The Twice Lost

Orange sunset light exploding everywhere, astonishment flaring in the trees, wide laughing mouths raining down from the blossoms . . .

Even through the unbearable music pounding at her ear Kathleen could still hear a sound that told her the promise would soon be fulfilled. Waves, she could hear the waves. They were the charging hoofbeats of an infinite horse assembled from moving diamonds. In the horse’s heart Eileen was waiting, whispering. “Keenie, hurry up hurry up hurry up! I’ve been waiting for you for so long!”

Kathleen turned a corner and saw the ocean as she’d never seen it before: countless blazing geometric planes, all transfiguring into momentary birds and stars and armies . . .

Someone who Kathleen knew had been a close friend of hers quite recently, maybe even yesterday, came up and started yammering stupidly about something and then looked hurt as Kathleen shoved past her . . .

The music and the sea were almost together now. When they finally met they would merge and expand, and Kathleen would ride with her sister in the quick of the miracle. She couldn’t stand waiting anymore; she started running right down the center of the street, dodging cars, then out onto the long dock where she’d had her first glimpse of what could be . . .

Just for a moment that astonishing music paused, replaced by a weary sigh from the phone. “I wish you’d finish up,” a girl’s voice complained. “I’m getting bored.”

Kathleen veered into a railing, gasped, and looked at water that was suddenly just water. She felt a frigid internal touch; something corrosive and evil fingered her heart. What was she doing?

The singing started again.

Eileen’s face became as huge as a cloud; it had endless changing angles, all of them sharp with glory; her mouth opened wide in greeting.

Kathleen vaulted over the railing. She felt her sister’s teeth close in.

They were very cold.

* * *

General Prudowski spread the photos in front of Secretary Moreland—satellite photos of the ocean near San Francisco taken over the previous three nights. The photos were utterly unbelievable; it was an insult to Moreland’s intelligence that Prudowski was forcing these images on him at all, let alone insisting that Luce Korchak must be responsible for those watery, convoluted ramparts rearing out of the Pacific. He began wondering how he might teach the general a lesson.

The general wouldn’t stop jabbering insolently about mermaids working together, and about some plan he had for stopping them. Maybe it would be simplest to agree, before his confusion became too obvious.

In a dorm room in Boston a chubby, sweet-faced, gold-skinned girl sat on her bed with her arms wrapped around her knees. She’d cut class that morning for the first time in her life, telling her roommate that she was nauseous and might be getting stomach flu. The nauseous part was true enough, but she knew flu wasn’t the reason she felt so awful.

A camera rested on her bedspread with its pattern of cartoon cats, and Gigi looked at the cats to avoid looking at the camera. For the last seven years she’d managed mostly to ignore the memories of the afternoon her mother had drowned, the afternoon her own life had been saved so inexplicably; at least, she managed to ignore them as long as she worked all the time and blasted abrasive music to drown out the music in her head; at least, until she had to go to sleep.

But now . . . I bet you don’t want them all dead any more than I do. Now the scruffy-looking man from that damned Internet video kept talking in her thoughts, trying to persuade her to do something thoroughly reckless.

“They killed my mother,” Gigi argued aloud. Her mother had taken her out on a whale watching trip for her birthday, but they hadn’t seen whales. “And their songs—it’s like I’ve had some kind of brain disease ever since. Why would I make a fool of myself in public for them?”

So I’m here to ask . . . Then there’d been the unbearably beautiful music that made her want to die from the sheer force of her joy, as if she’d finally understood that the only way to love life enough was to end it. The crash, the wild deep water. If that’s you, and some mermaid saved your life before . . .

Gigi thought of the astonishing face that had suddenly appeared next to hers in the water; it had belonged to a girl whose skin gleamed with subtle golden glow and whose body coiled away into a pinkish gold tail. The girl had looked distinctly pissed off, and she’d hesitated for several long seconds as bubbles oozed from Gigi’s lips, staring at her as they descended together. Then with a sudden angry shake the mermaid had grabbed her and dragged her back to the surface, glaring furiously at the other mermaids who still trilled their incantations to the sinking crowd.

“Queen Yuan?” one of them had called out, more bewildered than indignant. “What are you doing?”

The mermaid called Queen Yuan hadn’t answered, just taken off swimming with Gigi clutched in her arms. Gigi had gagged up salt water and wrenched her neck to take in as much as she could of the mermaid’s impossibly lovely face. The music still throbbed through her, and it didn’t even occur to her that her mother was dying.

Three of the mermaids followed them, calling to Yuan in coaxing voices. “Yuan, come on! You know we don’t want to expel you!” And: “Yuan, she’s just human! Please, please let us drown her. Do it for me?”

Yuan never answered them, just surged on through the waves with a bitter, stubborn expression, her black hair fanning through the pearl gray water. How long had they gone on like that before Yuan shoved her roughly onto a sandy shore, beating Gigi with her tail to make her get up? The golden fins smacked at her face, then her legs, while Yuan snarled, “Run! Stupid human, run! Inland! Now!”

Get up on this Internet and say so . . .

“I’ll never live it down,” Gigi argued back. “I’ll spend the rest of my life being that dumb girl who will make up any whacked-out thing to get attention. Mike will probably break up with me. And, seriously, you think that’s going to help me get into graduate school?”

What price had Queen Yuan paid for rescuing her, though?

Gigi wiped the tears from her face and picked up the camera, balancing it on her knees and staring at the empty black lens. She inhaled slowly twice then tapped a button, gritting her teeth as a small red light blinked on. “Hi. I’m Gigi Garcia-Chang and I’m here to answer Andrew Korchak’s call for testimony from people whose lives were saved by mermaids . . .”

It got a little easier after that.

18 Kraken Rising

Luce woke up at sunset, when a young mermaid whose name she didn’t know stopped by Catarina’s hammock to give them a small heap of oysters she’d brought back from deeper in the bay. Yuan had given the job of collecting shellfish to crews of the smaller girls, who went foraging every day with scraps of net slung over their shoulders and then came back to distribute their hauls. Cat fell back asleep as soon she’d finished eating, but Luce slipped out from under the warehouse to watch the sun sinking behind the hills and jagged factories of the city. She didn’t know why she felt so sad. Training was going remarkably well, and everyone seemed happier and less anxious. Behind her an encampment that now held well over two hundred mermaids drowsed and chatted and wove more hammocks to accommodate all the new arrivals, and there were many more members of the Twice Lost Army scattered around the bay. Luce couldn’t help realizing how much most of them trusted her. Somehow without even knowing what she was doing, she’d found a kind of destiny.

Luce hadn’t told them what Seb had said about that video she’d accidentally starred in. It seemed like too much to explain, but Luce had to admit to herself that it might be an important development. In fact, she still hadn’t told anyone except Imani about Seb at all.