The Twice Lost

anyway not people in the strict sense of the word.

He had only a few dollars left and he wasn’t about to shame himself by calling Kathleen collect. But he absolutely had to talk to her about this, right away. He had to know what she thought, and as he walked briskly away to hunt for a pay phone, an imaginary conversation was already playing in his mind: “You’re seeing this, Kath? You think that’s them? It’s got to be. I’ve got to get down there!”

And then the words he knew he couldn’t say: “You should come with me. Please come with me. I know I ain’t done right so far with my life, but now . . .”

“Now,” he murmured to himself. It had gotten pretty hard to find pay phones since everybody had a cell these days, but there was one behind the plate glass of that Laundromat down the way. He broke into a run, praying that the lousy thing wasn’t busted and scrounging through all his pockets for quarters.

It wasn’t Kathleen who finally answered, though. “It’s you,” Nick said with rough hostility. “You’ll be proud to hear how meeting you has worked out for Kathleen. A thirty-nine year-old woman with everything to live for doesn’t drown herself that way out of nowhere!”

Andrew couldn’t understand what Nick was talking about.

Who had drowned?

Ben Ellison spent the night trying to pack up his office as calmly as possible. After twenty-three years of devoted service to the FBI, it was hard to accept that he deserved to be fired so abruptly. Heaps of papers slid from the desk and cascaded onto the floor in terrible confusion. Only the images streaming live from his laptop provided any real satisfaction. The government’s efforts to keep Operation Odysseus secret—to keep the very existence of the mermaids secret—had evidently come to a dramatic end. The media was going to be bombarding the White House with impossible questions now. Reporters would strike out and investigate on their own, too. There was no way Moreland would get through this debacle unscathed.

Ellison had been kept in the dark about the maneuvers of the previous night, but it seemed clear from the helicopter gunships wheeling in disorder above the bridge that there had been a major assault on the mermaids. It was also apparent that the attack had failed in spectacular fashion. Looking at that wall of water gleaming in the morning light, Ellison knew he didn’t owe Dorian the promised phone call. Lucette Korchak was alive and free and wreaking havoc.

Ellison observed with relief that these mermaids obviously weren’t trying to kill anyone. A vast crowd of easy victims lined the bridge, mouths agape and eyes staring. This Luce seemed to be too media-savvy—or possibly, possibly she was actually too good-hearted—to allow the mermaids with her to sing all those awed, defenseless humans to their doom. And that was precisely the kind of move on her part that Moreland would have no idea how to handle. It was utterly unpredictable, bold and daring and brilliant.

Bone-tired as he was, Ellison couldn’t keep a hard, brutal grin off his face.

Whose side was he on, anyway?

* * *

Dorian woke up to Theo shaking his shoulder. “Sorry to bother you before noon, good sir, but the world is ending.”

Theo’s tone was ironic enough that Dorian didn’t immediately feel worried. “Yeah? Somebody release a herd of stampeding dinosaurs or something?”

“Tsunami. Epic scale. If you can call it a tsunami when it just stands there. In San Francisco.”

That made Dorian sit up abruptly, his heart quickening with hope. In the next moment he realized how absurd his idea was. Luce’s ability to control water with her voice was impressive, but he was fairly sure she couldn’t do that. “How big is it?”

“That’s what you want to know?” Theo laughed. “Not something reasonable? Like, oh, ‘How the fuck is that possible?’ It’s big enough to block off everything under the Golden Gate Bridge, is how big it is.”

Dorian was halfway out of bed, hauling on the jeans he’d dropped on the floor the night before.

“It’s on the news?” Dorian was groping for a T-shirt. There was one around somewhere.

“I know it’s crazy, but the media does seem to be finding the event rather noteworthy, yeah. My mom can’t even talk straight, she’s so shocked.”

Dorian was dressed and on his feet, stumbling after Theo down to the den, where Amanda Margulies sat on the green leather sofa in her yoga clothes. She was clutching a cup of coffee with a veil of cold scum on its surface, and drying tears streaked her face. Theo sat down next to his mother and hugged her warmly.

Dorian stared at the huge TV screen: on it there appeared a wall of bright water with fluted, faintly pulsating sides. The delicate rust red curves of the Golden Gate Bridge swanned above the unmoving wave, and in the background he could see the open ocean. Cordons of police boats were keeping a good distance from the bridge, shooing back the various sailboats and kayaks that jostled forward, trying to get closer to the action. And, above the clatter of gathered helicopters and the excited babble of the newscasters, there was a distinct musical thrum, sweet and immense and enthralling . . .

Dorian realized that the music was very much like something he’d heard before, except this sound was incomparably vaster and more complex: a rich, nuanced swell that could only be hundreds of magical voices thrilling together.

“What are those people doing?” Dorian suddenly asked. At the edge of the crowded bridge, a news crew was engaging in some kind of fussy activity involving ropes and pulleys. Whatever they were up to, it looked like a bad idea.

“Looks like they’re lowering that camera guy over the side. Trying to get some kind of close-up? But it’s just going to look like more water . . .”

The cameraperson was strapped into a harness, and his unwieldy camera was secured to his front with various cables. He clambered up onto the side of the bridge and then dropped slowly, twitching and kicking twenty feet below the line of spectators. They watched as he adjusted himself and trained his camera on the shimmering wall of water.

For a few minutes nothing else happened. There was only the crowd standing bone-still, enraptured by that unearthly music, the swaying figure of the cameraperson, the fractured diamonds of sunlight all over the water- wall. But nothing new was happening, Dorian told himself. The situation might drag on for hours without any change. So why couldn’t they look away?

Then—then something did happen. A small figure appeared at the wave’s base, arms raised as if it were diving. But the figure was inside the water, bending into strange refractions. Then it twisted, leaped upward . . .

And the figure wasn’t human. Even at this distance that was obvious.

The chattering commentators abruptly fell silent while next to Dorian Theo let out a kind of shrill, astonished moan. Of course they’d all watched the video of Luce—but this was different. No one could even pretend to believe that what they were seeing now was faked.

The leaping body on the screen rippled away into a long, lashing tail. The tailed figure vaulted smoothly up through the wave’s core and came to an unsteady stop just in front of the dangling cameraperson. He reeled against his straps, legs flailing helplessly. Then he stopped kicking, seeming to lapse into mesmerized calm.

The newscasters had started babbling again, but they weren’t making a whole lot of sense. “In just a minute . . . waiting for the feed to come in . . . truly an incredib—more in just a . . . bringing you a closer look at . . .”

The mermaid in the wave had something white in her right hand, and she fluttered it as a gesture of reassurance. Her tail looked more or less the right color: a light, silvery jade green.

“Trying to communicate . . . but does that mean . . . does that mean the same thing it would for us? Peaceful intentions?”

The mermaid leaned forward, parting the water in front of her face as if it were a curtain. Dorian’s heart was pulsing so quickly that it felt like some small sick bird spasming in his chest.

Then the image shifted abruptly as the close-up came on. She was wearing a tattered black bikini top; Dorian had never seen her wear human clothes before, only kelp leaves. Her arms and body were crosshatched with razor-fine wounds, there was a scar on her shoulder and a notch missing from her right ear—and she was smiling so sweetly and vividly that Dorian choked.