The Twice Lost

understand.”

“It seems crazy,” Luce objected. But somehow she’d started smiling. Imani might be out of her mind, but in this strange transported mood she was also magnificent.

“You get started, general. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I have to go give some orders.”

Luce shook herself as Imani streaked back downward. Luce watched Imani’s dusky blue fins flicking away. Above her people stomped and wept and moaned, their voices beating the air into agitated rags.

Luce thought of Dorian: of how he’d fought for her, of how he’d worked to help save her father, and how he’d come here to find her. She thought of how she used to sing to him beneath the undulating green of the aurora while the harsh Alaskan nights lingered on, and the taste of love turned to music on her tongue.

And then the memory became a living sound in her throat: a single low note that brushed the shrieking faces above her like a rain of light kisses, like a wind that could carry away all their tears.

A thousand distraught voices fell silent together as Luce’s voice rose. They couldn’t see her, positioned as she was directly under the beams supporting their feet, but they still recognized at once that the music streaming from her was entirely different from the kind of mermaid song they’d grown used to hearing. It was new, with a magic that wasn’t meant to enchant the water at all. It wasn’t even meant to enchant the humans who heard it.

Instead it was a song that wanted only to join with them, to share in their grief and terror and then, by sharing those unbearable feelings, to let them spin away in notes as fine as strands of drifting silk.

As she sang to them, Luce began to understand. With absolute tenderness she accepted the hatred and rage of the people above her. She turned those tortured emotions into music, let them expand and float in vibrating sonic clouds. And as she sang that darkness, the crowd on the bridge discovered that darkness was no longer necessary. They could let it go.

A shadow seemed to press down on her. Luce glanced up in momentary alarm and saw the bridge’s planks were only a foot above her head. The wave was rising higher. In a flash she understood that more mermaids were singing to the water now. The first of the mermaids gathered by Yuan and Graciela had arrived, and they were merging their voices with the bewitching chorus below. That was why Imani had gone: to gather as many voices as possible, to swell the wave in a show of strength.

Luce leaned back, letting herself drift toward the frothing edge. The wave was wide enough to support her beyond the dark roof formed by the bridge. As she approached the drop, the currents became choppier, more effervescent, and it took increasing concentration to maintain her balance with subtle loopings and flicks of her fins. She was still singing.

It occurred to her that, if any of the humans on the bridge had a gun, they might well open fire to avenge the dead of Baltimore. For a fraction of a second she hesitated, imagining the way her heart would feel as a bullet winged through it like some bright metallic bird with sharply bladed wings.

Then she gave a last slight kick of her fins, and propelled herself out where the crowd on the bridge could see her.

Some of the faces were still crumpled with anger or slack with confusion but others were crying or simply staring into her face with wide, accepting eyes. Luce felt a kind of jolting in the wave around her. Its crest cleft into two long parallel waves, still rising, and fanned out to enwrap the bridge’s roadway without engulfing it or spilling more than a few droplets onto the people squeezed against the railings. Luce was lifted high enough that she could feel the air around her cheeks warmed by the crowd’s mingled exhalations. Some of them reached out to touch her, and Luce reached back, her fingertips grazing theirs as she swam slowly along a wave that echoed the bridge’s form.

To all of those she passed Luce sang her grief for the thousands of humans slaughtered in Baltimore. Hearing her they gazed with recognition, understanding that her sorrow for them was as deep as her sorrow for the mermaids she’d allowed to die as the price of sparing the city at her back. And then Luce felt a cool, swirling presence at her side and looked to see Imani, her eyes wide and wondering in the amber dawn as she listened thirstily to Luce’s new song: a song that had left death far behind.

37 Aftermath

Luce had been battered by too many overwhelming emotions not to collapse into numbness at the first opportunity. As the news began to come in, as it became clear that the humans weren’t going to attack, Luce couldn’t even feel surprised. And when the reporters gathered jabbering onshore and asked for her reaction to the torrent of astonishing information coming from Washington she could only offer them drowsy, irrelevant replies. Soon Yuan and Imani were doing most of the talking. Half of the Twice Lost Army was still singing below the bridge, but everyone who was off-duty seemed to be too excited to sleep. The bay was full of darting, leaping figures, and their fins flashed colored reflections across the water’s glossy skin.

Luce slumped in the shallows near the bridge’s base with her head leaning on a rock while her friends spoke and gestured vivaciously beside her, only occasionally nudging her when the reporters bought up issues they weren’t sure about. Behind the reporters a crowd of humans pressed and shuffled, but all those people didn’t seem to be frightened and enraged anymore. Instead the mood was peculiarly light, even buoyant. People cried for the dead of Baltimore, but they also cried from relief: like Imani, most of them seemed to believe that peace was finally at hand.

“Yes. That’s Anais,” Luce confirmed sadly when they showed her the photo of the dead golden-haired girl with a badly bruised throat who’d been found naked and hopelessly drained of blood in the secretary of defense’s clinging arms. “We were in the same tribe once, up in Alaska. She was . . . really dangerous . . . but still . . .” Luce went back to staring at the late-morning sunlight speckled across the bay’s low waves.

“Secretary Moreland confessed to sending her out as an agent provocateur with instructions to trick the Baltimore Twice Lost into attacking. Can you tell us something about Anais that might help explain why she would agree to do that?”

Since Luce was looking away the reporter had addressed Yuan instead. “Well, Luce is the one who knew her; I never actually met—”

“She was a sika,” Luce murmured vaguely. She didn’t look around.

“A seekah?”

“Oh—yeah.” Yuan took up the question in authoritative tones. “See, a lot of mermaids are angry. But a mermaid who’s a sika isn’t angry, just empty. They’ll do anything because they can’t really feel, so it’s like they have to do evil, crazy things to feel anything at all, and nothing means anything to them.”

“Similar to what humans would call a psychopath?”

“Pretty much, I guess.”

The conversations went on and on. Luce couldn’t understand why this Secretary Moreland guy—wasn’t he the same one who’d said on TV that she was impersonating the real Luce Korchak?—hated mermaids so much that he was ready to sacrifice thousands of human lives simply to persuade the world to share in his hatred. But, unfathomable as it was, that appeared to be precisely the case. The tapes of his conversations with Anais certainly proved he was a madman, capable of extravagant evil. On the news they said Moreland was delirious now, gibbering, but telling everything over and over again as if he couldn’t believe it himself. He’d admitted that he was the one who’d sent out the helicopter with the net too. Catarina and the other mermaids caught that day had died because of him. And he’d also arranged for the murder of certain humans, ones he considered his enemies. That part was on the tapes: they revealed that he’d been using Anais as an assassin.

He didn’t care if everyone knew the truth, not now that he’d lost Anais, now that he’d been pulled off her floating corpse by the first rescuers to arrive at the scene. He only wanted to die, and to die by a mermaid’s enchantment. He was begging the mermaids to show him that mercy in gratitude for his confession.

Luce didn’t think any of them would.

Poor Anais, Luce thought. A gray glaze seemed to cover the water, or maybe it only covered her eyes. She felt sick and achy. Her head seemed to be drifting by itself down to Imani’s shoulder.