The Twice Lost

—”

“No we won’t,” Sadie snapped. She swirled forward and stopped with her face immediately in front of Tricia’s. “We’ll send someone to find out if Regina’s telling the truth. And if she isn’t, and I already know she’s not—”

“Find out how?” Paige sneered. “By asking the humans? The same humans who just tortured General Luce to death?”

“We don’t even know Regina! I’d trust a human more than I trust her!”

“Since when do you make the decisions here, Sadie?” Tricia was rippling savagely, her dark green fins kicking rhythmically. “What is this? A mutiny?”

Sadie reacted to this by lifting her head and unfurling her gorgeous amber tail to its full length. “It’s only a mutiny,” Sadie announced, “if I disobey my general, Tricia. And you know what? That’s not you. Everybody who follows General Luce? We are keeping this wave standing!” Sadie swam backwards, pouring her voice into the song. Anais couldn’t help but notice at once that Sadie was an exceptional singer. Her back was arched and dawn glow lit the swanlike curve of her throat. She fought the immense weight of the water above her, flooding it with her clear ascending voice. The wave above was bent, crumpling, as a few mermaids parted ways with the crowd and rushed to join their voices with Sadie’s song.

Anais’s distress was perfectly genuine now. She watched in anxiety as the Twice Lost mermaids of Baltimore chose sides, each of them using her voice to declare her allegiance to Sadie or to Tricia.

One by one they joined either the ranks of the singers, or the ranks of the silenced.

* * *

The giant wave above them teetered, bent halfway up its height like some doddering ancient man. Anais watched it from a spot a yard below the surface, gazing at the wave as if through a rippling glass pane. The singers strained to keep the wave up, their voices turning hoarse and wild as they tried desperately to support a volume of water that suddenly seemed to be staggering from its own weary immensity. On the freeway the cars’ windshields flashed bright palms of dawn, and people shrunken by distance walked along a promenade that followed the harbor’s curves. They didn’t seem to realize that anything was wrong.

For several minutes Anais couldn’t guess which side would win. At least two-thirds of the mermaids here had joined her and Tricia in embittered silence, their hearts poisoned by what she’d told them. They waited around her at various levels so that the water flicked with fins and swirled with bright hair. And as she watched the wave slumping farther forward, its crest writhing from the thrust of the mutineers’ frenzied song, Anais began to feel just a trace of the same emotion that had unaccountably possessed her on the day she’d sung to Luce’s father. It was a sensation of hollowness in her chest, as if a delicate creature that lived there had suddenly escaped from her and all she could feel was the brush of its departing wings. Anais didn’t have a name for what she was experiencing. Luce or Yuan or Nausicaa could have told her that it was regret.

But if she told the truth now, the timahk would hardly be enough to protect her.

“Sadie’s right,” Anais whispered. Her golden hair spun across her mouth as if it wanted to stifle her, then danced up and blinded her eyes. “I was lying.”

No one reacted to that. They were all transfixed by the sight of that crooked wave, somehow both lurching forward and yet suspended midway through its fall. Maybe they hadn’t heard her at all.

“I was lying!” Anais yelled. “Sadie, I was lying!”

Sadie heard her, and for a moment—for a pause briefer than a heartbeat—astonishment crushed the song in her throat.

34 Healing

Luce sang through her shift automatically. Catarina was dead, a dozen other mermaids were dead, but the war was still a living, lashing thing that had to be fed and tended. She was feeding it her own body and her song, just as earlier that day she had fed it her heart. Inexplicable things had happened over the last several hours. The president had denied responsibility for the attack, even sent her an apology, and the crowds onshore kept screaming her name . . . but none of that changed anything. The war was still famished, endlessly demanding, and she was still its unwilling keeper.

For once her song meant nothing to her, though magic still flowed from it. And at midnight when Cala arrived to replace her Luce slipped silently away. No doubt at the encampment there were friends waiting to comfort her. Yuan and Imani would hug her and assure her she’d done the right thing, the only thing, that she’d had no choice . . . and Luce knew she couldn’t bear to hear any of that.

Instead she swam deep, hugging the shore. For at least an hour she wove randomly between black pilings and lightly brushed the pink kiss of the anemones, stared into bone white sea stars draped across rotten beams. She couldn’t face her fellow mermaids, but something was pulling her along, and when at last she came up near a collapsing pier she knew what it was. That hunched figure sitting at the pier’s end was just as heartbroken as she was. Every line of his back showed it.

Seb, Luce thought with surprise, might understand what had happened that day. At least he might understand it enough. She dipped low again and came up in front of him.

He didn’t seem surprised to see her and raised a hand in greeting. His worn face looked severe and mournful under his uneven hair. His hideous tie flapped in the wind, and he’d pulled his blazer as tight as it could go. For a human, Luce realized, it was a chilly night—in San Francisco even August offered no guarantee of warmth—and there was nothing she could do for him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” Luce said. “To thank you. You did everything right.”

Seb just looked at her then shook his head. “Well, it’s a real luxury, isn’t it, Miss Luce? When you can do the right thing, because there’s one truly right thing to do?”

Luce was suddenly aware of the water cradling her, gently and faithfully. She looked at Seb with gratitude. “Yes. That is . . . a luxury.”

“So maybe I’m the one who should thank you, for giving me such a nice clear-cut right thing to do. Helping the mermaid who saved me when that’s not enough for her and she’s gone and set her heart on saving more than that? That was an easy one, Miss Luce. I haven’t had so many opportunities in my life to do anything as right as that. I’ve mostly been doing something at least halfway wrong, just fighting to get at one little speck of right that was mixed in with it somewhere.” Seb kept on looking at her. For all his tattered absurdity his gaze was as transparent as glass, and grave comprehension shone through it. “And I know you know about that.”

Luce felt something blocky and horrible in her throat. She looked away, unable to answer him, and wrapped her arms around a piling for support. Hoops of apricot light cast by the streetlamps pranced on the water. Luce looked at those beaming rings and thought she might fall through them and plummet into another world. “I killed them, Seb. Mermaids who trusted me.”

“I know you did, Miss Luce. I watched the whole thing on TV, along with practically everybody else on this planet of ours. It was as horrible as anything I ever saw, even in Vietnam, and I’m no slacker where horror’s concerned.”

“I had a choice. I let Catarina die. I decided that.”

“You made a choice. That’s why everybody here in humanland thinks you’re the big hero tonight. They’re taping your picture in their windows. You’re looking out all over, on all the streets, with those sad eyes of yours. It’s gonna change things for sure, what you did.”

“I’m not a hero,” Luce murmured dully. “I never was. Catarina was right about me.”

“I know you’re no hero,” Seb said seriously. “They set you up so you’d be a monster no matter what you did. And now a monster’s what you are.”

Luce nodded. Far from feeling offended, she was grateful and wildly relieved that Seb understood her so well. She looked at him. He was shivering from cold because he’d thrown away those filthy coats he used to wear—thrown them away so he could look better for his role as her ambassador. “I wish I could help you, Seb. I wish we did have treasure and pearls for you. I’m sorry . . .”