The Twice Lost

since Seb had wandered off with her missive, Luce had been waiting for a report, for any sign of how the humans might be reacting to her proposal. Some of the Twice Lost had started to make friends with certain humans on the shore, and there were already a handful of budding romances. If Luce’s letter was discussed on the news, the mermaids would be sure to hear something.

Imani leaned in and hugged her silently. All Luce’s grief and weariness and worry surged in that embrace, only to be met by the strong, sweet containment of Imani’s arms.

* * *

As they were rounding the Embarcadero, a young mermaid came dashing toward them through the deep green water. “General Luce! Lieutenants Yuan and Cala sent me to find you! They’re talking about us on the news!”

“The humans got the letter?” Luce asked breathlessly. “How did you find out?”

The little mermaid saluted, in a messy, embarrassed way. “They got it! They keep talking about it! And we can go watch the whole thing! On TV!”

Luce was perplexed. “TV? How do you mean?”

“They—two of those humans, the really nice ones? The woman with the brown hat? Who came looking for their daughter, except they say they know she’s gone? They brought a way for us to watch. Come see! General . . .”

Imani was smiling indulgently, but Luce was struck by the deep sadness of her expression. “I guess we’ll have to look for ourselves, Luce.” She touched the little mermaid on the cheek. “Would you go ahead and tell everyone we’ll be right there, please?” Then Imani’s face tightened in a way Luce had never seen before. She looked sharply away as the younger mermaid raced off.

“Imani? What’s wrong?”

Imani just shook her head, still turned away from Luce even as they swam. Wings of light brushed across the surface ten feet above Imani’s head, and a school of tiny silvery fish parted around her slim dark body like a strange cloud-shaped ball gown. Her storm blue tail cleft the water, flicking strokes of neon brilliance through the dimness.

“Imani?” Luce reached out and touched her softly. “Is there anything—”

“No one’s ever going to come looking for me, is all. Seeing all those humans who actually care, Luce, when—it’s hard for me. I wish they wouldn’t come here! No one ever loved me but my grampa, and he died.”

Luce wasn’t sure what to say; it seemed clear from the images she could see in the shimmering indication around Imani’s head that she’d already lost her immediate family by the time of her transformation, just as Luce had. And then the fact that Luce’s own father still hadn’t come to join the human crowds seemed to prove that he must not care about her at all anymore.

But Imani definitely didn’t need to be reminded of how many mermaids were in the same situation she was. “Your grandfather’s not the only one who ever loved you, Imani.” Luce hesitated but only for a moment. “I mean, you know I love you, right?”

Imani glanced over at her and managed half a smile. When they came up for a breath the water-wall gleamed ahead of them, foam sliding from its crest in a cascade of pearls. Pale mist wrapped the red bridge in bands of suspended glow.

* * *

A tangle of mermaids with arms around one another’s shoulders clustered near the shore not far from the bridge’s base, facing a tightly compressed crowd of humans some fifteen feet away. Police officers stood among them, tense and bristling in the headphones that protected them from the silky wash of enchantment endlessly throbbing from the singers under the bridge. An older human couple sat cross-legged at the front, pressing affectionately together. The woman wore a floppy brown hat and tweed coat and had a large laptop propped open on her knees, its screen turned toward the water. As Luce surfaced with Imani beside her several humans cried out softly, and the mermaids parted to make room. “Isn’t that her?” someone onshore murmured.

“Shh. Yes. Don’t scare them again!”

Luce’s tail fidgeted as she approached that mass of staring faces. Could it really be safe to come this close to a human mob? But there was the screen in front of her, with a newscaster introducing a man Luce had never seen before, his stiff white hair like frosting above a heavily jowled reddish face. The woman supporting the laptop looked kind and thoughtful, and she considered Luce with a mixture of warmth and open curiosity. “General Luce? I’m honored you could join us. I’m Helene Vogel.”

A bit nervously, Luce swam close enough to shake the woman’s outstretched hand. A few people gasped, and Luce abruptly swirled back to the waiting mermaids. “Hello, Ms. Vogel. Thank you for letting us watch the news with you.”

“My pleasure. I’m sorry the volume doesn’t go up any louder than this.”

Luce didn’t see any reason to explain that mermaids had much better hearing than most humans. Her attention was caught by the faces chattering on the screen in front of her; there was something unpleasantly fascinating about the man being interviewed, with his emotionless ice gray eyes and twitching half-smirk. A banner at the bottom of the screen read “Secretary of Defense Ferdous Moreland.”

“It’s plainly impossible,” Moreland was saying indignantly, “that these vicious entities were ever human beings. Those claims are pure propaganda.”

“But the facial resemblance?” the newscaster objected in a weak voice. “There are records of a Lucette Gray Korchak. A troubled eighth grader who was presumed to have committed suicide in Pittley, Alaska, in April of last year. So are you suggesting that General Lucette Gray Korchak is actually someone else?”

The image was suddenly replaced by two very close-up faces juxtaposed side by side. On the right was Luce, wounded and exhilarated and fierce, as she’d leaned from the wave’s flank during her conversation with the reporters. On the left was what Luce recognized with a jolt as her seventh-grade portrait from school, her gaze scared and full of longing. Together those two faces created an unsettling stirring, a sense of something irreconcilable and rasping and wrong, because they were so much the same but also not the same at all. Objectively there was no real alteration in Luce’s features between the two portraits, apart from the notch missing from her right ear, her fine crisscrossing wounds, and the strange internal luminance that gave the mermaid version of her face the feeling of a beacon floating in infinite darkness. It was precisely the sameness of the two faces that created such a disturbing sense of impossibility: how could the commonplace childish prettiness of her human face translate into the volatile, raking beauty of the face on the right? Luce heard murmurs around her and realized that both Yuan and Imani were squeezed against her sides as if they needed to protect her from something.

The screen switched back to the interview. “Our research suggests that these creatures can assume a resemblance to their victims,” Moreland intoned heavily, then paused for effect. “The real Lucette Korchak—an innocent although seriously disturbed child—was almost certainly murdered by this monster who has hijacked her identity.”

Around Luce mermaids cried out in indignation and disbelief. But didn’t some of the humans facing them look troubled, uncertain? Luce couldn’t completely blame them: it had been hard even for her to stand the dissonance between those two faces. Even as she remembered the cold metal stool where she’d sat for that school portrait, the bleak room and glaring flash, she could still feel a kind of shudder of persuasion in Moreland’s words.

Moreland kept going. “We also need to remember what happened to Kathleen Lambert of Grayshore, Washington, when she made the mistake of getting involved with these unnatural beings. It’s certainly a striking coincidence that Ms. Lambert turned up drowned so soon after videotaping this self-styled General Luce. Anyone out there who’s considering aiding mermaids, or trying to contact them—” Moreland’s voice became a bleak growl—“would be well advised to keep Ms. Lambert’s fate in mind.”

Yuan stared. “What is he talking about? You said somebody filmed you, Luce, but—”

Luce felt nauseous. “I don’t know. I only saw those people with the camera for a few seconds!” Had the strange woman Luce had glimpsed that day somehow died because of her? But that made no sense at all.

“The woman who put out the first tape of you was found drowned,” Helene Vogel confirmed softly, her hat