The Twice Lost

From the corner of her eye Catarina could see him nodding. “So what would you call Luce?”

“What would I call her? A heedless, destructive child! Wild with power, thoughtless of the honor that all mermaids must live by!” The words rolled out as if they didn’t belong to her, drowsy and incantatory.

“You don’t like Luce, then?” Rafe’s voice was soft and curious.

“No, I don’t. I love her.” Catarina rolled her head from side to side, feeling the metal ribs striping her face with their chill. “Luce was a little sister to me. Ungrateful, impossible, but still much beloved. And I was her queen.” Rafe didn’t answer, but somehow his silence had a warm, receptive quality that made Catarina want to tell the story. “I saved her life when she first changed, when she knew nothing of our ways or of what her transformed body could withstand. I followed her into the depths to pull her back, at great risk to my own life! And that was not the only time I rescued her. And after all that, to hear the things she said to Nausicaa!” Catarina reared back and slammed her forehead into the bars. The ache was almost comforting. She reared again.

And then Rafe’s hand was there—his human hand, as warm as earth in sunlight —cradling her forehead with just enough pressure to keep it from hitting the bed frame again.

The heat of his touch entered through her skin, suffusing her face and then brushing deeper. Catarina jerked sharply away from him, glaring into his dark eyes. “I won’t allow you to hurt yourself, Catarina,” Rafe said apologetically. He pulled his hand back and held it out for a moment as if he weren’t sure what to do with it anymore. “I won’t touch you again, unless . . . What did Luce say to . . . Nausicaa—was that the name? Luce said something to Nausicaa that was very hard for you to hear.”

Catarina scowled at him. His touch had woken her to the discomfiting awareness that she’d already said far too much to a strange human; worse, to someone who was holding her as a prisoner. “Why do you ask me such things?”

Rafe held his eyes on hers. “Why? Because I care about the answers.”

“It was wrong of me to speak to you at all. Please leave me now. It is a violation of the timahk for a mermaid to speak with a human. It dishonors me.”

She meant to look away from him again, but somehow her gaze seemed linked into his. His face was very serious as he waited, letting the air hold her words, letting them linger like unwinding smoke. Then he spoke again very quietly. “Are you a mermaid, Catarina?” He let his eyes travel, just for a moment, to the two elongated shapes under the sheet, then turned to look at her face again.

Catarina let out a sharp hiss.

She wanted to sing—to sing him to death—but the fear of what her voice might sound like now gagged her. A sickening silence filled her chest.

Rafe nodded gently, taking her silence as some kind of answer. “You have an accent. It’s subtle, but I keep noticing it. Are you Russian?”

It was a strange change of subject, Catarina thought. But she still felt relieved that he had dropped his earlier, intolerable question. “I was Russian, once. Now I do not belong to any nation in the way a human would.”

“Where were you born?” Rafe’s voice was careful, neutral; Catarina was vaguely aware of how much effort he was putting into controlling his tone. Still, she felt again that inexplicable impulse to answer him.

“A town called Anadyr. On the Bering Sea. Not that this is of any importance to me now, of course.”

“You don’t consider your own life history important, Catarina Ivanovna?”

A bullet made of silence seemed to explode in Catarina’s chest. Airy shards scattered, shocking her with a kind of white pain. Then the silence dissipated, and Catarina’s voice came back to her as a scream. “WHAT did you call me?”

“I believe I’m speaking to Catarina Ivanovna Smekhov, born in Anadyr, Russia, on February fifth, 1961. Reported missing by her parents in January of 1977. Catarina, you have a name that means much more than queen. You have a history—”

Catarina screamed wordlessly. Any words now seemed hideous, an insult to feeling. Without quite thinking she lunged up on the bed—up onto her knees.

Realizing that made her scream again, both hands flailing out into empty air. Those lumpy, bony things holding her up were much too weak. Her legs felt muddy, saggy, teetering; she was already pitching forward, her head swinging helplessly toward the floor.

Rafe caught her by her shoulders, tipping her back onto the bed.

With all her strength Catarina slapped him across the cheek. But even her arms were so much weaker than they used to be. The blow felt sloppy, flimsy. Rafe was standing over her now, holding both her wrists in an oddly light grip, looking at her as if he were staring through a window and into a deepening sky. She waited for him to strike her back, to pulp her face with furious blows. She would welcome a beating; this body she had now deserved no better.

Instead he let go of her wrists and sat back down. “Would you have preferred if I’d let you fall?”

“Can you do anything besides ask questions?” Catarina snarled. She was sitting on her heels in a tangle of sheets, and her new legs were trembling under her. “Only a weak man does that. That way he never has to give an answer!”

“So take a turn doing the asking, Catarina.” Rafe shrugged. “I’ll tell you the truth.”

“You said they reported me missing. So tell me, if you sold a thing—if you sold your watch to the pawnbroker or to some filthy man on the street—would you run and tell the police that it was missing?”

For a moment Rafe just looked blank. Then his eyes altered; all their darkness seemed to be falling to some terrible depth. His lips parted and pinched closed again. “No. I absolutely wouldn’t do that.”

“So you say,” Catarina hissed.

“I also wouldn’t sell something that didn’t belong to me.” Rafe’s breathing came fast and strained.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean you didn’t belong to your parents. You weren’t theirs to sell! You only belonged—you still only belong—to yourself.”

“Then let me leave here.”

Rafe stared. “I don’t think you can even walk. Not yet. You need time to build up your strength. And the idea of you wandering through the streets, Catarina, in the shape you’re in now—”

“I can swim! Only take me to the bay. I can beg Luce, she can try . . . perhaps she can sing me into my proper form again.” Catarina swallowed. “Please, Rafe.”

“I was wondering when you’d finally use my name,” Rafe observed quietly. “Do you think I’m your jailer, Catarina? That it’s up to me if you stay or leave? If I tried to take you out of here we’d both get caught before we reached the elevators. That’s the reality now. I’m not your jailer, so it’s not in my power to free you.”

He was lying, Catarina thought bleakly. For a while there she’d half believed he might be better, different, than the men she’d known in her human life all those years before. She turned away from him, tugging the sheet up around her head.

“I was expecting you to ask me a question,” Rafe said to her back. “I thought you would say, ‘If you’re not my jailer, Rafe, then what are you?’ But now it looks like that might be a misplaced hope. Your only interest in me is what I might be able to do for you. Isn’t that true?”

Was it true? Catarina suddenly wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of telling him so. She stayed curled away from him, shrugging the sheet a bit higher.

“I’m a research psychologist, actually, Catarina. I’ve done studies on the effects of severe trauma: people in war zones, victims of . . . of human trafficking. The Department of Defense brought me in to prepare a report on mermaid psychology. That’s why I have the opportunity to be here with you now. And a colleague of mine here has been working on a database of missing girls who we suspect might have become mermaids; there were only two Catarinas on the list. That’s how I was able to guess your real identity.”

Catarina couldn’t let that go. “You mean that name you said? Smekhov? It has nothing to do with me! Luce might demean herself by using a human name, but even for her that is not her real identity. That identity fell away from her