Waking Storms

by Sarah Porter

  Nausicaa gave the outreached hand a single brooding glance, but didn't approach. “She has said nothing of you, however,” Nausicaa growled. “Except that she does not consider you a story.”

  It occurred to Luce with a jolt that, even if Nausicaa wasn't exactly being friendly, she was still violating the timahk by speaking to Dorian at all.

  The gray whale stayed where it was, gazing into each of them in turn, while another surfaced on the opposite side of the boat. The boat looked so vulnerable between the whales, no stronger than an eggshell. The three of them were drifting inside a huge building with living walls.

  “I get that a lot.” Dorian smiled, lowering his hand as if he hadn't noticed Nausicaa's rudeness. The boat pitched, and he doubled over, grasping at the seat before he was able to right himself. “Look. You care about Luce, right?” All the flippancy had abruptly disappeared from Dorian's voice.

  “I do,” Nausicaa acknowledged, but she sounded cold. Luce could see the churning pallor of the water where Nausicaa's tail was stirring. Still, there was a focused brightness in those glittering dark eyes that suggested Nausicaa was more intrigued than she wanted to admit.

  “Then why don't you want her to be happy?” Dorian asked seriously. “She's going to live for maybe hundreds of years. You really think she should never get to be in love?”

  Nausicaa's stare was acerbic, but Luce noticed that she didn't even try to answer the question. “I suppose you claim to care for her, Dorian?”

  “I love her.” Dorian said it so fervently that Luce's heart skipped. His love had never felt so definite to her before, so real. She wanted to pull herself into the boat and drown in the warmth of his skin. Meanwhile Nausicaa was skimming closer to them, her bronze-dark face rising and falling with the water in a smooth, hypnotic dance, her black hair cresting over her head in heavy whorls.

  “You love her, and yet you promise her a thing you cannot give.” Nausicaa's voice turned low, meditative; the air seemed to vibrate in time with it. “Why?”

  Luce didn't know what Nausicaa was talking about, but still she started to feel alarmed. What if Nausicaa started telling Dorian about all the other mermaids she'd seen fall in love with humans? From the fierce way Dorian and Nausicaa were staring at each other, it was clear that there was nothing she could do to put a stop to the conversation. They were both determined to have it out.

  “I haven't promised her anything, actually,” Dorian announced; his cool tone sounded a little strained. “But when I do make her a promise I'll definitely keep it.”

  “You give her your promise now. "With every breath you promise her that she has found a home for her heart. You promise her that she is no longer one of the lost. And that promise is an unending lie, human.”

  Dorian sat back in the boat, and Luce felt the startled pain in his face reflecting in her own. For the first time she almost hated Nausicaa for being so sure she was right—and for being so merciless. “She isn’t lost. I found her.” Dorian's forced bravado was obvious now. “Or she found me. Has Luce told you how we met? Because it wasn't online ...”

  Nausicaa didn't deign to respond to this, just scowled away into the distance. Several gray whales crowded around them now, silently staring, jostling one another so that the patch of open sea around the boat grew constantly smaller.

  “I care for Luce enough to offer her the truth,” Nausicaa pronounced at last. She hadn't so much as glanced at Luce through the whole conversation with Dorian, but now she swung her head and shot her a quick, cutting stare. “She can do with it what she likes.”

  Nausicaa dove, but not quickly. Instead her movements seemed deliberately lethargic, her tail swinging in midair long enough that Luce knew it must burn. “Like I haven't seen any damn mermaids before...” Dorian hissed. Then Nausicaa was gone, with a last hard slap of emerald fins. The gray whales squeezed in so close now that Luce began to feel a little panicked, staring around at the stony banks of their hides. She could easily dive and escape, after all, but Dorian?

  Luce saw the same idea occur to Dorian; his brows lowered and his eyes flashed around, searching for a way out. There wasn't one. Luce began wondering if she could possibly raise a wave big enough to carry the boat safely over the back of a whale, steady enough that Dorian wouldn't be thrown out. But if the whale chose that moment to dive, lashing its enormous muscular flukes into the air, the boat would certainly be crushed and Dorian with it.

  A hovering soprano call moved in the water, welling up from the shadowy green below. It was like whale song, but also, Luce instantly realized, utterly different. The black eye closest to her seemed to glow with recognition, and the long head leaned deeper into the sea. Suddenly Luce and Dorian sailed up on a huge billow of displaced water as the whale dipped away, and Luce's whole body shook to the high pulse of its answering song.

  The voice from the deep cried again, in a long, alluring vibrato. Nausicaa, Luce realized with amazed gratitude. Nausicaa was calling the whales away so that Luce could get Dorian out of there. And one by one the enormous bodies curved downward, sweeping away in dark arches, plunging like waterfalls. The boat lurched up rising slopes of water, and Luce dipped underneath, supporting the hull with both arms to stop Dorian from being flung overboard. The dim space around her began to brighten as the whales dove away, their huge shapes sailing below her like the shadows of clouds on a hillside. As soon as everything was calmer, Luce surfaced again. Dorian's face shone with sweet amazement, and Luce felt a kind of joy as acute as grief. And then Dorian was pointing again, out behind her.

  Thirty feet away from them one of the grays threw itself high above the surface, its whole streamlined form in one long balletic curve, fins sweeping by its sides. Sunlight sharp as shining wounds flashed in the ruffs of water flying from its tail. Then it curled in space, racing downward into the vanishing green of the deep.

  14. Darkness

  By late November the sun barely had the strength to heave itself in a low are above the horizon. Even at midday the light looked bluish and tired. The endless, somnolent dusk set in by early afternoon and slowly fell into the yawning nights. It was hard not to get depressed, to feel starved for scraps of daylight. Dorian got used to meeting Luce after dusk, to watching the dim glow of her body parting the smoke-dark water. It was a beautiful sight but also lonely somehow. And it made his time with her seem even more remote from the rest of his life. The rooms of his school and house seemed like brightly lit boxes sealed to keep out the darkness where dangerous secrets leaped and swam.

  Today he'd lingered in the village's tiny library, and now he was running late. All the tenth-graders had been assigned a research paper on an environmental challenge of their choice, but Dorian hadn't been able to stop with one. He'd begun with problems that affected whales and gone on from there to a whole list of threats to the world's oceans: acidification, dead zones, global warming ... Already he had almost fifty pages of notes and he couldn't seem to stop collecting more information. When he glanced up from the computer it was already after four, and he hurried to stuff his books away, bundle himself into his hat and parka, and run to meet Luce.

  Luckily she could read in the dark without any trouble, and he talked over his research with her. He'd started to bring her stacks of library books, too, tightly wrapped in layers of plastic so that they wouldn't get soaked as she carried them home. Even so he'd had some pretty serious fines for water damage, and the librarian had told him to stop reading in the bathtub. A little to Dorian's surprise, Luce wanted to read his school textbooks, too. But it was a good idea, he realized. That way if she ever turned human again she wouldn't be too far behind.

  Maybe next year she'd even be in high school with him.

  All they needed was someone they could trust and who could help them figure out how to change her back without killing her. Someone smart, like a scientist. Out in the street the air itself seemed to be tinted with bruise blue ink, and the cold bit into his face and bare hands. Stretches of dead gra
ss separated the small brown-shingled houses. The printed red roses and blue plaids of the curtains glowed like lanterns, and at the bottom of the street the lights of a few boats tossed gently up and down. Dorian thought the dusk even had a smell; it was like the scent of clay, musty and dank.

  “Dorian. Lindy said you might be here, so I thought I'd see if I could catch you.”

  Dorian had already recognized the voice before he turned to look. It was Ben Ellison. Dorian hadn't heard from him for a few weeks. Seeing that broad brown face in the blue dimness provoked a mixture of feelings in Dorian: anxiety that he couldn't get to Luce right away but also a strange sense of comfort. He couldn't tell Ellison about the mermaids, of course. But unlike everyone else Dorian knew, Ellison would believe him if he did tell the truth. He felt sure of that, and it almost made him think of Ellison as a kind of fellow conspirator. This was someone who understood about secrets. “Hey.”

  Ellison looked at Dorian with his usual expression of fatherly concern. Dorian had hated it at first, but now he felt himself softening a little. Not that Ellison needed to worry about him, but still it was nice that somebody gave a fuck. “Can I take you for something to eat?” Ellison asked; he was somber, unsmiling. “We haven't had a chance to catch up for a while.”

  Dorian shook his head. “I'm ... kind of supposed to be somewhere.”

  “Band practice? Did you find a drummer yet?”

  “No. Well, Steve says his cousin knows this girl who plays the drums, so maybe. But she lives like fifty miles away, and we haven't even met her. They're supposed to drive up here sometime.” As Dorian spoke he found himself wondering what would happen if he said something completely different: “Look, I really need your help. It’s about my girlfriend...” If only Ellison weren't in the FBI, Dorian thought, it might be worth taking the chance.

  “It sounds like it might be difficult to schedule practice times, then. If your drummer lives that far away.” Ben Ellison sounded distracted, and Dorian suspected that he was only going through the motions of having a normal conversation, just the way Dorian was doing himself.

  Somehow they'd started walking together in the direction of the dock. Between the buildings the sea appeared as a huge dark blot where all the ordinary human things, houses and cars, were simply canceled out. But in a way, Dorian thought, that darkness was his real home, at least as long as Luce was living there. How was he going to shake Ellison? “Steve's about to get his driver's license, though, so we'll be able to go there for practice. It could work out all right.”

  “Not if you—” Ellison's voice leaped higher and then broke off abruptly, and he shook his head hard. They had stopped in a place with no streetlights, and Ellison's broad body appeared as a black silhouette against the charcoal sea.

  Dorian was confused. “Not if I what?”

  “Dorian, I'm ... facing a dilemma.” There was an unmistakable ring of sincerity, even desperation, in that low voice, and Dorian started. “There's something that I know I need to say, and soon. Someone I care about is putting himself in a position of extraordinary danger, and I'm the only one who can warn him.”

  The sudden shift in their conversation was too weird, Dorian thought. Warn someone? What was the guy talking about? “Then why don't you?”

  “Because the young man I need to warn is frankly untrustworthy. And I don't know whether I can make him understand the danger he's facing without revealing information that could be ... quite sensitive.”

  They were walking again, but Dorian still couldn't see Ben Ellison well enough to make out the expression of his face. “If you're talking about me, I'm totally fine.” Dorian impatiently snapped the words out but then realized that his heart was racing. The hill sloped steeply away at their feet and he felt a rush of vertigo.

  Ellison seemed not to have heard him. He was staring at the sea as if he half expected it to come rushing up the hill and engulf them. “Maybe you remember something I told you that time you came to Anchorage. I mentioned then that there have been very few recorded survivors of shipwrecks like the one you were on.”

  “So?” Dorian's voice wavered audibly. They were passing in front of a tiny gray house with brightly shining windows, its curtains drawn back, and golden light spilled over them both.

  Ellison abruptly stopped and wheeled toward him, taking him by the shoulders. His broad fingers squeezed in so hard it hurt. “Dorian, you're frightened. I can hear that you are. And you should be. You still have some instinct for self-preservation, and if you'll only listen to what your instincts are telling you ... you might grow up to be a very interesting person.”

  Dorian reeled a little in Ellison's grip, unsure if he should try to pull away. Wasn't there something skittish, even a little crazy, in the older man's eyes?

  Ellison kept on, his voice hard but also somehow distracted. “I realized that I needed to investigate. To find out what happened to the other people who went through experiences similar to yours. It wasn't easy. But I did discover—unsurprisingly, I suppose—that most of your fellow survivors have also been young males.” Ellison made a sound that was almost like laughter, but his mouth was twisted downward. He was staring into Dorian's face without actually meeting his eyes.

  It was all so strange that Dorian had trouble processing what Ellison was saying to him. Then it hit him: unsurprisingly the survivors were young men? For some reason Dorian felt offended by the statement.

  Ellison let go of Dorian's shoulders, but he didn't move out of his path. “In two of the cases where I was able to track down records, the young men in question went permanently insane. Institutionalized. There was a case like that twenty-five years ago, outside Anadyr, Russia—”

  “You’re calling me crazy?” As soon as Dorian said it, he realized it was the wrong approach. He should try to reassure Ellison, not provoke him. “It's nice of you to worry about me, but I'm a lot better now. I've pretty much stopped having nightmares and everything.” It was true. Every time Luce sang to him he felt a little stronger, not as broken inside. The sea had stopped following him around like some huge watery ghost, a heaving shadow. It mostly stayed where it belonged.

  “Three others drowned within two years of escaping from their shipwrecks, Dorian. It appears that for many people in your position, survival is only a temporary reprieve.”

  Dorian stared. “I'm not planning on drowning myself. Like I told you, I'm feeling way better—”

  “I'm not worried about suicide. At least, that's not my primary concern. I believe that you do indeed ... have something to live for.” Ellison's tone didn't make any sense, Dorian thought. Was he actually envious?

  Just for a second Dorian considered running. But what good would that do when Ellison could find him anytime he wanted? “Then what's the problem? If you know I'm not going to kill myself—”

  “Something else might kill you. You may have placed your trust in something ... extremely capricious, and lacking any conscience as we understand it. You may be naively putting yourself in harm's way, day after day, with no idea of the risk.”

  Dorian's knees suddenly buckled, and he barely stopped himself from falling. The cold wind whistled between the houses, and his hair snapped hard around his face. Was Ellison talking about Luce? But how could he know anything about her?

  If the FBI was after Luce, Dorian knew, he had to find out. But it was hard to see how he could ask the right questions without giving too much away.

  “Are you talking about my girlfriend?” Dorian struggled to keep his voice as flat and noncommittal as possible. He waited anxiously for Ellison to react with surprise: the older man should smile at him and say something like, “Oh, you have a girlfriend now, Dorian? I didn’t know.”

  “Of course I'm talking about your girlfriend.” Ellison growled. Somehow hearing him say this out loud made it worse. “I suppose the term applies.”

  Could Ellison really know that Luce was a mermaid? Dorian had trouble believing it. But either way...“Well, it's not fair
for you to say shit like that about her, then. You don't know her.”

  “That's true. I don't. But I doubt I'd make it through an introduction intact.”

  “She's not like that.” There was a strange timbre in the rising wind, Dorian realized, a haunted musical beckoning. It was a sound he'd learned to recognize. Luce was upset that he hadn't come, and she was calling him from the dimness below. They were only a block from the harbor, and by the intensity of the sound Dorian guessed that Luce had come recklessly close to the village dock.

  Ellison seemed to be listening to the wind, too hard for Dorian's comfort. He turned away from Dorian to gaze down into the bluish darkness. “She's 'not like that'? Are you sure about that? Because in that case, Dorian, I'd ... like to meet her very much. Maybe you'd be willing to pass on the message?” Ellison paused and seemed to think of something. “How does she communicate?”

  So the guy was still fishing for information, Dorian thought sarcastically. At least that showed that the FBI didn't know everything. “She won't want to meet you.”

  “Why not?”

  “She doesn't like cops much.” Dorian's tone was deliberately insulting.

  “I can see that she might have her reasons for feeling that way.” Ellison delivered this in a snide voice that clearly implied Luce was a criminal, and Dorian glared at him. “But I'd actually like to meet her on a personal level. Not as part of my job, but simply—”

  “Simply to what?” Dorian couldn't have explained why he suddenly felt so furious. He fought down an impulse to lash out, shove Ellison in the chest, punch him.

  “Simply to know, I suppose. What she is. What she wants. Maybe there are other approaches...”

  “You need to leave us alone!” Dorian couldn't keep his voice down. It was stupid of him to yell in the street like this. It was a tiny town, and at any moment people would come to find out what was going on. “I'm not in any danger. My girlfriend's not ... a bad person.” As Dorian said this Ellison grinned strangely. “I just want you to leave me alone from now on, okay? I don't want to talk to you again.”