The Twice Lost

“Luce, come on! You have to lead them away from this!”

Luce turned and red-gold hair swirled into her face.

Mermaids were squirming free of that scrum of sharks and clouding blood, whipping away into deeper water. But Luce hesitated. What if there were wounded mermaids in that mess who could still be saved? It didn’t seem likely at this point, but—

“Luce, if you don’t call everyone to follow you now, more of them will die!”

Luce looked at Catarina in a daze and then realized that she was right. Her own arms were laced by lines of seeping blood as thin as paper cuts, all stinging horribly from the salt water, and below them the gray forms of hundreds of sharks were lancing upward. They could outswim them, but they’d have to move fast.

“To the bridge!” Luce screamed. “Follow us! To the bridge!”

Her voice echoed through the dark sea, and mermaids who’d scattered began to race back to her. Luce threw herself into movement, her injured tail lashing out behind her. Mermaids streaked around her, their dimly shining arms reaching forward into nothingness, their fins kicking. Luce whipped her tail until it ached, listening all the time for the sound that might save them: the song of the Twice Lost Army. If they were holding a giant wave up right under the Golden Gate Bridge, Luce was almost sure the humans wouldn’t dare to attack them again.

But . . . she heard only silence. Or not even silence, but the sound of air battered by what must be several helicopters now. They must have planned to catch the entire Twice Lost Army in that net and machine gun all of them together.

Maybe she’d asked Imani to do the impossible. Maybe the Twice Lost had dashed away in a hundred random directions, helicopters whirling above and picking them off whenever they came up for air . . .

Maybe nobody would be waiting for them at the bridge, and the wounded remnant that was following her now would find themselves helpless and alone. There were about twenty mermaids racing along with her, twenty-five at most: without the others they wouldn’t be able to raise enough water to create a credible threat.

And without a threat it would be just like Catarina had said: they wouldn’t last an hour. Should she order everyone to turn around and scatter through the ocean? They would if she told them to, Luce knew. They could give up the fight and try to find caves to hide in, at least for a while, at least until the divers tracked them down.

Was that a faint glow in the water up ahead? It might be the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge blurring and fragmenting in the water. But the glow had a green moonish cast that didn’t look like electric light, and it seemed to be stirring in a long curving line, several yards below the surface, spanning most of the Golden Gate.

And then, electric lights could never make a sound like that: a low swell of rising music so sweet and wild that Luce’s heart seemed to expand into infinite space. Even after all the horrors she’d witnessed that night, even with Bex and the others ripped to shreds behind her, Luce was suddenly suffused by an unbearable joy that was also profound grief, and she was singing.

Singing into the other voices even as those voices opened inside the water. Each voice blossomed inside the next, flowers inside flowers, or stars bursting inside other stars. Now Luce could see Yuan racing back and forth, pulling stragglers to fill the empty spaces in the long row of mermaids. Cala was hugging Jo, coaxing her to join the song. It didn’t look like the entire Twice Lost Army, but Luce guessed that at least half of them had assembled there. And there was Imani, her head thrown back, her voice vaulting above the other voices and calling them to rise inside the gleaming wall of water . . .

Water that shuddered, flexed, bowed for a moment as if it might come crashing down again . . . Then stood up in a huge fluctuating ribbon so tall that it brushed against the underside of the Golden Gate Bridge, so long that it stretched across at least two-thirds of the channel. Luce broke through the surface to see it, suddenly utterly unafraid.

A line of stilled headlights needled the dark. All the cars had stopped where they were. People were getting out, standing in small confused clusters against the railings. Luce hoped the music wouldn’t hurt them. But what they were hearing wasn’t the mermaids’ death songs, after all, and Seb had heard her sing to the water without it doing him any harm. He’d even said it had helped him.

Probably they’d be okay.

Ten or twelve helicopters vibrated above, their searchlights swinging wildly across the standing wave-wall, and Luce turned to watch them. All the beams together made her think of a giant spider with legs made of spindly light. Then one searchlight pivoted, raced along the frothing surface, and shone straight into her face. She stared back. The light blinded her and she couldn’t tell where she was looking, but she did her best to aim her gaze into the pilot’s eyes. Would he open fire?

The helicopter chattered on unmoving, and Luce went on singing. Around her more of the mermaids in that long chain kept surfacing, singing with her as they faced the guns above. Luce lifted her arm, still etched by hairline streaks of congealed blood, smiled at the pilot, and waved.

19 The News

Andrew looked at the drugstore’s cash register and sighed. The clerk had turned away, absentmindedly leaving the cash drawer ajar. It would be so easy to take advantage: just one quick forward flick of his wrist and he’d have enough for a few days’ travel. His skin was almost crawling with the desire to reach out, to casually turn and walk away with bills stuffed in his pocket.

Except, well, if he kept on stealing then how was he ever going to make a decent life for Luce, once she was finally human again? And say Kathleen e-mailed him one day and told him that she’d decided to get a divorce? If that happened how was he supposed to be good enough for her? He was almost positive that Luce and Kathleen would be crazy about each other. Luce would read every last one of Kathleen’s books, she’d help out in the garden, she’d grow up and go to college and not waste her potential the way he had.

Because there had to be some way to turn Luce back. He refused even to consider the possibility that there wasn’t.

He balled his hands into fists and swung his body out the door. Didn’t even snag a goddamn candy bar. It was such unaccustomed behavior that he found it almost disquieting and he shuffled his feet aggressively to make the feeling go away.

On the opposite side of the drab street a small crowd had gathered in front of an appliance store. It was weird to see people bunched together like that in this drowsy little town. That store must be having a hell of a sale. Not having anything in particular to do, he wandered over to see what was going on.

The crowd seemed to be standing in shocked stillness, watching a scene playing out on a dozen televisions at once. Andrew’s first thought was that it had to be some kind of big-budget Hollywood movie, the kind with incredible special effects, because, well, those screens all showed what appeared to be a huge glassy wave standing upright under the Golden Gate Bridge. That couldn’t be real, simply. But if this was a movie, it was awfully slow paced. The wave fluttered and swayed near its summit, but other than that it didn’t seem to move much. A crowd of people pressed against the bridge’s railings, staring down, backed by rows of cars that weren’t going anywhere either.

There was no sound through the window, but a news ticker scrolled relentlessly along the bottom of the screen: “San Francisco’s standing tsunami, now at hour six. The wave appeared at 3:28 this morning, accompanied by unexplained music. Police have been attempting to evacuate the bridge, but they are meeting with resistance from the crowd. We are awaiting further reports.”

“Is that some kind of joke?” Andrew asked. For some reason, the lingering music that always throbbed on in his head seemed to be getting a little louder. The mermaids’ songs he’d heard that time had made him pass out; it was something about the unbearable way that Luce’s voice had dueled with the strange mermaid’s. But didn’t this look a bit like something he remembered from the moment before he’d lost consciousness?

“It’s real,” a big gray-haired woman said sadly. She didn’t turn her eyes from the screen as she spoke. “It’s real, but nobody knows what’s going on. There was some talk about a lot of people spotted down there in the water, but that doesn’t stand to reason either.”

“Sure doesn’t,” he told her. Unless whoever was in the water weren’t people, or