by Sarah Porter
“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.
And then the memory became a living sound in her throat: a single low note that brushed the shrieking faces above her like a rain of light kisses, like a wind that could carry away all their tears.
A thousand distraught voices fell silent together as Luce’s voice rose. They couldn’t see her, positioned as she was directly under the beams supporting their feet, but they still recognized at once that the music streaming from her was entirely different from the kind of mermaid song they’d grown used to hearing. It was new, with a magic that wasn’t meant to enchant the water at all. It wasn’t even meant to enchant the humans who heard it.
Instead it was a song that wanted only to join with them, to share in their grief and terror and then, by sharing those unbearable feelings, to let them spin away in notes as fine as strands of drifting silk.
As she sang to them, Luce began to understand. With absolute tenderness she accepted the hatred and rage of the people above her. She turned those tortured emotions into music, let them expand and float in vibrating sonic clouds. And as she sang that darkness, the crowd on the bridge discovered that darkness was no longer necessary. They could let it go.
A shadow seemed to press down on her. Luce glanced up in momentary alarm and saw the bridge’s planks were only a foot above her head. The wave was rising higher. In a flash she understood that more mermaids were singing to the water now. The first of the mermaids gathered by Yuan and Graciela had arrived, and they were merging their voices with the bewitching chorus below. That was why Imani had gone: to gather as many voices as possible, to swell the wave in a show of strength.
Luce leaned back, letting herself drift toward the frothing edge. The wave was wide enough to support her beyond the dark roof formed by the bridge. As she approached the drop, the currents became choppier, more effervescent, and it took increasing concentration to maintain her balance with subtle loopings and flicks of her fins. She was still singing.
It occurred to her that, if any of the humans on the bridge had a gun, they might well open fire to avenge the dead of Baltimore. For a fraction of a second she hesitated, imagining the way her heart would feel as a bullet winged through it like some bright metallic bird with sharply bladed wings.
Then she gave a last slight kick of her fins, and propelled herself out where the crowd on the bridge could see her.
Some of the faces were still crumpled with anger or slack with confusion but others were crying or simply staring into her face with wide, accepting eyes. Luce felt a kind of jolting in the wave around her. Its crest cleft into two long parallel waves, still rising, and fanned out to enwrap the bridge’s roadway without engulfing it or spilling more than a few droplets onto the people squeezed against the railings. Luce was lifted high enough that she could feel the air around her cheeks warmed by the crowd’s mingled exhalations. Some of them reached out to touch her, and Luce reached back, her fingertips grazing theirs as she swam slowly along a wave that echoed the bridge’s form.
To all of those she passed Luce sang her grief for the thousands of humans slaughtered in Baltimore. Hearing her they gazed with recognition, understanding that her sorrow for them was as deep as her sorrow for the mermaids she’d allowed to die as the price of sparing the city at her back. And then Luce felt a cool, swirling presence at her side and looked to see Imani, her eyes wide and wondering in the amber dawn as she listened thirstily to Luce’s new song: a song that had left death far behind.
37
Aftermath
Luce had been battered by too many overwhelming emotions not to collapse into numbness at the first opportunity. As the news began to come in, as it became clear that the humans weren’t going to attack, Luce couldn’t even feel surprised. And when the reporters gathered jabbering onshore and asked for her reaction to the torrent of astonishing information coming from Washington she could only offer them drowsy, irrelevant replies. Soon Yuan and Imani were doing most of the talking. Half of the Twice Lost Army was still singing below the bridge, but everyone who was off-duty seemed to be too excited to sleep. The bay was full of darting, leaping figures, and their fins flashed colored reflections across the water’s glossy skin.
Luce slumped in the shallows near the bridge’s base with her head leaning on a rock while her friends spoke and gestured vivaciously beside her, only occasionally nudging her when the reporters bought up issues they weren’t sure about. Behind the reporters a crowd of humans pressed and shuffled, but all those people didn’t seem to be frightened and enraged anymore. Instead the mood was peculiarly light, even buoyant. People cried for the dead of Baltimore, but they also cried from relief: like Imani, most of them seemed to believe that peace was finally at hand.
“Yes. That’s Anais,” Luce confirmed sadly when they showed her the photo of the dead golden-haired girl with a badly bruised throat who’d been found naked and hopelessly drained of blood in the secretary of defense’s clinging arms. “We were in the same tribe once, up in Alaska. She was . . . really dangerous . . . but still . . .” Luce went back to staring at the late-morning sunlight speckled across the bay’s low waves.
“Secretary Moreland confessed to sending her out as an agent provocateur with instructions to trick the Baltimore Twice Lost into attacking. Can you tell us something about Anais that might help explain why she would agree to do that?”
Since Luce was looking away the reporter had addressed Yuan instead. “Well, Luce is the one who knew her; I never actually met—”
“She was a sika,” Luce murmured vaguely. She didn’t look around.
“A seekah?”
“Oh—yeah.” Yuan took up the question in authoritative tones. “See, a lot of mermaids are angry. But a mermaid who’s a sika isn’t angry, just empty. They’ll do anything because they can’t really feel, so it’s like they have to do evil, crazy things to feel anything at all, and nothing means anything to them.”
“Similar to what humans would call a psychopath?”
“Pretty much, I guess.”
The conversations went on and on. Luce couldn’t understand why this Secretary Moreland guy—wasn’t he the same one who’d said on TV that she was impersonating the real Luce Korchak?—hated mermaids so much that he was ready to sacrifice thousands of human lives simply to persuade the world to share in his hatred. But, unfathomable as it was, that appeared to be precisely the case. The tapes of his conversations with Anais certainly proved he was a madman, capable of extravagant evil. On the news they said Moreland was delirious now, gibbering, but telling everything over and over again as if he couldn’t believe it himself. He’d admitted that he was the one who’d sent out the helicopter with the net too. Catarina and the other mermaids caught that day had died because of him. And he’d also arranged for the murder of certain humans, ones he considered his enemies. That part was on the tapes: they revealed that he’d been using Anais as an assassin.
He didn’t care if everyone knew the truth, not now that he’d lost Anais, now that he’d been pulled off her floating corpse by the first rescuers to arrive at the scene. He only wanted to die, and to die by a mermaid’s e
nchantment. He was begging the mermaids to show him that mercy in gratitude for his confession.
Luce didn’t think any of them would.
Poor Anais, Luce thought. A gray glaze seemed to cover the water, or maybe it only covered her eyes. She felt sick and achy. Her head seemed to be drifting by itself down to Imani’s shoulder.
“When Dorian Hurst of the Twice Lost Humans started claiming he’d been subjected to an attack by a mermaid assassin via telephone and that he’d fended her off by singing back to her, his story struck most people as pure fantasy. But now it appears that Hurst was in fact targeted by Secretary Moreland,” someone said loudly onshore.
Luce jolted out of her hazy half-sleep and sat up, her mouth suddenly opening in wordless indignation. Anais had tried to kill Dorian? How dare she?
“That got a reaction from you,” Yuan observed, smiling slyly at her. “You know that while you were singing on top of the wave earlier, Dorian was here the whole time? He wanted to go up on the bridge and jump off into the wave so he could see you. God knows how he thought he was going to squeeze through that crowd up there, but anyway. I told him no, to just let you do your thing, and he could come visit you at our camp tomorrow.”
Luce was now so wide awake that her eyes ached. Everything felt cold and sharp even though it was a beautiful warm day, and she found herself sitting bolt upright. “You told him what?”
“He’s earned it, Luce.” Yuan was firm. “I know he hurt you, but he’s earned a chance to make his case. Maybe he’s earned more than that.”
“But I—” I can’t see him, Luce thought. I can’t face it.
“And maybe you’ve earned some happiness too. I mean, the war might be over for real soon. There are just too many humans on our side now for them to keep on fighting us, right? And you know Dorian had a lot to do with that.” Yuan was watching her with an expression Luce couldn’t decipher. “What did you think about what he told us, anyway? That mermaids can turn back if they want to now?”
Luce shook her head. It felt like her skull was filled with loose silver sparks. She was beyond exhausted. “Yuan! We don’t even know if that’s true. And even if it is . . .”
“I’ll be the first in line!” Yuan grinned in such a strange haphazard way that Luce couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.
Either way, her thoughts were still on Dorian. “There’s no way he’ll be able to find our camp,” Luce murmured. It sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
“Oh, I think I gave him pretty good directions.” Yuan was still smiling. “Don’t sweat that part, general-girl.” An outcry started up in the parking lot behind them, and Yuan jerked around, raising herself as far as she could in her effort to see through the clustered humans. “Whoa, Luce. Look! What the heck?”
All the mermaids along the water’s edge turned to look. As usual the parking lot next to the bridge’s base was packed with people, sitting or standing, some with signs or cameras, singing or debating the latest electrifying fragments of news. That was normal. What wasn’t normal was that for once many of the people there were climbing back up onto the road above, shuffling and scrambling onto the hillsides as they tried to clear a path . . .
A path for a chain of black-windowed limousines. The cars advanced patiently, solemnly, but they were obviously determined not to stop before they reached the land’s limit.
Imani caught Luce’s hand and squeezed it.
Soon the limousines stopped. Doors opened, and a dozen men and women in dark, crisp suits stepped out. For all their poise, they seemed a bit uncomfortable as they looked around at the water-wall still glimmering like an immense ghost under the Golden Gate Bridge, at the jostling crowds and the wide expanse of the bay. They didn’t seem to notice the watching mermaids, low down and half-concealed by the line of rocks. “We’re here to speak with General Luce,” a man called out.
“I bet you are!” Yuan called back. “She’s right here!”
The man started apprehensively, caught sight of them, and assumed a professional smile. He was very handsome, slim and straight and black-haired, with vivid blue eyes. Luce sat up as far as she could without exposing her tail to the warm air. The black-haired man walked forward to meet her; Luce was suddenly aware of her ragged bikini top, her scars, and the missing notch in her ear. “Hi. I’m General Luce.”
“General.” He nodded, looking her over in exactly the way Luce had feared he might. “I’m Ambassador Prescott, authorized by President Leopold of the United States of America to formally request negotiations with representatives of the Twice Lost Army.” His mouth tweaked a little as he tried to repress a smile of amusement. Yuan’s forehead looked tense. Luce thought that he was having trouble taking her entirely seriously; after all, to him she must look like a child.
For a moment she was almost cowed. For a moment she almost saw herself through his eyes, as an absurd, pretty little schoolgirl with a tail like shiny mint candy—but with enough power that she had to be humored.
And then she remembered who she really was, along with everything she’d gone through to become who she was now. This ambassador was in no position to condescend to her, and she knew it.
“I speak for the Twice Lost Army,” Luce said. She kept her tone as calm and straightforward as she could manage. “Does President Leopold want peace?”
Ambassador Prescott looked a bit graver now. “He does. He’d like to meet with you in person to negotiate a treaty.”
Imani squeezed Luce’s arm, hard. It was only then that the enormity of what was happening sank in. Her mouth seemed clotted with ashes and her heart drummed.
“We’re ready to negotiate anytime,” Luce told him carefully. At first all she’d seen in Ambassador Prescott’s eyes was crystalline blue vanity, but now she began to see the possibility of something better than that. “We want peace, too.”
Prescott nodded so soberly that even Yuan stopped glaring at him. “We believe that you do, general.”
38
Dorian
The kayak steadily wove its way among the pilings under the factory next to Islais Creek. On all sides the mermaids chatting in swaying hammocks fell silent as they saw the human boy, his expression somewhere between nervous and determined, being escorted into their secret redoubt by Lieutenant Yuan. He looked around at them in turn, the dim shine of their bodies like sleepy comets in the shadows. “Where’s Luce?”
“Our general is still asleep,” a small mermaid, no older than eight, called defensively from the water. “Yuan, don’t you think we should let her rest?”
“She’s been asleep for like twenty hours straight already,” Yuan said. “And this is important, too. Would you please go wake her? Tell her she has a visitor.”
For the next few minutes Dorian’s foot could be heard tapping gently but rapidly on the kayak’s hull. “Yuan,” he whispered, “what if she really doesn’t want to talk to me? I completely blew it with her, and she’s probably going to think that I’m not worth her time.”
“If she refuses, she refuses, and then you get to deal with that,” Yuan agreed. She smiled. “But I don’t think she will.”
A soft rippling disturbance approached beneath the dusky surface and then stopped ten feet away. Even through the dark water Dorian could see that the submerged tail flashed a light silvery green, and he groaned and leaned sideways, one hand floating tentatively toward her. If Yuan hadn’t caught hold of the kayak he would have capsized. “Luce?”
Dorian and Yuan could both see the luminous form slip closer to the surface, hesitate, and then retreat again.
“At least give me a chance to tell you how sorry I am. Please.”
Luce’s head parted the waters. She started to say something, then stopped and twisted a bit. “Hi . . . Dorian.”
For a moment Dorian just stared at her: she had the same spiky dark hair as ever, the same long charcoal eyes and broad forehead and slightly sharp features. The same unbearable beauty still radiated from her, undiminished
by her scars. So much about her was exactly the way he remembered that it only made the aching strangeness of her expression harder for him to accept. “Hey, Luce. I’m really . . . happy to see you.”
She gazed at him searchingly. He wondered what she saw. “Does Zoe know you’re here?” Luce asked quietly.
The question startled him. “Oh—yeah. We were just texting about it last night. She wished me luck.” He caught Luce’s look of perplexity and hurried to explain. “Zoe and I broke up a long time ago.”
Luce was still watching his face as if she were trying to see into an undersea crevasse many fathoms deep. It was both painful and thrilling. “Why?” she asked.
“Why? Because Zoe’s not stupid. She knew I still loved you.”
Luce looked away from him and down. Her tail was curled behind her and he could see her fins stirring just below the surface.
“Um . . .” Yuan began. “There are a few wharves on the other side of the factory? You’ll have more privacy back there.”
Luce nodded. Without glancing at Dorian again she began to lead the way, and he paddled after her. The war had changed her so much, he realized. Maybe too much?
She led him out into the blazing daylight and then below a small dark slip with a half-sunk motorboat still tied to it. A monstrous metal construction scabbed with rust, maybe some kind of ancient machinery, loomed from the waves nearby, and the water ran in chevrons of taupe and lemon yellow and milky turquoise. Luce sat close to the water’s edge, her tail coiled tight around her, and caught the kayak’s side in both hands. Its hull lightly scraped against the pebbled seafloor. She was very close to him now but she still wouldn’t look up, and suddenly Dorian realized why. The fringe of her lashes gleamed with tears. She was trying not to cry in front of him.
He reached out and curled his fingers around her damaged ear, then—so lightly that his fingers barely grazed her—he stroked the side of her face. “Luce, I’m sorry. I know I screwed up. I was completely in love with you the whole time, even when I was breaking up with you. I mean, I loved you so much that it just made me angry, like, that my feelings were out of my control. And I took that out on you.” Luce glanced up at him so quickly that he felt himself lanced by phosphorescent beams. Then her eyes lowered again. But to his surprise she didn’t pull away from his caress. If anything she might have drawn slightly nearer to him.