The Twice Lost

need to rush south as quickly as possible.

But now that she understood how hunted she truly was, there was an acute need for stealth. The black- suited divers probably knew that mermaids tended to cling to the coasts and that they needed air periodically as they swam. Slipping her head out of the water anywhere near the shore would be wildly risky; she’d have to travel uncomfortably far out to sea. Luce didn’t even want to think about how impossible it would be to find anywhere she could sleep.

For a whole day she lingered in J’aime’s narrow hiding place, letting her damaged body start to mend itself, singing low, melting songs to that piece of broken sky high above her. It was the first time in weeks she’d stayed so still and let herself succumb to everything she felt in the quiet. Her song curled around fragments of Dorian’s voice: If you want to kill me for this, you can. I won’t sing back. He’d given her a chance to stop him before he’d started trying to make sure the divers disposed of her. Maybe he’d decided only one of them could continue to live.

And already so many other mermaids had been slaughtered because of what Dorian had done. Girls lay in rotting heaps deep in their caves while the one in particular Dorian wanted dead somehow lived on, carrying the images of the lost with her. Dreamily Luce pictured herself trailed by ghostly faces, all glowing like jellyfish, all warping with the loft of the waves . . .

Was she sorry, then, that she hadn’t drowned him? She’d come so close; she’d forced herself to stop just in time.

But no, she couldn’t regret it. He’d wanted her to kill him, even tried to manipulate her into it, and the only vengeance left to her, feeble and fragile as it was, was to make him live with the knowledge that she was living, too.

* * *

Luce slept for many hours that night, awkwardly balanced against the cave’s wall on a rocky shelf that wasn’t really long enough for her body. She woke with the heavy conviction that she had to keep heading south no matter the danger. As far as she could tell, Nausicaa had passed this way, and finding her friend was the only real hope she had left at this point. Together maybe they could come up with a plan: some way to stop the slaughter of the mermaids. Maybe even some way to make peace with the humans, as impossible as that seemed. After all, any mermaids who survived these massacres would only hate humans more than ever. The idea that she of all people might somehow manage to persuade them to stop killing, well . . .

It was preposterous. But it was the only idea she had.

Luce set out again at dawn. Swimming was still painful, but the ache in her bruised midriff was starting to dull a bit and her torn ear barely hurt anymore. Risky as it was she paused at a beach and ate as many shellfish as she could manage, constantly scanning the golden waves for any hint of a black boat with silent engines. Then she went on, sweeping at least half a mile from the shore. She didn’t know what kinds of predators she might encounter out here, but she had a feeling they couldn’t be as dangerous as humans firing razor-sharp blades. And at least animal predators wouldn’t be hunting specifically for her.

Still, she kept a close watch for any creature that appeared too big or too hungry. It was strange, though: she didn’t see anything big at all. In fact, as she went on there weren’t even any fish, apart from some jellyfish and unusually thick smears of bright green algae when she surfaced. It didn’t make sense. Luce paused, breathing, wondering why the sea was so oddly empty. There weren’t even any birds.

And, Luce thought, the water felt a little different on her skin, though not in any way she could identify. It didn’t feel like fresh water, but it definitely felt wrong, almost sticky. Or somehow slow. Somehow breathless, sad, inert. The morning sun swayed in brilliant flags along the water’s surface, and Luce felt overwhelmed by solitude so immense that it crowded the sky.

Except for, far in the distance, a single dark boat. Luce couldn’t hear an engine.

It was too far away for her to guess if it was the same as the boats that were hunting mermaids, but even so her heart went cold, its rhythm fast and light and whispery. She dived, hurtling deeper than she would ever normally choose to swim, so deep that the water’s gray weight squeezed in on her and the light deadened into a hard slate dusk. She could see the seafloor from here; it must be relatively shallow.

The seafloor looked all wrong. Bone white, with nothing moving, with none of the usual grades and variations of color.

Her instincts told her not to go any deeper than she was already. The pressure was too much, and she’d be too far from the air. Instead she needed to concentrate on going as far as she could at a depth where the boat couldn’t find her.

Luce went down, her better judgment screaming in protest. But there was clearly something very wrong here. The sea had never looked so forlorn. She had to know what was happening here, to understand . . .

There! Something was moving. Luce’s pulse quickened with hope until she saw the limp, lifeless way it drifted. It was something pale, spindly, and complicated, skimming over a plain made of impossibly spiny, whitish stones. A large crab, Luce realized after a second, but it was clearly dead. Its splintered claws trailed over the weird stones of the seabed, clacking softly.

No. It couldn’t be. Those things she’d thought were stones . . .

Dead crabs. Many thousands of them lay packed together in all directions for as far as Luce could see, heaped and askew, their jointed limbs slopped across one another’s shells. Matted weeds; decayed fish; rotting, fluctuating ribbons that were once gigantic worms. All of them were thickly covered in fuzzy, whitish slime, a carpet of disease.

What was this place? What kind of world allowed such a sweeping destruction of life? Luce reeled in place, her body lurching through the water, her tail suddenly lashing senselessly. Horror choked her; she felt crushed and airless.

She needed to slip back to the surface for a breath. As deep as she was now, she ought to swim up soon. Go, Lucette! Instead she stayed where she was, staring mesmerized at the field of unmoving animals, jagged shells, and bacteria. A transparent creature floated by her, looking like a feathery scrap of silk torn from a ballerina’s dress. Countless tiny lacy filaments sprouted from its sides; it should have been wonderfully beautiful. But it was turning brownish, and it draped on the current with sickening indifference.

Go on, Lucette! Now! Her lungs were starting to burn, but that was just for lack of oxygen. Wasn’t it? Or was the water here poisoned somehow? She tensed herself, forcing her tail to spiral purposefully again, to carry her up . . .

But hadn’t she heard something about this, once? Hadn’t someone—Luce couldn’t even stand to think his name anymore—hadn’t someone she once knew told her that there were ocean areas near the shores where almost every living thing was dying? That there were only a handful of species that could survive in them, because the water was starved . . .

Starved of oxygen. She remembered now. All those creatures had suffocated. That must be why the water felt so wrong. Humans had done this, too, Luce remembered; it had something to do with all the extra fertilizer pouring into the ocean from farms.

The water’s weight began to shift off her body and green wands of sunlight reached her. She was speeding upward now, constantly imagining that, wherever she surfaced, the boat would be waiting for her. Could they find her with radar? In a place with so much death, it would only make sense if she died too. Her lungs ached, longing for air, but for another few minutes Luce lingered ten yards below the surface, her gaze searching the green-glass surface above for any hint of an impending shadow. There was nothing up there, only the twisting light pleated by the waves, but still she couldn’t calm the panic that throbbed through her body. The instant she broke through into the air they’d rush in from nowhere, and glinting steel would cut the water so fast that she would only know it was there when she felt her body splitting wide . . .

At last she rocketed upward, appalled by the wind on her face, and heaved in one quick breath before diving again to hover in watery space. Her heart punched at her chest. She knew she was being ridiculous; there was nothing up there. But after what she’d seen of her own tribe and J’aime’s, after seeing that field of death at the bottom of the sea, the whole world seemed jagged with menace.

No, Luce told herself. She couldn’t go through her whole journey this way. She might be killed at any time but there were more important things to worry about. She floated where she was a little longer, then deliberately flicked her tail and broke the surface, looking around at the serene golden light and breathing slowly. A few lifeless fish skimmed past, pale bellies winking at the morn- ing sky.