The Twice Lost

by Sarah Porter

  When her screams started, they wouldn’t sound much like a human baby screaming, either.

  “Remove the rest of the towels, please, Charles,” the woman said quietly.

  He did it, tugging them free of the jerking fins and dropping them in a sodden heap to one side. Then, for the first time, he wondered why he had done it. But wasn’t it better for Snowy to have someone she loved and trusted at her side now rather than to find herself abandoned to uncaring strangers? It was only by doing exactly what they told him that he could have the opportunity to be here for her and the other larvae—just as he had to obey Secretary Moreland if he wanted to spend time with Anais. If he didn’t follow their instructions exactly he would be fired, and then what would become of Anais without him?

  “Take the towel off her face, too. We need a complete record of the effects.”

  Hackett removed the towel silently. He was doing it for Anais, his darling, golden Anais, so that he could stay here, so that he could continue to serve as her protector and her knight.

  Snowy’s blue eyes swung wildly around the room as if she was looking for someone who might save her. Her brilliant silver tail dashed violently against the cold steel table. She screamed again and again, her racked body slamming against the restraints so hard that her stomach began to weep beads of blood around the straps. For two full minutes the humans stared mesmerized at the dying larva, their minds like sails filled by her screams.

  Then Charlie Hackett felt himself breaking through entrancement as if it were some slick membrane. He groaned sharply. “It’s not working! It’s not working! Just do something for her!”

  The lab-coated man looked up from his notes. “It’s hardly appropriate for you to second-guess our work. It’s a new formula, it should—”

  “I’m upping her dosage,” the woman interrupted. Her voice was barely audible over that throbbing scream. Another needle drew a bright clear line across the air, straight into Snowy’s neck. The little larva was in convulsions now, and the luster dimmed on her silver scales. They had turned the color of old tin, as dry as scabs, loose-looking and ashy.

  Snowy couldn’t even scream anymore now, only sigh. Charlie Hackett knew from experience what that meant: she was near the end. Her scales were flaking away, winding into a kind of silvery smoke. Her spasms ceased, her blue eyes closed, and she shuddered. She seemed surprisingly quiet all of a sudden, actually, her small body suddenly gone soft and limp. Her hands made tiny fists then opened again. She gave a long exhalation.

  And then two babyish legs sagged on the gurney. Snowy lay silent, unmoving. The gray woman moved forward and rested a hand on that small pale chest, feeling for a heartbeat.

  He might as well get back to the rest of the larvae, Hackett thought. It would take at least an hour of coaxing and petting before they would be calm enough to eat their dinner. And then there was Anais, who probably hadn’t heard any of the bizarre, incomprehensible news coming out of San Francisco. He wasn’t supposed to tell her anything about the outside world, of course. Talking too much was the kind of small defiance he felt ready to risk. And as his reward she would murmur to him, turn her azure eyes on his face, laugh and play and tell him her secrets.

  Snowy’s corpse had a faint blue tinge and a subtle luminous quality that marked her, even in death, as having once been something more than human. Hackett ran a hand over his face and turned to leave.

  A whispery moan came from the air behind him. The woman gave a sudden cry.

  Charlie Hackett spun around. The moaning stopped for an instant and then came back more loudly.

  There was the thump of a small foot kicking steel. Two sapphire eyes opened, and then Snowy let out the full-throated cry of a hurt human toddler. The change in her voice startled Hackett even more than the change in her body, even more than the fact that she was miraculously still alive. She suddenly sounded like any other frightened child.

  The gray woman was unbuckling Snowy’s restraints with trembling hands. She scooped the howling little creature up and cradled her close against the coarse white lab coat. “Oh, you poor little thing, you poor little thing. Oh, you’re going to be fine . . .”

  The drab man nodded sharply. “Mr. Hackett? Fetch us another one.”

  The words jarred through Charlie Hackett; his shoulders heaved up and his voice came out as a yelp. “Excuse me?”

  “We have to ascertain that this larva lived through the transition because of the new drugs. Until we can replicate our results with a second larva, there’s nothing to indicate your Snowy’s survival wasn’t just a fluke like that mermaid in San Francisco we’ve been hearing about. It might be rare, but apparently in exceptional cases mermaids do survive the transition without the benefit of medical intervention. There’s no room for doubt here. Another one, please.”

  Hackett stared, outraged and breathless. Snowy bawled in the woman’s arms. “I do have other responsibilities,” he managed at last. “It’s after six, and I haven’t had a chance yet to feed the larvae their dinner, and I haven’t seen Anais in hours.”

  The lab-coated man’s bland affect was punctured by sincere surprise. “Anais?”

  “I’m responsible for making sure her needs are met, not just for being your errand boy! She’s been kept in solitary confinement for months now, and the potential damage to her mental health is—”

  “Anais isn’t here anymore, Mr. Hackett. I assumed you’d been informed.”

  “Anais isn’t . . . Of course she’s still right where I . . . She couldn’t just get up and walk.” Had his golden beauty escaped through the plumbing somehow or used some unfathomable magic to melt a tunnel to the sea? But then . . . wouldn’t she have asked him to come with her?

  “Secretary Moreland ordered her prepared for transport two hours ago. I personally saw her being loaded into the special tank truck that was used to bring her here. She was on a gurney, much like—” here the drab doctor allowed his face to show just a flutter of malice—“much like this one you used to bring us Snowy. Larger, of course.”

  “But didn’t she—” He couldn’t ask if she’d cried, if she’d begged to at least be allowed to say goodbye to him. “Didn’t she say anything?”

  “She appeared to be heavily sedated. Presumably as a precaution against singing, although the men moving her were also wearing protective helmets.”

  Sedated. His Anais drugged, unable to cry out for her one true friend, her champion. If he had only been here, he would have torn her from that gurney with his hands suddenly gleaming like gilt steel and run with her in his arms all the way to the sea. And with her by his side the cold, compounding waves would be no obstacle. But instead he’d been sent out of the way on purpose, to guarantee that no one would defend her. His rare beauty, his strange jewel . . .

  “You do realize we’re at war,” the gray man said. His voice came as a terrible violation of Hackett’s thoughts. “I am not a sadist, Mr. Hackett. I don’t enjoy torturing . . . creatures of ambiguous status . . . especially when they happen to resemble human children. But changing mermaids back successfully will mean the end of the war. They’ll abandon the Twice Lost Army in droves once we can offer them a different, better life. You’d agree that that’s a noble objective, wouldn’t you?”

  How stupid Moreland had been. So distracted, so unhinged by Anais’s mere presence that he hadn’t even considered what Hackett might do for love of her. But he was Anais’s one true friend, and he’d taken what precautions he could on her behalf. If anyone ever brought any accusations against her—accusations concerning the deaths of Kathleen Lambert or General Prudowski, for example—he could prove that Anais had been cruelly exploited, forced to act against her will.

  “Another one, please, Mr. Hackett. Then we can all go home. Believe me, I’m every bit as tired and hungry as you are.”

  Anais hadn’t wanted to do those things any more than he wanted to go pluck another sacrificial larva from the tank.

  The thought consoled him as he gripp
ed the gurney’s cold metal handle and—obediently, miserably, with all the rebellion sapped from his body—turned and rolled it out the door.

  Somehow it was the squeak of the wheels that changed everything for him.

  Somehow, in that moment, his own obedience became unendurable.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  A man lay on the pavement of an alley in Washington, DC. He was humming a melody that seemed to trace drowsy circles in the dusky air around his head. He hadn’t understood before, he hadn’t understood, but now he knew that the only true language was music. Even his thoughts no longer took the form of words but instead were transcribed as elaborately coded blurts of sound. He knew what words were, of course, when he heard them: they were the unmusic, squawks not bright or rare or beautiful enough to mean anything.

  He only wanted to join with the songs and the world they revealed. That world had contours of impossible purity. Its empty spaces fell from resonant claps of the moon. Sometimes he was in the music. Sometimes he was what it sang, his being summed by the sequence of its tones. But more often his body got in the way. He could understand that. Flesh and bone were bulky; they annoyed the music with their intractable mass.

  He was lying on the pavement now, very still, in the hope that the music might forget that he still had his body with him. He stared up, face to face with the extreme blue that showed between two brick walls. In a dim way he knew that the car had left him here some days before—an octave or more of days, each one full of light like the slap of a bird’s wing against his eyes. Perhaps he’d been expected to go somewhere else, but he heard the world so clearly here that movement seemed wasteful, even absurd.

  One of the back doors along the alley vented food smells. A woman opened it and leaned out, searching, then spotted him. She set a paper plate full of eggs and toast down on the cement and let out three sharp cymballine hisses—tss, tss, tss—as if she was calling a cat. The door clicked shut.

  He didn’t go in pursuit of the food. Perhaps later. At the moment he’d almost coaxed the music into rendering him in its true voice again, making him the substance of its melody. It sat on his chest, considering him. Two round lights parted the alley like shining throats. The music rumbled thoughtfully and then ground to a stop.

  “They left him here,” a voice said. “I wasn’t supposed to know. I wasn’t supposed to know anything. It’s funny that I know everything, then, isn’t it? Except the only thing that really matters, where she is . . .”

  “I’m truly sorry,” someone answered gently—and those words, strangely, did seem meaningful. They carried a certain familiar warmth that was in itself a form of unexpected music. “I do hope you’ll make the decision to take your information public. To expose the way Anais has been used. Of course I’ve been aware for months now that they were holding her and that she’d been providing information, but it never occurred to me that even someone like Moreland might use her as a weapon!” The voice tipped across space with each word: there was the face, swinging like a lantern in a car’s open window. “Andrew’s probably long gone, of course. But I’ll get out and search, just in case.”

  Andrew. That was surprising. That was a sound that formed a skin, and inside the skin there was a person . . .

  “I want Moreland dead,” the first voice moaned. “Whatever is the worst nightmare he could have, the worst torture, for taking her from me . . . She’s been through so much, and she’s fragile, and he has no idea how to care for her.”

  The man on the pavement had stopped listening. The sky’s blue blast was louder than words.

  Then he felt a sudden grinding pain and heard himself shout. His body curled involuntarily, bringing his head and chest up into shadow-damp air. He didn’t know it, but someone had accidentally stepped on his hand. The pressure pulled back, and his hand hurt much less.

  Another cry came, not his own. And the man on the pavement discovered that the cry came with a face: tan, with large, sympathetic brown eyes and silver hair. It came attached to a name.

  He didn’t seem able to speak. Instead he sang the name, slowly, groping his way through the syllables with raspy music. “Ben . . . Ell . . . iss . . . son?”

  “Andrew! Good God, you’ve been here in this alley all this time?”

  He couldn’t answer that. But it didn’t matter.

  The wonderful thing about music was that whatever was true was also obvious: as obvious as those large hands grasping him and hauling him to his feet.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “Anais.” Moreland breathed her name out, hard, as he climbed into the back of the truck and then pulled the heavy doors shut behind him. Was she finally awake? He was hot-faced and palpitating; his jowls trembled, pale lilac in the blue skeins of light from the narrow upright tank where she floated. He was standing somewhat below her in a channel the same width as the tank, high walkways on either side of him and, far up on the left, a lever that would swing the glass open and send the water, and the other contents, flooding out.

  He’d been driving up and down random streets or sometimes just sitting in the parked truck for hours, in DC and later in Baltimore, through the previous evening, then on through half the night. They’d given her too strong a dose of sedatives; she just couldn’t seem to come to. But surely by now . . .

  Someone had fitted inflatable water wings of the kind used by swimming children on both her pearly arms to prevent her from drowning while she was unconscious. A single bulb shone just above her. Her golden head flopped and her long hair spread through the water like radiant yellow veins. He caught a gleam of sleepy azure as she gazed at him from the corner of her eyes and then closed them again. “Anais, my precious one, you want to talk to me. Now, even if you’re still feeling poorly. You do. I’ve brought you here,” he gasped out, “to offer you your freedom.”

  She raised her head and stared at him, her skin blanched and ashy in contrast to his damp flush. “I don’t trust you,” Anais slurred. “I don’t. There’s some kind of trick.”

  At least she was talking again. “No trick, beauty, I assure you. But a price, of course. There’s always a price, isn’t there?” Unbelievably, in the far-off city of San Francisco , the wave still shimmered in an upright mirror below the Golden Gate Bridge. He’d expected mobs in the streets screaming for mermaid blood. Instead the crowds filling blue suburban parks, dark highways, and city bridges across the country were calm and quiet, their faces gilded in the cupped light of candle flames. They sang in mourning for the mermaids who had died that day: died so that thousands of humans would live.

  Worse, they were acclaiming General Luce as a hero.

  And as soon as the missing secretary of defense was located, President Leopold would surely demand his resignation. But his own destruction hardly mattered as long as he could leave a solid record of accomplishment behind him. “Not so high a price, Anais, I promise. Nothing you can’t do in a few hours.”

  “What kind of price? You’ve already made me work so hard, and I’m tired, and I don’t even care about getting my house back anymore! I just want . . .” She leaned her face on the tank’s wall, her mouth a compressed pink blob on the glass, her cheek a slick pale dab.

  “To be the way you were, free and blissful in the ocean. Of course I understand that, dear one. Of course. To be the way you were before you sold yourself to us. I suppose, relatively speaking, you were innocent then.”

  Anais didn’t answer.

  There wasn’t enough time left for him to indulge her self-pity. “You bought your life from me, Anais. Now buy one more thing. You only have to complete one final task, and you’ll have your freedom again forever. Even your humanity and your inheritance from your parents, if you decide you want those things. I can arrange it all for you,” Moreland lied. “But there’s always a price, isn’t there, for anything worth having?”

  The Twice Lost Army was still spreading to other cities around the United States; it seemed there was a new blockade every day. Half an hour after General Lu
ce’s astonishing act of resistance he’d heard the first reports of a wave rising outside of Liverpool in England. Tomorrow the Twice Lost might appear in Holland, then in France, then possibly on the north coast of Africa.

  This wild expansion of their movement was the Twice Lost Army’s greatest strength, but it also might be their downfall. If General Luce had proved stubborn, well, she was only in San Francisco Bay. And it wasn’t as if mermaids on the opposite side of the country could telephone her for instructions.

  “You want me to drown someone else for you?” Anais asked. “And then you’ll let me go?” She tilted her head, gazing blearily at the truck’s dark metal walls.

  “Anais,” Moreland scolded. He waved a finger at her. “Do you think you’re worth so little to me? Do you really imagine I would give you up in exchange for a simple murder? And whenever I begin to forget how deeply your last effort disappointed me, that humanity-hating boy radical always seems to pop up on TV again at the head of another march, declaiming this, that, and the other. After that, Anais, do you think I would rely on your competence as a killer?”

  Anais didn’t seem to be listening. She reeled slightly under the impact of his voice, but her eyes stayed dim and insensate. The neon orange water wings held her arms sloppily akimbo so that they dangled from the elbow. “Where?” Anais started vaguely. “Wait, where are we? Why am I, why did you . . .”

  “You’re here to do something that could make a real difference in the world.” Could she pull it off? Suddenly he wasn’t entirely sure, but she was the only hope he had left. His voice thrummed; his heart heaved and stammered in his chest. “We’re two miles from Baltimore’s Harborplace. As I said, this a chance for you to earn your freedom. You’ve been so sad locked up, haven’t you? Promise me you’ll do this one thing for me, and I’ll—” He hesitated, nauseous at the prospect of losing control of her. But if everything went well tonight they would only be separated for a few hours, just a very few, and then . . .“I’ll release you into the harbor. You’ll do your job, and then you can choose the life you want next. Human or mermaid. It’s simple.”