by Sarah Porter
“Doesn’t this show that Secretary Moreland was lying just now?” a woman asked. “On television?” No one answered her. The breeze dragged steadily across their faces, drying the tears of humans and mermaids alike.
“We have to get back to work. No matter how we all feel. It’s way after six; the singers from the last shift have been going for way too long,” Imani murmured the words even as tears were still welling in her midnight eyes.
“We’ll sing for her tonight, though,” Luce said gently. “All night. We’ll sing to the water as her . . . her . . .” she couldn’t remember the word at first. “Her elegy.”
Imani nodded. Wearily the mermaids slipped away from shore, heading out to take their places in the ranks under the bridge, while the mermaids who were finally off-duty streaked below them, their dimly phosphorescent skin glancing through green waves.
∗ ∗ ∗
The singing of the mermaids under the bridge sounded sad and strange that night, without its usual undercurrent of sweet shared delight. As Luce dropped under the surface the line opened to welcome her: two mermaids she didn’t know took her hands, one on each side, and squeezed them. Actually, Luce realized, she did recognize the blond girl: wasn’t that Opal, who had traveled here with Nausicaa? Opal’s voice had a slow, ghostly vibrato. The mermaid on her other side looked Hispanic, and she sang in such a sweet, lambent voice that Luce was surprised she wasn’t a lieutenant.
The evening felt endless, and yet all its many moments seemed somehow to be the same moment infinitely repeating. The lights from the bridge slit the water above them with a thousand bladelike lines of light, and once a dolphin swam close enough to nose curiously at their fins.
As the song soared endlessly onward, surging from her core and up to merge with the rising water, Luce couldn’t help thinking of the last time she’d sung in mourning over a mermaid’s death. It had been that horrible dawn when Miriam had committed suicide by crawling onshore—when, in the frenzy of their grief, her tribe had sunk the cruise ship that was carrying Dorian’s family as well as Dorian himself, and Luce had seen him for the first time, staring down from the ship’s railing and singing back at her in cool defiance. At least this time the mermaids weren’t expressing their sadness through more murder!
Luce felt selfish for even thinking of Dorian at a time like this, but as she sang on and on into the light-slivered night she found herself wondering again if it was possible that Yuan was right. Could it really be that he’d marched on behalf of the Twice Lost, even worn that T-shirt, as a way of trying to tell her he was sorry for breaking her heart? Had he broken up with Zoe? And after all the callous, uncaring things he’d said to her, was it really possible that he wanted her back? The fused voices of hundreds of mermaids eddied through Luce’s mind and sent her thoughts spinning on dizzy trajectories.
She caught herself thinking that Dorian really had looked beautiful at the head of that march, with his hair dashed by the wind, his expression so strong-willed and serious.
Was it possible that he still loved her?
When her shift finally ended Luce kept on singing. New mermaids arrived and took the places beside her; Luce barely noticed Opal and the other singers leaving to go back to their encampments. She sang well past midnight, then on into the new dawn, even when her tail began to tremble from exhaustion.
She had too much emotion to contain in her small body; she had to let it out somehow, turn it into music, and she could never stop. Luce’s voice was roughening, crackling, but she drove it up to meet the vibration of the water above her.
Then Yuan was there, her hands on Luce’s shoulders, actually tugging her out of the line as Graciela arrived to take her place. Luce strained back, but now that she saw the expression on Yuan’s face—a mixture of strict and concerned and mocking—stopping began to feel a bit more manageable than it had moments before. “Come on, general-girl. You’re going to go home and sleep whether you like it or not. And eat, a lot. And maybe talk to me about all that stuff we saw on the news last night. Okay?” Yuan shook her a little.
Luce’s voice ebbed away. Without the song sustaining her she was suddenly unbearably hungry and so tired that she was tempted to simply collapse on the nearest beach. “Okay. Okay.” Yuan towed her to the surface, and Luce breathed deep and stared around at the dawn-smeared bay in a daze. Far away Alcatraz sat in a slick of lemon-colored light so brilliant that the whole island appeared to be levitating. “Thanks, Yuan.”
“Oh, my pleasure. Somebody’s gotta make sure you don’t go off the deep end, right?” But Yuan suddenly sounded a little distracted. She was looking toward the shore. At this distance the humans and their posters looked quite small, and Yuan was squinting at them. “Uh, Luce, what does that look like to you? I mean, it couldn’t be . . .”
Luce saw what Yuan was talking about. “That poster on the right? That does look like you! But Yuan . . .”
“It couldn’t be someone from my family! It’s been—God, almost fifteen years or something? And then—” Yuan looked down. “I mean, I used to get grounded if a boy called me up or anything. You’d think killing both my parents would be enough to get me disowned!” She gave a heart-rending laugh.
Luce focused on the image. “I think it might be a picture of you as a mermaid, actually. And it says—it says Queen Yuan. No last name.”
Yuan visibly relaxed. “Probably just another guy with a mermaid fetish, then. What a relief! Want to go tease the groupies for a minute? Could be fun.”
“It looks like a girl.”
Tired as she was, Luce was too curious not to swim a little closer with Yuan in the lead. People started waving to them, but Yuan’s eyes remained focused only on the human who had come for her. Then she stopped and grabbed Luce’s arm. “Oh, God. Oh, Luce, I wish that was my aunt or something! Anything would be better than—”
Luce could see the girl more clearly now. She was chubby and pretty and had golden skin that beamed orange in the dawn glow. “Do you recognize her?” Luce asked. Then the girl spotted them. She dropped her poster and started waving both arms wildly in midair.
“Yuan! Queen Yuan! It’s me!” the girl shouted. And all at once Luce understood.
“That’s her?” It was the girl Yuan had saved, the girl Yuan had despised herself for saving, the one whose survival had cost Yuan her tribe and her role as queen.
The girl who was both Yuan’s secret heart and the crack in her heart.
“Oh, God. She’s gotten so much older. But I have to talk to her. Do I have to talk to her? Luce!” Yuan’s nails sank deeper in Luce’s flesh.
“Queen Yuan! You saved my life! I came all the way from Boston to thank you!” the girl called out. She was looking around at the police, as if she might be considering making a leap for the water.
Yuan’s face looked greenish, her stare confused.
“You don’t have to talk to her if you don’t feel like it, Yuan. If you want I’ll go over there and tell her that . . . that you don’t think it’s a good idea,” Luce whispered.
Yuan shook her head. “I have to. It’s my fault she’s alive at all! I feel”—she gave that strange laugh again—“responsible.”
Luce considered that. “I felt that way too.” She hesitated. “With Dorian. Like I was tied to him somehow.”
Yuan’s grip on her arm eased, leaving deep red crescents where her nails had been. She groaned. “You get home safe now, general-girl.”
29
Disappointment
“Anais, my dear. It appears that you’ve hardly been putting forth your best efforts of late. Just when I was hoping that I might have some good news for you soon. But I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself,” Moreland explained to the speaker set into the glass wall. Anais was in the tank, of course, but she was refusing to emerge from behind her pillows. He could barely see her azure fins flicking irritably in the crystalline water.
He took a breath and continued. “We’re close to a breakthrough, tadp
ole. Any day now we’ll have the means to restore your kind to their lost humanity without damaging them. Isn’t that wonderful? Of course, if you changed back, you’d be promptly convicted of so many murders that you’d never see daylight again. I was just starting to think that I might be willing to ask the president to pardon you, and to see about getting you your inheritance as well. And then”—Moreland’s voice turned to a growl—“I found myself gravely disappointed in you. You failed me, tadpole. After the extraordinary trust I’ve reposed in you, you didn’t merely permit that boy to live. You actually went to the extreme of introducing yourself?”
Anais mumbled something. From the sound of it, her face was probably buried in a cushion.
“I can’t hear you, Anais. If you have something to say for yourself, you might do better to speak up and enunciate.”
Anais lifted herself on her elbows, just high enough that her tousled head appeared from behind a pink satin mound. Her lids were swollen and raw, and she seemed to have some kind of rash on her cheek. “I said I didn’t introduce myself! And I really tried to kill him! He just—he lived anyway.”
“You should know better than to lie to me, Anais,” Moreland snarled. His anger rose in him with an icy, buzzing sensation. “This isn’t amusing. Do you know what this boy is saying now?” He hadn’t shown Anais any of Dorian’s inflammatory videos or postings about the attempt on his life, though. She might guess at some of the contents, but she couldn’t actually know what Dorian had said. “Luckily his claims are so extravagant that no one in the media—no one serious, at least—is paying any attention. But the mermaid lovers and other fringe types are only too eager to believe his story of a mermaid assassin named Anais controlled by someone in the government. Now, where do you suppose he got that remarkable little morsel of information?”
It was actually worse than that. Dorian had repeatedly named Secretary Moreland himself as the most likely culprit. He’d said that since Anais’s old tribe had been slaughtered, it was logical that she might have survived by surrendering. He’d learned far too much, and he was shouting all of it to the four winds. “I have a press conference later,” Moreland fumed. “Anais, if I’m obliged to deal with questions about this—” He let the unspoken remainder curl into a threat.
Anais muttered something again. She was back in her pillows.
“Yes? What was that, Anais?”
“I said, then maybe you shouldn’t have made me try to kill him! You knew he used to be with Luce! It’s not my fault she—she probably taught him—so he can—” Anais broke off with a keening cry and slammed a pillow into the floor.
For a long slow moment he considered her. “So that’s it, is it, tadpole?” Moreland rasped at last. “You didn’t want to kill him?” He simpered out the words, crudely mimicking Anais’s chirpy voice. “Now, why would that be? You thought you might like to take your old enemy’s boyfriend away from her and get cozy with him yourself? If you simply explained that you’re a poor little captive and that you never wanted to commit those nasty murders at all, maybe he would ask you to the prom?”
Anais turned pointedly away from him, grabbed some random gadget on the artificial shore, and threw it as hard as she could at the blue cement wall. There was a percussive crack and black plastic shards flew everywhere. He had forgotten how strong she was. Anais paused and deliberated over her remaining possessions, then selected some sort of hand-held video game. Crack. Moreland watched her with a hard empty smirk on his face. The best way to punish her was to deny her the pleasure of a reaction.
She pulled out one of her ornate dresser drawers and hefted it experimentally by one corner, shiny tops and bracelets tumbling into the water. She swung the drawer onto the hard blue pavement. It buckled and splintered, and she swung it again. Moreland was beginning to find the whole business tedious. He turned off the speaker and swung away from the glass wall as Anais worked doggedly at her tantrum.
“Sir!” someone exclaimed as he walked out into the hallway, clicking the door firmly shut behind him. Moreland turned to see the undersecretary for Intelligence, a severe man in black-framed glasses. “Secretary Moreland, there was some difficulty reaching you? There’s a new development, sir. The port of Tacoma . . .”
If he could only focus better, without the bits of song in his head always breaking apart and jangling at him like electrified coins. “Tacoma? What about it?”
“There’s . . . a second blockade there, sir. A group of mermaids there apparently spray-painted messages along the channel walls declaring their allegiance to the Twice Lost Army during the night! Obviously that implies human collusion; someone provided the paint. Now they’ve raised another of those water ramparts at the channel’s mouth. The messages were signed by a mermaid using the name Lieutenant Dana, sir. If this continues to spread . . . There’s an emergency meeting of the Joint Chiefs to discuss the situation.”
Lieutenant Dana. Another of the mermaids on that recording he’d heard.
One of his mermaids. Irrationally Moreland found himself thinking of Dana’s joining the Twice Lost as an intolerably personal betrayal. How could she? His eyes rolled up; fluorescent rings shone at intervals along the ceiling, tugging at his thoughts. They looked like round singing mouths.
“Sir?” The undersecretary was looking at Moreland with such an odd, concerned expression that it verged on insolence. “I was extremely sorry to hear the news about General Prudowski’s death last week, sir. I know you worked closely with him. And then the shocking manner of his death, the way he was found drowned in his own swimming pool, must have been very disturbing.”
“Of course,” Moreland snapped.
Anais’s caretaker—why could he never remember that pasty young man’s name? Was it Freddy, or maybe Charlie?—peered out of an open door down the hallway. His face shone with pale pink hatred as he gazed at Moreland. His mouth hung open over his sharply receding chin.
“Sir? Shall we proceed?”
Moreland began walking automatically, almost brushing against that glowering face as he passed. “What about human activity?” Moreland asked. He knew that asking questions was expected of him, but in this case he also felt an ache of genuine interest. Human rebelliousness would be instigated by that Dorian Hurst boy; it would justify his steadily mounting fury at Anais.
“Human activity?”
“Those self-hating children calling themselves Twice Lost Humans. Any more trouble from them?”
“Yes, sir. There are large demonstrations going on in several cities at the moment. Most without permits. And there was an attempt to build a barricade across Route Sixty-six.”
Unbelievable foolishness. Clearly there was a need for drastic action. General Luce’s movement couldn’t be allowed to disrupt naval traffic in any more cities, and she certainly couldn’t go on attracting human followers seduced by her phony pacifism, her pretended naïve desire to protect the oceans.
The public needed to hate mermaids as much, as implacably, as he did. As for the way to make that happen, well . . .
It was unfair and outrageous that all the real effort, all the imagination and initiative, fell to him. But it looked like he’d just have to take matters into his own hands.
30
The Net
“Hey, Luce?” Imani had swum up beside her just after Luce’s shift ended. They were floating together in the low waves halfway between the bridge and the crowd onshore. Luce was watching Eileen, who’d swum over to scan the faces in the crowd; she seemed to spend half her time there, swimming back and forth for hours. Obviously Eileen was searching for someone in particular, and Luce wondered who it was. And there was Yuan, leaning on the shore and talking with her new human friend Gigi again . . .
“Hey, Imani,” Luce murmured. “Everything okay?” In the days since the murder, they’d fallen back into the same steady routine of singing and sleep. Nothing had really changed, except for occasional reports that mermaids in other cities had joined the Twice Lost and renounced
killing and raised waves of their own. Nausicaa was doing incredible work, that was clear, and everyone was feeling optimistic. Their friends onshore told them about increasing numbers of humans protesting on the mermaids’ behalf too. Almost everyone in the Twice Lost Army seemed convinced that the eagerly-awaited negotiations would start very soon, now that their movement was spreading and now that more and more humans seemed to be on their side. But as the days went by without a response from the human government, Luce only grew more anxious.
She could understand why so many of her followers were hoping for an easy victory. But this almost seemed too easy.
“It’s about Catarina,” Imani began, and Luce groaned inwardly. “She’s completely stopped showing up for her shifts, Luce. And some of the other mermaids over at the Mare Island camp say she’s been getting really angry for no reason and saying horrible things, like that Nausicaa persuaded you to betray everything mermaids stand for. I know she got jealous of Nausicaa, but still . . .”
Luce bit her lip. “Why does Catarina have to go and make more problems? Everything’s already so hard, and she’s just making it all worse.”
Imani looked at her for a long moment, her eyes deep and searching. “But Luce . . . you’re still her friend, right?”
Luce considered that. Delicate wands of mist stroked over the water, and by the shore it glowed mirror smooth and brilliantly silver. Gigi and Yuan were laughing hard about something, and the sight of their closeness brought tears into Luce’s eyes. Even if Catarina’s constant moodiness sometimes became exhausting, Luce did still love her. Maybe she should be the one to try harder, to reach out. “I’m still her friend. I just want her to stop making everything so complicated! Just because Nausicaa’s my friend too, she doesn’t need to go off and sulk and start telling lies like that.”
“I think she’s depressed, Luce. She thinks she’s losing you.” Imani’s voice was even softer than usual. “You should go talk to her.”
