The Twice Lost

when she changed. And even if I’ve . . . lost my proper body, lost it for now . . . I don’t accept those noises you say are my name! Dogs barking, goats bleating as their throats are slit, are more my name than those! Ivanovna! That you could dare to call me Ivanovna!”

“Your patronymic. ‘Daughter of Ivan.’” Rafe said softly. Then he seemed to realize something. “Oh, Catarina, I’m sorry. I should have thought . . .”

“Surely when that man sold me for cigarettes, he sold my name as well! What right does he have to be called my father?” Catarina rolled over to glare at him.

A tear glittered on Rafe’s cheek. He wasn’t looking at her. “No right at all, Catarina.”

“And you dare to speak of our psychology, as if you knew anything.”

Rafe started laughing bitterly, brushing the tear away with the back of his hand. “I don’t think the Department of Defense is going to be too pleased by my report, honestly. They might be glad to hear your opinion that I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Against her own will, Catarina was curious. For several seconds she struggled to suppress her desire to ask him the question and then failed. “What will you tell them, then?”

“That you’re no different from humans. Psychologically a mermaid is indistinguishable from a human who’s been through a similar degree of trauma. The only real difference is the physical manifestation. Suffering transformed into beauty, into magic. It’s fascinating.”

“I am hardly a human,” Catarina muttered. She felt an impulse to flick her tail—and instead felt bare feet kicking at the white sheet.

“You’re . . . both, I’d say. Human and mermaid. That’s what’s so intriguing about you, Catarina. You have an exceptional richness of experience and identity. I mean, are you a beautiful young girl? Or are you a woman in her early fifties, with a lifetime of struggle and exploration behind her? On paper, of course, you’re the much older version of yourself, born in 1961, and not a teenager at all.”

“I’m sixteen years old!”

“And fifty-two years old. Simultaneously.” For the first time Rafe grinned at her, almost rakishly. “Now, I’ll be the first to admit that you look simply fantastic for your age.”

Hearing him say that made her feel so old, so weary. In a way he was right: she could sense all the long years dragging at her back, years that split the ocean waves with grief and death and pleasure. But Catarina also suspected that Rafe had reasons of his own for wanting to think of her as an adult and as at least somewhat human. She meant to stare at him contemptuously but instead looked down at her hands. She was annoyed to feel herself flushing.

“I’m sorry,” Rafe said after a long moment. “It’s inappropriate for me to tease you.”

Catarina shrugged.

“Can I return to an earlier question? I’ll understand if it’s too private, but I do care . . . about how you see things. About what matters to you.”

Catarina twisted away from him, but her body was tense and her head cocked as she waited for him to speak.

“What was it that Luce said to Nausicaa? That hurt you so much?”

Catarina leaned on one hand, thinking. If he was telling the truth, if he actually cared about the answer, well, nobody else did. Her breath rushed on, much too quickly, filling her lungs and then abandoning her again.

“Luce said—” Catarina paused, feeling her chest rise and fall, curling her unaccustomed toes and then spreading them. “She said to Nausicaa, ‘While you were away, you saved me so many times!’ As if even absent Nausicaa meant more to her than I could while staying faithfully by her side! As if the times I saved her were worthless in comparison!”

Rafe was silent, but his silence had a slow, serious tone to it that Catarina understood as if it were speech. “That sounds extremely painful,” he said after some time. “You’re saying you saved Luce’s life repeatedly, but for some reason she couldn’t acknowledge that, only what Nausicaa did for her. Is that right?”

She wouldn’t look at him, but after a moment she nodded.

“Excuse me for asking you this, Catarina, but . . . am I correct in thinking that you’ve been involved in sinking ships? With the deliberate intention of drowning people?” Rafe was using the same extremely careful tone she’d noticed earlier, his words seemingly placed one by one on velvet.

“I’ve drowned many hundreds,” Catarina answered dully. She was surprised to find that the statement felt strange to her. “Of course I have. The humans are owed our vengeance! It was only this madness of Luce’s that made me cease to kill.”

“And yet what you want most is to be recognized for saving someone, for saving Luce. Catarina, what does that tell you about yourself?”

Catarina looked at him.

“To me it says that you’ll get much more of what you truly want from life if you try approaching it from a different angle.” He grinned again, and his dark eyes sparked with sudden amusement. “It sounds like bringing vengeance isn’t actually all that fulfilling for you.”

“You mean that I should be like Luce is, with her plankton?” Catarina snarled. Rafe just smiled at her, his look calm and warm.

Before she could stop herself Catarina realized that she was smiling sadly back at him, smiling even as her first uncontrollable tears began to flow.

33 Regret

The blue-black water seemed boundless, pierced by myriad points of starlight. After months of living in a tank only five feet deep, with no room to leap or spin or plunge, this wild, welcoming space intoxicated Anais. She yanked the idiotic inflatable swimmies from her arms immediately. For half an hour she dived as deep as she could and then spiraled her tail and went rocketing back to the surface, over and over again. She swooped until dizziness reeled through her and green lights scattered themselves across her eyes. It occurred to Anais that she’d never really noticed before how incredibly fun it was to be a mermaid. If it weren’t for that flabby-faced old lunatic and his assignment, wheeling through Baltimore’s night-covered harbor wouldn’t be so bad at all. Mermaid song licked through the water on all sides, until she seemed to part countless ribbons of music with every stroke of her fins. It did sound a lot like the odd, smooth tone Luce had always used when she called to the water, only much more so now: the same tone multiplied, curling and rebounding and blossoming as it passed through dozens of different voices. But that kind of singing wasn’t so great, Anais thought sullenly; it wasn’t real singing at all. It wouldn’t kill so much as a five-year-old kid!

Moreland been right about one thing. However reluctantly, Anais had to concede that much. If she approached these strange mermaids and claimed to be a metaskaza, her ruffled ivory silk top and the diamond studs in her ears would instantly mark her as a liar. After a few moments of hesitation, she pulled the studs from her ears and dropped them, then wriggled out of her shirt and let the current loft it away. It flowed like a moon- colored kite through the darkness. Now Anais was as naked as the water around her, and she bared her teeth as she watched the silk fluxing away into a small pale blot. Moreland had given it to her, she thought. Of course she didn’t want it; of course she felt better without it clinging to her skin.

But nakedness alone wouldn’t be enough to convince these unknown mermaids that her story was true. Anais had never encountered a newly transformed mermaid herself, but she’d heard enough stories to recognize that her own reaction to the change hadn’t been typical. She should seem stunned, bewildered, stricken. She stopped swimming and simply hovered in water that now graded from jet black to violet-gray along its eastern fringe. Dawn was coming. Anais held herself in place with tiny ripples of her fins, carefully assuming the emotions she knew would be expected of her. To her, it felt like getting dressed for a party. She furrowed her brow, widened her eyes, and bent a scared, sagging mouth just as someone else might adjust a scarf.

Anais was aware of her peculiarity: the veils of dark shimmering that any other mermaid would see clinging