by Sarah Porter
Dorian’s name was enough to make Luce glance up sharply at the silver-haired man, but only for an instant. Almost immediately her eyes went back to her father’s face, to his head fallen over at a steep angle and his wandering gaze. But looking up, even so briefly, reminded Luce of the crowd watching raptly from above as if they were in some kind of bizarre theater built from night and sea. “I can try,” Luce breathed out. “I can try to heal him. But I’m going to have to sing to do it. I mean sing in ways that might not be safe for the people here. Hearing me—I don’t know what that will do to everyone. They should leave.”
In the corner of her eye, the strange man nodded thoughtfully. But for some reason he didn’t get up and go.
Yuan began swimming back and forth under the pallid bunkers, calling up, “General Luce needs to sing. It could be dangerous. You should leave for your own safety, okay? Everybody please leave!”
Some people started climbing down from the roofs and vanishing behind the buildings. But far too many lingered where they were, and Yuan’s voice began rising in frustration. “We’re trying to be responsible here! We’re asking all of you to GET— AWAY—NOW! Why don’t you all get moving? This is serious business!”
“We just want to listen,” a young woman in a red parka answered from a curving cement roof. “We won’t bother you.”
“It’s dangerous!” Yuan yelled back. “Don’t be stupid! This isn’t a rock concert!”
“I’ll take my chances!”
Yuan wheeled around to look at Luce and raised her hands helplessly. Luce groaned. Her father was as hollow as an open wound, and these stubborn, reckless humans wouldn’t get out of her way and let her help him. Luce gave her father’s unresponsive hand a quick squeeze and swirled back a few feet to look up at the crowd. Her tail coiled around her. “Please, please leave! Now! I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I can’t just keep waiting!”
“General Luce?” It was the man who’d brought her father. “The way you need to sing to your father—it must be a way of singing that’s meant to help, not harm. Isn’t that correct? You won’t actually be singing in a way that would persuade the people here to drown themselves.”
“I don’t think anybody will drown,” Luce agreed. “But I can’t tell; it might hurt them in other ways. I just don’t know, and there’s already been—so many horrible things have happened already—and if anyone else gets hurt because of me—” She closed her eyes in despair. Maybe she should just seize hold of her father and drag him away from here, across the bay. Maybe she could take him to Alcatraz.
“It’s really going to be fine, Luce,” someone said. The voice ached inside her, as warm and reassuring as her own blood, but somehow she couldn’t place it at first. “You can sing without hurting anyone. I know that for a fact. Mr. Ellison? Can we get him closer to her, like on the other side of the rocks?”
Now she knew who was there. Luce looked up again, her vision scattered and silvery with tears. Dorian appeared at the center of a web of light. He was helping the strange man to maneuver her father’s limp body over the line of rocks and into the shallow lapping water where Luce waited.
It was all too much, too painful. Luce closed her eyes again, trying to squeeze the darkness so close that it would never leave her. She caught her father’s lolling head between her hands and held on gently, keeping him from sliding down into the water. And then she heard him trying to speak. The word came out as a lowing, broken note. “Lu . . .” her father half groaned, half sang. “Lu . . . ssss.”
And very softly, very delicately, Luce began singing back to him.
Her voice spread through her father’s mind. He was full of a trilling emptiness, yes—but that void didn’t possess all of him. Instead he was fragmented, torn apart by that darkness. Aspects of him shone far apart in that vacancy like suns separated by the immensity of space. Luce’s voice reached through his strange internal night and gathered pieces of his consciousness, until those suns weren’t scattered but instead hung like apples from a single blazing tree.
Luce heard herself singing slow, high notes that traveled along sweeping curves, touching everything in her father’s mind that had gotten lost. She sang the webs, the reconnections, but her own voice sounded to her like the deepest possible silence. There was still the endless thrum of mermaid voices under the bridge. There was the subtle breathing of the wind. But even in concert with those sounds the silence was perfect, just as actively present as any music. It rose in harmony with the music.
In that silence her father would hear his own thoughts again.
In it he would recognize himself again. And the world, which had been washed away by some uncanny, destructive flood of sound, would come back to him with its sky and its ground and its trees. Those things would seem real to him again, without any music.
By the time Luce let her voice softly die away, she knew that he wasn’t completely cured—but also that he was much, much better.
And so was she. At least she was well enough now to open her eyes and face the world outside her own private darkness.
The people on the hillside were crying silently, each one consumed by a lifetime’s worth of emotions all streaming into wild release at once. None of them spoke.
Dorian was sitting cross-legged only five feet away from her. His cheeks were tear-streaked and his ochre gaze seemed to cradle her face. She looked away from him, suddenly embarrassed.
And her father—he still swayed uncertainly. He looked weak and sleepy. But he also looked like a person and not like a shell filled with yawning night, and his eyes met hers with dreamy recognition. “Hi there, Luce,” he whispered. “I was trying to get to you. I wanted to explain . . .”
Luce hugged him, trying not to break down and sob. “Explain later. You need to go somewhere warm now. You need to get in dry clothes and then sleep for a long time. Okay?”
“That sounds about right,” Andrew Korchak agreed vaguely. He lifted his hand from the water and watched with perplexity the drops falling from his fingers. “How did I get here, Luce? I was just trying . . . I saw you in the water, and I tried to swim out to you. And after that . . . there was that room made out of glass, and I was talking to your friend.”
He was still half-crazy, Luce thought: still shaken and disoriented. “Tell me everything later. And if you need me to I’ll sing to you again, and soon, soon you’ll be okay.” Andrew Korchak nodded hazily, then stood up and clambered over the rocks. He curled in a ball on the pavement and sighed. Maybe he was already asleep.
Luce looked toward the silver-haired man. Like everyone else, he was gleaming with tears that seemed to illuminate something deep inside him. It was only now that Luce realized how much this unknown man had done for her. “I haven’t thanked you yet. For bringing my dad here. And I don’t know your name.”
“I’m Ben Ellison.” He smiled at her sadly. “I’m glad to finally meet you, general. Dorian always speaks of you . . . very lovingly. And now I truly understand why.”
Luce’s eyes went wide as the realization hit her. How could she have forgotten? Ellison, Ben Ellison: this was the same FBI agent who’d tried to make Dorian betray her. Even without meeting Ben Ellison she’d always hated him, always regarded him as an implacable enemy.
But he’d helped save her father, and she couldn’t hate him anymore.
“Hi, Mr. Ellison,” Luce said a bit awkwardly. “It’s nice . . . to meet you, too. I really, really appreciate your helping my dad this way. Can you please take him somewhere safe now? I think I shouldn’t try any more tonight.”
“I have a hotel room waiting for him,” Ben Ellison assured her. “General, I’d very much like . . . to speak with you again soon. Your old acquaintance Anais did this to your father”—Luce jolted, stunned to realize that Nausicaa had been right again, and that Anais had in fact survived the massacre of their old tribe—“and her current whereabouts are unknown. Obviously she could be extremely dangerous.”
Luce nodded, but she
was so overwhelmed that she could barely take it in. Anais was still causing extraordinary harm; Anais was still out there somewhere . . .
“Luce?” Dorian whispered. But she couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
“Dorian, are you coming with us?” Ben Ellison asked. “We’re leaving now.” He tried to lift Andrew from the ground, and a few people from the crowd came down to help. In a moment a group of half a dozen was carrying her father, probably to a waiting car. He’d be safe, Luce thought, and eventually he’d recover completely.
“I’ll come later,” Dorian called. Even without glancing at him, Luce knew his stare hadn’t once shifted away from her face. “Luce, I know you must be really mad at me, and you’ve gone through hell, and I don’t blame you if you hate me. But—”
“Not now, Dorian.” The voice was Yuan’s, coming from just behind Luce’s left shoulder. “We all know you love her, okay? And I’ve been really impressed by your whole Twice Lost Humans thing. But this is not the time. It’s not fair to ask Luce anything tonight.”
It was strange, Luce thought. But somehow now that she heard Yuan say it she knew it was true: Dorian did still love her. What she didn’t know was how she felt about that.
Dorian tilted his head toward Yuan. “Who are you?”
“I’m Yuan.” There was a brief pause. “And I’m pretty sure I want the same things you do for Luce. I think we’re on the same side. But everything’s changed since you knew her.”
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 h
arbor’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.
