The Twice Lost

“Does it mean nothing to you, Luce? If I leave here? We may never see each other again.” Catarina’s voice was veering up the scale, wild and plaintive.

Luce finally turned to look at her. Catarina’s gray eyes met hers with a shocked, scattered brilliance. Cat’s cheeks were bone white, and as she saw the look on Luce’s face she visibly recoiled. Her recoil transformed into a sudden, violent rippling like a flame in the wind, and she vanished under the water. Luce could just see the golden shimmer of her tail streaking away.

For half a second, Luce felt nothing but a kind of savage relief that Cat was gone. Then something in Luce’s stifled heart burst free, and she gave a trembling cry and dived after her.

* * *

Luce had forgotten what an exceptional swimmer Catarina was, how extraordinarily quick and fluid she was even for a mermaid. The water of the north bay was murkier than she was used to, beige and unpleasantly brackish; Catarina’s golden fins showed only as a kind of bright disturbance far ahead. “Cat!” Luce called into the opaque water. “Cat, I’m sorry!” She knew how well sound traveled through water; surely Catarina must hear her?

Then Luce couldn’t catch even a glimmer of distant fins anymore, even as she drove herself faster. When she surfaced for a breath there was nothing around but the lonely shore with its scattered palm trees and rusty metal huts leaning in auburn grass. Bridges like the skeletons of snakes were slung across the pale sky.

But if Catarina was determined to leave she could be going in only one direction: back toward the Golden Gate and the wild deep sea beyond. Luce gathered her strength and dived again, her tail lashing behind her. Once Cat reached the open ocean, Luce would lose all hope of finding her. A black slash of wings broke the water just in front of her, startling her into reeling abruptly sideways, before she saw the cormorant sweep toward the surface again with a silver fish in its beak.

Still, Catarina was nowhere, not even when the city loomed ahead again, not even when Luce came up to see the dull red curves of the Golden Gate Bridge not too far away. Mermaid song vibrated through the water, stroking Luce’s fins with tremulous music, and the wave beneath the bridge still shone like a wall formed from millions of shivering crystals. The sun burned through a fine haze, and light like grainy brush strokes danced around her. “Catarina?” Luce called, but the air suddenly pulsed with a loud, disturbing noise that drowned out her voice.

Luce looked up to see the helicopter whizzing overhead. Of course there were always helicopters around the bay now, sent by different news channels as well as by the military, but they never came this close. The military ones usually just circled high above the bridge, watching the mermaids below.

This one was darkly drab, heavy but sleekly formed, menacing: definitely the same as the ones that had attacked them before. And it was swinging rapidly lower. Something Luce couldn’t quite make out swagged from the helicopter’s base until it was almost skimming the water. Then with an agitated rippling the surface broke and whatever that dangling thing was dipped into the bay, slicing deeper as it neared the bridge with disquieting speed. Luce raced ahead. The glassy sides of the towering wave juddered with the pounding air from the propeller. She heard screams unraveling from the human crowd lining the bridge, saw people shift and jostle and slam one another in a panic as the helicopter rushed toward them, its blades ripping so close to their gathered faces that Luce feared they would be slashed to bits.

At the last possible moment the helicopter changed course, pulling steeply straight upward. Luce had a brief moment to feel relieved.

Then she recognized what the helicopter was dragging with it, out of the bay and up into the gusting wind.

A net. That thing hanging from its bottom was a net.

And now it wasn’t empty.

The helicopter rose, its blades hacking at the air. Below it a tangle of mermaids—ten? a dozen?—jerked and thrashed against the net’s strands. Luce flung herself across the water even as she stared in desperation. Netted arms bent randomly around rippling, translucent fins in subtle shades of bronze and celadon and smoky peach; ribbons of long hair tumbled through the mesh; dark and pale hands wrenched at the strands, trying frantically to tear their way free. Then the helicopter stopped its ascent and simply hovered high in space: higher than the bridge, higher than any wave the mermaids could hope to command.

Didn’t the humans understand that—

“They’ll die!” Luce heard herself screaming into the sky. “You have to put them back in the water! They’ll die!”

If the helicopter’s crew heard her, they gave no sign of it. But other mermaids did. In a moment Luce was surrounded by clamoring girls: “Luce, what are they doing? Aren’t they afraid we’ll let the wave go?” “What are we supposed to do?” “You have to make them stop, Luce! You have to!”

The standing wave still shone in the misty, smoldering sunlight, but Luce saw that it was starting to dip and wobble a little. Too many singers were abandoning their places, racing out to see what was happening.

“We have to keep singing!” Luce yelled. “No matter what! Everyone, get back in the line!”

Luce saw reluctance, even anger, in the faces around her. “They’re killing our friends!” Eileen snarled back at her. “We’ll go back to singing once they let everyone out of that net. How’s that for a compromise?”

“And what about all those humans onshore? What about the ones who are just there to help us? Are you going to let them drown?” Luce’s voice was savage as she wheeled on Eileen. “Get back to your place, Eileen. What if one of those humans is that person you keep waiting for?”

Eileen’s face blanched and she swirled back a few feet under the impact of Luce’s glare. “Fine. I guess you have a point.” She crooked her strawberry-blond head at the other undecided mermaids. “Come on, everyone. You heard the general.”

Eileen was just turning to go when two appalling sounds called her back.

The first was a thin, strangely pale-sounding scream from the net above. It prickled on the air like a million motes of galvanized dust.

The second was a loudspeaker. A rough, staticky voice boomed down through the treble of that scream. “You have three minutes to lower the wave completely and end the blockade. Repeat, you have three minutes only. If you do not comply, the captive mermaids will be allowed to die. Release the wave now, and the captives will be released.”

It was so insane that for an instant Luce could only stare up at the helicopter, flabbergasted. They must realize the impossibility of safely lowering so much water in such a short time. If she obeyed them, she’d unleash a tsunami. A speeding field of water would crush the city, and thousands of people would certainly die.

The humans in that helicopter were ordering her to destroy San Francisco.

The air shook with another high, sustained scream, and then another. The mermaids in the net were starting to go into convulsions as their tails began to dry out. The net rocked and heaved in the air high above until it looked like a single shapeless, tortured animal.

For a few seconds there was nothing Luce could say. Around her other mermaids gaped with the same staggered hopelessness she felt herself; beside them the standing water-wall buckled a little more, and odd blobs and sashes of water began to tumble down its brilliant flank.

“Luce,” Jo begged beside her, “just tell everyone to stop singing! Just let the wave go! Even you said we could kill to save other mermaids! You said so! And we don’t have any choice, not when they’re . . . when we’re . . .”

The mermaids were being tested, Luce realized.

Whoever was ordering them to release the wave understood perfectly well what the consequences would be. For some strange reason, the humans in that helicopter wanted the Twice Lost Army to kill—to kill as many people as possible.

“Hold the line!” Luce screamed. “It’s a trick! They want us to kill everyone!”