Waking Storms

by Sarah Porter

  “We're talking about some human,” Jessie objected. She was still rubbing her throat, but she didn't seem to be really hurt. “Sedna, you know it's not right—”

  “She's a friend of Nausicaa's!” Queen Sedna snapped back. “And think about it, Jessie: she's also an enemy of that rotten sika bitch ...Have you thought at all about how happy that sika will be if we do anything to upset Luce? You want to do Anais some huge favor? After she killed your sister?”

  Luce was still gasping, overwhelmed by storming emotions, breathless with weariness. But her mind was clearing enough for her to understand two things: a lot had happened while she'd been stalled at her father's island, and if her father was safe it was thanks, in some unimaginable way, to Nausicaa. “What ... are you talking about?” Luce managed.

  Sedna smiled at her. “Wow. It's a long story.”

  All the stories are long, Luce thought. She suddenly missed Nausicaa so much that something seemed to crumple deep in her chest.

  “But still ...” Jessie kept trying to argue. “It's not like the timahk makes exceptions for anyone, Sedna.”

  “Oh, for Crissake.” Sedna rolled her eyes. “Whatever. We can do this.” Do what? Luce thought. She tensed again, but Sedna was still grinning. “Luce, okay, so has your dad there ever heard you sing?”

  Luce started. Of course he must have heard both Jessie and Luce singing just a few minutes before, but it seemed like Sedna had decided to ignore that. It could only be deliberate, and Luce started grinning back into the queen's sparkling eyes. “Absolutely not.”

  Sedna raised her eyebrows at Jessie. “See? So where's the problem?”

  “Well—her.” Jessie gazed around at the tribe for support then pivoted her eyes slowly to fix on Luce. “She’s the problem. Queen Luce. Okay, Sedna, even if ... Singing or not, she's still been fraternizing with humans. You know what the timahk says! We can't just let her get away with that. Not even ... You know how much I want to get back at Anais, but—

  “There's the timahk, all right,” Sedna pronounced definitely. “But there's also common sense! God, Jessie, we're talking about the girl's dad here.” Luce found herself liking Sedna more by the second. She looked anxiously back at her father, but he was sprawled unconscious with his head crooked awkwardly sideways, the edge of a board digging into his cheek.

  “Queen Sedna? Thank you so much ... for understanding. I need to go make sure he's okay.” Sedna and Jessie were busy glaring at each other, tails flicking, and Luce skimmed away from them. In a moment her hands were in her father's hair, gripping his arms, and she was shaking him. At least he was breathing, even if he wheezed like some kind of broken toy. “Please. Dad, please. Don't you dare...” lose your mind, Luce thought, but she was too afraid to say it. “You need to live! You need to be okay, and happy, and...” grow up for me. Since I can’t.

  A sliver of cinnamon eyes gleamed at her. “Lucette. What kind of world is this?”

  Luce beamed in relief. “The same kind it was ten minutes ago. You just fainted.” If only that’s all it is, Luce thought.

  “It's not the same! It's new, always new. Every second. Like waking up on some kind of hard diamond planet.”

  He was delirious, Luce decided. She stroked his matted hair and murmured to him, even as she wondered at what he had said. Always new?

  Nausicaa certainly didn't think so. But even Nausicaa wasn't right all the time.

  “Let's get you to shore,” Luce whispered. “We're almost there. You'll be safe...” She forced herself to start swimming. Her tail was a snarl of pain, and her shoulders screamed as the ropes snapped taut again, but they would reach land in only a few minutes.

  “Come back and talk to us when you're done with that, okay?” Sedna called after her.

  Luce looked around and smiled, and the glow on Sedna's face told Luce that Sedna understood how utterly grateful she was. From the limp way Jessie held herself Luce thought she was starting to back down. Sedna would handle the situation fine, Luce felt sure. She was a real queen.

  The raft finally ran aground a bit too close to the village for Luce's comfort, but she was too tired to care. She flung her upper body onto the beach as her father scrambled ashore, staring all around him as if he really were seeing glinting diamond facets in all the trees. Smoke blue dusk blurred the waving grass. “Oh, Luce! It's hard to trust it, but it's all so beautiful!” He pulled himself upright and staggered a few dizzy steps, and Luce slipped the harness off her shoulders. Blood raced back into her arms like a hundred spinning razors, and she stretched and closed her eyes for a moment to fight the pain.

  How could she possibly say goodbye now? But there was Dorian, and she'd already made him wait for so long. It was cruel. He must be so worried about her, maybe even afraid that she was dead.

  Her father twirled messily, still clearly half-maddened by his brush with enchantment. “It’s so beautiful! I'll never ask where I am again. Luce, baby doll, wherever it is, you brought me to it!” He was shouting, and Luce glanced nervously toward the shining windows of that tiny village: tiny enough that any disturbance would attract attention instantly. Humans would come. Already Luce caught sight of yellow light abruptly slicing from an opening door. Someone was calling and a dog barked.

  “Dad? I'm going to ... I have to go. In just a minute.” Another door opened as if it were answering the first. They'd definitely heard him, then. “I—we have to say goodbye. It might be a long time—”

  “No!” He staggered into the water, and Luce gaped in alarm. “No, doll, I'm going to do right by you this time. I swear it. Now that I've found you again, I'm going to change everything.”

  She could already hear faint footsteps, and the barking was getting louder. A blot of yellow from a swinging flashlight crisscrossed a path; it wasn't all that far away. “You can’t. You've—done everything you can for me, and I love you so much, but I have to go.” Luce heard the childish appeal rising in her voice. As if she was begging him to forgive her.

  “How am I even going to reach you? Lucette, you can't just—”

  “I have to.” She considered the problem, but there was no time to come up with a good solution. “Make sure Peter always knows where you are. That way, if I ever ... I'll have a way to find you.”

  Her father snorted. “Don't think Peter will want to do me a lot of favors. Not when I get done with him.”

  She didn't actually want him to hurt Peter, but this hardly seemed like the moment to start an argument. “I'll find you somehow.” She sounded like Nausicaa, Luce thought. “Don't wait for me, don't worry, just do whatever you can to be happy...” She could hear men chattering, their rapid steps, the skittering sound of the dog breaking into a run. The flashlight's beam suddenly swept across her eyes as the men turned onto the beach. She didn't think they'd seen her, but they would very soon.

  “Hey.” The man was heavyset and lumbering against the twilit sky. “Thought we heard something. Who's there?”

  She couldn't hug her father properly while he was standing. She settled for squeezing his knees. Everything she'd promised him might be a lie. Luce had to choke down a wild cry of grief as she realized that she might never see him again.

  The water closed around her, but she couldn't bring herself to speed away. Instead she hovered under the surface just offshore. “LUCE!”

  “Hey there.” Dimly Luce could hear the strange man's whistle of surprise and she knew he'd spotted the crude raft. “You okay, man? Looks like you've been through a rough patch..."

  “LUCE!” her father screamed. His steps splashed in the water, but Luce was sure the strangers were restraining him. “LUCE! Oh, come back!”

  “Luce isn't here, old guy,” the man's voice soothed. “Just you.”

  ***

  Queen Sedna and the others caught up with Luce twenty minutes later. She was swimming lethargically under the water, her whole body trembling from a mixture of fatigue and heartbreak. She barely registered the presence of the other mermaids as they
flocked around her, guiding her to a safe cove on the next island over. Luce drowsed on the beach as the other mermaids ate dinner, their chattering voices mingling with the wash of thickening darkness.

  “Don't you think she needs some food, too?”

  “I don't know, I think we should let her sleep...”

  “You think Nausicaa is right about her? Like, of course what she did was incredible, but...”

  “I trust Nausicaa more than anyone I've ever known.” Luce thought the voice was Sedna's, but maybe she was already dreaming. “If she calls somebody 'the future of the mermaids,' I don't know, I kind of tend to believe that she knows what she's talking about.”

  “Anyone Anais hates that much has to be special at least.”

  “I think they've lost us. We're not going to catch them now.”

  “She’ll know. She can show us where they live.”

  Luce watched curved shapes like glowing seals in a midnight tide. Her father stepped out of the sea, his hair clean and his beard shaved, and threw back water like a shining cloak. He was safe now, and Luce slept.

  Luce woke to another clear morning. She still felt hopelessly weak and drained, but her tail flipped at the thought of getting back to Dorian. Something thwacked on a rock near her head, and Luce opened her eyes to see Sedna offering her a mussel. Luce noticed that three fingers were partly missing on the hand reaching toward her; they looked hacked-off, the stumps oddly angled, though they had clearly healed long ago. Luce and Sedna were alone together, and Luce wondered hazily where the other girls had gone.

  “Hey, Luce. How are you feeling?”

  “Awful.” Luce smiled at her and sat up, taking the food. She was so hungry that it felt like a kind of illness. “Thank you, Sedna.” They watched each other for a minute: a little warily, but Luce knew they were already friends. “You said you know Nausicaa?” Sudden hope rose in Luce. “How about Violet and Dana?”

  “Violet and Dana? I don't think I've heard of them, no.” Luce stifled her disappointment as Sedna went on talking. What had happened to the two fleeing mermaids? “But I've known Nausicaa for a long time. Like maybe every ten or twenty years she comes through my territory, and she usually stays awhile...”

  Luce had assumed that Sedna was a fairly new mermaid, but clearly that wasn't true. “You've been in the water that long?” Luce was still a little wobbly. It took an effort to stay focused.

  “Well, not like Nausicaa long.” Sedna smiled. “But born-1852 long? Kidnapped-by-sadistic-fur-trappers long? Yeah. And I've been queen south of here for at least sixty years.”

  It was funny, then, that Sedna's way of talking was so modern. Probably it was something she did on purpose; maybe she thought it was important to stay up to date. Sedna watched her, black eyes deep and alert, black hair glossy in the fresh sunlight. Her skin was a lush, glowing gold, almost the color of a dawn sky.

  “I said, 'south of here.' On the far side of the Aleutians, like pretty near Canada even. Most of the tribe is still there now.”

  Luce was confused. “Okay.”

  “Don't you want to know why we're so far out of our territory?"

  Luce ran a hand over her face. “I already know. You're chasing Anais. Maybe the rest of my old tribe, too...” It was coming back to her. “They must have run into you after they migrated down the coast? You said Anais murdered Jessie's sister.”

  “That doesn't surprise you? Fiona was just a larva, but she and Jessie changed together, and we'd kept Fiona safe for years. You can believe a mermaid—even a sika—would do something so outrageous? It's the kind of thing you'd expect from humans, and not even all of them ...”

  “It doesn't surprise me at all,” Luce said wearily. It was depressing to be reminded of Anais. “She's killed larvae before. She probably didn't care whose sister it was.”

  “Oh, she cared!” Sedna's fury was building. “She cared! She did it to get back at us, and she went out of her way to hurt us as much as she could. When we catch her I'm going to expel her myself, and I'm going to make sure there are orcas all around first. Even if I have to personally draw the orcas there with bait, I'll make sure of it!” Sedna's tone was grim, and Luce knew this wasn't an idle threat. “We knew the bitch was sika, but we just felt so sorry for the mermaids with her. They seemed so scared and miserable, like they were all about to crack up completely, and we made the mistake of taking them in. Those girls are really crazy, though.”

  Luce's head reeled a little. She wanted to think about Dorian and her father, not about whatever awful things Anais had done. But still...“What happened?”

  “Well, we're a strict tribe. We don't take down more than four or five ships a year, max, and I have a rule about only doing it when there's a big enough storm that it won't look suspicious.”

  Luce was impressed. Keeping the mermaids' longing to kill under such tight discipline couldn't be easy, she knew, even if she wished that they wouldn't sink ships at all. She looked at Sedna with sudden respect, but Sedna was too furious to meet her eyes.

  “So I explained all that to them when they showed up, right? And for a while they were mostly okay. But then they started just ignoring me! Like they weren't in my territory at all!” Sedna was indignant at the memory. “They were attacking ships in this insane, random way, so I told them to get the hell out. And they did, but before they left—”

  “They threw Fiona on shore,” Luce finished. She felt nauseous. It was such a hideous, vicious thing to do, even for Anais. “But why do you think they ran back this way? Wouldn't it be more likely for them to keep traveling south?”

  Sedna shook her head. “A few of the littlest girls snuck back to us. Begged us to let them join our tribe. And they said Anais didn't want to risk meeting any more tribes that already had queens of their own, so she was just dragging them all back to their old territory. Anais kept talking about all the stuff they'd left in their cave, anyway ... Luce? What's wrong?”

  Luce clung to the shore, greenish lights flashing in her eyes as the blood drained from her head. All her joyful fantasies of peace with the humans suddenly weighed on her in a new way, steely and threatening. “They can’t go back!”

  “Who else is going to put up with them?” Sedna asked flippantly.

  “No—Sedna—no, this is horrible. I know Anais deserves it, but the rest of them ... Rachel, Kayley...”

  Sedna stared at her, utterly bewildered. “Um, Luce? Want to make sense?”

  “It's not safe for them to go back there. I think—no, I'm sure—the human police up there know about us—

  “The humans what?”

  Luce gazed back at her numbly. “They know, Sedna. At least a few of them do. We're not a total secret anymore.”

  “You'd better take that back!” Sedna shrieked. Her tail was writhing in midair, ready to strike, and Luce jerked away from her. “You'd better—You can’t be right!”

  “I saw them plant a camera. Divers. They stuck it to a wall underwater, hidden, right next to the beach where we ate,” Luce insisted. “Sedna, don’t bring your mermaids up there!”

  “Humans lose cameras all the time!”

  “Sedna, please!” Luce yelled. “That camera wasn't lost. It was planted on purpose. Do you think I'm telling you this so you won't go punish Anais? After she tried to kill me and my closest friends?”

  “You might be,” Sedna murmured, but Luce could tell she didn't believe it. Her black eyes flicked fearfully around the placid silver waves.

  “Maybe I am wrong,” Luce groaned. She tried to feel convinced. “Maybe I'm crazy, and everything is just the same as it's always been. But Sedna, if I'm right about this...”

  Luce watched Sedna's face twisting and suddenly knew that, no matter how much Sedna wanted justice, she wasn't about to lead her followers into so much potential danger.

  “Queen Luce?”

  Luce couldn't answer at first. Instead she watched Sedna fighting to compose herself. Everything was too painful, too out of control. Even if L
uce raced desperately to her old tribe and warned them again to get out, they'd be more likely to murder her than to listen to her. But even so...“I should hurry back there, Sedna. I should try to do something.”

  Before it’s too late, Luce thought. Before something so terrible happens that we can’t ever fix it.

  Sedna exhaled, hard, and looked straight into her eyes. “Goodbye, then, Luce. I really hope we'll see you...” She trailed off abruptly.

  But Sedna didn't need to say the last word out loud for Luce to know what it was.

  Alive.

  25. Till Human Voices Wake Us

  The journey back took two long, tiring days. Luce's thoughts flurried on in a dreamlike whirl of images: sometimes Dorian was kissing her, sometimes Anais had a knife at her throat. She'd made up her mind that she was going to do something, anything, to get her old tribe out of danger, but she had no idea how she could actually help. Not when they were all so certain that she was their enemy. Anais would treat anything Luce said as a joke, and the rest of the tribe seemed to be utterly under Anais's control, too intimidated to even question her. Had they really stood by and let her murder Fiona? Had they known?

  But maybe she had some time to come up with a plan. As long as the tribe didn't bring down any more ships, maybe the humans wouldn't realize mermaids were still living near there or maybe the humans wouldn't do anything to hurt them after all. Luce did her best to find the idea comforting, but when the coastline finally began to bend into familiar cliffs and zigzags she only grew more anxious. It was already late at night, much too late to look for Dorian, and the sky was moody and starless. Luce made her way to the inlet that sheltered her own small cave. She felt entirely depleted, ready to sleep for days. In just a few moments she would be resting with her head on Dorian's old jacket, and she sighed gratefully as she turned toward the cave's entrance. The entrance was usually completely submerged, but the tide tonight was exceptionally low: low enough that a sliver of jet emptiness showed above the lapping water.