by Sarah Porter
“Thanks,” Luce said shyly. “I don't know if I could do that again, though.”
“Maybe we could, I don't know, like freeze one of those heads while you were singing? I guess it would be hard for you to keep it up that long, though. Or at least I could take a photo next time...”
“You can take a picture if you want,” Luce said, but for some reason she didn't like the idea. “But I don't see why you should, actually. Dorian, it's just something for you to remember.” They were quiet for a while, and Dorian wiped his tears with his sleeve.
“I'm going to have to start leaving early on Wednesdays,” Dorian said abruptly. He sounded slightly embarrassed, but Luce couldn't tell why. “We finally met that girl Zoe? The drummer? And we're going to try to have band practice regularly twice a week. Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings.”
Luce felt a quick rush of jealousy and just as quickly repressed it. Of course Dorian would meet human girls sometimes; it didn't mean he was going to fall in love with them. “What's she like?” Luce asked with deliberate lightness. “Is she a good drummer?”
“She's not a bad drummer, anyway. Pink hair and like three nose rings. Maybe kind of a poser punk, and a little bratty sometimes? But she's funny. She might be smart, too. It's kind of hard to say.”
“Is she pretty?” Luce couldn't completely keep the edge out of her voice this time.
Dorian rolled over so that Luce's head slipped off his stomach and then reached to pull her close. For a few moments he just stared at her, his gloved fingers softly exploring her face. “I really can't tell. If Zoe's pretty or not,” Dorian said at last. His voice was very low and his breath feathered against Luce's cheek.
“You can't tell?” Luce was suddenly intensely happy and so in love she almost felt like crying.
“I can't tell. I mean,” Dorian added, “maybe some guys would think she was. Cute, anyway. But that would only be because they've never seen you.”
At another time Luce might have pointed out to him that the astounding beauty of her own face was just a part of her magic—that the beauty of the mermaids was, in some sense, not real. But she didn't feel like saying that now.
There were advantages to staying a mermaid, after all; in some ways a human couldn't hope to compete.
***
As she towed Dorian home that night they could both feel the swelling aggression in the wind. The waves started to chop and jar below them, and white rafts of ice pitched perilously close to the boat. As he clambered out onto the dock they both looked back at the high slopes of water beyond the tiny harbor. The waves appeared to be getting taller by the minute, and Luce felt her stomach tighten a little at the thought of swimming back to her cave. She should try to collect a supply of food in case the storm lasted for days; she might be trapped inside for some time. Dorian looked worried, too. “Is it going to be safe for you? Getting home?”
“I'll try to stay underwater,” Luce told him. “So I don't get slammed by an ice floe.” She didn't mention the possibility that she might be overpowered by the currents. Dorian's hair whipped in the icy spray now blowing off the harbor. “Dorian, I might not be able to see you for a few days...”
Dorian answered Luce by throwing himself face-down on the dock and leaning out to take her face between his hands. He kissed her with such intensity her lips ached, and then he reached to squeeze her shoulders.
“I'll wait for you.” He struggled to his feet and ran up the dock, his body doubled against the thrust of the storm.
Luce fought her way through the violently swaying currents. Black nets of water swept her far away from the coast, dragged her deeper, then rolled her through streaking foam. She would escape from one watery fist only to be seized by the next, slamming her away from the air, then just as suddenly find herself thrown free of the surface. Veils of snow spiraled above waves at least twenty feet high, but she could just make out the jags of the coast that sheltered her own small cave. Luce stared back that way, her view broken by each new wall of water, and realized that exhaustion might overwhelm her before she could reach the coast again.
Luce screamed a long note, bright and urgent with the will to live. Her song was no match for the ferocity of the storm, but as she called to the water she found she had enough power to create a slight countercurrent, an eddy immediately around her body. She tried to drive it with her voice and found that at least it was strong enough to keep her from being swept farther out to sea. She drove with her tail and her song at the same time, dodging ice floes that appeared as suddenly as ghosts, and slowly, painfully, saw the coast sliding nearer. It was at least two more hours before she grasped the stone walls of her small cave, her weary muscles relaxing in the sudden stillness of its sheltered water. Luce flopped to the shore and fell into a long, profound sleep.
***
It had been impossible, of course, for her to stop and collect shellfish on her way back to her cave. She woke to darkness and cold, hungry and just as suddenly aware that she might not eat for days. The storm screamed and whistled, and even enclosed as she was in solid rock, Luce could hear the groan and snap of shattering trees. At least she had a pile of books Dorian had brought her, though there was something a little ironic about reading Jane Austen to distract herself from hunger as she lay on the stones in a cave as dark as soot. The women in the novel worried about their romances and about how many servants they could afford, and Luce read on and listened to the storm's vast orchestra of crunching ice cellos and yowling brass. No matter how long she read, no trace of light seeped through the entrance, though she could still see the pages and the stone vault above her. The clouds must be thick enough to erase the few brief hours of bluish daylight whenever they came.
After a while Luce put down the book. The darkness made it impossible to fight off the images that crowded her mind. The black diver slipped from the boat again and plopped down into midnight water, Dana's wounded eyes stared at Luce, and Nausicaa touched Luce's cheek as she readied herself to swim away. The pictures jumbled and merged with one another until Dana's eyes became the winking lens of the camera, until Violet spoke with Luce's father's voice.
Luce nestled her cheek against Dorian's olive jacket, trying not to think about the long months of winter still ahead of her. It was only December now. The worst was still to come.
***
“Why don't they turn on the lights?” Luce asked. She couldn't see anything, but somehow she knew that she was standing in a slick corridor with walls and floors of polished gray marble; maybe it was some kind of museum or a huge bank. Standing, Luce thought. That seemed peculiar, but then as she thought about it she couldn't understand why it should seem strange to her. Her sneakered feet squeaked against the slippery tiles.
“They must have all burned out,” her father answered from somewhere beside her. “Lights burn out as quick as matches in these places. But I don't know how you're going to help me if we can't see where we're going.”
Luce squeezed her eyes tight and then opened them again. Now there was a faint dusk glow coming from somewhere up ahead. “Are they in there?” Luce asked. The glow revealed the hard, glossy planes of the hallway, but for some reason it didn't allow her to see her father. She knew he was right there, though. She could feel him as a kind of warm shadow, invisible but somehow more powerfully alive than a normal person would be.
“That would be the place,” her father agreed. “I'm so glad you could come, Lucette. I've been trying and trying, but I can't get them out.”
They were moving down the corridor, and Luce was vaguely relieved to find that she could hear his footsteps as well as her own. The glow ahead got gradually brighter, more silvery, and then they turned a corner and entered a large window-less room. Blocks of ice much taller than she was were lined up around its gleaming walls, and each clear mass seemed to have a flaw at its core: a milky impurity. Those flaws were the source of the light, each of them dully luminous. Luce stepped closer, her heart pounding savagely, and saw th
at there was a mermaid frozen inside each block. And, Luce realized, she knew all of them: there were Rachel and Jenna, Regan and Kayley, Samantha and the red-haired larva Anais had tortured, along with other girls from the tribe. Luce spread her hands on the cold glassy blocks, leaning close to see. The mermaids' eyes were closed, their mouths open around knots of ice they could never swallow, but Luce felt sure they were still alive. She had to find the block with Anais, Luce thought. It was important to make sure that Anais was in here somewhere; if she wasn't she might cause terrible trouble.
“I can't get them out, Lucette,” her father said. Luce forgot her search for Anais and turned to stare at him. He was visible now, oddly hunched and much older than he should have been. His curly hair looked dusty and brittle. “I've tried everything I can think of, but I just can't break through that ice...”
Luce looked at her pale blue sneakers on the gray marble floor. She understood what her father was trying to tell her, and shame overwhelmed her until she could barely stand. Her old tribe was trapped in frozen suspense as payment for the legs she was walking on, and there was only one way to free the mermaids. Her legs would have to be cut off, Luce realized, and her father was holding the saw...
Luce screamed in terror. Something was holding her fast, and the blade was coming closer. Her body twisted and whatever was gripping her middle bent like rubber and then ripped, and she screamed again as her eyes opened wide.
***
More darkness was around her, but now it was darkness she could see through. It took her a few moments to understand that she was back in her own small cave, and she lifted her hands to confirm their faint inhuman shine: she was still a mermaid. The wind moaned, and the clamor of her heart beat through it. Had that really been only a nightmare? There was still something catching at her middle and keeping her from moving freely. Luce looked.
A layer of ice covered the water in her cave. It was only an inch or so thick and peculiarly flexible in the way of freshly frozen salt water. Nilas, Luce remembered. That was what this weird elastic ice was called. Her struggle had wrenched part of it free of the water's surface so that a giant whitish air pocket shaped almost like an uneven skirt extended from Luce's rib cage and concealed most of her tail. Luce reached down and tore the nilas open, then slid deeper into the water. The ice layer wasn't that strong, she told herself; it hadn't even come close to trapping her for real. And horrible as her dream had been, it was torn like the ice now. There was nothing to be afraid of.
At least not just yet.
***
When the storm finally passed Luce swam weakly from her cave into a vague haze of blue daylight. It was a little warmer, and the film of ice had melted, much to her relief, but there was no way she could tell how many days she'd gone without eating anything. She was so hungry that her body veered sloppily through the water. It would be crazy to let herself get stuck without food like that again, Luce realized. She needed to plan ahead. Once she made it to her dining beach she looked for the little Inuit larva but there was no trace of her. Luce sat disconsolately cracking shellfish, trying to gather her strength.
Much as she wanted to find Dorian, there was something else she needed to do first. Luce gazed to the north. Pack ice came from there in a steady procession like a herd of pale animals. As soon as she could swim steadily again she'd head that way.
Two hours later Luce was skimming through her old tribe's territory, keeping underwater to avoid the ice but also to make it less likely that she'd be seen. She had to wait until she could catch one of the girls from the tribe out on her own, and that might take some time. Luce slipped behind a jag between the tribe's cave and their dining beach and waited. They were probably all still frightened enough of the orcas to stick near the cliffs.
It wasn't long before she heard the voices of the tribe as they swam back to their cave. Even from a distance they sounded shrill and irritable, all bickering at once. “If Anais says we're staying,” Luce heard Jenna snap, “then we're staying! If you don't like it you can go look for a new queen!”
“Stop shoving me!” Kayley yelped just as someone else whose voice Luce couldn't place said, “But Jenna, that storm was so horrible ...”
“Like they don't get storms in the winter south of here! Even if we went all the way to, like, Canada! What, you want to swim to Hawaii?” Jenna's tone was contemptuous, and she wasn't far at all from Luce now. “Go right ahead. Maybe you'll pass Violet's corpse on the way.”
“I'm still ... kind of worried about Dana,” Kayley murmured, but everyone ignored her.
“Besides,” Samantha added as the tribe flowed past Luce, “like Anais says, it would suck big-time if we ran into some other tribe. They'd probably be all hung up on the timahk, and we'd have to deal with all their stupid issues. And Anais thinks the ships are going to come back this way in the spring, so it really makes more sense to just wait here...”
Then they were gone, except for what sounded like a single straggler. It was just what Luce had been hoping for. She could hear the half-stifled whimpering of someone trying to keep the others from noticing that she was crying. Cautiously Luce skimmed around her crag and peered out. It was Rachel, dragging against the rocks with her head lowered so far that the strands of her pale blond hair formed a kind of cage around her face.
“Rachel!” Luce whispered. “Keep quiet, okay?”
Rachel recoiled as if the water was grabbing at her. Her head swung wildly around before she spotted Luce and jerked again, her pale eyes bright with fear. Even the magical beauty that all mermaids possessed couldn't save Rachel from looking a little mousy, Luce thought, and she felt an impulse to comfort her. Rachel was such a sad, scared, broken little thing. Tears gleamed on her cheeks, and her nose was running.
“Rachel! Don't be scared. It's just me, Luce.”
“Are you going to kill me?” Rachel squeaked. But she was whispering, too.
Luce was shocked. “Of course not! Rachel, I would never hurt you. How could you think that?” When Luce had still lived with the tribe she'd given Rachel singing lessons, held her when she woke from nightmares. "Why should Rachel look at her with that frantic, hunted expression?
“Because I...” Rachel started in surprise, then shook herself. “No reason. Except that you hate all of us, Luce.”
Luce tried to calm her rising impatience. “I was mad at all of you because of Catarina. But that doesn't mean I hate you, Rachel! And I only hurt Jenna that time because she was trying to kill me.” Rachel wobbled from side to side as if she couldn't make up her mind whether or not to dash away. “But you need to come with me for a few minutes,” Luce added sharply, staring hard into Rachel's eyes. “There's something I have to show you, okay? It's really important.”
Rachel was still wavering and gazing nervously around when Luce took hold of her wrist. She couldn't allow Rachel's neuroses to ruin her chance of getting a warning to her old tribe. Luce's nightmare of the ice blocks still had a terrible grip on her mind, and she knew it wouldn't let go until she'd made sure the other girls were safe.
Luce kept a firm hold on Rachel's wrist as she led her back to the tribe's dining beach. There was Catarina's sofa-shaped rock half-submerged as always in the lapping waves; there was the place where the black boat had bobbed with silent engines; there was the dense, rubbery seaweed matting the cliff wall, though now the leaves above the waterline were sleeved in brilliant ice. As long as the camera was still here and she could find it again...
Rachel kept twitching fearfully in Luce's grip, but Luce ignored her as she dove to search among the brown leaves below the tide line. Kelp swirled into their faces as they squeezed close to the wall, Luce ransacking the leaves and fronds. After a few minutes Rachel stopped struggling. “Luce? What are you looking for?”
“A camera,” Luce told her absently. “I smashed it.”
“A camera?” Luce couldn't have said if Rachel sounded more confused or more terrified. “Why would ... what would ... Luce, a camer
a here?”
After another minute Luce found it, its shattered lens still peeking blindly between two thick leaves, its black body wedged securely into a chink in the wall. Luce began wrenching leaves away until she'd cleared a pale circle of stone around it. “We need to make it easy to find again. So you can show everyone,” Luce explained. “But you have to tell them you're the one who smashed it, Rachel, okay? You can't let them know I was here.” If Anais thought the warning was coming from Luce she'd be sure to ignore it.
The two of them rose to the surface again. Cold wind licked their faces, and ice floes bucked on the lead-colored water.
“But Luce...” Rachel squealed. “Why would somebody put a camera here? What does it mean?”
Maybe it would have been better to find a different mermaid, Luce thought. Rachel was already close to panic. Luce hesitated for an instant and then decided that she couldn't afford to beat around the bush. She had to make sure Rachel understood exactly how serious the situation was.
“It means the humans know about us, Rachel,” Luce said levelly. “It means they're watching us. It's lucky that I found this camera, but I'm sure it's not the only one.”
Rachel opened her mouth wide as if she couldn't decide whether to argue or scream. In the dull blue-gray light she looked sickly, almost decaying. “But then...” Rachel gasped and stopped abruptly.
“The humans are going to come after us. I don't know when, but it could start anytime. They're going to hunt down the tribe,” Luce announced, then waited a second for this to sink in. “You have to show everyone, Rachel. It's your job to make sure they understand. Do you hear me?” At first Rachel only gaped, but after a moment she pulled herself together just enough to nod. “You all have to get away from here. Find someplace where the humans aren't looking and stay hidden...” Luce heard how her voice was rising now, getting harder and more urgent. “No matter what Anais tells you, you all have to run away!”