by Sarah Porter
By the time he'd made it to the beach where she'd left him he'd started to feel just a little bit sorry for her. For all he knew, he was about to mess up her life completely. And she'd saved his, no matter what else she'd done. No matter whom she'd killed ... He sat on the shore, the cold lumps of the stones digging into his legs, and looked up at the sky. The stars here were bigger than he'd ever seen, outrageous in their purity and blue, blinding fire. The waves shone steel-bright in their frozen light, rising in liquid metal arches, crumpling like silver paper as they hit the stones.
Was he really going to back down out of compassion for Emily's murderer?
Dorian waited for the water to roll back, then ran down the beach and jumped onto a rock. He didn't want his fragile missive to get swamped. When the water tumbled in below him, he waited a moment and dropped the little boat on the outracing foam. As soon as he let go of it, something tightened in his stomach. He fought down a sense of queasy apprehension.
The boat sped away, becoming no more than a pale triangle skating up the dark surging water, spinning down again. He hadn't given much thought to the timing, but now he could see it had been perfect. The tide was going out, taking the folded drawing away with it. He found himself lingering on the rock in the irrational hope that the drawing would drift close enough again that he could reach down and snatch it back from the sea.
It was far away now. A white blinking eye on the wild water.
“Hey,” Dorian said softly. He didn't know how he'd gotten in the dubious habit of talking out loud to her all the time. “Hey, girlfriend.” That was a pretty sick joke, really. He suppressed an unwanted memory of her arm holding his waist, her glossy, almost luminous shoulders, that bare chest. His lips twisted into something between a smirk and a grimace. “I really don't want to cause trouble for you, but you're forcing me to. I have to do something ...”
Of course there was no answer. There never was. It seemed like all he ever did these days was talk to the unresponding night.
4. The Diver
She could stay away from him, Luce told herself. After all, she'd had the self-discipline to develop the power of her singing in ways the other mermaids had never even imagined, practicing hour after hour. And she'd managed to overcome the cold desire to sing humans to their deaths, bind them in enchantment, even as she'd felt the dark, addictive thrill of controlling so many people. With her singing Luce could force anyone to love her to the point of self-obliteration, but she'd refused to continue doing it. Compared to that, ignoring one pathetic human boy should be easy.
It was dangerous, of course, to have him howling her song on the cliffs at night. If any of the other mermaids heard him, they'd probably figure out that Luce was guilty of letting him survive; her song was so recognizable that it would almost certainly give her away. But as Luce thought it over, she decided it was a risk she could take. Her old tribe almost never swam that far from their own cave, and as long as the boy didn't see her again, he'd get tired of calling her and give up before long. Humans were cowardly and weak-minded. They got bored easily. There was no reason to believe he'd be any more determined than the rest of them. For the next few days Luce deliberately swam in the opposite direction, toward the Aleutians, even though there were more orcas that way.
On the fourth night, though, her curiosity got the better of her. Was he really still showing up at that spot on the cliffs, singing his ugly parody of her song? She skimmed through water that glowed blue with dusk and shivered with whale song, stopping at a rock heaped with drowsy seals. They were used to her and didn't startle, though a few of them looked up with dreamy black-glass eyes and snuffled.
She'd made up her mind to see if the bronze-haired boy was still singing to her. Why was she so reluctant, then, to discover the truth? Luce imagined arriving below the cliffs and hearing nothing but the rasp of surf and wind and suddenly felt almost nauseous with loneliness.
If that was it, though—if she actually wanted him to keep coming to the cliffs and singing for her—then that was worse than insanity. Hearing him would be all the pretext Anais would need to persuade the other mermaids to attack her, for one thing. She should want the human boy to forget about her as soon as possible. Talking with him would be pointless even if he didn't hate her so much, and Luce had to admit, so deservedly ... It suddenly occurred to her that he might be trying to lure her close enough that he could murder her in revenge. Maybe he was carrying a knife, even a gun.
She slid quickly along under the surface, not bothering with any singing games this time, and popped up fifty yards from the cliffs. She was careful to hold her face lowered toward the water, to keep him from seeing a telltale patch of pale skin out on the dark waves. Luce hovered in place with just a slight rippling of her fins, comfortable with the steep lift and fall as her body rode the swells.
His voice was very faint at this distance, a melodic scratching on the wind, but he was there. Luce was incredulous, again, at just how terrible human singing was, but he was clearly doing his best to reproduce the song Luce had used back when she'd lured humans to their deaths. Really, he sounded even worse than last time, as if he'd sung his throat raw. The notes croaked and sputtered, flapping awkwardly over the sea like wounded crows. She didn't know whether to think it was funny—or horribly, wrenchingly sad.
His voice was thick with heartsickness, Luce realized, with icy grief and loneliness as blue-black as the Alaskan sky in deep winter. And all that suffering was her fault. As she kept listening, she noticed a new emotion seeping from that voice as well: frustration and the beginnings of rage. He was getting furious with her for failing to appear. He wouldn't just give up, Luce suddenly realized. Instead he'd only turn crazier, more extreme...
Didn't he understand that she couldn’t talk to him? The timahk stood between them, of course, along with the risk that her old tribe would discover them together, but there was also the whole untamed vastness of the sea. Luce remembered reading somewhere that the sea covered two-thirds of the earth. To humans the sea was only an afterthought, but in reality it was the dominant force, the roiling mind of the planet, and she was a part of it now. As far as the sea was concerned, human life—his life—was filthy and insignificant. Just a source of leaking poisons.
Luce dove down again, giving herself up to the glassy dimness of the water. It was an impossible situation, and any choice she made would be wrong one way or another. She couldn't talk to him, but she could hardly leave him in so much pain either. He was maddened by a song that had pierced into him and stayed there, barbed deep into his flesh. Luce twisted in the water, her chest tight with worry. Torment would drive him to do something crazy ... Luce fought down a sudden, vivid image of his body snapped and bleeding on the rocks. Maybe the simplest solution would be to talk with him, just once, but it was hard to see how that could resolve anything. Schools of shimmering fish fanned through the greenish black water while the brilliant stars refracted into pale writhing blobs on the restless surface overhead.
Only the rare occasions when she skimmed up for a breath gave her any sense of passing time; she swam along in a blur of night and the liquid movements of the animals that shared the depths with her. Luce was so absorbed in her thoughts that she didn't notice how long she'd been swimming, or how quickly. She recoiled in surprise when the coastline suddenly bent into familiar shapes: a deep cove dipped away on her right, and she noticed a certain odd, sofa-shaped rock now almost completely submerged by the tide. She was at her old tribe's dining beach already; that rock was the one where Catarina always used to sit. It loomed in front of her, a lonely slab of darkness interrupting the rippling starlight. But the strange thing was that the rock wasn't the only patch of black standing out against the shining water. A shape pitched up and down five yards away from Luce to the left. It took her a moment to recognize what it was: a small boat, painted jet black, and anchored in the inlet's mouth with its engine cut. Luce darted deeper underwater and curled behind Catarina's rock, peering around
the edge at the boat in total perplexity. The moving water made the image curve and ripple, but she could still see it clearly enough. It was so bizarre, Luce thought. Humans never came to this place.
Whoever they were, they were being extremely quiet. Luce had almost decided that the crew must be asleep when she saw two figures slip out of the cabin. Both of them were as pitch black and sleek as the boat itself. One helped the other adjust what Luce guessed was some kind of oxygen tank. The glossy blackness enveloping them was their diving suits, then. Were they marine biologists, here to study creatures that only emerged at night? Luce froze behind the rock, keeping her head under the water and her body deep in the shadow thrown by the burning moon. Strange helmets with attachments Luce couldn't identify covered the two figures' heads; if they were seriously planning on diving this late they were probably wearing some kind of night-vision goggles. Any movement might attract their attention. She couldn't even risk slipping to the surface to breathe, but with any luck they'd finish whatever they were doing here and go away before her air ran out. Luce could stay underwater for a long time if she had to.
One diver plopped overboard: a careful, vertical drop as if it was important to minimize the splash. Luce could just see the black body slicing down through the water, the flippers stirring as the diver began kicking deeper into the cove, angling toward the rough shelf of rock that walled one side. The other figure remained on deck, peering intently into the night away from Luce. Something about the moody, anxious tension of the figure on board began to worry Luce, and it suddenly occurred to her that these people were acting more like criminals than scientists. It didn't make any sense, though. There was nothing in this desolate spot that any thief could possibly want.
The swimming diver had reached the rocks and seemed to be fiddling with them somehow, pulling back swags of seaweed and jamming or twisting an object that Luce couldn't make out. The spot was deep enough that it would probably be underwater, though barely, at even the lowest tide.
A square patch of light suddenly gleaming off to the left made Luce swing her eyes back toward the boat. The figure on board had some kind of device out, bigger than a cell phone but smaller than a computer, with an oblong, glowing screen. Like that of all mermaids, Luce's hearing was much sharper than a human's. She could hear a quick tapping at some controls, see the figure nod in apparent relief. “We're good, okay, we're doing all right here...” a man's voice mumbled, but something in the helmet distorted it into a staticky growl.
The diver was already kicking back to the boat with nervous speed, clambering up the side. The suited man still onboard stared fixedly at the screen, which was now giving out a darker glow, and didn't move to help.
“It's already transmitting,” the man growled, still nodding. The diver jumped down onto the deck and reached up to unfasten that dark, complicated helmet. “Do not remove that! You know the protocol. Do not remove your hood under any circumstances until we're back on land!”
“There's nothing here,” a woman's voice objected. Feedback whined from the helmet. “I was underwater for ten minutes, and I didn't see anything worth worrying about. I'm sweating like a dog in this thing.”
“Take it off, and I guarantee I'll write you up.” The man's voice was curt, and his companion hunched her shoulders resentfully but didn't answer. They were already moving into the cabin, and Luce could just make out a few more voices coming from inside. A quiet motor had started, and Luce could see the chain running down to the anchor slowly spooling up. A few minutes later the boat was creeping out of the cove, its engines velvet-soft. The wake was so low and smooth that it didn't even foam.
Luce squeezed her hands against the rock to calm the trembling, and her tail began to thrash. Something was very wrong.
It’s already transmitting, the man had said. Had the woman diver attached something to the rock? The worst possibility was that they'd installed some kind of underwater camera. Given the way the man had stared down at the screen in his hands, that even seemed likely. But if a camera was already transmitting images, Luce couldn't very well disable it without revealing herself. She had a sudden, disquieting memory of the first time Catarina had warned her of what would happen if the humans ever learned mermaids existed. They’d poison the whole sea if they had to, Catarina had told her, just to kill all of us ... Humans had every reason to want the mermaids dead. Leaving an underwater camera where it might capture images of mermaids—well, that was unthinkable. It simply couldn't be allowed.
Did the intrusion of that quiet black boat mean the humans already suspected there were mermaids darting through their coastal waters, mermaids hunting their ships? It did seem peculiar that a diver was intruding on their territory not long after other ships had almost completely stopped navigating anywhere near them. Luce tried to shake the thought away. They were just scientists, she told herself, biologists or oceanographers, and the fact that they'd chosen to monitor this particular cove was purely coincidental.
Luce flicked away from the sofa-shaped rock, careful to give a wide berth to the area the diver had tampered with. Maybe if she stayed pressed to the rock wall above that spot she could approach the camera without putting herself in range of its lens. She swept far out, then squeezed up to the rock face and began wriggling carefully along, dislodging a few tiny crabs from their hiding places. They skittered away from her in annoyance, clinging to the slanting wall. It was an uncomfortable way to swim and the sharp crags scraped at her scales as she bellied along. The gray wall with its twisted kelp and feathery, pale green weeds slid by, only a fraction of an inch from her cheek. The diver had been somewhere over here, but for a long time Luce couldn't find anything unusual. She had a sudden awful sense that she might have dragged herself at full length across the camera without noticing it.
No. Something dark and very small poked between two broad brown leaves. Its lens reminded Luce of the wet darkness inside a snail shell. Luce paused a foot away from the camera and considered what to do. It was tiny and well-concealed enough that she never would have seen it there if she hadn't been searching carefully.
She broke a rubbery leaf free and lined the palm of her hand with it. If a human hand suddenly appeared on screen it would certainly attract attention. Then she found a sharp rock, crept a bit closer, and slammed the rock down hard into that lifeless, staring eye. She heard the glass shatter, and brought the rock down again, grinding deeper. This time there was an electrical fizzling as something in the camera's insides shorted out.
That was easy, Luce told herself as she began the long swim back to her own cave. She'd protected the mermaids from discovery. Everything was going to be fine.
Of course those people were scientists. Humans were so convinced they owned the planet, sea and all. Luce could slap them right in their faces with her tail and the existence of mermaids would still be more than they could comprehend.
***
Luce's cave was the same one where she'd taken Catarina to recover after the tribe had assaulted her. Luce could never slip through the entrance without remembering the time she'd come back bringing dinner for the two of them and found Catarina gone, the cave somehow colder from abandonment. It felt even worse tonight. Luce had thought she was used to being on her own, but now she squeezed tightly against one wall of her cave and gazed into shadows that seemed suddenly malignant. It wasn't a particularly cold night, especially not for a mermaid, but Luce still felt horribly chilled. She curled there shivering, remembering the song from the cliffs, until the bronze-haired boy's voice turned into hundreds of black sinuous eels. The eels emitted terrible music, shrill as electrical feedback, as they squirmed up the side of a soot-colored boat. Soon there were so many eels that the boat was just a black, glossy, wriggling mass, tugged gradually downward into water so black and slimy that it might not be water at all. And suddenly Luce knew that the boy was in the center of that mass. He was going under...
Luce's tail convulsed. She felt the splash hit her face, heard her
own small scream, and opened her eyes to the twilight glow that filled her cave even on the brightest days. It took her a moment to understand where she was and that it was already morning.
And she wasn't alone. Dana was there, sitting with her back against the opposite side of the cave. Her tail was flicking, and Luce couldn't help noticing the hard, strained look on that beautiful face. Dana had been angry with her before, of course, but this look was different: cold and skeptical and, Luce thought after a second, disappointed. Coming up from anxious dreams, Luce felt instantly worried.
“Dana? What happened? Is something wrong?”
Dana smirked. “Are you expecting something to be wrong?” It was a strange thing to say, Luce thought. “Actually, I just came to visit you. Violet wanted to come, too, but then—Dana broke off sharply. There were so many different emotions moving in her satiny brown face that Luce couldn't keep track of them. “But I sent her home. I thought it would be better if I talked to you alone.”
Luce sat up facing Dana. Anxiety twisted inside her like the slippery eels from her dream. It was so out of character for Dana to take this cool, abrupt tone; her personality was usually warm and relaxed.
“What did you want to talk to me about?” It took all of Luce's courage to ask the question. She wanted to stare down at her hands, at the wall, and she fought to keep her gaze steady on Dana's eyes.
“Well...” Now Dana seemed embarrassed, too. Her voice switched abruptly from curt to oddly shy. “Luce, I mean, last time I saw you, you said something? And I just wanted to ask what you meant by it.” Luce began to have a sense of what was coming. She braced herself. Suddenly Dana was the one who couldn't hold her gaze on Luce's face, and she stared off. “You said you weren't sure you believed in the timahk anymore. What was that about?”