strong, smooth hands on her arms, gently unwrapping them from the piling. “I’d let her stay here if I could, Seb. Really. But this is important. Luce?”
Important, Luce thought with grim sarcasm. “What’s so important now?” She barely muttered the question.
“They could be lying,” Yuan conceded. “But if they’re not—and I really don’t believe they are, actually—”
“Yuan,” Luce snapped. “What do I have to do now?”
Yuan’s gentleness was gone in a flash. She gripped Luce by both shoulders, spun her savagely around, and gave her such a quick, jarring shake that Luce opened her eyes in exhausted surprise. Yuan’s golden face appeared, fierce and radiant and loving. “You have to come see your father, Luce. He’s by the bridge. And he is not okay.”
∗ ∗ ∗
With those words everything changed. The night seemed to inhale, to stretch itself wider and darker in all directions.
Luce gave an apologetic wave while Seb sadly watched them from the pier. Yuan was already towing her away and talking as they swam. “Luce, listen, about your dad: it’s bad. He’s not physically hurt, but . . . it might be something a mermaid did to him? And I don’t know, but there’s this nice old guy who brought your dad to the bay, and he keeps saying . . . that maybe you can help somehow? Come on.”
They were already swimming under the water. The darkness ran like quicksilver around Luce and also straight through her veins. She was the pulse in the night, the racing surge, and Yuan’s words seemed to signal her from far ahead, bright and strange in the distance. She drove herself on, faster and faster, until Yuan was trailing just behind her. Past the Embarcadero and its shining clock, below the looming hill with its pale tower. As the bridge neared, Luce lunged for the surface, staring frantically at the crowd onshore. Humans were gathered there in greater numbers than ever; they all seemed to be holding candles and their faces floated on the dark like glowing balloons. Instead of jostling they stood quietly with arms around one another’s waists, staring wide-eyed at the brilliant streaks of reflected light playing on the soaring flank of the water-wall. Many of them were weeping quietly. The rush of mermaid song suffused Luce’s mind so completely that it took her a moment to understand that the humans were all singing too, in a long incantatory drone of rising and falling harmonies. It was their best effort to sing along with the mermaids under the bridge, Luce realized. They couldn’t contribute magic to the mermaids’ struggle, but they could offer compassion and the strength of their hearts. Tears swarmed into her eyes. But she didn’t see her father.
“He’s farther along, Luce. Around the next bend, on the ocean side. We tried
to pick a spot where you could have a little more privacy, but it’s still pretty crowded.”
Luce dipped again. On the bridge’s far side was a hill with strange bunkerlike buildings and terraces set into its slope. The singing human crowd had grown big enough now to submerge the bunkers in a tide of bodies: people sat and stood on the decks and rooftops, their candles sending pitching waves of light across their faces. The shore here was paved in cement, defined by a row of large rocks mortared together.
And at the base of one building, very near the water’s edge, was an empty doorway. And poised in that doorway . . .
Her father, but also—not her father. Her father with everything that made him who he was somehow missing. His face and body looked slack and empty, and another man—a thickset, strong-looking man with tan skin and neat silver hair—was holding him firmly upright. Luce swam closer, a strange paralysis gripping her heart, her eyes helplessly drawn by the awful vacancy of her father’s face. To think that she’d blamed him for not trying to see her . . . Even when he’d been snarled in the spirits’ enchantment on that lost island, he hadn’t seemed as profoundly injured as he did now. His body was like a shell for the void.
Even worse, she could hear the strange shapeless emptiness that was waiting for her behind his cinnamon eyes.
Even worse, the void was singing.
Luce was gripping the shore before she even knew what she was doing. Some of the people on the roof had started calling to her, crying out her name. The silver-haired man stepped out of his doorway, Andrew Korchak’s vacant body still sagging against him, and half turned to silence the crowd with a single imperious hand. “General Luce isn’t here for you,” he announced, sharply. “She’s here to see her father, and he’s not well. Please respect that.” He kept on staring into the faces above until they quieted, then he nodded with a certain curt efficiency and carefully lowered Andrew until he was sitting loosely cross-legged just behind the row of rocks that separated him from his daughter. By stretching her arm through a gap between two rocks Luce was able to catch his hand and hold it tight, and all the time she was listening to the void’s slow, musical purr, attuning herself to its thrum and its cadence. To fight it she had to become its intimate, as familiar to it as its own echo.