The Twice Lost

Yuan visibly relaxed. “Probably just another guy with a mermaid fetish, then. What a relief! Want to go tease the groupies for a minute? Could be fun.”

“It looks like a girl.”

Tired as she was, Luce was too curious not to swim a little closer with Yuan in the lead. People started waving to them, but Yuan’s eyes remained focused only on the human who had come for her. Then she stopped and grabbed Luce’s arm. “Oh, God. Oh, Luce, I wish that was my aunt or something! Anything would be better than—”

Luce could see the girl more clearly now. She was chubby and pretty and had golden skin that beamed orange in the dawn glow. “Do you recognize her?” Luce asked. Then the girl spotted them. She dropped her poster and started waving both arms wildly in midair.

“Yuan! Queen Yuan! It’s me!” the girl shouted. And all at once Luce understood.

“That’s her?” It was the girl Yuan had saved, the girl Yuan had despised herself for saving, the one whose survival had cost Yuan her tribe and her role as queen.

The girl who was both Yuan’s secret heart and the crack in her heart.

“Oh, God. She’s gotten so much older. But I have to talk to her. Do I have to talk to her? Luce!” Yuan’s nails sank deeper in Luce’s flesh.

“Queen Yuan! You saved my life! I came all the way from Boston to thank you!” the girl called out. She was looking around at the police, as if she might be considering making a leap for the water.

Yuan’s face looked greenish, her stare confused.

“You don’t have to talk to her if you don’t feel like it, Yuan. If you want I’ll go over there and tell her that . . . that you don’t think it’s a good idea,” Luce whispered.

Yuan shook her head. “I have to. It’s my fault she’s alive at all! I feel”—she gave that strange laugh again—“responsible.”

Luce considered that. “I felt that way too.” She hesitated. “With Dorian. Like I was tied to him somehow.”

Yuan’s grip on her arm eased, leaving deep red crescents where her nails had been. She groaned. “You get home safe now, general-girl.”

29 Disappointment

“Anais, my dear. It appears that you’ve hardly been putting forth your best efforts of late. Just when I was hoping that I might have some good news for you soon. But I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself,” Moreland explained to the speaker set into the glass wall. Anais was in the tank, of course, but she was refusing to emerge from behind her pillows. He could barely see her azure fins flicking irritably in the crystalline water.

He took a breath and continued. “We’re close to a breakthrough, tadpole. Any day now we’ll have the means to restore your kind to their lost humanity without damaging them. Isn’t that wonderful? Of course, if you changed back, you’d be promptly convicted of so many murders that you’d never see daylight again. I was just starting to think that I might be willing to ask the president to pardon you, and to see about getting you your inheritance as well. And then”—Moreland’s voice turned to a growl—“I found myself gravely disappointed in you. You failed me, tadpole. After the extraordinary trust I’ve reposed in you, you didn’t merely permit that boy to live. You actually went to the extreme of introducing yourself?”

Anais mumbled something. From the sound of it, her face was probably buried in a cushion.

“I can’t hear you, Anais. If you have something to say for yourself, you might do better to speak up and enunciate.”

Anais lifted herself on her elbows, just high enough that her tousled head appeared from behind a pink satin mound. Her lids were swollen and raw, and she seemed to have some kind of rash on her cheek. “I said I didn’t introduce myself! And I really tried to kill him! He just—he lived anyway.”

“You should know better than to lie to me, Anais,” Moreland snarled. His anger rose in him with an icy, buzzing sensation. “This isn’t amusing. Do you know what this boy is saying now?” He hadn’t shown Anais any of Dorian’s inflammatory videos or postings about the attempt on his life, though. She might guess at some of the contents, but she couldn’t actually know what Dorian had said. “Luckily his claims are so extravagant that no one in the media—no one serious, at least—is paying any attention. But the mermaid lovers and other fringe types are only too eager to believe his story of a mermaid assassin named Anais controlled by someone in the government. Now, where do you suppose he got that remarkable little morsel of information?”

It was actually worse than that. Dorian had repeatedly named Secretary Moreland himself as the most likely culprit. He’d said that since Anais’s old tribe had been slaughtered, it was logical that she might have survived by surrendering. He’d learned far too much, and he was shouting all of it to the four winds. “I have a press conference later,” Moreland fumed. “Anais, if I’m obliged to deal with questions about this—” He let the unspoken remainder curl into a threat.

Anais muttered something again. She was back in her pillows.

“Yes? What was that, Anais?”

“I said, then maybe you shouldn’t have made me try to kill him! You knew he used to be with Luce! It’s not my fault she—she probably taught him—so he can—” Anais broke off with a keening cry and slammed a pillow into the floor.

For a long slow moment he considered her. “So that’s it, is it, tadpole?” Moreland rasped at last. “You didn’t want to kill him?” He simpered out the words, crudely mimicking Anais’s chirpy voice. “Now, why would that be? You thought you might like to take your old enemy’s boyfriend away from her and get cozy with him yourself? If you simply explained that you’re a poor little captive and that you never wanted to commit those nasty murders at all, maybe he would ask you to the prom?”

Anais turned pointedly away from him, grabbed some random gadget on the artificial shore, and threw it as hard as she could at the blue cement wall. There was a percussive crack and black plastic shards flew everywhere. He had forgotten how strong she was. Anais paused and deliberated over her remaining possessions, then selected some sort of hand-held video game. Crack. Moreland watched her with a hard empty smirk on his face. The best way to punish her was to deny her the pleasure of a reaction.

She pulled out one of her ornate dresser drawers and hefted it experimentally by one corner, shiny tops and bracelets tumbling into the water. She swung the drawer onto the hard blue pavement. It buckled and splintered, and she swung it again. Moreland was beginning to find the whole business tedious. He turned off the speaker and swung away from the glass wall as Anais worked doggedly at her tantrum.

“Sir!” someone exclaimed as he walked out into the hallway, clicking the door firmly shut behind him. Moreland turned to see the undersecretary for Intelligence, a severe man in black-framed glasses. “Secretary Moreland, there was some difficulty reaching you? There’s a new development, sir. The port of Tacoma . . .”

If he could only focus better, without the bits of song in his head always breaking apart and jangling at him like electrified coins. “Tacoma? What about it?”

“There’s . . . a second blockade there, sir. A group of mermaids there apparently spray-painted messages along the channel walls declaring their allegiance to the Twice Lost Army during the night! Obviously that implies human collusion; someone provided the paint. Now they’ve raised another of those water ramparts at the channel’s mouth. The messages were signed by a mermaid using the name Lieutenant Dana, sir. If this continues to spread . . . There’s an emergency meeting of the Joint Chiefs to discuss the situation.”

Lieutenant Dana. Another of the mermaids on that recording he’d heard.

One of his mermaids. Irrationally Moreland found himself thinking of Dana’s joining the Twice Lost as an intolerably personal betrayal. How could she? His eyes rolled up; fluorescent rings shone at intervals along the ceiling, tugging at his thoughts. They looked like round