by Sarah Porter
“We’ve already met, Nausicaa,” Catarina snarled.
Nausicaa started. For a moment her face went completely blank and confused, then she looked up at the buildings, almost as if her lost memory might reappear in one of those broken windows. She shook her head. “I apologize. Where have we met? I can’t recall.”
“You can’t recall?” Catarina simpered the words mockingly. “I suppose you can’t recall Queen Marina, either?”
“Marina, yes, of course. I have not traveled through her territory for some time, however. Do you have news of her?” Nausicaa looked at Catarina again. “You were in Marina’s tribe, once? Oh . . . perhaps I do remember something of you . . .”
“Marina’s been dead for twenty-five years.”
“I am sorry ..”
“And she never should have trusted you!”
There was a swing and a clap of Catarina’s bronze-gold fins, and she was gone.
The silence that followed lasted much too long—and Luce found herself wondering if Catarina’s words had really been as spontaneous and emotional as they seemed. Maybe she’d been calculating the best way to make everyone suspicious of Nausicaa before they even got to know her.
Yuan was the one who rose to the occasion. Her jealous look was gone, and she grinned at Nausicaa with distinctly forced lightness. “Hey, sorry about that, Nausicaa. Cat’s just being like that. She’s not completely down with all the big changes around here, and she’s kind of been getting moody a lot.”
Nausicaa shook her head. “I should speak with her. I am not entirely sure if I deserve her anger. But thank you for your welcome. You are?”
“Yuan.” A quick shiver of hesitation followed, almost too brief to be noticeable. “And if you’re Luce’s friend, then we’re all really happy to have you.”
Luce looked at Yuan, unsure if she’d heard a tiny hint of emphasis on the word “if.” She decided to ignore it. “Yuan’s in charge of organizing the Twice Lost Army, Nausicaa. And she’s brilliant at it. And . . . she’s one of my best friends, too.” It was true, Luce realized, but that wasn’t why she’d chosen this particular moment to come out and say it.
Yuan flashed Luce a look, warm but also a little sardonic. Then she flurried into action, introducing everyone to Nausicaa, reminding some mermaids that they should return to the bridge for the rest of their shift and others that they should go and get some sleep.
When almost everyone had gone, Yuan clocked her head at Nausicaa. “So, Nausicaa? Did Luce already teach you how to sing to the water? ’Cause if you’re with us, that’s the first order of business.”
“Of course. But I have yet to learn this skill, Yuan.”
Yuan was nodding. “You’ll be studying with the best! Well, I’ll leave you guys to it. And Luce? You’re excused from your next shift. I won’t expect you at the bridge until six in the evening, okay?”
Luce gazed at Yuan for a moment then splashed over to hug her. She knew Yuan was still fighting a twinge of jealousy, and it was incredibly generous of her to offer Luce extra time with Nausicaa this way. “I’d be setting a really bad example if I did that, though, Yuan. I’ll be there at six in the morning.”
Yuan shrugged, but she looked pleased. “See you soon, then. God, I’m only going to get like three hours of sleep.”
Then Luce was alone with Nausicaa in a night filled with hovering lights, the breathing sounds of cars on distant highways, the dark scrolls of indigo clouds. A light rain was just starting to fall. They stared at each other: those were really the same blackish eyes with their look of ironic wisdom, really the same smile turned a bit grim with the weight of centuries, and the same wonderfully unpredictable intelligence sparking behind those features.
Luce realized she’d always assumed that Nausicaa had simply seen too much and grown too jaded to feel the same depth of love that Luce felt for her. She was thinking of that when Nausicaa let out a short astonished laugh and threw her arms around Luce’s shoulders, squeezing her tight. “My dearest, bravest Queen Luce. With all the languages I know added together, I don’t seem to find enough words!”
Luce buried her face against Nausicaa’s cool shoulder. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that, Nausicaa. You know I’m never going to be Queen anything.”
“But Luce,” Nausicaa murmured, “it has taken me these three thousand years to find the mermaid whom I wish to call my queen. How can you deny me that joy?”
No matter how many times she’d been lost, Luce thought, she was suddenly even more found.
As long as Nausicaa was with her, she was found.
∗ ∗ ∗
They settled on the shore under the pier, rain seeping in slow trickles between the planks and pocking the drowsy water. Luce poured out the story of all the events that occurred after Nausicaa had left Alaska. Somehow Luce didn’t mind talking about Dorian with Nausicaa, and she told her everything: how she’d been driven away from him by the encroaching ice, how she’d been swept out to sea in a storm and then found her father miraculously alive but enthralled by spirits on a remote island. She told Nausicaa how the long effort to free her father from that enchantment had made her late in returning to Dorian, and how he’d betrayed her for a human girlfriend rather than wait. How very close she’d come to killing him in her heartbreak. How she’d tried to warn her old tribe away from the area, only to find that they’d returned to their cave after Anais murdered a mermaid from Sedna’s tribe.
Then how, as she was still stunned by Dorian’s betrayal, she’d found her former tribe slaughtered, their cave dripping with fresh blood.
Nausicaa had asked very few questions while Luce spoke, only held her and sometimes nodded. After all, nothing about the story surprised her; she’d even predicted Dorian’s treachery before it happened.
But at Luce’s account of finding the torn and partly dismembered bodies of the mermaids she’d once lived with, Nausicaa was suddenly sharply alert. “That sika,” Nausicaa growled. “Was she among the dead?”
“Anais? She must have been! Nausicaa, there were bodies all over the place. I saw faces split in half. I saw—”
“But did you see Anais? See her there, clearly dead, her body reverted to human form? If you did not notice her distinctly enough for her name to arise in your mind . . .”
Luce didn’t want to search her memories of what she’d found in that cave. “What does that matter? Nausicaa, they killed everyone. I couldn’t think about names!”
“A sika will always find a way to save herself, Luce. If you did not remark her face among the dead, we must believe she lives.”
Luce stared. It took her a moment to process Nausicaa’s words. “I guess . . . it could be possible. But even if she did escape, it’s hard to see why that matters now. With the tribe dead, she can’t really hurt them anymore.”
“It might matter very much, Luce. It depends on the price that Anais paid for her life. It was likely bought at a cost no decent mermaid would consider.”
“You mean . . .”
“Luce. What happened next?”
Luce was suddenly finding it hard to concentrate. It took a huge effort to focus her mind and keep up the story. How the silent black boat appeared and the divers fired on her before she knew what was happening. How in the impulse of her rage and terror she’d called the wave and flung the boat furiously against the cliff, then fled in a daze to warn as many mermaids as she could. Her hallucinations and the encounter with the school of huge squids, her collapse, those humans holding a camera.
J’aime’s cave. The massacre there. Then what Luce overheard about the divers’ search for one mermaid in particular—her—and how they seemed to know far too much about her.
How she’d concluded that Dorian must have informed on her—and thereby placed other mermaids in the line of fire.
Nausicaa was already shaking her head, her fins flicking with impatience. “It was Anais who told them of you! Luce, this only proves to me that she still lives—perhaps as a captive. H
ow has your pride kept you from seeing something so obvious as this!”
“What makes you think it wasn’t Dorian? Nausicaa, I didn’t want to believe he could do something like that either, but . . .”
“He could not. If he spoke more than he should, he did so naïvely, with no intent to harm you. Luce, I know him.”
“I thought I knew him, too!”
“You know him still. Your pride and your hurt prevent you from seeing what you know. You make blind your own thoughts, and they wander in the darkness.”
If it had been anyone but Nausicaa who had said that to her, Luce would have felt nothing but resentment. As it was, her tail was beating the water into a froth, and she twisted out of Nausicaa’s embrace. “You’d rather make up some crazy story about Anais than admit you were wrong about someone—some human. You know why I’m glad I didn’t drown Dorian, Nausicaa? Because he didn’t even deserve the honor of being killed by me—after how shallow he turned out to be! He—”
Nausicaa burst out laughing uncontrollably, and Luce fell into an annoyed silence. Then, as Nausicaa kept on giggling, Luce found herself breaking into a responsive grin. Maybe she was being a little overdramatic. “Oh, such pride you have now, Queen Luce! I cannot begrudge you. You’ve earned this new arrogance, I admit that. But—”
Nausicaa couldn’t keep talking. She was laughing too hard again.
And, to Luce’s surprise, she felt grateful to Nausicaa for laughing at her. “Okay, maybe you’re right about Anais, Nausicaa. Maybe. But that doesn’t mean Dorian hasn’t been trying to hurt me—to get some kind of revenge! They could both—”
“Ah, Luce.” Nausicaa had finally mastered her laughter. “Dawn will be with us soon. You must teach me your way of singing so that the water will understand me and answer my voice. And I must learn your methods of teaching as well. Clearly, the next great task falls to me. Much as it will pain me to leave you again . . .”
Luce couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You can’t leave! Nausicaa, you—are you just trying to upset me? You can’t actually mean that!”
Nausicaa gazed at her strangely, almost speculatively. “We need each other, Luce. I am more aware of this than ever.”
“Then how can you even talk about—”
“But, as truly as you need me beside you, your struggle needs me more. Think of what I can do for the Twice Lost! At present, you and your followers here are alone in this battle, isolated in this bay, without support. The humans have only this one group to overcome and then everything you strive for will be destroyed. But I am accustomed to traveling great distances. I speak so many languages that their words tangle like brambles in my mind, and I am known well to hundreds of mermaid queens throughout the world.”
Luce was beginning to understand Nausicaa’s reasoning. She just didn’t want to understand it. “So you’re saying—you’ll go teach what we can do to other tribes?” Of course mermaids in other countries probably needed a way to defend themselves just as desperately as the Twice Lost did, or else they would very soon.
“More than that, dearest Luce. I will carry your skill to distant tribes, yes, so that they are not entirely helpless against these helmeted soldiers. But more than that, I will spread your movement and your goals. The humans will soon have more than just the dock mermaids of San Francisco to contend with!” Nausicaa laughed again, a little harshly.
“Dock mermaids?” Luce wasn’t entirely happy with Nausicaa’s tone; there’d been an audible breath of disdain in it.
“Strange enough, but this is true the world over, Luce. Those mermaids outcast by their own kind gather at the margins of great human cities. They hide themselves between the two worlds, in the shadows there, under the docks or factories or in half-sunk ships. Breakers of the timahk most often become dock mermaids just like these you know.”
“You know you broke the timahk too,” Luce pointed out. Nausicaa had spoken with Dorian at least twice—and those were just the violations Luce knew about. In three thousand years, there might have been others.
Nausicaa hesitated. “I did.”
“And so did I. I’m a dock mermaid too!”
Nausicaa smiled at Luce, her expression wry and thoughtful, and reached to stroke her hair. For several seconds neither of them spoke. “Then I will travel to the dock mermaids first, Queen Luce. The outcast mermaids of this world will be your vanguard. The Twice Lost will be the ones who create the mermaids’ future.”
Luce looked at her. “And after the war—if there is any ‘after,’ Nausicaa, if we live? Then . . .”
Nausicaa smiled, but there a shadow seemed to flit behind her eyes. “Then we may still have Proteus to contend with, Queen Luce. I cannot imagine that the god who gave the mermaids their form and their destiny will take kindly to your defiance of the timahk. The first mermaids, the Unnamed Twins, know me as an old friend, but even they might refuse to listen to me speak in your defense. You have not merely broken our law for yourself, after all.”
Luce barely registered the words. “But I need to know what you’ll do after the war, Nausicaa! I don’t care what Proteus does.”
“I will not part from you again.”
It all made sense. Nausicaa was obviously making the right decision for everyone; Luce could almost accept that. At least, she could accept it until she pictured Nausicaa swimming away from her again. Then her emotions all roiled in rebellion, wild with unreasonable urges to somehow force Nausicaa to stay with her, no matter the cost.
Water dripped from the rotting planks, and dull gray light suffused the morning sky. Nausicaa’s singing lessons would have to wait.
It was almost time to report to the bridge.
∗ ∗ ∗
Soon she and Nausicaa swam close enough to the bridge to feel the water trembling against their skin from that overwhelming song. There were the usual animals: clouds of weaving blackish fish and scarf-winged rays—and, up above, something Luce didn’t recognize. She felt a quick impulse of fear. Maybe whatever was floating on the surface was some new weapon or a trap. There were dangling lines at its base that might be the wires of some strange bomb. She surfaced at a cautious distance to take a look at it.
Roses. It was messy bouquet of pale pink roses, balloons tied among them to make them float. Those trailing things Luce had taken for wires were actually curled white ribbons. Some human, Luce decided, must have dropped them in the water by accident. Beside her, Nausicaa gazed quizzically at the flowers.
Cala appeared at her elbow and prodded the bouquet. “They’ve started throwing us presents.” She sounded somewhere between exasperated and wearily amused. “The humans on shore, I mean. And they keep calling out, trying to get us to come talk to them, General Luce. Nobody knows what to do! And that’s not even the worst thing—” Suddenly her tone veered close to hysteria.
“What is this worst thing?” Nausicaa asked.
“I’ll . . .” Cala started. “I guess I should just show you. We’re all staying under the surface as much as we can because every time they notice one of us they freak, and no one knows how to react.”
On the San Francisco side, the bridge’s base was joined by a large parking lot. As usual these days it was packed with people. Some of them had started bringing folding chairs with them or else simply sat on the pavement with their eyes closed and their heads thrown back, rapt in the shimmering music of hundreds of mermaid voices joined together. But there were others who pressed purposely forward, some with mouths wide open but soundless, their expressions eager or ravenous or crazed. Luce, Nausicaa, and Cala had surfaced some twenty yards from shore, and at the sight of them the watchers squeezed together at the water’s edge began shouting desperately, waving their arms to beckon the mermaids closer.
Dozens of police wearing headphones stood stiffly among the listeners; Luce didn’t understand why they were there until a tall young woman with a mohawk leaped into the water only to be promptly hauled out and dragged away in handcuffs.
And, Luce realized, some of the humans onshore were carrying signs. At first glance they might have been mistaken for the kind of signs people carry at a political demonstration. But at the second . . .
“That’s what I was talking about,” Cala groaned. “It’s so—I never knew I could feel so sorry for humans, but this is just horrible!”
Faces. The signs had blown-up photographs on them, sometimes blurry or grainy from how much they’d been enlarged.
And they were all photos of girls, grayish in the overcast dawn light. In those poster-sized images tiny girls in ruffles blew out the candles on their birthday cakes, smiling teenagers draped insouciantly over leaning bicycles, and nervous-looking ten-year-olds held up just-unwrapped Christmas sweaters. And scrawled above or below or across those images were the names, printed in huge letters: MELINDA CRAWFORD, CARIDAD ROSARIO, PRECIOUS TAYLOR-HAWKINS . . .
Luce heard a low, keening cry, and then realized it had come from her own throat: noise squeezed up by the painful tightness in her stomach.
“Oh my God,” Luce finally managed. “They’re the parents? Of girls who vanished or . . .”
“I know,” Cala murmured. “I know. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Maybe some of those girls are mermaids now, but the others!”
Cala didn’t need to finish the thought. A lot of those girls probably weren’t on land anymore, but their families wouldn’t find them in the water, either.
A lot of them would never be found alive.
The desperate parents screamed and pumped their signs into the air, trying to get the mermaids’ attention. Luce felt the hot salt stripes of tears crossing her cheeks. She couldn’t bring herself to look away from those signs. She didn’t think she recognized any of those faces—but maybe if she just looked long enough she’d notice a familiar smile or a name she knew.
Cala noticed the intensity of Luce’s gaze and nervously twirled an auburn lock around one finger. “I know. I keep staring like that too. I mean, I guess people whose daughters actually turned into mermaids wouldn’t care enough to come and look for them. But—”
