by Sarah Porter
“Oh boy oh boy oh boy!” Anais shrieked. “Wow, you must be a really, really special girl, Cat! For those guys to think they could do that! I mean, I guess we all already knew that you were ... talented...”
“Shut up!” Luce was yelling now, queasy with disbelief. She never would have imagined anyone saying something like this, not even Anais. “Anais, just shut up! What happened to you, anyway?” Then Luce saw Catarina’s face, and the shout died in her throat.
Catarina should have been in a fury. She should have been terrifying, a blaze of blanched skin and leaping flames.
Instead her face seemed to cave in on itself. She wasn't looking at Anais at all, but at her own knotted hands. No! Luce wanted to tell her. Whatever you do, don’t let her see you’re ashamed.
It was too late, though. Anais was grinning triumphantly.
"Well, maybe not everybody appreciates Cat's talents the way I do. I think I've seen more of her in action...”
Luce wobbled. This couldn't possibly mean what she thought! No, Luce tried to reassure herself. Anais was only talking about what she'd just seen of Catarina's human life, whatever it was that had changed her. After all, Anais was the only one there who'd ever had the nerve to infringe on Catarina's privacy that way.
Luce had to do something to make this stop. "ANAIS!”
It was better than nothing. At least those syrupy blue eyes swung toward her, away from Catarina's collapsed mouth and downcast gaze.
"Yes, Lucette?” Anais's voice dusted down like powdered sugar.
"Everyone else here, you can see what happened to them. I mean, if you're messed up enough that you'll go looking where it's none of your business...” Anais's smile didn't weaken at all. "You're the only mermaid here where there's nothing to see, really. So what happened to you?” When Luce glanced around for a second, she realized everyone was awake by now, gawking at them.
"You know, it's funny you ask me that, Lucette.” Luce hated the phony maturity Anais was putting on now even more than she hated her fake sweetness or her fake tears. “Samantha and I have discussed that very thing. Nothing that bad ever happened to me, really. My parents both loved me very much. They always told me I was their princess, and they gave me anything I wanted.” Disgust clogged Luce’s mind as she listened, but somehow she knew Anais was telling the truth. But then why had she changed? “Isn’t it interesting? If you think about it, everybody always seems to get exactly what they deserve...”
Luce thought that the rest of the mermaids might finally turn on Anais. After all, she was basically saying that Samantha deserved to be thrown from a moving car, that Jenna deserved to be trapped in a burning house. Luce looked around for support. Even if they couldn’t actually expel Anais, couldn’t they pressure her into leaving the tribe?
No one met Luce’s eyes. After a second Luce understood why.
They actually believed what Anais was saying to them. At least they half believed it or they were afraid it was true: that their parents had left them or hurt them because of some deep, secret flaw in their own hearts. It didn’t take much, just the smallest crack of self-doubt, and Anais’s words could insinuate themselves through the gap and then drive it wider.
They were all ashamed. Just like Catarina. Even Samantha, who had insisted so loudly that no mermaid should ever allow herself to feel shame for one second. And Luce had never felt so sorry for them. “You shouldn’t listen to her,” Luce whispered. “None of you should.” She waited a moment, and no one answered. “Cat? I mean, do you want to come back to my cave for a while?” But Catarina wouldn’t even look at her. There was no point in staying with them, not now. If anyone wanted to talk to her, they could come and find her.
When Luce surfaced for air, she saw a man’s body washed up against the beach where Miriam had died. He bobbled loosely, his head tapping at the rocks.
She would find a way—someday—that the mermaids could live without anything they had to be ashamed of.
She would find the song that showed them how.
***
Luce stayed alone in her cave, only darting out occasionally for food. She was still strangely exhausted and slept long hours. When she woke she’d sing quietly to herself, calling tiny waves to come and dance around her while her mind filled with images of the dead: Tessa and Miriam, Tessa’s mother, her own parents, the curly-haired Coast Guard boy. It was hard for her to think about anything else now. She knew that sometime she should try to straighten out all the confusion with Catarina, but she kept putting that off. It would almost surely be painful, and Luce had all the pain she could deal with for now. There were so many things she should have done differently, so many times when, if she’d just said the right words, there might have been one less body lolling in the deep gray water.
Luce sang. It was the only thing that made her grief bearable. As soon as she stopped, it felt like knives driving into her chest.
It had been a crazy thing to do. It might even have been wrong, selfish, irresponsible ... but Luce was glad she’d saved the boy who sang back to her. His face was one image that she didn’t have to see in that winking museum of lost faces.
Only four days after Miriam's death, Luce heard the mermaids singing. They sounded shrill, manic, completely out of control. They were taking down another boat, and it was much, much too soon, especially since the last one had been so huge. Helicopters rattled overhead all the time now. But Luce couldn't make herself care. In her mind's eye she was watching Tessa, who was sitting cross-legged at the bottom of the sea with a book spread on her knees, the tip of her tongue sticking out as she reached some particularly dramatic point in the narrative. Luce didn't know what book it was, but even so, she sang along with the story, with the rise and fall of the characters' thoughts. Then she saw that she'd actually made one small wave break free of the ocean's surface, and circle in midair ... She wanted to call Tessa to look, but the wave plopped back into the water in a shower of droplets that glimmered like tears...
She could hear the mermaids singing, and the crunch of a boat hitting the cliffs very near her cave. Maybe Anais would get a new dress or something.
Luce sang to herself and to the dead. Other mermaids could sing for the living. Even if it was strange and awful to hear Catarina's voice tangled up with Anais's, not too far away. How could Cat possibly sing with Anais after the vile things she'd said? Then Luce realized what was wrong in the tone of the song licking over the sea now. The whole tribe was hopelessly drunk again, deranged by human liquor.
Luce found herself listening very intently in the minutes that followed the ship's crash, although she didn't know why it seemed so important to keep track of all the individual voices—or really, just of one voice. Luce was listening to make sure that Catarina stayed up near the surface with the others and that she didn’t take off alone on any mysterious dives. Luce realized that her heart was beating faster, that she was peculiarly cold. But no, it was okay. Luce could follow Catarina’s voice the whole time. She never left the group. After a while the singing dropped away, replaced by the fainter but still distinct sounds of girls’ voices squabbling over choice bits of plunder, and Luce finally relaxed. But what was she worrying about? Catarina could swim deep down without endangering herself, even as she gave her own reserves of air to some boy in her arms. Luce had seen her do it, after all, and Cat had been fine. For a while Luce went back to daydreaming, to scattering her voice in tiny flying notes like rising sparks. She was just so tired now; maybe she always would be.
Then Luce sat up abruptly. She’d realized what was bothering her.
She’d seen Catarina twined around a drowning human boy. But someone else had seen it, too, on a different occasion. Luce had suspected this before, but suddenly she was sure of it.
Much as she hated the idea, Luce realized she’d have to follow the tribe anytime they attacked a ship. Just in case ... Luce couldn’t stand to finish the thought, and for an instant her voice stabbed upward, bringing a small fountain of salt
water with it.
***
Luce tried to time her forays out for food at hours when no one else would be around. She even tried eating at beaches besides the dining beach, but the other spots where the mussels were good were all too exposed, and with the new frequency of boats and helicopters in the area she was too nervous to spend time anywhere that wasn't underwater or in some particularly sheltered nook of coast. After a few days passed quietly, she slipped over to the dining beach in the long slur of sunset, probably close to midnight, when the tribe would usually have headed back to the main cave.
But on this particular evening, she found them all still there. Dana waved shyly, and Violet smiled, but everyone else ignored her. Even Catarina seemed to have given up her campaign of trying to provoke Luce into a contest; her old friend just sat talking to Jenna, pretending Luce wasn't there at all. So, she'd gone back to being invisible, Luce thought; that was manageable, even if it hurt her. She'd had a lot of practice at being a kind of living secret when she was human, and she could adapt to being one again: the dark eyes that gazed out of the water...
Anais cracked a mussel, but she didn't eat it. Instead she dangled it over the head of an iridescent, pinkish larva, which leaped and gibbered eagerly, trying to grab the treat. Anais just twitched the mussel higher, then made a looping motion with her free hand. After a few more futile lunges, the larva seemed to comprehend; it turned a messy somersault in the water, then bobbled up, begging and squeaking. Anais taunted it for another few moments, and as the larva started whimpering she popped the mussel in its gaping mouth. The tribe looked on, and Luce saw a confusing assortment of expressions on the watching faces: Kayley seemed disgusted, Violet pitying, others maliciously delighted.
"Who knew you could train these gross little things!” Anais shrilled. "I'm going to have to think of some, like, more useful stuff I could get them to do.” She cracked another mussel, but this time she withheld it until the larva executed three flips in a row. It wobbled dizzily the third time, slapping sideways into a protruding rock. Anais laughed. Luce was terribly hungry, having made herself wait so long for dinner, but as she watched the eager little larva prancing in front of Anais she had trouble swallowing. The poor little things were so lonely, Luce thought, so eager for attention, that they didn’t even mind being degraded in order to get the older girls to look at them. Now Anais was making the larva leap, though with its stubby, uncoordinated tail it couldn’t go very high. A cluster of other larvae drifted closer, open-mouthed, emitting mewing sounds.
“Good one, Anais!” Samantha laughed as the larva belly-flopped back down with a frightened gurgle.
“No guys here,” Anais explained lazily. “You really have to do, like, whatever to keep from getting bored.” The moon was rising in the pale blue of the summer night, and Luce looked out to see its glow forming a trail of faint stripes across the distant waves: a trail that led into the deepening sea where the mermaids never swam.
“Totally,” Samantha agreed. But what wouldn’t she agree with if Anais said it?
“I mean, I keep hearing about that Coast Guard boat you guys sank, back before I got here.” Anais’s tone was still casual, but there was a hidden tension in it that made Luce look back at her again. She was just in time to see Anais darting a stealthy sideways glance at Catarina, and the glance was much faster, much sharper, than the sleepy drawl of her voice. “So, you know, I keep thinking we should be on the lookout for another boat like that. I mean one with a lot of hot guys. We’ll at least get to have some fun with them, even if we're not allowed to keep them...”
Catarina was still talking to Jenna, seemingly oblivious, but from something subtle in the tilt of her fiery head Luce could tell she was listening.
Luce forced herself to keep eating. Otherwise she'd just wake up famished in the middle of the night. Besides, she had a feeling she should hang around a while longer, just in case anyone said anything important. But the subject of boys seemed exhausted. Now Anais had a new larva flapping hopefully in front of her. It was slower on the uptake than the pink one, though, and couldn't figure out that it was expected to turn a somersault before it could have the mussel. "Stupid thing,” Anais cooed. "Stupid little bitch. You think I'm feeding you before you do what I want?”
Luce thought of bringing the larva a mussel, but she didn't feel like getting into another fight with Anais tonight. She was too drained.
Before she headed back to her own little cave, Luce swirled over to Catarina, who was seated on her favorite sofa-shaped rock. Luce could see her bronze-gold tail flaring and ebbing under the blanched water.
"Cat?” Catarina completely ignored her. Luce's voice could just as well have been a breeze passing by. "Hey, Cat!” Jenna was glaring now, leaning out past Catarina's shoulder, and finally Catarina glanced around.
"How nice of you to stop by, Lucette.” She didn't sound unfriendly, but none of the unexpected warmth she'd shown after Miriam's death was there either. Her tone was purely empty, the voice of someone chilled to the quick.
“Cat, I just want to ask you...” Catarina’s eyebrows shot up; Luce knew she was waiting for the challenge to come at last. The look on her face was a mixture of apprehension and relief. Luce stared into Cat’s gray eyes and raised one tentative hand, but then she didn’t reach out, didn’t touch her. “Just, please be careful.” Catarina’s expression returned to a perfect blank. She might have been looking at a patch of moonlight glinting off the sea.
***
Over the next few days Luce had trouble sleeping, and when she did sleep everything around her seemed to have its own voice: the water hummed and purled, the rocks trilled in a wheezy soprano, and the faint moonlight fell like the broken notes produced by creatures that were half seal and half cello. The cliffs had two different voices: one for day and one for the blue, sun-streaked Alaskan night. Even when she was awake her mind was stained by the residue of dreamed music, until she sometimes wondered if she was hallucinating, and she sang to herself in the voices she heard pouring from the tides, the sun, the jagged cliffs...
The only song she never seemed to hear anymore was the mermaids’. She didn’t run into them again, and no one came to see her. Maybe everything was okay after all, and she’d been worrying for nothing. Only once or twice Luce woke from a song like a trance with the aching sense that someone had been listening to her, just outside her cave.
Everything was music, even her. She didn’t feel quite as lonely now that the whole world kept singing back to her, though she still missed Tessa, and Catarina, and Miriam. It was all her own fault, Luce realized, that she and Miriam hadn't become very good friends. Miriam had tried to get close to her, but Luce was so accustomed to isolation that she hadn't really responded. Miriam couldn't hear her, but Luce still sang to tell Miriam how sorry she was...
Her dream of changing the tribe was ridiculous, though. Luce knew that now. If she was ever going to realize her vision of belonging to a tribe that didn't kill, she'd have to start over fresh; she'd have to travel down the coast, maybe find brand-new metaskazas who weren't already addicted to their songs of murder.
And, Luce realized, she'd have to be the queen. It was the only way. And since she couldn't imagine wielding so much power she stayed where she was, listening to the enchantment of pure being. Sometimes she floated down the coast, letting the currents control her body. It was a bit reckless with so many humans around now; Luce often heard their graceless voices carrying over the water, but she didn't quite care.
She lost track of time. Sometimes she knew whether it was night or day only by the pitch of the cliffs in her ears, the blue or bright timbre of their song.
***
Luce was stretched out on her back in the open sea. She knew, of course, that it was reckless to drift that way, so far from the cliffs. If something leaped at her from below she wouldn't see it coming, and she'd have no chance to escape. She didn't care anymore. She floated, listening to the waves that gently lapped against her
ears. Their song was a slow, percussive chant, a kind of moan. Beautiful, Luce thought. As she floated onward the music split into two sounds, gaining a very faint harmonic overlay, and Luce smiled appreciatively. It was like living warmth inside the wind, and it seemed to come from far, far away: the hum of distance itself. It brought heat rushing to her cheeks, made her blood run faster, and Luce suddenly thought of the boy with bronze-blond hair, the one she’d saved. She thought of his mouth sneaking up inside the waves next to her and then cresting onto her lips in a slow, smooth kiss...
Luce started from her daydream and rolled over, scanning the sea in all directions. The sound shattered and echoed off the water and off the cliffs, so that she couldn’t be sure which direction it came from. Somewhere ahead, probably, and a bit to her right.
It wasn’t some half-hallucinated song of the distance she was hearing at all. It was Catarina, singing in the soft, insinuating lull she used when she was just starting to lead a boat to its doom. And out on the horizon Luce caught sight of it, no more than a gray speck. She could tell that it was turning by the way the bright sunlight on its flank was gradually rotating into shadow. Luce could swim at terrific speed, of course, but she was many miles away.
The note rose, and the gray speck began to move faster. Luce knew what was coming, and a lump of shame almost choked her.
She’d been wasting her time on selfish dreams, and all the while Catarina was in danger.
18. Violation
