by Sarah Porter
“All over the place. A bunch of them you should just kind of leave alone—they’re too crazy—but you won’t see them much. There are a lot of us under the old factories before Hunter’s Point, though. You coming?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, and Luce went swimming along beside the stranger. They skimmed between angled pilings then beside strange crenelated metal walls that stood in the water with ships docked between them. It seemed like a peculiar place for mermaids, gritty and mournful, though it had a lonely beauty of its own. “Do you know a mermaid named Nausicaa?” Luce asked at last. “I’m trying to find her.”
Luce half expected the stranger to jerk back in astonishment at Nausicaa’s name; she was disappointed to find that this gold-shining girl didn’t react at all. “Um, I don’t think I know her. But there are a lot of us out here I don’t know, so maybe she’s around someplace.”
Maybe Nausicaa hadn’t been here, then. They skimmed up for air and passed a spot where a cement-walled creek released a plume of revolting fresh water into the bay. A seal bobbed and then vanished. Then they reached salt water again and dipped under a vast ruined factory propped on a forest of upright logs. It was dark apart from a scattering of long, dimly shining forms far back in the shadows, and even though the dark didn’t stop Luce from seeing, she still had trouble recognizing what was in front of her. The water lapped gently at the pilings, and stretched here and there between them was a network of what appeared to be enormous drooping webs, each web set on a slant so that one side trailed into the glossy skin of the bay. And in their webs those glowing things were figures, some chatting quietly to each other, the subtle gleam from their faces dabbling on the water like bits of melted star.
Then Luce understood. Of course there were no suitable caves here. Instead the mermaids had adapted, stringing up half- submerged hammocks woven from old scraps of fishing nets, plastic bags, algae-slimed ropes. Luce noticed one hammock that appeared to be made from dozens of pairs of pantyhose knotted together. They could sleep here with their tails under the water, their heads above, in the last place humans would ever think to look for them.
“New girl,” the Asian mermaid announced tiredly to no one in particular. “Don’t know how long she’s staying.”
Luce looked around the black mazelike space under its low ceiling of boards just in case Nausicaa was there somewhere. She didn’t feel much hope of that anymore, but maybe . . . Condensation gleamed on the tar-smeared trunks around her. A few mermaids leaned in their nets to get a better look, though they didn’t seem particularly interested. In one of the more remote hammocks Luce noticed three mermaids laughing together. One of them tipped forward as she laughed with a voice that was at once harsh and delicate, and Luce saw her red-gold hair flaring in the dimness like a match before it vanished again behind one of the pillars.
Luce’s heart stopped. She couldn’t let herself believe it. The mermaid beside her was still talking—something about where Luce should sleep—but Luce couldn’t focus enough to make out the words. There it was again, red-gold hair suffused with its own light, and Luce was flinging herself across the water. It wasn’t what she’d hoped for, but if it was true it was almost as wonderful. A long, wordless cry rushed from Luce’s throat. Girls turned to stare at her in surprise as she dodged wildly around pilings. She smacked into someone and reeled away, gasping a vague apology, while red-gold light came tumbling toward the water just ahead. Bronze fins brushed Luce’s shoulder. Then two moon gray eyes were staring at her, wide with disbelief, and Luce finally managed to form her outcry into a word:
“CAT! Cat, Cat, it’s . . .”
“LUCE?”
There was a light splash, and shining hair radiated out through the water, rushing closer until Luce was surrounded in fiery waves. Pale hands reached up, grasping randomly at Luce’s shoulders, squeezing her face, and Catarina’s eyes gazed fiercely into hers.
Luce couldn’t even speak at first. Her whole chest heaved with sobs as Catarina’s cool fingers sank into her short hair. Then they were holding each other so tightly that Luce’s ribs ached. “Lucette,” Catarina was murmuring, “my Lucette, my crazy little Luce. Thank God! All this way. And after everything we’ve heard . . .” Catarina touched the notch in Luce’s ear, then brushed her fingertips across the imperfectly healed cuts in her cheek and the white scar on her shoulder.
“Cat, I can’t believe you’re here! Everything’s been so terrible.” Luce breathed the words out between half-sobs, but she’d started smiling now too. She was holding someone she loved again, a friend whom she was now completely sure loved her back, and that almost made the horror and loneliness of the past weeks disappear into a cloud of warm relief.
“Where is everyone else?” Catarina leaned away to look at Luce, her eyes shining with unbearable hope. “Are they with you? Are they coming?”
Sudden dread coated Luce’s insides like cold oil. She didn’t know how she could begin to tell Cat what had happened. And all of it was her fault: if she’d only become queen the way Catarina wanted, the tribe might have survived. “Dana—and Violet—and a few of the little ones. They’re the only ones . . .”
Luce broke off. It was too horrible to say out loud.
Catarina’s lovely mouth pinched with dismay, but for some reason the eagerness in her face was still stronger. “The only ones? Luce, tell me! It’s so horrible to think . . . Dana . . . Oh, but I was afraid it would be so much worse than that!” Luce stared at her, starting to understand. Her mouth opened but no sound would come. “Luce? That’s what you’re trying to tell me, isn’t it? You mean those are the only ones who died?”
Luce shook her head. “No. Cat . . . No.” The words came out in a croak.
“LUCE!”
“Cat . . . I mean . . . those are the only ones besides me who might still be alive.”
9
The Twice Lost
What made it even worse was that there was no way she could tell Catarina the story privately. Other mermaids had gotten interested; they were slipping from their hammocks and flicking closer. The dim glow of their faces dotted the water on all sides. Luce stared around, and everywhere she looked another pair of eyes gleamed back at her. The soft light of their arms curled through the water. There were so many of them, far more than in any tribe Luce had ever seen.
“You know her, Catarina?” It was the Asian mermaid who’d led Luce there, her face a floating golden disc in that crowd of bright faces.
“Yuan! This is Luce. I told you about her.”
“The one who was supposed to be queen? What happened to the rest of your tribe, then?”
“Slaughtered.” Luce breathed it out. “Those divers, with the helmets that block out our songs . . .”
It was obvious from the grim way the other mermaids looked at one another that they already knew about the divers. Luce noticed a few mermaids who were crudely bandaged, their eyes flickering with remembered terror. Refugees. Survivors. That couldn’t explain what all these mermaids were doing here, though, could it? “How did you get away, then?” Yuan asked. “If your whole tribe was killed . . .”
“I wasn’t living with them.” Luce saw Catarina grimace at that, but she couldn’t lie about this. “I had my own cave, down the coast. And . . .”
Yuan nodded at the white scar on Luce’s shoulder. “Was that the divers?”
“Yes. They shot at me, out in the water.”
Now there were too many voices, coming at her from all sides.
“Luce! What do you mean you weren’t living with them? You didn’t leave everyone with Anais!” Catarina hissed with indignation.
“Luce? She’s called Luce? They—those humans—they said that name! They’re looking for her!” one of the refugees trilled, half-panicked.
So Nausicaa almost surely hadn’t come this far, Luce realized, or this strange mermaid would have heard her name before the divers reached her tribe. “The humans are hunting me,” Luce admitted. “If you think it’s not safe to have me h
ere, I’ll leave right now.”
“They’re hunting for all of us!” Catarina snarled imperiously. All at once her arm wrapped protectively around Luce’s shoulders and her eyes flared, daring anyone to contradict her. “Having Luce here won’t make any difference!”
Yuan tipped her head. “We’d better get the whole story before we decide that, Cat. Luce? Can you explain what all this is about?”
Luce stared around at everyone: dozens of mermaids who looked as if they’d come from every country in the world, the tints of their faces ranging from night dark to icy pale. Swimming away by herself would be so much easier than trying to tell this crowd of strangers everything that had happened to her. On the other hand there was Catarina gazing at her with a mixture of anger and—Luce had to admit it—feverish tenderness. Luce definitely owed her an explanation at the very least. “I’ll try. I don’t know where to start, though.”
“Start when I left,” Catarina growled. “Luce, why didn’t you go back to the tribe? You were supposed to be their queen! Oh, I was so sure that once I left you would do the right thing, the only thing, and lead them.”
Luce looked at her and suddenly knew that she was going to say the unsayable. “I couldn’t, Cat. I was furious with them because of what they did to you, but . . . that wasn’t the real reason. I wasn’t worthy to be queen.” Everyone was gaping at her; a few of them had started smiling slyly, as if they were sharing some joke Luce couldn’t understand. “I broke the timahk.”
There it was. Now they would drive her away, and they’d be better off with her gone.
A few mermaids had started laughing in a choked, delirious way. Catarina moaned and Yuan flashed a lopsided grin. “You don’t say. How?”
“I saved a human. A boy.” Luce wished they’d hurry up and tell her to leave. She didn’t want anyone asking questions about this boy; she didn’t want to confess how pathetically stupid she’d been, loving someone who’d betrayed and humiliated her and who clearly wanted her dead. And she definitely, definitely didn’t want to say his name again, not as long as she lived.
“Luce!” Catarina seemed like she was about to cry. “You—oh, I needed you to be better than that. You were always the one, the only one who could save us. Restore our honor . . .”
Luce couldn’t understand why, while Catarina seemed on the verge of hysterics, Yuan couldn’t stop grinning as if her face was about to split open and at least half the mermaids around her had joined in that disturbing laughter. “Yeah, Catarina, this is terrible! What kind of dirty bitch would save a human?” Yuan sneered. Luce looked at her in total perplexity. Yuan met her gaze with a hard stare and smiled with too many teeth showing. “Just a bitch like me, or like Rafa, or like Imani. Nobody ever had any crazy fantasies about us restoring anyone’s honor, right?”
Hazily Luce thought Yuan must be kidding somehow. She knew she wasn’t the only mermaid in the ocean who’d violated their laws, but it couldn’t be true that so many of these girls had failed the same way she had. Could it?
“Luce is—she was always—different from the rest of us, Yuan. She made me believe in . . .” Catarina broke off, glowering through the streaks of her tears. Luce reached out and stroked a tear away, half expecting Catarina to slap her.
She didn’t, but the way the glazed shine of those gray eyes suddenly fixed on Luce’s face felt worse than a blow.
“Believe in what, Cat?” Yuan’s voice was silky, insinuating.
“In purity.”
“Oh, boy. Purity.” Yuan’s face was still contorted by that sarcastic grin. “Might want to forget about that now!”
Luce impulsively pulled Catarina closer and leaned her cheek against her friend’s wet face. All she could see was the fire-colored waves of Cat’s hair. At least the frenzied laughter around them was finally subsiding.
“No.” Catarina’s voice was a blur in Luce’s ear.
“Cat? Yuan’s right. I’m not any more pure or honorable than anyone. I haven’t even believed in the timahk for a long time, and I broke it over and over, and then I didn’t . . . do what I should have done to stop our tribe from getting killed. I did everything wrong.”
Catarina moaned. “Then you’re different because dishonor can’t touch you. You still have your innocence, Luce! I know you do. I heard it every time you sang.”
Luce didn’t know what to say to that. She looked up through soft tangles of Catarina’s hair to see Yuan still smiling cynically. “Guess we can’t talk her out of it, then. Luce, it looks like you’re just going to have to live with being Catarina’s shining star, unless you decide you can’t stand it and ditch. I know what it’s like. My daddy used to cry and sob and say I was so pure and special that I couldn’t lose my innocence no matter what, too. See, that made it okay for him to rape me.”
Luce stared for a moment. “Please don’t compare Catarina to him, then.”
“You don’t like hearing it? Why not? You love Catarina or something?” Yuan suddenly demanded; her voice was changing, turning high and strange. Luce couldn’t help flinching.
“I do. I always did, ever since I met her. Even when we were fighting.”
Catarina exhaled sharply and squeezed Luce tighter.
“Oh, see, but I loved my daddy, too. And the first thing I did when I changed was swim right back to our house and drown him. And my mom and my piano teacher, even though I wasn’t really trying to get them. Too bad for them our house was right on the water!”
Yuan’s eyes were narrowing, and her voice took on a dreamy, obsessive lilt that Luce knew all too well. But it wouldn’t make any difference if someone told Yuan to let go of the past. That wasn’t something you could just decide to do.
“Yuan?” It was a new voice, very low and gentle. Luce looked and saw a mermaid with blue-black skin and soft dark eyes; her hair was short, like Luce’s, though it stood out like a halo around her head. She wore a white lace headscarf and a bikini top that appeared to be made from snow-colored lace as well, though on closer inspection it proved to have been intricately crafted from plastic grocery bags. The blue luminance of her skin reminded Luce of neon reflecting in a street lacquered by rain. “Luce is still just meeting everyone, and seeing Catarina again after a long time. It’s a lot for her to think about. Couldn’t we wait to tell her . . . everything about ourselves?”
Luce smiled gratefully.
“I’m Imani. I’m one of the ones who broke the timahk the same way you say you did. But I don’t think it has to mean we’re dishonored. It can mean . . . we wanted different rules, or we wanted to be honorable in a different way.” Imani’s voice was barely audible.
Yuan laughed nastily. “Try telling that to any queen in the world, Imani. Any tribe! No mermaids would ever accept us! They’d only think of us as . . . soiled. Ruined. And they’d be right!”
For an instant Luce just stared around, uncomprehending. What could it mean to say that no mermaids would accept them when they were living in what looked like the biggest tribe she’d ever seen? But Yuan had said it wasn’t a tribe, and no one seemed to be in charge. Unless, somehow . . .
“All of you?” Luce asked. She could barely hear her own voice.
“Oh, now you get it! All of us except the refugees. And even if we disgust them they don’t have a lot of choice about putting up with us.” Yuan’s strange grin came back. “Yeah, everyone here broke the timahk, one way or another! We all got thrown out of our tribes. Not for the same reasons, though. Tania over there got into a fight, for instance, and Jo was caught trying to call her mom with a cellphone she found on the beach.”
Yuan nodded toward a girl with her hair dyed an artificial ruby red. Jo was wearing a huge necklace made from dozens of algae-slicked plastic toys and tangled string, and she kept squirming and biting the back of her own hand.
“Well, I don’t believe that Jo is dishonored either,” Imani objected. Even when she seemed angry her voice was low and soft, almost cooing. “She’s not soiled.”
Luce l
ooked around. Jo wasn’t the only mermaid there who had strange tics or eyes as restless as swarming gnats. “And that’s why you don’t have a queen?”
“No queen!” Yuan agreed fiercely. “Even if we’re filth, at least we’re free! It doesn’t matter what we do. We can’t be any more worthless than we are already.”
Luce began to wonder why Catarina had been silent for so long. She was still clutching Luce tight in her arms, and her face was hidden against the side of Luce’s neck, but her breathing sounded different now, raspy and somehow thoughtful.
“It always matters what we do!”
Luce looked up, surprised, and suddenly realized that the words had come from her own mouth.
“Not us,” Yuan insisted. “We’re twice lost. The humans lost us the first time, then we were lost to other mermaids, too. Now there’s nothing left to lose us, except life, and the way things are going, that shouldn’t take long either!”
“And the world, which is really in trouble now,” Luce said sharply. She still felt amazed at herself. “And each other, and all those mermaids out there who are getting murdered with no way to even defend themselves. We need to figure out a way to stop that.”
Everyone was staring at her, harder than ever. Luce felt embarrassed, but even more than that she felt possessed by an unexpected urgency.
“We don’t need the timahk anymore!” Luce added. “The timahk doesn’t even make sense now that the humans know about us. Maybe we’re dishonored, but that’s not the kind of honor that matters now! And we don’t need purity either. We just need to change what’s happening.”
For several seconds no one said anything. Catarina finally released Luce from her embrace and dipped quickly under the water before coming up again with streaming hair. Now that Luce was floating alone in the water dizziness rippled through her head.
Why didn’t anyone answer? They must all think she was insane, Luce decided. Even in this band of desperate outcasts she was simply too weird to fit in. There was no place for her anywhere in the world . . .
