The Twice Lost

Andrew Korchak wasn’t watching his daughter. Instead he was sitting on a park bench, sobbing so violently that the world pitched and swam in his eyes. He knew beyond all doubt that Kathleen would be alive now if she’d never glimpsed Luce. Kathleen had been trying to help the mermaids, and they had killed her. He was positive of that, even if he couldn’t begin to guess how they had done it. It was worse than any treachery he could have imagined. And maybe it was his fault, too. Somehow those videos had brought Kathleen to the mermaids’ attention.

He should have told Kathleen he loved her. While there was still time.

* * *

Seb perched on a folding chair in the community center housed in a church basement, other homeless and luckless people crowded around him. When Luce got to the part about mermaids changing their ways, Seb burst out laughing and cheering so loudly that the volunteers ordered him to leave.

* * *

Gigi Garcia-Chang knelt with her cheek pressed to her TV screen. With one finger she followed the ever- shifting curves of Yuan’s pinkish gold tail. She’d recognized her rescuer immediately, even after so many years. Until this moment, Gigi thought, she hadn’t understood how terribly she’d been missing the mermaid who had saved her.

She was taking two summer classes, and then there was her part-time job in a cafe. Her responsibilities were a real impediment to just catching the next flight west.

But maybe she would anyway.

* * *

“Damn. How many guys do you want to bet are ordering sushi right now? Like, ‘Hey, um, can you deliver this to the bottom of the Golden Gate Bridge? And, like, tell that mermaid I sent it’?” Theo was laughing uproariously, though from something dark in his eyes, Dorian thought his friend was trying to conceal wilder emotions behind this display of silliness.

Dorian slumped on the green leather sofa, biting his lower lip and hoping that Theo wouldn’t notice his burning cheeks. His distress was partly provoked by bitter longing at the sight of Luce looking so proud and free and beautiful, and acting so brave. But that wasn’t all he was feeling. He was also queasy with shame. He’d watched Andrew Korchak’s appeal over and over, and he’d kept an obsessive watch on all the video testimonies that followed from it. But he hadn’t quite worked up the nerve to post a video of his own.

And now—now it was way too late to do anything like that.

Within hours thousands of people—and mostly, Dorian thought hatefully, they would be young guys, and some of them would be way better-looking than he was—would be posting videos claiming they had been personally saved from drowning by General Luce. There would be declarations of love, offers of adoption, the works. Damaged and defiant as Luce was now, she was simply that enchanting. Adding his own video to that ruckus would just make him look like a total moron. At best it would be an exercise in pointless humiliation.

There had to be something else he could do, Dorian thought. Something to show her . . .

“But I’m the one who’s going to get the date with her, because I know the secret. Mermaids can eat fish anytime they want, right? So the way to get their attention is obviously with pizza . . .”

Something to show her I deserve to get her back, Dorian thought grimly. Something to prove to her . . .

“ . . . we could use your help!” Luce exclaimed passionately from the television. “Join us.”

Her pale olive face gave off a subtle greenish shine. The glow shone brighter in the streaks of her tears. When they were breaking up Dorian had told Luce her problems weren’t real; he’d told her she wanted to stay a kid forever so that she could avoid responsibility; he’d even blamed her for letting herself turn into a mermaid in the first place. And now here she was, injured and scared but still leading an army into this weirdly peaceful battle, doing what no mermaid had ever done before, while he sat on his ass.

“Or, you know? Maybe that black mermaid is even hotter. Yeah, check out that blue tail!”

“Theo?” Dorian snapped. “Could you possibly shut up?”

“I see no call for such an uncouth remark, good sir. I was merely expressing my sincere desire to send those exquisite mermaids a hot, cheesy pizza.”

“It’s a war!” Dorian growled. “Luce is wounded, okay? Her friends just got shot. She doesn’t need your fucking pizza!”

What Luce needs, Dorian realized, are allies.

And he was ready to join her war.

A hazy pink glow filmed the water, slivered with turquoise by the ripples flowing smoothly toward the shore. Bell-shaped scarlet flowers cascaded down the cliff, lush mosses dripped, and a tiny waterfall raised a perpetual shimmering froth where it splashed into the cove. But for all the fantastical beauty around her, the emerald-tailed mermaid leaning on the shore looked somber and a little bored. Coils of black hair snaked thickly around her dark bronze shoulders, and her greenish black eyes were glazed with sadness. She’d already seen every possible permutation of beauty the world had to offer far too many times.

If the friend she was missing had been there with her, then she could have experienced this sunset as if for the first time, seeing the world with borrowed freshness and enthusiasm. But the odds that that particular friend was still alive were admittedly poor.

The waterfall’s sleepy percussion changed its tone. The mermaid looked, without much interest, at a sudden fervor of bubbling, a slippery confusion of crosscurrents that beat and rose and gathered form . . .

This too was something she’d seen plenty of times before. The mermaid waited with morose patience for what she knew was coming. A new mermaid was about to appear, a metaskaza, stunned by the transformation and the devastation that had provoked it.

New fins flashed into existence under the water’s disordered surface, and with them there appeared a girl with a long tail that swung erratically. Her scales were a lovely color somewhere between dove gray and lilac, gleaming with pearly iridescence. The tail went well with the metaskaza’s coloring. She was a very pale blonde with deep gray eyes, and she sat up with her hands scrambling wildly into empty air. Her breath was heaving with terror and shock, and a single impossibly sweet note tore from her lips and ended in a sudden gasp.

The dark observer thought she might as well do the helpful thing: stay and talk this newly transfigured mermaid through her inevitable reaction to the change. The girl would be overwhelmed by denial, hysteria, grief . . .

She was genuinely surprised when the metaskaza displayed none of those emotions. Instead the blonde gaped wide-eyed at her own tail, hefting it uncertainly and letting it fall back again once, twice, three times. She looked amazed, yes, but not devastated or incredulous.

That was unusual, to say the least. Of course, if this girl was sika, someone born cold and void of true emotions, then she might not be capable of the usual responses. The dark mermaid twisted her head to check up on that possibility, peering from the corners of her eyes into the dark shimmering that winked around the blond girl’s head. With a normal mermaid you could see the terrible incident that had chilled her heart to the point where she let go of her humanity; with a sika, cold from the beginning, there would be nothing to see.

The blonde wasn’t sika. She’d been altered by one of those horrors that her observer regarded as simply wearisome routine.

“Oh my God!” the new mermaid exclaimed shrilly. “It’s just like on TV!” Then she noticed that there was another mermaid watching her. “It is, right?” she asked. “This is just like on TV. And that video. I knew it was real!”

This situation wasn’t just unusual, the green-tailed mermaid realized. It was utterly unprecedented. And she adored anything unprecedented no matter what it involved. “I don’t know this video you speak of. But certainly, all of this is real.”

“You have to know!” the metaskaza squealed. “And—oh, wait, can we swim that far? We have to get to San Francisco! How fast can we swim there?”