The Twice Lost

Dorian gave a kind of abrupt, wheezing laugh. “Yeah. Changed. Yeah, it has. You have no idea, Yuan. While we were on the plane coming here Ben Ellison told me something that’s going to change everything.”

Even Luce looked toward Dorian now. He sat like some wounded prince at the edge of a battlefield, his skin golden and his bronze-blond hair overgrown and knotted.

Yuan stared at him. “Dorian? What are you talking about? Are they ready . . . are they going to end the war?”

“I don’t know about that,” Dorian said wearily. “I hope so. It’s something else—about you guys. About mermaids. You can change back into humans if you want. They’ve found a way. You can all change back, and it won’t kill you.”

Yuan let out a shriek of pure amazement, and an answering outcry poured down from the hill.

At first Luce thought it was a cry of surprise, maybe even of joy, provoked by what Dorian had said. The storm of voices kept getting louder, growing and booming. The sky seemed to thunder with human shouts, and Luce realized that the uproar had spread to the mass of people lining the Golden Gate Bridge, to the hills above them, maybe even to the far shore of Sausalito.

And it no longer sounded like a cry of amazement. The tone had darkened to a howl of fury and dismay. Imani, Graciela, and Yuan rushed close to hold her, tugging her away from the shore in alarm. All of them were buffeted by a torrent of outraged sound. They spun in place, bewildered. A woman was yelling at Dorian. In that vast clamor Luce couldn’t make out what she was saying, but she saw the desperate look that came over Dorian’s face, the way his body wrung with sudden despair as he scanned the water for her.

“Luce! Yuan!” Dorian screamed. The mermaids were floating together thirty feet out, scared to approach any nearer. He caught sight of them and waved his arms wildly; Luce thought he was beckoning them over and shook her head in anxiety. “Get out of here now! Swim away and hide!” Hide? Luce shuddered with the first gasp of understanding. “The mermaids just destroyed Baltimore!”

35 The Sea Inside

If it had not been for the vast tumultuous crash that turned the inside of the harbor into slashing crosscurrents as strong as waterfalls, for the shock waves slamming forward with irresistible violence, for all the froth and the mermaid bodies hurled in disorder, Anais wouldn’t have had the slightest chance of escaping. She was sent tumbling with the rest of them through a labyrinth of foam that rose in veils and hid them from one another. A surge like an angled geyser caught Anais and shot her up and over. Strange green fins smacked at her face; a hand wriggling like an anemone burst out of a wall of crystalline foam and grasped her wrist. Anais craned forward and bit the hand savagely, and it let go. Then she was speeding away, although at first she was too disoriented to guess at her direction. When she surfaced she saw cars drifting like bubbles where the freeway had been minutes before, an off-ramp snapped in two halfway up its arch, buildings slumped over into heaps of angled walls and rubble while high wild waves leaped through the city streets.

Moreland had promised her that she could be human again if she wanted to. And she couldn’t keep being a mermaid, obviously; as soon as the Twice Lost recovered from the shock and realized what she’d done they’d be after her. And once they caught her . . . Her only option was to leave the water as soon as possible before dozens of enraged mermaids shredded her fins, twitched her scales off one by one, then opened her veins with raking nails. But when she looked around she couldn’t recognize the spot where Moreland had left her anymore. The streets channeled eddying waters spangled peach and bronze by the rising sun. She had a vague sense that she’d slid into the harbor somewhere on the left, near those slips where dozens of shattered and upended yachts now slanted across the jetties, their white hulls grinding together with each new impulse of the maddened sea. Anais dashed in that direction. Soon she was weaving between the submerged cars on the freeway, sometimes ducking below rolling human bodies dressed in bright summer outfits. A German shepherd with blood pouring into its eyes from a head wound snarled furiously at her as it swam nearby, but with a quick lash of her tail Anais darted out of reach of its jaws.

Lush green trees cast endless shadows over the dawn- shimmered water as she turned up a street of partly collapsed red brick townhouses and small, uninteresting shops that had sold plumbing supplies and carpeting. The water was high enough that she skimmed alongside second-story windows, sometimes peeking in at beds whose sheets suddenly hovered above them like huge waterlogged wings. Anais passed a teenage girl who was standing on her dresser in a room whose front wall had torn away so that rags of its flowered wallpaper bellied in the currents. The girl was gasping so hard that her breath sounded like tearing flesh. In the green water below a drowned white cat thudded against crushed bits of furniture, shoes, and uprooted saplings, followed by an unmoving boy no older than four. A silver fish peered out of his open mouth. Anais felt her heart beating so quickly that it merged with the sound of her blood into a single skittish clamor. She’d only done it because Moreland had made her, she told herself. But somehow that didn’t calm her down or ease the yawning, rattling sensation in her chest.

The water was smoother now, gradually lapping into the calm that comes after utter devastation. Birds trilled in the protruding crests of uprooted trees lining the street; sirens howled in the distance. Wherever she looked, Moreland was nowhere. A torn daisy grazed Anais’s shoulder, heading out toward the sea. She didn’t think about it, only about the black van that had to be around here somewhere. No matter how much she hated Moreland she needed him now to rescue her from all this awful chaos.

Then a garbage can lid came spinning straight at her, clapping her on the head. She glowered at it in irritation as it cycled on toward the harbor. It was traveling faster than the daisy had been.

A chair swung itself through roiling water, smacking her arms and bruising her tail. The drag of the current was against her now, and she had to fight to keep swimming inland. Her fins flicked against the cold metal dome of a car. Lace curtains billowed from a second-story window, and now they were well above her head.

With a sudden jolt, Anais became aware that the level of the water was dropping. Fast. The flood was receding from the ruined blocks along the waterfront.

And she couldn’t find Moreland anywhere, and soon she might be left beached and helpless on a field of silt-filmed debris, her tail slowly drying in the brightening sun. She toyed with the idea of turning back to the harbor and trying to escape into the open sea. But the harbor’s neck was quite narrow, and it seemed much too likely that the mermaids she’d deceived would catch her if she tried it. Anais could already picture the water streaked by their rapidly converging bodies, their hands contorting with desire to sink into her throat. She hovered where she was for a few moments, the water bubbling past her as if drawn by some immense drain. Then she began slipping along with the flux.

Where had Moreland gone? How could he have abandoned her now? It was, Anais thought, so terribly unfair. Doorways flashed by. She was drifting backwards now. Something razor-sharp gouged into her scales. She screamed and rolled sideways to escape it and only succeeded in slashing herself more deeply. Anais curled in place, turned awkwardly on her side, and saw that her tail had snaked deep into the broken windshield of a car strangely canted on a pile of fallen tree trunks. The hole where her tail was lodged gleamed back at her like a mouth lined with gleaming diamond teeth. The water kept pulling out from below her as she struggled to free herself until she was draped across a row of serrated glass jags, her upper body tipped across the car’s steeply angled hood. A long curve of her tail was exposed to the summer air now and her fins flapped helplessly against the driver’s seat. Blood streamed down the car’s scraped silver paint and blossomed in the greenish tide. With every twist and spasm Anais felt the glass stabbing her anew. Hot sun settled gently on her scales. Droplets of water flared like sparks, and soon Anais felt the pain of a deep internal fire. Her tail smoldered unbearably; it was all far beyond any suffering she’d ever imagined.

With a desperate effort she managed to tilt her body off the hood until her torso dipped into the outflowing sea. The sloping trunks below appeared through the reddish clouds of her spreading blood as she braced herself with both hands, then heaved her tail up and free of the slashing glass and jerked herself violently forward at the same time. Pain raked through her and gouts of blood spurted from wide ragged cuts. Her azure fins shredded as they flopped across the jags again, and she landed screaming in the water: water that was now no more than three feet deep. Bleeding and frantic, Anais swung her lacerated tail. She had to get back across the highway and