by Sarah Porter
Even as he kissed her with melting softness, Luce was uncomfortably aware that they hadn't actually resolved anything. He was still threatening to talk to the FBI, and she still had no idea what to do about Anais. She hadn't yet tried to explain why the mermaids had destroyed the Dear Melissa, and Luce couldn't help but realize how empty her reasons would sound to him. She hadn't answered his questions about her knowledge of things on land, either. Somehow she felt an intense reluctance to let him know she'd once been human herself, but how could she avoid that forever? And it wasn't even clear if his tenderness toward her was only a lingering effect of enchantment.
Dorian had the indication around him, the same dark shimmer as the mermaids, and she'd assumed that it helped protect him from their power. Luce hoped that his shimmering didn't mean he could also see the sparkling around her. If he could, he'd be able to see that she'd been just as human as he was. Worse, if he just looked at her from the corners of his eyes, he might be able to see the events that had changed her.
His own cloudy shimmering proved that someone had once done something terrible to him: terrible enough to leave a lasting crack in his very identity as a human. So far, though, a kind of shyness or politeness had kept Luce from looking to see what that heartbreak was. But as his lips flowed on hers like a velvet wave Luce stole a single sideways glance. She couldn't stifle a cry at what she saw there. A younger Dorian lay pretending to be asleep, straining to control his terrified breathing, while his mother—
“Luce?” Dorian pulled away slightly. “Did I hurt you?”
“I'm okay,” Luce whispered back. She slipped one hand up and lightly brushed his cheeks. “You don't have to stop.” She wanted to kiss him until she forgot everything else: her own overwhelming problems, yes, but also the cruelty that made being human insupportable for so many others like her.
She wasn't nearly as sorry now that Dorian's parents were dead.
8. The Jacket
When Luce woke up the next day she stretched and rolled where she was, acutely aware of the subtle wavering of the water against her scales. The sensation of Dorian's cheek pressed to hers lingered on in her skin. She felt imprinted by his warmth, and the softness of his touch still breathed through her hair. Luce had been too shy and withdrawn as a human girl to talk to boys at all, much less kiss them. She was still in shock from the sweetness of it all. The timahk, she decided, must simply be wrong. There was no good reason, not really, why she shouldn't have a boyfriend onshore, at least as long as she could persuade him to keep the existence of mermaids a secret. She remembered how passionately Catarina had warned her against falling for a human, but then Catarina hated humans so much, and so indiscriminately, that it simply made her unreasonable. A lot of humans might be evil and destructive, Luce knew. But there were others, like Dorian, who were warm and brave and open-hearted and who understood how infinite the world really was.
She slipped out to look for breakfast and found the sea blanketed in a dense, sullen fog. Every time she came above water it was as if she were enclosed in a soft gray egg, and even her outstretched hands vanished from sight. Only the rattling of a high wind in the spruce trees told her the direction of the shore. Winter was coming fast. It was going to get colder very quickly now, and there would be ferocious storms. She should look for a better spot where she and Dorian could meet; even if he was exceptionally brave, Luce thought, he was still fragile like all humans, terribly vulnerable to the cold.
Luce swam underwater so that she could see the way to her dining beach; that was the only way she could make out the shape of the coast and spot the familiar rocks going by. When she came up she heard a windy half-song. It wasn't wind, she knew at once, but another mermaid disguising her voice with the airy call they used to beckon each other when they were afraid of being overheard by humans. The fog was so thick and pillowing that it muffled the sound, and Luce dipped again to try and find the source of it. Whoever it was sounded nervous, she thought, and then the voice began to seem a bit familiar. By the time she caught sight of a distant, coppery flash, Luce had already recognized it: Dana, resting on a sandbar not far from shore. She'd finally come to demand an accounting, then. Luce hurried over to her, rehearsing lies as she swam, and came up ready to pour out the story of how she'd murdered Dorian.
“Oh, thank God! I couldn't tell where I was, and I thought maybe I'd gone way past your cave.” As Dana spoke she still scanned the sea anxiously, though there was nothing to see but the pearly gray blindness of the mist. “I got too scared to keep going. You remember Regan?” Luce had hardly ever talked to Regan, but she nodded. “An orca almost got her, Luce. A few of us were just swimming over to get dinner yesterday, and we weren't paying attention. It came up so fast, and she actually managed to leap sideways right before its teeth snapped closed, but her fin got torn. They're really ... Kayley says there aren't as many seals as there used to be, so the orcas are getting really hungry. They keep acting crazier all the time.” Dana was so agitated that Luce didn't have any time to react to this. “And Samantha sure can't keep her mouth shut, but I don't know what to believe. But you did something to Anais, right? She was being a total screaming bitch last night. She didn't seem to care about Regan at all, and the rest of us were freaking out, we were so worried.”
Luce had been so ready to start reciting her story—slamming up into Dorian's rowboat, dragging him under—that she was almost disappointed to find that Dana didn't seem interested anymore. “I ran into Anais and Samantha yesterday.”
Dana flashed her a skeptical look. “You ran into them?”
“No, really. It was really by accident, Dana! I wasn't trying to start anything with them. It just—things got weird really quickly.”
“Okay. They would get weird. You're going to tell me everything, right?”
It wasn't the story Luce had expected to tell, but maybe it was better this way. “Let's go to the beach first, okay? I haven't had anything to eat yet.”
Sprawling next to Dana on a beach, cracking oysters and talking while their tails swished side by side along the seafloor, felt almost like being back in her old tribe. Much as she felt drawn to Dorian, powerfully as she wanted to feel his hands on her face again, Luce realized that his company was never going to stop her from missing being with other mermaids, too.
Dana listened wide-eyed while Luce described her encounter with Anais, stopping her every few moments to ask questions. When Luce got to the part about Anais torturing the larva, Dana gasped and put her hands over her eyes for a moment.
“She held its tail out? Luce, really?”
Luce was relieved. It wasn't just that Dana had chosen to ignore what Anais was doing, then.
“Really, Dana. I saw her do it, and the larva started screaming ...” Luce told the whole thing, including the moment when Samantha blurted out that Anais had been murdering larvae. When Dana heard that, she choked, then went quiet for a while.
“I'd wondered about that. It seemed like too many of them were getting washed up on the beach, way back from the water, too. But, Luce, I didn't actually know! I would have at least tried to stop her ... and I would have told you what was going on.”
“It's way too sick to believe,” Luce agreed, then considered for a moment. “I still don't want to believe it! Dana, you think she's been throwing them onshore?” They both knew what that meant. The larval mermaids had all died in unspeakable pain, writhing and juddering until their hearts stopped. Then tiny human legs lay on the beach where their tails had been before.
For a few minutes they sat silent together, clouded in cold fog and a few spatters of rain. Wind sawed at the trees until they moaned like violins.
When Dana finally spoke again, it was to ask Luce about the whirlpool that had caught Anais.
“How did you do that, anyway? Have you gotten that insanely powerful?” Luce shook her head, remembering the deep trancelike feeling that had possessed her as she'd sung those unearthly scales.
“I'm—I'm pretty
sure I couldn't do that again, actually. I've gotten more control over the water and everything, but that—it didn't even feel like the song was coming from me, Dana. It was more like I was so upset that I called to a bigger song, and it came through me somehow...” Luce realized from Dana's expression that this sounded utterly crazy to her.
“It was completely you. It was just you and them there, right?”
“And the larvae.”
“Whatever. You know larvae can't sing at all.”
“I'm not saying there was another mermaid singing, though!” Luce didn't know how to explain it, and Dana's gaze was mocking, even if she also looked impressed. “I'm saying I don't actually have as much power as it sounds like, from what happened. I heard something singing with my voice, but it wasn't exactly me.”
Dana smiled at Luce with a funny, disbelieving look on her lovely brown face, and lifted both arms over her head to stretch. Luce was just cracking another oyster when Dana brought her hands down into the water so suddenly that the splash soaked both of them, and as Luce yelped in surprise Dana twisted her tail around Luce's and flipped her sideways. When she came up with sheets of water tumbling over her face, Dana was already ten feet back and barely visible through the fog, laughing, but with her hands raised to ask for a truce.
Luce lunged through the water to tackle her anyway, but Dana spun to one side and caught Luce's shoulders between her cool hands. “Wait, wait, Luce! Wait, okay? I'm trying to tell you something, but you're not listening to me. I had to get your attention somehow!”
Luce drew back, wary, half expecting Dana to flip her again. “What's so important, then? That you need to tell me?”
“That you've always been scared to death of how powerful you are.” Dana suddenly sounded completely serious. Luce gaped.
“What makes you think I'm scared? I'm just—I'm trying to be honest about it, Dana!”
“Because! Because even if you were, like, calling up some bigger force, you were still the one who was doing the calling! No one else was there, Luce. And I'd be scared, too, if I could do that, but sooner or later you're going to have to deal with it!”
“I bet you could learn how to do it. I don't think there's anything I can do that you couldn't.”
Dana just shook her head. “You just don't want to face up to it. You ... I don't want to say you don't have an ego because you do. But sometimes I think you're basically hiding from yourself. That's the real reason you don't want to be queen!”
Luce was astonished. “How can you even talk about me being queen? I mean, now that you know...”
“About that guy?” Dana ran one glossy hand over her face. “It still kind of blows my mind that you did that, Luce. I wish you hadn't, I mean, so I could still think of you as being—I don't know, the one who's always so serious about the timahk and all intense about what it means to be a mermaid. Even if I told you off for being uptight about it before ... I really liked believing I could count on you that way. But our tribe hasn't done such a good job of sticking to the timahk anyway. We've all kind of screwed up. So it's not really fair for me to hold that against you, right?”
Luce sat silent for a moment, resting her fingertips on the milky gray whorls of out-rushing foam. Someone had to stop Anais. On the other hand, living on her own made it a lot easier to slip off without anyone noticing. As queen of a tribe, sneaking away every evening wouldn't really be an option. Before too long she'd get caught in Dorian's arms.
“Luce?” Dana's voice was suddenly shy.
“What?” Luce's thoughts were far away, and it took her a moment to focus on Dana again. When she did Dana's brown doe eyes looked tentative and sad.
“You did drown that boy, right?”
“Yes,” Luce said. The lie was like a cold stone jammed in her throat. “I took his jacket. Just in case you wanted to see.”
“I don't want you to think I don't trust you or anything...” Why did Dana's voice sound so mournful? “But I guess, sure, I should look at it. Like, for the record.”
Luce noticed that Dana stayed nearby as they made their way back to her cave and that she kept almost herding Luce so that they hugged the shore as closely as possible. Luce had to maneuver carefully to keep her scales from getting grazed on the rocks. That orca attack had really rattled Dana, then. Luce couldn't blame her. She'd seen orcas leap herself, seen the sea tint red with blood.
Luce had left the jacket wadded up in a corner of her cave in a deliberate show of indifference. Dana smoothed it out with delicate movements, turning it from side to side in the dimness. She caught sight of the writing on the sleeve.
“Dorian. You think that was his name?” Luce was amazed to hear Dana's voice cracking.
“Maybe. That or it was some band he liked.”
“Have you checked the pockets or anything?” Luce hadn't. She'd wanted to make sure everything looked perfectly untouched. She tensed as Dana's graceful fingers began sliding through the many pockets, pulling out bits and pieces of Dorian's life: a pencil stub, some gum, coins, a thick black marker. Then something shifted in Dana's face, and Luce knew she'd found the drawings. They were folded in a white square, stiff with salt. There was something strangely gentle in Dana's movements as she unfolded them. Luce was shocked to see a single gleaming tear curve down Dana's cheek then land with a tiny splash on the pebbled shore.
“Look, Luce. They're all pictures of you!” Luce tried to keep her expression calm as she slipped closer to Dana. It had never occurred to her that Dana might cry over the death of a strange human, and for some reason the sight of it made her nauseous with guilt. What would happen if she told Dana the truth? “Wow, he could draw! And he must have been so obsessed with you...” Luce appeared again and again on the sharply creased pages: her body curled inside a wave, her face and shoulders as she towed a dazed-looking Dorian in one arm.
“He had the indication around him. The sparkling.” Luce knew it was a mistake to tell Dana too much, but somehow the words escaped her anyway. Dana looked up sharply, tears streaking her full glossy cheeks. “He was a metaskaza, Dana, except that he was a boy. You remember how Catarina told us it was impossible for them to change?”
“That’s why you saved him?” Dana didn't seem angry about that anymore.
“Maybe.” Luce was suddenly close to tears herself. It almost felt like Dorian was really dead. “I don't completely know why I did it, but ... that was probably the reason.” She still didn't want to talk about Dorian singing her song, not to anyone. It seemed too personal. Dana looked down.
“I mean ... did you really like him, Luce? Like, seriously?”
“Yes.” Was it wrong to admit that?
“Then do you hate me for making you do that? You ... you know I had to, right? If we let him live...”
“I don't hate you,” Luce insisted. Dana was crying harder now. She buried her face in her arms. “Dana, you were right! I don't hate you at all.” Luce could barely keep going. It was monstrous to lie to her sobbing friend this way. “You forced me to do the right thing, Dana, okay? Please don't blame yourself for that!”
Dana looked up, her eyes blurred by tears, and pulled Luce into a long hug.
Luce came back from accompanying Dana almost as far as the tribe's cave that afternoon. The fog had pulled back, and a sluggish, clammy rain had started falling; the fresh water felt slick and repugnant wherever it touched her skin, and Luce realized, a human wouldn't like it any more than she did. Dana's nervousness had gotten to her, and Luce hugged the coast much more closely than usual. More than once when she surfaced, dim scythelike shapes were faintly visible through the silvery strands of rain: almost certainly the dorsal fins of orcas. Luce began to wonder if they were shadowing her, just waiting for her to drift a bit farther out. She hadn't bothered exploring the coast much recently, and there were bends and shelves of splitting stratified rock that she'd forgotten. At one point she noticed a shallow cave, not much more than a deep dent in the cliff with a peaked overhang of rock reach
ing into space above it. It was squeezed between low points of rock capped by wind-thrashed spruce. Erosion had ripped the ground partly away from beneath the spruce trees, and a snarl of bare roots protruded overhead, clawing at the empty air. A fallen tree spanned the shallow water, its bark worn away and its stripped branches as pale and smooth as a skeleton.
Luce kept thinking of Dana. Mermaids never talked about their human lives, so Luce had been surprised that afternoon to hear her murmuring, between her sobs, about her early childhood. Dana and Jenna had still lived with their mother then, and Dana had told how their mother had sewn matching purple velvet dresses for their sixth birthday, how she'd sung them songs in a language Dana didn't know so that the words seemed to melt into the music. Luce had listened in silence, stroking Dana's hair, until she'd finally calmed down.
Back in her own cave she fidgeted. She tried singing for a while, but the fluid beauty of her song didn't absorb her attention the way it always had before. She raised a wave with one thrumming, endless note and sent it winging in circles through the shadows, but somehow her heart wasn't in it and after a minute she let the wave collapse with a disconsolate splash. Evening seemed so far away, and with the weather so dismal Dorian probably wouldn't show up anyway. Knowing that didn't stop the twisting sensation in her chest every time she thought of him. She gave up trying to practice and sprawled on the stones, gazing at Dorian's drawings. Dana had smoothed them all out, and they lay in a row just above the tide line. The paper was warped and buckled from its long submersion in the sea, crisped by dried salt, but other than that, the drawings were undamaged. The images were so beautiful, so dimensional; Luce especially admired the way Dorian had drawn dozens of broad curving strokes that followed the contours of each wave. It gave an amazing sense of depth, and it added to the surprising effect of her own pale face breaking through. It was impressive that he'd captured her so well from memory, too, as if her face had burned its way into him and these drawings were the scar...