The Twice Lost

everyone to try to match my voice. Take your time, and try to . . .” Luce thought about how to describe it. “Try to let your voice kind of spread out on the water, like you’re . . . like you’re touching someone you love. Once you can almost feel the water responding to you, just pull back a little bit.”

Putting her secret experience into words that way made it sound half-crazy, even to her. Luce broke off in embarrassment. But Yuan’s eyes were bright with fascination, Graciela was trembling like a plucked string, and Imani was beaming as if she had just caught a star on her tongue. “Um, does that make sense?’ Luce asked.

How was she supposed to be a general when she couldn’t even overcome her own shyness?

“It makes sense,” Imani said. Her voice curled like something alive, and Luce suddenly felt certain that—how had Nausicaa put it?—that the water would understand Imani at least. “It makes sense the way all miracles make sense.”

The hills hovered like shadows at the edge of the sky while cars flowed like a river of diamonds along the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. Around them the Pacific rocked, its stone dark waves always beckoning them on to nowhere at all, while above the night was blinded by clouds. Like Imani said, it was miraculous. Luce realized how much she’d forgotten to notice ever since . . .

She half closed her eyes, the distant lights blurring in her lashes, and tried to take her own advice. She let out one single soft note like a palm cupping the water’s cheek, like a patiently caressing hand. For several moments she didn’t try to control the water at all, only to feel it, and to feel it feeling her. Until each molecule touched by her voice became a nerve, or a thought, or a moment of realization.

Luce’s arms were wrapped around her chest; she caressed the ocean’s skin only with her song, and soon she shared its sensations. The water woke with a tactile vibration just the way Luce’s own skin had once woken under the touch of a boy whom she couldn’t bear to remember. This was a kind of love, Luce thought as her song fanned softly outward. The water would do almost anything for her because they loved each other.

Other voices were gathering under hers. Luce knew that she should pay attention to how everyone else was doing; she just couldn’t, not right now. There was a kind of sighing pressure inside her. A feeling she had no name for rose in her chest. Her voice began to lift, very slowly, and a slender wing of sea followed it. It gleamed and circled and finally broke free of the surface. Wherever she was, Luce thought, she was home as long as the ocean kept her in its heart this way.

She felt ready to look around now. As she’d expected, Imani had raised a wave, thin and slight and curling like a question mark, and Bex was making flat little waves jump and fall in sudden spurts, but some of the others were having trouble.

Luce took a moment to concentrate on Catarina’s voice. Cat was singing one high note very beautifully, but Luce got the sense that she wasn’t really trying to beckon the water at all. But the fact that Bex and Imani were making progress at least proved that it was possible.

A skinny blonde in the back whose name Luce couldn’t remember suddenly lifted a knife-shaped wave, then let out a little scream of surprise that sent it splashing down again. Luce smiled to herself. It reminded her of the first time she’d seen the water answer her, when she’d refused to believe what was happening.

Luce let her own note fade away. The others should keep on without her for a while. Instead she focused on listening. Yuan’s timbre was a little off; her voice had a rough magic that Luce didn’t think the sea would respond to. They could work on that, though. Graciela was . . . not paying attention to anything outside her own mind. But her tone was lovely, and Luce realized that the sea was answering her, only with a kind of fitful stirring instead of an ascent. And Catarina: Luce was suddenly sure that Catarina was deliberately singing in the wrong way. She couldn’t begin to guess why, though. Maybe Cat was angry about Luce’s rule against killing?

Fine, then. Cat had wanted Luce to become their leader, and if she was going to sulk about it now Luce wouldn’t try to stop her.

Luce swam over to Yuan and started singing very faintly, her voice sliding under Yuan’s and lightly, slowly, smoothing out the harshness in her tone. In a few minutes Yuan’s voice conjured up a tiny prancing jet, and Luce moved on. She sang with each of them, her voice luring their voices after hers, until the dark sky behind the hills graded to a murky violet. The clouds were barely parting, and frills of electric blue sky showed between them.

She hadn’t been crazy at all, Luce thought with relief. She wasn’t a liar. Everyone there had managed to call up at least a small wave. Everyone except for Cat, anyway, who was too stubborn to make a serious attempt.

The singing faded, but no one spoke. The first hints of dawn seemed to hold the silent mermaids together in a sense of soft exhilaration. Blue glow touched them all, and with it came a shared awareness of marvelous possibility. Luce heard Imani’s laughter, amazed and tremulous, and noticed in surprise that Yuan’s cheeks glittered with sudden tears.

Inexplicably, Catarina swam over and hugged Luce hard, almost as if she needed to protect her from something.

The only thing that made the moment less than completely perfect, Luce thought, was that Nausicaa wasn’t there with her.

* * *

“Luce?” Catarina murmured. It was just after dawn, and beams of golden light streaked across the dimness under the empty factory. The pilings looked like a forest. Rats skittered on the planks above, but apart from that everything seemed so peaceful.

Luce had just been drifting off in Catarina’s hammock of shredded nylons, scraps of silk, wire and string, but she jolted awake at the sound of her name. “Can’t you sleep, Cat?” She tried to keep the annoyance out of her tone. Maybe Cat had some good reason for how strangely she’d been acting.

“Teaching everyone to do what you can do . . . Luce, have you thought about what that could mean?”

Catarina’s cool shoulder pressed against Luce’s cheek. It was so much like the way things had been over a year before when Cat was Luce’s queen, and her friend—and when Luce had still believed that Catarina had murdered her father. “It’ll just mean we’ll all stand a chance if the humans ever find us here,” Luce said. She felt sleep brushing up inside her mind again, coaxing her to fall.

“Oh, Luce,” Catarina whispered. Her voice was a low, airy moan. “You’re so trusting, even after everything you’ve gone through. You can’t imagine how much darkness and treachery there is in . . . in almost everyone. If everyone can control the water, if everyone can fight, they won’t need you anymore. And if someone ever manages to surpass you . . .”

Drowsily Luce began to realize what Cat was getting at. “I don’t care if somebody else takes over as general, though,” Luce murmured back. “I just had to do something, so everyone here doesn’t end up . . .” She didn’t need to finish the sentence: like the girls from our tribe. Like dozens of other mermaids we don’t even know. “I’ve ruined so many things, Cat. Yuan . . . I don’t think she’s right that the rest of us are soiled, but I know I am! If I’d only listened . . .”— to Nausicaa, Luce thought—“to you, Cat, I probably could have saved at least some of them. I can’t let that happen again.”

“Even though if someone else takes control, that will be the end of your little prohibition on killing humans, Lucette?” Catarina snipped. Luce was suddenly much more awake; of course Catarina must be right about that. Luce felt the hammock starting to sway and only then realized that her tail was flicking. “Though that isn’t really what worries me. Even for you, Luce, it seems absurdly naive to insist on defending those creatures now.”

“We . . . The humans need to see that they don’t have to kill us, Cat!” Luce knew what she felt, but her feeling seemed too big and too awkward to fit into words. “I think maybe if we prove to them that we can change . . . then we can persuade them to change too?” That was part of what she wanted to say, Luce thought, but there was more to it.

It was about more than just mermaids and humans and how they just couldn’t seem to stop hating each other. The whole world was in danger; the sea was stained with death.

Catarina’s mouth twisted as if what Luce was saying was too ludicrous even to deserve a response. “Luce, you’ve announced to everyone that you won’t let humans be killed, that you won’t even show anyone how to protect herself if that means humans will be endangered! And you’ve said it just when