Waking Storms

by Sarah Porter

  “I doubt that avoiding each other will be an option for us, Dorian.”

  “I'm going to make it an option...”

  “I tend to think of you as a kind of hostage. An innocent mixed up in things he can't possibly understand. But other people won't see the situation that way, of course, and I've taken a considerable risk by coming here to warn you. At the worst my actions could be construed as treasonous.”

  Dorian began to think he might have some leverage. “I promise I won't tell anybody about this, then. As long as you don't come back here.”

  “The two of us belong to a very select society, Dorian. There are only a handful of people in the world who have heard what we've heard. Whether we like it or not, that binds us to one another.”

  Dorian gaped. He simply couldn't accept that this meant what it sounded like. The idea that Ellison could have his own share in the most powerful experiences of Dorian's life—it was revolting, impossible. He braced himself and looked up, glowering straight into Ellison's sad brown face. “You're insane. What do you think I've heard?”

  Ellison smiled, but there was something shattered and terribly distant in his eyes. “Haven't we already discussed this once? In Anchorage?”

  Dorian's stomach lurched, and his legs seemed to be crumbling under him, but he did his best to stay brazen. “I don't know what—”

  “Say hello to your girlfriend for me. I expect I've made you late for your meeting with her, haven't I?”

  “I'm not—”

  “Make sure you give her my message. It's ... in her best interest if you do.”

  Dorian watched as Ellison turned away and walked back up the hill, his dark body half vanishing in the shadows and then winking into view again as he passed through the rare patches of light. Luce was still calling, but instead of running to her Dorian slumped down abruptly on the brittle grass of a nearby lawn and leaned his head against his knees. He knew he had to tell her what had happened, but as he thought it over he realized that Ellison hadn't quite said anything that proved the FBI knew about the mermaids. And now Dorian wasn't sure if he'd be able to remember exactly what Ellison had said to him, much less convey just how threatening and disorienting their conversation had felt.

  The wind shrilled through his hair, but now the sound of it was empty of magic. Luce had given up waiting for him, then. He'd just have to find her tomorrow.

  It seemed so unfair. Ever since the day of the gray whales, he and Luce had been so happy together. She'd stopped worrying about her old tribe and about the police, and Dorian finally felt like he had her almost completely to himself. He had stopped telling her to become queen, too—he didn't actually want to share her with the tribe. Even Nausicaa's hanging around didn't seem to be much of a problem anymore, though Dorian still would have been glad to hear that she was going away. And now he was supposed to tell Luce—what, exactly? That some FBI agent had dropped a lot of hints that might mean she and all the other mermaids were in serious trouble—or that might just as well mean something totally different?

  Capricious, Ellison had said. Lacking any conscience. Luce wasn't like that at all, actually. But weren't there plenty of human beings you could describe that way?

  Even worse: what if Luce became convinced that Dorian had betrayed her? After all, how else could Ellison know so much? Dorian had never really promised Luce that he wouldn't talk to the FBI. So what was she supposed to think?

  The cold seeped through his parka until he shivered, and the wind came rushing faster from the wild black sea. A few drops of sleet spattered against Dorian's face.

  People kept saying it would be a bad winter.

  ***

  When Luce and Nausicaa slipped out late that evening to look for dinner, snow was falling in thick plumes that dissolved the instant they hit the coal black sea. Luce felt like she was swimming through an endless maze stitched from pale lace and crisp billowing silks. Even Nausicaa stopped and spun in circles, gazing around at the white frills drifting down the black sky. It was all magnificently beautiful. The snow pranced in each gust of wind, and Luce could just make out the subtle tinkling sound of the huge flakes crumpling into water. Luce and Nausicaa floated slowly together to the beach, where they ate, both of them silent from wonder.

  “Soon enough the ice will come,” Nausicaa observed at last. She was nibbling seaweed, and the green-gold shine of her skin reflected in each snowflake that swirled past her. “We will have to swim south, far past the peninsula. Some years ago I knew the queen of a tribe that lived there—”

  “It didn't get that bad last winter,” Luce objected. She had cracked her first oyster, but she was too perturbed by what Nausicaa had just said to eat it. “I mean, I wasn't a mermaid yet then, but everybody told me there wasn't too much ice. They all just stayed here.”

  Nausicaa glanced at Luce with sardonic affection. Of course she knew why Luce didn't want to think about migrating. “This winter will be worse. I can almost feel the breath coming off the pack ice already. And we have not even reached the darkest days.” Nausicaa paused. Snow clung to the fringes of her black wild hair in a kind of icy halo, the flakes sparked with gold here and there by her soft brilliance. “I may think of leaving soon, Luce. And you should come with me.”

  Luce's heart jarred in her chest. Nausicaa's words felt almost like a threat. “I'm not going to leave here. And I wish you'd stay, too. I don't care about the ice.”

  Nausicaa had given up arguing with Luce about her love for Dorian. Instead she smiled, and her green-black eyes flashed with sly amusement. “I knew a mermaid once, gone utterly mad, who kidnapped an entire human family: a boy perhaps six years old, his mother and father. She plucked them one by one from the lifeboat where she found them drifting and dragged them to a cave. The cave had a deep underwater entrance, and the humans could not hope to swim through it without her help. She kept them there for years, making them pretend that she was their beloved daughter, the boy's sister. The family had to play games with her, comb her hair, and invent imaginary memories of her childhood with them, all in endless darkness. If they tried to resist or if they confused their 'memories' too much, she would cease to bring them food for a day or two...”

  Luce knew Nausicaa well enough by now to understand why she was telling this story: it was a way of implying that Luce's sense of belonging with Dorian was just as delusional as the crazy mermaid's pretending to have a family. Luce tensed with annoyance, but at the same time she was intrigued by the thought of this human family held captive in a cave like dolls kept in a box. “So what happened?”

  “Well, the mermaid—her name was Kumiko—I was told that she died very strangely. That she was lured by a spirit in the water and followed it to a depth where she drowned. Maybe she died another way, but one day she did not come back. Then there was no one to feed these humans she had kept as her pets, of course.”

  “But ... if you know all this ... the other mermaids around there must have known, too?” Luce couldn't stop herself from hoping that someone might have rescued the family after Kumiko's disappearance.

  “They all knew. Kumiko was so insane that her tribe felt sorry for her. No one interfered with her games, but they hardly wished to deal with the humans she left behind. I passed by that way again some years after, and I stopped at the cave. The family's bones were all scattered at the water's edge. As if they had kept trying to find the courage to attempt an escape, right up to their last moments.”

  Luce lost her appetite completely as she imagined the three humans exploring the margin of the water with their hands, never quite daring to dive, and gradually falling into complete despair. The perfect blackness all around them must have crept into their brains like a parasite, devouring what was left of their sanity. And the other mermaids hadn't even cared enough to drown them out of pity...

  “Did Dorian bring you any new books today?” Nausicaa went on dreamily.

  Luce looked up, uncomfortable at the sudden change of subject. She almost won
dered if Nausicaa was playing with her somehow. “He ... didn't actually show up,” Luce admitted, and then tried to cover her embarrassment. “I guess something must have happened so that he couldn't get away.”

  Of course it was ridiculous to try to bluff Nausicaa this way; Luce felt twice as embarrassed as she realized that. Luce watched a quick glimmer of irony pass over Nausicaa's face before it blinked out again.

  “Unfortunate,” Nausicaa observed dryly after a moment. “I've been learning so much from the books and from everything he tells you. I would like to see more of what he discovers about the damage humans have done to our oceans...”

  Luce was still upset by the story about Kumiko and also irritated with Nausicaa for telling it so calmly. “If you'd talk to him yourself, I guess you could ask him to bring you more stuff about the ocean.”

  “I thought you preferred to see him alone.” Nausicaa wasn't bothering to keep the sarcasm out of her voice anymore. “But of course I can speak to him directly if you like.”

  Luce jumped a little from sheer surprise. Nausicaa had talked to Dorian once before, though just long enough to insult him, on the day of the gray whales' migration. But Luce assumed that Nausicaa had been making an exception, doing something she actually considered wrong. “But don't you care about...”

  “About timahk, as you call it?” Nausicaa's sarcasm was gone; she was staring out at the waves rising to meet the seething snow, and there was something wistful in her gaze. “You know I do, Luce.”

  “But then...”

  “You have not seen what I've seen. The humans are multiplying wildly. What I thought were terrible crowds of them five hundred years ago, or even fifty ... that can't be compared to their numbers now. They are choking the shores, and there are ever fewer places where we can live hidden from them.”

  Luce didn't understand what humans multiplying had to do with talking to Dorian, but she couldn't help seeing the awful sadness welling in Nausicaa's eyes. Impulsively Luce took Nausicaa's dark olive-bronze hand in her own. “Nausicaa...”

  “And as there are more humans there are also more of us, of course: their cast-off daughters. There are many more mermaid tribes, and larger ones, most full of mermaids too new and too bitterly angry to have any wisdom. Humans' numbers grow and so do ours, but the world remains the same small tumbling stone.”

  Suddenly Luce thought she knew what Nausicaa was getting at. “You're saying—we might have to talk to them? If the world gets so crowded that humans and mermaids can't help running into each other?”

  “For years now I've wondered how much longer we can keep ourselves entirely secret from them. It seems inevitable that they will start to notice. Too many ships will vanish; too many people will hear a strange sound in the far distance. And then”—Nausicaa looked hard at Luce—“too many mermaids will spare the lives of human boys. They will think that this one boy can do no harm. Who would believe his story when no one else has ever seen what he has seen?”

  Luce stared out at the lush, heavy snowfall, a wild tangle of emotions in her heart. What Nausicaa said made her afraid and ashamed—she had been foolish to believe, as she'd carried Dorian to safety, that no other mermaid had ever made the same choice. But she couldn't accept either that it would have been better to let him die. The snowflakes fell in such huge clusters that they looked like cupped pale hands begging in the dark.

  Besides, if Nausicaa was right, humans would find out about them soon enough anyway. The problem wouldn't be Luce and Dorian, but something bigger than that: a world too packed and busy to allow for secrets. Luce suddenly pictured the earth as a prison yard restlessly crisscrossed by floodlights. No patch of darkness would be allowed to rest undisturbed.

  “But Nausicaa?”

  Nausicaa's eyes were fixed on the snow. Luce had never seen her look so depressed. “Yes, Luce?”

  “If the humans do find out about us—do you think talking to them might help? Is there something we could say...” Luce broke off as she saw the expression on Nausicaa's dark face. It was utterly bleak, so heartsick that Luce felt almost desperate at the sight of it. “You think they'll still want to kill us, Nausicaa? No matter what we do?”

  “I'm sure they'll try,” Nausicaa said, and Luce realized there was more than despair in her friend's face. Beneath the pain there was a steely ferocity, determined and calm. “We would hardly be the first creatures they've driven to extinction. But there will always be new mermaids arriving in the sea, and we won't cease to fight.”

  “But if we promised to stop killing them, then...”

  Nausicaa's look was scathing. “No doubt you would like to believe it could be as simple as that, Luce. But humans have wiped out hundreds of species that posed no threat to them. They find happiness in their power to destroy.”

  “Not all of them do!” Luce insisted. “Anyway, what does this have to do with you talking to Dorian?”

  “It remains dishonorable, certainly, for me to have a discussion with your human lover.” Nausicaa sounded so thoughtful that Luce suddenly understood she'd been brooding over the question for a long time. “But what will honor of such a kind finally matter, Luce? In a world where so many things are changing?”

  Luce didn't try to answer. For some reason she wondered again how Dana was doing and why she never came to visit anymore. Probably Dana was furious that Luce had hurt Jenna, even in self-defense. Still, Luce thought, she should try to make up with Dana sometime.

  She kept meaning to head over to Anais's territory to look for Dana and Violet. And she kept putting it off. Why risk a fight when it was so much easier to dream in Dorian's arms?

  15. Prisoners

  Violet was lying on the sloping white leather couch of the submerged cabin, her arms behind her head and her straight brown hair weaving around her with each tiny fluctuation of the water. Her tail flopped across the armrest. She looked over at Dana, who was asleep on the floor ten feet away, a steady stream of bubbles seeping out where her full lips met the trailing hose that was the cabin's only source of air. Violet knew she couldn't take the hose away without waking Dana, so she did her best to endure the painful craving growing in her own lungs. As long as she stayed very still, Violet found, she could go without air for longer than she would have imagined possible. It was hard to know exactly, but Violet guessed she'd held out already for almost an hour. It helped that they weren't more than a dozen yards below the surface, so the pressure wasn't too overpowering. Most of the yacht had remained lodged between two underwater crags when it sank, though parts of it had broken free and tumbled much deeper.

  When Violet couldn't stand it anymore she slipped over the edge of the sofa and swam across the electric blue carpet. In the water-warped bluish glow Dana's full mouth took on a purple tint; she gasped and half opened her eyes as Violet gently tugged the hose free. A stream of bubbles surged upward, dancing with blue light. “Sorry,” Violet whispered, then inhaled urgently. The hungry ache in her chest subsided and she thought she could feel the oxygen tingling in her blood and lighting up her cells. It felt like electricity sweeping back through a city gone dark, golden light bursting from all its windows with a movement like an oncoming wave.

  “ 'Sokay...” Dana murmured drowsily. “Take your time, Vi.” With only one air hose between the two of them they were forced to take turns sleeping, and the one who remained awake would draw on the air as rarely as possible. Even so they were both constantly exhausted from being woken at regular intervals as the other came for her ration of breath.

  Anais could pull the hose up anytime she felt like it, of course, and drown them both. But there was no point in dwelling on that. Dana kept insisting that Jenna would never allow that to happen anyway. Violet didn't say so, but she wasn't so sure, though it was only Jenna's intervention that had persuaded Anais to lock Dana and Violet up instead of murdering them outright.

  It was Rachel who'd spied on Dana and who'd reported that Violet had slipped away to bring Luce the knife; Rachel, who'd
always seemed so sweet and fragile, and who'd been one of Violet's few friends. She couldn't think of Rachel as a cruel person, but Violet knew the little nervous blonde was terrified of Anais. If Rachel did bad things sometimes, Violet told herself, then she did them out of cowardice rather than meanness. Who knew what Anais had said to pressure Rachel or to threaten her?

  Violet sighed, pulled in a final inhalation, and gave the air back to Dana, who took the hose sleepily and rolled onto her side. The movement set off a small current in the confined space, and the curtains waved lethargically. At the bottom of the room the man's skeleton seemed to shake its head as the current brushed against it.

  That skeleton had once been Anais's father, Violet knew. But she tried not to think about that too much.

  She also tried not to look too closely. The tiny fishes and strange accordionlike orange worms had devoured most of the flesh, but in places gray-pink shreds still clung to the bones. Small sharp-toothed animals came to gnaw on them. Ribbons of what had once been a large green polo shirt and a pair of khakis hovered like awful plants around the rib cage and pelvis. Violet had seen human corpses before, of course. But she'd never spent so much time with one, and the longer she went on with this dead man as her cellmate the more she began to think about him: how he'd felt as he died and what serpentine dreams might still be wriggling through his empty skull. Sometimes she had to fight down an impulse to talk to him, maybe even to apologize.

  Violet made herself look away, up and around the cabin. Most of the yacht's rooms had been thoroughly plundered, but even Anais had been a little squeamish about entering the cabin where her father's bloated corpse rocked with each new current. A collection of framed photographs of sea animals had remained untouched, including one of a leaping orca that Violet had turned toward the wall. The walls were white, and the bright blue ceiling echoed the color of the carpet. There was a chrome desk clogged by warped papers and photographs, a shelf of rotting books with dreadful titles like The Financial Warrior, and a glass cabinet full of brightly colored crystal dolphins and brandy decanters long since flooded with salt water. There was a single door, barred on the other side, and three shattered portholes much too small for Violet or Dana to squeeze through. An early attempt to get out through the vents had proved to both of them that that was impossible, too.