The Twice Lost

“Down.”

“Just down?” Yuan tried to sound like she was kidding. “Send us a postcard, okay?”

“Please—just get the guards in place. Right now.” Luce looked around at her lieutenants. Most of them seemed vaguely shocked by her strange behavior, but Cala saluted crisply and she didn’t even look like she was doing it as a joke.

Luce dived.

She could see in the dark, but in this darkness there was nothing much to see except for jellyfish and a few small bored-looking sharks. To her right she noticed one of the mermaid guards dropping and then hovering head downward, held in place by the steady rotation of her fins. Luce waved to her and kept going.

Above her the first voices leaped into fluid harmonies, and for a few seconds Luce was towed sharply backwards as the water streamed upward in thrall to the music. She fought her way to the side of the strange ascending current and kept swimming straight down. Her hands spread out in front of her as if she could feel the immensity of the space still opening below.

Shadow on shadow, tangled night on charcoal deeps. She was at least fifty yards below the surface now, maybe seventy. The water’s weight pressed in on her. It was easy to start imagining things, to think that there were blots in that darkness that were somehow a little denser or a little darker than the rest. Of course there might be sea lions out hunting, and there were definitely more sharks gliding by. But here and there Luce began to think that there were dark shapes that weren’t moving at all, and that seemed . . .

Well, that seemed wrong. Luce thought she detected black balls of shadow spaced far apart from one another. They were almost invisible against the blackness beyond and hovered with uncanny stillness.

Then her own rapid downward movement began to make it look like the shapes were rising just as fast as she was plunging.

No. They really were rising. In the nothingness below her Luce’s outstretched palm was suddenly crisscrossed by inexplicable lines of pain as fine as cutting wires.

Then Luce was reeling backwards, her tail whipping and balling up around her as those razor filaments cut at her fins. A piercing, ululating cry burst from her throat. She shrieked the alarm-call without pause as she lashed her way back toward the surface, those black spheres rocketing up around her just as fast as she could propel herself. Her frantic call reverberated through the water, breaking and echoing into a dozen different voices—or, no, those were the guards she’d posted below the surface, picking up the alarm like a relay.

Again and again the lashing of her tail sent traces of sharp pain through her fins. There was something sharp and impossible to see below her: some kind of cutting mesh. And it was rising as quickly as those dark spheres on all sides, jetting up so fast that even a mermaid couldn’t outrace it.

The spheres were pulling it up.

There were four of them, positioned at the corners of an enormous square.

The song above her collapsed into confused quiet; only a few mermaids still seemed to be singing. Luce could just make out the shimmer of tails flashing wildly away in all directions, radiating outward like blurry fireworks still far above her head. Shock waves slammed her down again as the city of towering waves above dropped abruptly back into the sea. The blade-sharp mesh raked her fins even as Luce jerked her tail up in a coil around her body, and her alarm-call turned into a sustained scream. She couldn’t swim up quickly enough to escape from the mesh, not with so much water pummeling down on her. She couldn’t . . .

A few mermaids were still so consumed by their song of rising water that they remained oblivious to the chaos. Luce could hear the song reverberating just to her left. Without fully understanding what she was doing she flung herself in that direction, her scales goaded by those knifing wires.

Then the current spinning upward in the song caught her, and Luce was hurtling straight up, still screaming. Her body burst past the startled singers and up into midnight air. Suddenly Luce was turning far above the surface, watching hundreds of panicked mermaids scattering in widening circles like the ripples around a dropped stone. Huge waves released by all that falling water rode outward, sweeping away even the mermaids who were still too confused to swim. Just in time, because those awful black spheres were almost at the surface now, lifting their cruel net with them.

Most of the mermaids were outside the area enclosed by the spheres. Only a few dozen were caught, their song breaking into shrieks with the first touch of the mesh as it rose below them. In those brief moments while she rotated in space, Luce understood: the mesh was meant to drive the mermaids to the surface and trap them there, while—

She heard the beat of helicopter blades above her, and now she was plummeting right into the center of the net. Mermaids flopped strangely, stretched out on the surface of the water in their struggle not to graze those wires. Every tiny movement lacerated their fins, the skin of their backs, their faces. Luce saw her followers gasping and crazed, their bodies covered in a delicate tracery of trickling blood.

Most of the ones who’d escaped from the net had disappeared below the water, but some of the bravest fought their way back through the outracing waves and hovered nearby, gaping in horror while they wondered how to help their trapped comrades. As she crashed down into the net’s center, Luce noticed Imani staring at her in desperation.

“Imani! To the bridge! Lead everyone back to the bridge!”

In the split second that followed, Luce saw Imani hesitate.

She saw how much Imani wanted to ignore the order and try to help Luce instead. In that moment Luce felt nothing but a single explosive wish: that Imani would abandon her.

Then she saw Imani nod in assent, her eyes wide and stunned.

“Start the blockade! Now! Imani, go!”

There was a rattling noise, and Luce turned in time to see the first blast of machine gun fire cut through Bex in a line that began at her shoulder and slanted straight across her heart. A dozen jets of blood sprayed from Bex’s opening chest, and her shoulders tipped away from her torso as if they were hinged. Luce saw pale eyes watching through the domed window of a round black machine.

Those sleek, compact submarines would be harder to knock out of the way with waves than a boat would, Luce realized. They were designed to travel through buffeting undersea currents, to resist the water’s force. The mermaids around her were screaming in shock, and the helicopter was swooping down again.

And Luce was howling to the water, calling it to save them. She tried to calm herself and concentrate on the submersible sphere where those pale eyes gaped. At first Luce’s wave lifted the nearest sphere, bringing cutting mesh right against her flesh and the flesh of the mermaids around her. More screams came, jarring through Luce’s head and making it harder to focus on the water.

She had to drive the water outward. If she could break even one corner of the net, they would all be free to tumble out into the ocean and escape.

A fist of water, bulging and glassy, wrapped around the black sphere, and Luce’s shriek-song rose higher and fiercer as she strained to force the sphere back and snap the net. The water only seethed and eddied around the sleek metal sides, unable to get a grip on it.

Streams of bullets sliced the air again, and at least two more mermaids ruptured around lines of flying blood. Luce knew she couldn’t look, couldn’t gasp; she could only keep singing.

Something like a scroll of living fire moved in the water below her, and Luce heard another voice joining her voice, entering into it and expanding it until the dome of water covering the submarine pulsed white with foam. That net had to be made of something extraordinarily strong, Luce realized, but now she heard it start to creak in shrill protest. There was a whiny snapping noise, and suddenly the sharp wires were dropping away beneath her. The sphere rolled back and downward, its motors snarling, and Luce saw its glass dome implode.

“Everyone, roll!” Luce heard herself screaming. “Roll out of the net! Dive down!”

At least twenty tangled mermaids were spilling from the net with her. The water below them was quick with gray shapes. White spreading teeth were already coming at her, and Luce barely managed to jerk out of the way.

A froth of sharks leaped against them, maddened by all the blood. Luce felt herself jostled by slippery skins. Three sharks fought over a bullet-riddled mermaid, fangs tearing into her tail even as it trembled and turned back into human legs. Luce tried to lunge for the dying girl, to somehow drag her away from the slashing teeth, but something had a grip on her shoulders. She was being dragged rapidly backwards, down and away from the frenzied sharks and the noise of machine gun fire still rattling above the waves.