The Twice Lost

“To San Francisco? I can help you do this, yes. But why?”

“Like on TV yesterday! Didn’t you see it?”

“I don’t watch a great deal of television,” the dark mermaid observed dryly.

She watched as realization, then embarrassment, flickered over the blonde’s face. “Oh. Oh. Wait, so are you saying you don’t know what’s happening? You haven’t heard about the Twice Lost Army?”

Things were only getting more interesting. “I’ve heard nothing of this, no. What is this army?”

“And you don’t know about General Luce? We have to go help her!”

For the first time in several centuries, the green-tailed mermaid was briefly rendered speechless from astonishment. Her jaw dropped and her eyes widened. Within moments, though, she had recovered most of her poise. “General Luce?” Her look of surprise was rapidly mutating into one of absolute delight. “General Luce? So she still refuses to be called queen? ”

“She’s leading this mermaid army to stop the government from killing them. And there’s this wave, and they’re holding it up by singing, and she said on TV that they need other mermaids to come and help. Please . . .”

“Of course, you are right. Of course, we must rush to aid General Luce! With the next ship! I will show you how we can ride across unseen.”

“Can’t we just swim?”

“Not so far. We would drown. The first thing you must learn is that you still need to breathe, and to breathe while you sleep. You must be careful of how deep or far you swim. Many new mermaids die of their ignorance. How are you called?”

“Oh. I’m Opal Curtis.”

The green-tailed mermaid smiled at her warmly. “Welcome, Opal.” She already liked Opal, quite a bit, for her impassioned, spontaneous loyalty to Luce. “My name is Nausicaa.”

22 Reaching Out

For the next twenty-four hours the mermaids were preoccupied with figuring out the details of their new struggle. Luce was more grateful than ever for Yuan’s help. Under Yuan’s direction the mermaids were organized into two groups; each group would sing for two six-hour shifts every day in order to keep the wave up nonstop. It wasn’t far to the clock tower at the Embarcadero, and a small mermaid was dispatched to keep track of the time. Once they divided the army in half that way it became clear that they didn’t have quite enough mermaids to sustain the wave at its full force, but they didn’t want to risk a disastrous collapse. Yuan was the one who got the idea of removing the singers one by one, letting the water adjust for a few moments before she beckoned the next mermaid out of the line. She posted guards, choosing those mermaids whose voices weren’t as strong to keep watch.

Half of their force proved to be enough to keep the wave going, though not quite at its previous height. It wasn’t ideal, but they had to hope that it would be enough. And as Yuan had predicted, many of the Twice Lost mermaids who had scattered in terror were starting to drift back, drawn by the faint resonance of the music stroking through the water. The wave swelled higher as they poured their fresh voices into the effort. Then in the early evening a new tribe of refugees showed up, and Imani immediately set to work on training them to join in.

Above them police wearing what were probably noise- canceling headphones had begun physically carrying people off the bridge. But for every one they removed it seemed like some other human would manage to sneak on and take their place. The crowd hadn’t thinned at all, and now the shores were packed with listeners as well. The base of the Golden Gate Bridge began to resemble a jostling auditorium.

Luce sang through her shift from late afternoon until midnight then swam back to their hidden encampment to get a few hours’ sleep. She was bleary with exhaustion, and with Yuan handling so much of the work—and so much happier than Luce had ever seen her before—Luce felt more like just another weary soldier than like a general.

At least she felt that way until she looked up and saw three younger mermaids watching her with a kind of disbelieving admiration. Luce smiled at them, but she still felt a little shy under the pressure of their eyes. She knew she might fail them horribly, and she almost wished they understood that. They should be more skeptical, Luce thought as she fell asleep, and not so innocently ready to entrust their lives to her.

Before she knew it, a gentle hand came and shook her awake for her next shift. It was lucky, Luce realized, that their new way of singing together was so thrilling or the effort of continuing it for so many hours at a time would have proved overwhelming very quickly. Even with the exaltation of that music coursing through them, how long would the Twice Lost be able to keep going with such intensity?

There were more helicopters today. And a lot of them weren’t from the TV news.

Then it was noon, and she had six hours to rest and eat. But there was something else that she needed to do, Luce realized, before she let herself collapse into her hammock again.

A soft arm wrapped around her shoulders. Imani was there beside her, and in a moment Cala joined them too. “Luce? How are you holding up?”

“I’m doing okay,” Luce murmured. The truth was that, the longer she floated in the bay gazing up at that sparkling translucent barricade under the bridge, the more anxious she became. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she was asking too much from the Twice Lost mermaids. Something had to change and soon . . . and she’d promised the humans that there would be a letter stating the mermaids’ demands. “I think I have to go see Seb. If you want to, you could come with me.”

Imani shrugged. “I’ll come meet him, sure. What did you want to see him about?”

“There’s something I need to ask him to do for us,” Luce said. “He might be a little . . . I don’t know . . . unreliable? But we don’t know anyone else.”

* * *

Twenty minutes later they set off for the collapsing pier where Seb passed so much of his time. A day or two before, of course, Luce would have made a visit like this in the strictest secrecy, and she still had a sense that going to see a human friend was slightly disgraceful. There was a tinge of the forbidden to it, even now that she wasn’t going alone.

She was going with a whole mermaid delegation. Imani and Cala were with her, but also Graciela, Jo, and two other mermaids Luce had just met. It only seemed right that she include some of the others. After all, this was official business.

Luce had asked the other mermaids to keep out of sight, at least at first. When they reached the pier she surfaced alone, the others waiting below the water. Luce hadn’t been there in broad daylight before, and the shattered holes in the factory windows formed constellations of black vacancy against the shining glass.

Seb was there, sitting bolt upright and obviously expect- ing her.

“Hiya, General.” He grinned as she appeared. “Hey. Didn’t know my little fishy friend was so danged important. You’ve sure thrown a whole bunch of big shots for one hell of a loop! ‘Little Lucy just goosed the president,’ was what I said!”

Luce winced a little at the thought that the other mermaids were listening to this. She hadn’t considered the possibility that Seb would embarrass her—but apparently she should have. Was he drunk again?

“Seb,” Luce tried. “This is serious.”

“Serious is right, girl. For right now you’ve got them in such a knot that they don’t know what to do, but you’d better expect that pretty soon they’re going to hit you back, hard. Kablooey!”

“Seb, listen! I’m here to offer you a job.”

That helped. Seb was startled out of his giddiness. “A job, Miss Luce?”

“I mean,” Luce said, suddenly shy, “we couldn’t pay you or anything. But—”

“With all the sunken treasure and rubies and pearls you all are hoarding, you say you can’t pay me? You’ll pay me, girl, and plenty!”