The Twice Lost

Millions of people had watched her swimming out from under that dock. They’d seen her hesitate as she considered trying to get a message to her father and then turn back to the sea as she rejected the idea. But maybe, just maybe, her father was one of the millions who’d seen the video. Maybe she’d managed to let him know she was alive after all.

Maybe someone whose name Luce refused even to think had seen it too. He’d know that all his scheming to get her murdered had failed, and maybe he’d remember what it had felt like to kiss her and brush his hands around her face.

Maybe he’d feel sorry for what he’d done.

The problem with entertaining these fantasies, even briefly, was that they made her miss him. It was disgusting to realize that she could miss someone like that, but all at once his scent and warmth and glance came back to her like sensual wraiths. He’d seemed so tender sometimes; it was still hard to believe that he could bring himself to inform on her.

He must have, Luce reminded herself sternly. How else could the government have learned so much about her?

Even as she wondered about Dorian Luce’s eyes kept reflexively scanning the bay. White houses spilled down the clefts between yellow hills on the far side. Bridges crossed the horizon, rusty cranes shaped like skeletal horses loomed, and a few small boats puttered on water lacquered gold and violet by the evening sky. The noise of their engines reverberated faintly while the gulls cried above. Certainly there was nothing out there that resembled the black silent boats used by the divers, but somehow she wasn’t reassured.

They’d been incredibly lucky so far, Luce thought. The only real question was how long their luck would hold.

* * *

It was after midnight when Yuan sent her messengers darting out to all the secret mermaid camps around the bay to assemble them for that night’s training. Luce smiled as she watched Yuan slipping among the pilings, quick and efficient, giving everyone their instructions. Yuan seemed so much more hopeful now that she had a job to do, and she was impressively good at it. “Yuan?” Luce called.

Yuan swirled to a halt in front of her, black hair swinging in the water, and saluted with a touch of comic exaggeration. Only a touch, though. “Hey, general-girl! Whazzup?”

Suddenly they were both giggling. “Um, snap to, lieutenant-babe.” Luce felt a little self-conscious; she’d never really been this silly with anyone before except for maybe her father. But she found herself enjoying it. “Yeah, girl, I got some orders for you. You better jump!”

Yuan whipped her tail and spiraled straight up out of the water, knocking her head against the underside of the pier. “Ow! Oh, jeez . . .”

“Are you okay?” Luce asked.

“Oh, sure.” But the blow had knocked Yuan’s exuberance out of her. “What do you need me to do?”

For a few seconds there Luce had felt so young; she already missed it. “I think we need to start posting sentinels during training. A big circle of them, pretty far out.”

Yuan was rubbing her head, and she suddenly looked very serious. “I was wondering if I should suggest that, yeah. We should assign a different division to guard duty every night so everyone still gets to practice singing.”

“Good idea,” Luce agreed. She was vaguely impressed that Yuan had started calling the groups “divisions” too. “And Yuan? Not all the guards should stay on the surface.”

Yuan looked surprised. “How do you mean? We’ll see the boats coming from far enough away to get everyone out of there.”

“But . . . I don’t know what they could do, Yuan, but what if they sent a submarine or something? We need a ring of guards on the surface and another ring maybe, well, twenty yards down? Just in case they come at us from below.” Like orcas, Luce thought. Like what Seb said the navy would do if the kraken was rising.

Yuan considered that. “It seems like if they got close enough to do that we would notice.”

“Maybe we would, but just in case?” Sometimes Luce experienced a kind of tidal sense that Nausicaa was there with her. She felt that way now. It seemed to her that she was following the advice Nausicaa would give her in this situation.

Yuan shrugged. “You’re the general, Luce. And, hey, should we figure out a special alarm-call?”

They talked that over for a few minutes. Neither of them was sure anyone would notice the windy call mermaids usually used as an alarm over the sound of the entire Twice Lost Army singing together, and they settled on a series of piercing trills instead. Bex joined them, along with several other girls Luce barely recognized, though Yuan clearly did. Luce still couldn’t get used to the nervous, admiring way a lot of the Twice Lost looked at her.

“It’s getting late,” Yuan said. Her voice was uncharacteristically soft. “Shouldn’t we be heading out, Luce?”

Luce glanced back into the dimness and realized that dozens of mermaids were flicking expectantly in the water. They dived, all staying near the bottom to keep out of sight, and headed into deeper waters: first under the Bay Bridge then around downtown and a tall hill topped by a single cylindrical tower. When they skimmed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge its starry lights draped like countless tangled ribbons on the fluctuating ceiling above them. It took them another twenty minutes to find the rest of the Twice Lost, already gathered and waiting to the south. They could just see the lights of the Cliff House beaming from the shore, but the waves on all sides were steep and dark.

With the new arrivals there must have been at least five hundred mermaids huddling together, their faces and shoulders forming a dimly phosphorescent raft that curved with the passing swells. Luce was startled, again, to see how much her army had grown. Yuan called the former queens together and explained the new system. Only Catarina was nowhere to be seen. “Lieutenant Cala, everyone in your division already has a pretty good handle on their water-singing, right? Okay, I’m going to assign you to lead guard duty tonight. Ten mermaids on the surface, ten mermaids twenty yards below, changing off at about half-hour intervals. Have you got that? And you’ll need a signal for when it’s time to switch positions that’s really different from the alarm-call Luce and I worked out. It’s like this.” Yuan demonstrated, her voice piercing against the low roar of the sea and the dim chatter of the assembled girls. “Everybody? You’ve got to get this right, because you’ll each be in charge of teaching it to your division.”

Suddenly the night shuddered with the unearthly, metallic trilling of the alarm as everyone tried it. Luce floated, feeling almost irrelevant with Yuan working so efficiently to keep things organized. She kept staring around. The Pacific looked almost too vacant, the sky too cavernous.

“Did you guys notice anything?” Luce asked suddenly as the harsh cries died away. “I mean, before we got here?”

“There’ve been a few more boats than usual, I think, General Luce.” It was the auburn-haired mermaid Yuan had addressed as Lieutenant Cala. Her dark turquoise tail flurried just under the surface, pale green iridescence flashing on her scales. “Just yachts, but they came close enough that we got kind of nervous. We just hung out below the surface for a while and they all went away again. I think we’re cool.”

“Okay,” Luce said, but then she realized she didn’t mean it.

“Can we start practice?” Bex asked eagerly. “You know, I thought I loved singing when we did it to drown people. But the way we sing now—it’s so, so, completely great and amazing! I never want to stop.”

“Get the guards in place first,” Luce said, and then flinched a little at the grim, paranoid tone of her own voice. What was wrong with her tonight? “And—sorry. You should just go ahead and start without me.”

“Luce?” Yuan was looking at her worriedly. “Is something, like, wrong? You’ve been acting kind of jumpy all evening.”

“Probably everything’s fine,” Luce said. Her voice sounded even worse this time: strained and phony. “I just—I don’t know why, but I feel like we need to start being extra careful. I’ll be back soon.”

“You’d better come back! I mean, where are you going?” There was a shadow in Yuan’s gaze that contradicted her sassy tone.