The Twice Lost

what all this is about?”

Luce stared around at everyone: dozens of mermaids who looked as if they’d come from every country in the world, the tints of their faces ranging from night dark to icy pale. Swimming away by herself would be so much easier than trying to tell this crowd of strangers everything that had happened to her. On the other hand there was Catarina gazing at her with a mixture of anger and—Luce had to admit it—feverish tenderness. Luce definitely owed her an explanation at the very least. “I’ll try. I don’t know where to start, though.”

“Start when I left,” Catarina growled. “Luce, why didn’t you go back to the tribe? You were supposed to be their queen! Oh, I was so sure that once I left you would do the right thing, the only thing, and lead them.”

Luce looked at her and suddenly knew that she was going to say the unsayable. “I couldn’t, Cat. I was furious with them because of what they did to you, but . . . that wasn’t the real reason. I wasn’t worthy to be queen.” Everyone was gaping at her; a few of them had started smiling slyly, as if they were sharing some joke Luce couldn’t understand. “I broke the timahk.”

There it was. Now they would drive her away, and they’d be better off with her gone.

A few mermaids had started laughing in a choked, delirious way. Catarina moaned and Yuan flashed a lopsided grin. “You don’t say. How?”

“I saved a human. A boy.” Luce wished they’d hurry up and tell her to leave. She didn’t want anyone asking questions about this boy; she didn’t want to confess how pathetically stupid she’d been, loving someone who’d betrayed and humiliated her and who clearly wanted her dead. And she definitely, definitely didn’t want to say his name again, not as long as she lived.

“Luce!” Catarina seemed like she was about to cry. “You—oh, I needed you to be better than that. You were always the one, the only one who could save us. Restore our honor . . .”

Luce couldn’t understand why, while Catarina seemed on the verge of hysterics, Yuan couldn’t stop grinning as if her face was about to split open and at least half the mermaids around her had joined in that disturbing laughter. “Yeah, Catarina, this is terrible! What kind of dirty bitch would save a human?” Yuan sneered. Luce looked at her in total perplexity. Yuan met her gaze with a hard stare and smiled with too many teeth showing. “Just a bitch like me, or like Rafa, or like Imani. Nobody ever had any crazy fantasies about us restoring anyone’s honor, right?”

Hazily Luce thought Yuan must be kidding somehow. She knew she wasn’t the only mermaid in the ocean who’d violated their laws, but it couldn’t be true that so many of these girls had failed the same way she had. Could it?

“Luce is—she was always—different from the rest of us, Yuan. She made me believe in . . .” Catarina broke off, glowering through the streaks of her tears. Luce reached out and stroked a tear away, half expecting Catarina to slap her.

She didn’t, but the way the glazed shine of those gray eyes suddenly fixed on Luce’s face felt worse than a blow.

“Believe in what, Cat?” Yuan’s voice was silky, insinuating.

“In purity.”

“Oh, boy. Purity.” Yuan’s face was still contorted by that sarcastic grin. “Might want to forget about that now!”

Luce impulsively pulled Catarina closer and leaned her cheek against her friend’s wet face. All she could see was the fire-colored waves of Cat’s hair. At least the frenzied laughter around them was finally subsiding.

“No.” Catarina’s voice was a blur in Luce’s ear.

“Cat? Yuan’s right. I’m not any more pure or honorable than anyone. I haven’t even believed in the timahk for a long time, and I broke it over and over, and then I didn’t . . . do what I should have done to stop our tribe from getting killed. I did everything wrong.”

Catarina moaned. “Then you’re different because dishonor can’t touch you. You still have your innocence, Luce! I know you do. I heard it every time you sang.”

Luce didn’t know what to say to that. She looked up through soft tangles of Catarina’s hair to see Yuan still smiling cynically. “Guess we can’t talk her out of it, then. Luce, it looks like you’re just going to have to live with being Catarina’s shining star, unless you decide you can’t stand it and ditch. I know what it’s like. My daddy used to cry and sob and say I was so pure and special that I couldn’t lose my innocence no matter what, too. See, that made it okay for him to rape me.”

Luce stared for a moment. “Please don’t compare Catarina to him, then.”

“You don’t like hearing it? Why not? You love Catarina or something?” Yuan suddenly demanded; her voice was changing, turning high and strange. Luce couldn’t help flinching.

“I do. I always did, ever since I met her. Even when we were fighting.”

Catarina exhaled sharply and squeezed Luce tighter.

“Oh, see, but I loved my daddy, too. And the first thing I did when I changed was swim right back to our house and drown him. And my mom and my piano teacher, even though I wasn’t really trying to get them. Too bad for them our house was right on the water!”

Yuan’s eyes were narrowing, and her voice took on a dreamy, obsessive lilt that Luce knew all too well. But it wouldn’t make any difference if someone told Yuan to let go of the past. That wasn’t something you could just decide to do.

“Yuan?” It was a new voice, very low and gentle. Luce looked and saw a mermaid with blue-black skin and soft dark eyes; her hair was short, like Luce’s, though it stood out like a halo around her head. She wore a white lace headscarf and a bikini top that appeared to be made from snow-colored lace as well, though on closer inspection it proved to have been intricately crafted from plastic grocery bags. The blue luminance of her skin reminded Luce of neon reflecting in a street lacquered by rain. “Luce is still just meeting everyone, and seeing Catarina again after a long time. It’s a lot for her to think about. Couldn’t we wait to tell her . . . everything about ourselves?”

Luce smiled gratefully.

“I’m Imani. I’m one of the ones who broke the timahk the same way you say you did. But I don’t think it has to mean we’re dishonored. It can mean . . . we wanted different rules, or we wanted to be honorable in a different way.” Imani’s voice was barely audible.

Yuan laughed nastily. “Try telling that to any queen in the world, Imani. Any tribe! No mermaids would ever accept us! They’d only think of us as . . . soiled. Ruined. And they’d be right!”

For an instant Luce just stared around, uncomprehending. What could it mean to say that no mermaids would accept them when they were living in what looked like the biggest tribe she’d ever seen? But Yuan had said it wasn’t a tribe, and no one seemed to be in charge. Unless, somehow . . .

“All of you?” Luce asked. She could barely hear her own voice.

“Oh, now you get it! All of us except the refugees. And even if we disgust them they don’t have a lot of choice about putting up with us.” Yuan’s strange grin came back. “Yeah, everyone here broke the timahk, one way or another! We all got thrown out of our tribes. Not for the same reasons, though. Tania over there got into a fight, for instance, and Jo was caught trying to call her mom with a cellphone she found on the beach.”

Yuan nodded toward a girl with her hair dyed an artificial ruby red. Jo was wearing a huge necklace made from dozens of algae-slicked plastic toys and tangled string, and she kept squirming and biting the back of her own hand.

“Well, I don’t believe that Jo is dishonored either,” Imani objected. Even when she seemed angry her voice was low and soft, almost cooing. “She’s not soiled.”

Luce looked around. Jo wasn’t the only mermaid there who had strange tics or eyes as restless as swarming gnats. “And that’s why you don’t have a queen?”

“No queen!” Yuan agreed fiercely. “Even if we’re filth, at least we’re free! It doesn’t matter what we do. We can’t be any more worthless than we are already.”

Luce began to wonder why Catarina had been silent for so long. She was still clutching Luce tight in her arms, and her face was hidden against the side of Luce’s neck, but her breathing sounded different now, raspy and somehow thoughtful.

“It always matters what we do!”