The Twice Lost

Yuan hesitated. “You said it was a boy, right? The human you broke the timahk for?”

“It was a boy,” Luce agreed stiffly. “Yuan, I actually—I really need to talk to you about something else, okay? I wanted to ask you a favor.”

From the corner of her eye Luce couldn’t help noticing how fixed and curious Yuan’s gaze looked. She wasn’t going to stop wondering about Luce’s past. “What favor?”

“Well—you said there are a lot of other mermaids. Living around the bay? It’s not just the girls here, right?” Luce made herself look back at Yuan, though hot veils of shame still seemed to press on her face.

“Tons. A few actually came out last night when you were singing, didn’t you notice? And somebody was telling me that a whole new tribe just turned up this morning, like somebody came and warned them but they didn’t know where else to go.”

Luce felt a surge of gratitude at the thought that they’d been warned by J’aime, still struggling to save as many mermaids as she could. “I wanted to ask if you would go talk to them. To the other mermaids around the bay.” Luce hesitated; it seemed so presumptuous. “Ask them if they’d like to join us for training tonight.”

“You mean—if they’ll promise not to kill humans in exchange for learning what you can do?” Yuan thought about it. “You even want me to ask the crazy ones?”

“If . . . if that’s okay with you. I mean . . .” Luce tried to shake off her embarrassment. “I think we’re going to need as many mermaids working with us as we can get. If we’re really going to stop the humans.”

“So you’re not just talking about teaching everyone? You’re talking about . . .”

“About asking them to really join us. Yeah.” Luce considered the question then straightened herself. “Please tell them that General Luce is inviting them to join the Twice Lost Army.”

13 Kathleen

“Hi,” Andrew Korchak said as the door swung open. He’d arrived at a small, white, extremely pretty house, its yard a jumble of vivid flowers and its windows set with panes of stained glass. He couldn’t help feeling out of place there. “Um, I’m Andrew. We talked on the phone?”

“Of course. Very glad to meet you.” The woman stepping back to welcome him in was also small and pretty, with light brown hair in a ponytail and soft blue eyes. “I’m Kathleen, and this is Nick.”

Andrew shook hands with her and then, a bit less comfortably, with her angular, balding husband. “I really appreciate you both agreeing to see me about this. I don’t mean to impose.”

“Of course not! After what you told us, we wanted this meeting just as—well, I’m sure not as much as you, I don’t mean—but it feels very important to us also.” Kathleen was leading the way down a broad hall lined in books, with small twisty tables displaying collections of seashells. Andrew couldn’t help thinking how the sight of all those books would thrill Luce if she were here with him. “You can imagine, we’ve received some pretty peculiar messages since we posted that video, but yours— I knew right away that it was something different.”

“I know I must sound like a nut,” Andrew said defensively. “I’ve got the photos right here. I’m sure you want to see for yourselves—that this is for real.” They walked into a kitchen where, to Andrew’s surprise, a large wooden table was set with plates and glasses, a salad and cheese and fruit. The warm, yeasty smell of fresh bread mixed with the scent of roses gusting through the window. Heavy lilacs swooped from a vase. “Oh—I didn’t mean for you to go to all this trouble! I’m . . .” He wasn’t sure what to say. He’d been hitchhiking for days, not eating much, and it was all he could do not to lunge for the food. “I’m real grateful.”

“Our pleasure,” Nick said behind him; a little primly, maybe, but it didn’t sound hostile. “But I would like to see those photos, Andrew, when you get a chance.”

He was already pulling the pictures out of an inside pocket, spreading them out to show his hosts. What would he do if they decided it was all a lie? “This one—you maybe can’t see so good that it’s the same girl. She was only three there, with her mother. But this one right here . . .”

Kathleen had turned greenish white and she teetered a little. Nick moved to put his arm around her. “Oh, Nick. Oh my God, it’s her!” The words came out in a long moan.

“It certainly—if that’s not the same face we saw, there’s an impressive resemblance at least.”

“It’s her. It’s even the same expression that she had when she looked at me! You could see in her eyes that she’d been through things that, that no one should ever have to . . .” Kathleen’s voice was breaking, and she bit her lower lip.

“It’s my Lucette. It’s the same girl who you all filmed out in the water. And—there’s some terrible things happening, and—I didn’t do enough to protect her before, but now . . .” He broke off when his view of the sunny room started rippling in the tears filling his eyes. He was longing to tell Kathleen everything, but he didn’t feel as confident about trusting her husband.

Wordlessly Nick pulled out a chair for him, and he slumped down. Kathleen dealt with her emotion by swinging into energetic movement, bustling to fetch a bread knife and ice and a pitcher of lemonade. Andrew watched her dart around the kitchen in her jeans and pale blouse, her ponytail lashing. This was how he should have brought Luce up, in a house just like this one. He pictured Alyssa’s dark hair tumbling as she bent to lift bread from the oven.

“So,” Nick said, and Andrew jumped at the sound of his voice, “assuming you’re both correct about the identity of the mermaid we saw—and I have to say I think that’s a huge assumption for all of us to make—there’s still a question I’d like answered, if you could.”

Kathleen smacked the cutting board down hard enough to make the silverware rattle, and thumped the bread on top. “Would you please not condescend to me! It’s not an assumption!”

Nick smiled over at him in a way Andrew found vaguely irritating, as if he’d be sure to agree that Kathleen was just one of those high-strung women who have to be humored. “All right, darling. Let’s say that the mermaid’s identity is an irrefutable fact: she is Lucette, and the earth orbits the sun. It still leaves us with one unavoidable question, doesn’t it?” Kathleen was slicing bread more vigorously than seemed strictly necessary. “Why was it a mermaid we saw and not a teenage girl in a swimsuit? Do you think that’s something you could resolve for us, Andrew?”

“When you wouldn’t even admit that we’d seen a mermaid at all until we watched our own video ten times, I don’t think you get to lay claim to some kind of higher rationality!” Kathleen fumed. She slathered butter on a hunk of bread and flung it on Andrew’s plate in a way that made him grin uncontrollably.

“It’s okay,” Andrew said softly. “I can answer. But it just . . . it means getting into kind of a long story, and a lot of it . . . it might be hard for me to say. Or for you to believe, really. I’ll do my best, though.”

“Please,” Kathleen said. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her. Whatever you can tell me, it would mean so much! Right now all we know is what Chrissy told us.”

“Chrissy?”

“The neighbor’s little girl. You can see her in the video too. She said she talked to the mermaid under the dock and brought her some food, and that the mermaid was very nice and told Chrissy not to trust magic things, and that she’d been bit by a squid.”

“And you believe every word Chrissy said, because seven-year-old children never invent stories like that?” Nick asked.

Kathleen looked like she was on the verge of an outburst, and Andrew tried to deflect it. “That rip in Lucette’s ear? Must have been a pretty big squid.”

“Oh.” Kathleen sounded distracted. “Maybe one of the Humboldts. They’ve been showing up here recently. Andrew, I’m sorry. You were about to tell us about you and Lucette.”

“Yeah. See, the thing is I wasn’t around when she changed, but she told me about it later.” Andrew barely remembered to eat as he told the story, trying to keep it as short as possible. He left out some things, like how he’d made his living during their years on the road; he didn’t want his hosts to start worrying that their credit cards would disappear. But he tried to be honest about the rest of it: how Alyssa had died as a result of their rambling life, how he’d finally moved to Alaska to give Luce some stability, then how his fishing boat was destroyed in a storm not long afterward, drowning almost everyone onboard. How he wound up marooned on an island in the