The Twice Lost

strangeness of her expression harder for him to accept. “Hey, Luce. I’m really . . . happy to see you.”

She gazed at him searchingly. He wondered what she saw. “Does Zoe know you’re here?” Luce asked quietly.

The question startled him. “Oh—yeah. We were just texting about it last night. She wished me luck.” He caught Luce’s look of perplexity and hurried to explain. “Zoe and I broke up a long time ago.”

Luce was still watching his face as if she were trying to see into an undersea crevasse many fathoms deep. It was both painful and thrilling. “Why?” she asked.

“Why? Because Zoe’s not stupid. She knew I still loved you.”

Luce looked away from him and down. Her tail was curled behind her and he could see her fins stirring just below the surface.

“Um . . .” Yuan began. “There are a few wharves on the other side of the factory? You’ll have more privacy back there.”

Luce nodded. Without glancing at Dorian again she began to lead the way, and he paddled after her. The war had changed her so much, he realized. Maybe too much?

She led him out into the blazing daylight and then below a small dark slip with a half-sunk motorboat still tied to it. A monstrous metal construction scabbed with rust, maybe some kind of ancient machinery, loomed from the waves nearby, and the water ran in chevrons of taupe and lemon yellow and milky turquoise. Luce sat close to the water’s edge, her tail coiled tight around her, and caught the kayak’s side in both hands. Its hull lightly scraped against the pebbled seafloor. She was very close to him now but she still wouldn’t look up, and suddenly Dorian realized why. The fringe of her lashes gleamed with tears. She was trying not to cry in front of him.

He reached out and curled his fingers around her damaged ear, then—so lightly that his fingers barely grazed her—he stroked the side of her face. “Luce, I’m sorry. I know I screwed up. I was completely in love with you the whole time, even when I was breaking up with you. I mean, I loved you so much that it just made me angry, like, that my feelings were out of my control. And I took that out on you.” Luce glanced up at him so quickly that he felt himself lanced by phosphorescent beams. Then her eyes lowered again. But to his surprise she didn’t pull away from his caress. If anything she might have drawn slightly nearer to him.

“You broke my heart.” Close as she was, Dorian had to strain to hear the words. “You said my problems weren’t real. And then I found my old tribe massacred.” Again there was that quick flash of her eyes. “What’s not real about that?”

Dorian sighed. He deserved this. “I was being an asshole because I was trying to make you mad enough to kill me! God, Luce, you’ve been leading a war. I’m not so dumb that I think that’s not real!” He was caressing her cool, wet face with both hands now. “Look, I know I don’t deserve for you to forgive me. I’m asking you to anyway.”

“Forgive you,” Luce murmured. She sounded doubtful.

The chill under Dorian’s fingers was suddenly interrupted by a tiny splash of warmth: a tear against his thumb. “Please,” Dorian said. He heard his voice crack.

She leaned her cheek against his palm and took a long deep breath. What was she thinking?

“Do you forgive me?” Luce asked at last. Dorian didn’t know if he was more amazed by the question or by the fierce sweetness of the gaze that she suddenly fixed on him. “Even for helping to kill your family? Because I don’t think you ever really did before. No matter what you said. And I understand if you can’t, but if you can’t there’s no point in—” She broke off with a moan.

“That wasn’t the only thing I couldn’t forgive you for.” Somehow saying that sent a shock through him. Truth rose in his mind like bubbles and then popped horribly.

“How do you mean?” Luce’s voice was still very soft.

“I couldn’t forgive you for always getting to be the hero when I wasn’t one.”

They were looking at each other so intensely that the air seemed to ring. “So go work on being a hero,” Luce said. “If that’s what you want.”

“I did.” For the first time since he’d found her again he felt himself grinning at her. “I mean, not like you, Luce. But I really tried my best. That’s all I’ve been doing for weeks now. And I know everything we did at least helped.”

“The Twice Lost Humans, you mean?”

Dorian felt the thrill of seeing her responding smile. Possibly, just possibly, there was still hope for the two of them. “Yeah.”

“I was so mad about that. You using our name.”

“I know,” Dorian whispered. And before he was entirely conscious of what he was doing he’d leaned forward and kissed her.

The kiss was a bright banner unfurled and beating in the wind. It was an expanse of water suddenly waking with a surge of blinding ripples. It was his heart made manifest, and it felt like a triumph that comes unexpectedly when all hope has long been lost. He heard her gasp and pulled her closer still.

Then Dorian kicked his legs out of the kayak and landed on his side in the shallow water, his arms binding her fervently. For a time they tangled sweetly, Luce’s fins flicking and curling around his ankles. General or not, Dorian thought, Luce was still his. They still belonged together, and he told her that with a slow whirl of deepening kisses.

Then she pulled away—not far enough to leave his embrace but enough to break the kiss and rest her forehead on his chest. He gazed down at her, his hands still glossing gently around her faintly shining shoulders, her back, the nape of her neck. “Luce . . .”

“Everything’s changed,” Luce murmured. “Everything is different now! Dorian, I can’t even explain—”

Dorian felt his heart plummeting. The world became nothing but ice, falling stones, blackness. She couldn’t explain why she could never love him again? Was that what she meant? “What can’t you explain?” His voice rasped out of him.

“I mean . . . if everything is different now . . . why hasn’t this changed, too?” Luce looked up at him, her eyes shining and vulnerable, spangled with hints of desperation. “Why do I still love who I’ve always loved?”

“You mean me,” Dorian said proudly. He brushed his cheek against hers.

“You and my dad. Dorian, do you know—have you heard anything about him since—”

“Oh.” He was ashamed now that he’d been so consumed by his own longing that he’d forgotten to tell her the news immediately. “I saw your dad this morning. He had breakfast with me and Ben Ellison. Luce, he’s way, way better. He still seemed—kind of out of it, like, spacy?—but he’s not all insane and catatonic anymore. You did an amazing job. Ben’s so impressed that he can’t really talk about anything else. I don’t know why. I mean, I told him you could do that, but I guess he didn’t believe—”

“What did my dad say?”

Dorian hesitated. He wanted to have this conversation with her, but later, once her responsibilities to the Twice Lost were completely out of the way. But Luce’s look was so worried and tender that he couldn’t hold anything back from her. “We talked about you.” He paused again. “About what you’re going to do after the war is really over, like once there’s a treaty and everything. Your dad’s already thinking about—you know, where he should live, and what would be best for you.”

Dorian was still hedging, but Luce was quick enough to guess what he was really getting at. “You mean, you talked about turning me human again?”

Now he was afraid of bringing up all the fights they’d had back in Alaska: fights about exactly this question. “Well, maybe. It is—an option now. If you want. But maybe you’d rather keep being a mermaid general than go to high school or whatever.”

Luce leaned her forehead on his chest again. She held him tight, and, in the way of mermaids, there was a long, long silence between each of her breaths. He could feel the intensity of her thought as if it were a physical thing turning against his skin. “I can’t be a general anymore,” Luce whispered at last. “As soon as there’s a treaty, I’m going to . . . let go of all that.”

He didn’t want her to see how happy that made him. It might seem like he was gloating. “You can’t be general? Luce, why—”