Authors: Sarah Porter
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Family, #Alternative Family, #Girls & Women, #Love & Romance, #Fantasy & Magic, #Social Issues, #Emotions & Feelings, #Friendship, #Self-Esteem & Self-Reliance, #Violence, #Values & Virtues, #Visionary & Metaphysical
The Twice Lost
Read More from the Lost Voices Trilogy
Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Porter
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Harcourt is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Porter, Sarah, 1969–
The twice lost / Sarah Porter. pages cm
Sequel to: Waking storms.
Summary: When humans declare war on mermaids, Luce swims to San Francisco Bay where she finds a group of “twice lost” girls, lost once when trauma turned them into mermaids and again when they defied mermaid law, and unites them into an army under her leadership.
ISBN 978-0-547-48252-1 (hardback)
[1. Mermaids—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 4. War—Fiction. 5. San Francisco Bay Area (Calif.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.P8303Twi 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2013003918
eISBN 978-0-547-52628-7
v1.0713
For my mother, Betsy Hart Porter,
with love
When the world is sick, can’t no one be well,
But I dreamt we was all beautiful and strong.
A Silver Mt. Zion, “God Bless Our Dead Marines”
1
“Hello,” the young man in the lab coat purred into a round speaker, his hands fidgeting. Ripples of azure light reflected on his cheeks. “Are you awake?” There was no response. He stood with a few other stiff-backed men, among them the nation’s secretary of defense, in a room divided in half by a wall of thick—and perfectly soundproof—glass. Behind the glass was something that resembled the kind of fake habitat found in a zoo, like an enclosure for keeping penguins or seals. Bubbling salt water filled most of the tank to a depth of about five feet, but on the right there was an artificial shore of baby blue cement sloping down into the water. That was where the resemblance to a zoo display ended, though. A giant flat-screen television blazed high on the wall above the tank’s deep end, playing what appeared to be a reality show about rich teenagers. Flouncy pink satin cushions were heaped along the shore just above the waterline, and a large white dresser decorated with golden scrolls perched on a ledge at the back. Various electronic gadgets were scattered on the cement, but beyond the clutter the tank gave no sign of being inhabited. “You have a very important visitor today, so . . . your full cooperation . . .”
The crowd behind him shifted impatiently, and the young man flinched as if he could feel their disapproval pricking his skin. “Getting on with it! I’m going to be turning on your microphone so you can talk to these men. But I have to warn you . . .” Far back in the tank something sky blue and pearlescent flicked up for a moment from behind a pile of cushions. For a second the young man’s voice grated to a halt, and he stared urgently before he mastered himself enough to keep going. “We’ve programmed the computer to recognize any hint of singing. If you try anything, it will send out an electric shock automatically. A pretty severe one. All right? I’d like you to be on . . .” There was that blue flash again, and a trace of rippling gold. “On . . . your best behavior, please.” He turned to look at the secretary of defense and offered a tight, ingratiating smile. Then he flicked a switch in a small control panel set into the glass beside the speaker. “Please meet the United States secretary of defense. Secretary Moreland?”
Moreland leaned toward the glass, an odd expression rippling over his heavy reddish face with its sagging jowls. His white hair shone like meringue above his gleaming pate. “Anais,” he snapped, then waited, scowling, for a reply. It didn’t come. “I’d suggest you get your damned tail over here. You’re our little mermaid now.”
The sky blue tail rose above the water again, twitching irritably. Pinkish iridescence shone on its scales, and the cushions stirred as a golden head shifted up into view. Dreamy azure eyes turned to gaze through the glass. Several of the men stepped forward as if involuntarily, and others visibly braced themselves. She shook herself, and her inhuman beauty came at them like a living wave. Moreland’s smirk tightened, and his upper lip jerked sharply higher to expose his perfect teeth. “Hello, there.”
“Hi.” She examined Moreland’s crisp, expensive suit with a trace of approval. “Are you really important?”
It was hard to tell if Moreland was leering or snarling in response. “Oh, I’d say so.”
“Then I only want to talk to
you.
” She scanned the other men disdainfully. “Having all these people staring at me makes me feel so shy!”
She didn’t look shy, but Moreland nodded almost indulgently. He made a quick motion to the young man in the lab coat, who hurried to tap at the control panel, cutting off Anais’s sound. “Do you mind, gentlemen?” Moreland asked.
“We can observe through the monitors in the next room?” the lab-coated man asked anxiously. “She is—I mean—I am her primary handler, and I should know—”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Moreland’s lip hiked up again. “I don’t think you should observe. I’d like to allow
her
”—he cocked his head toward the tank, where Anais, piqued at not being able to hear what they were saying, was now swimming toward the glass—“a chance to confide in me. Privately.”
“But—of course you’re aware, Mr. Secretary, that she’s suffered some very serious trauma. Those mermaids she was living with, all . . .”
“A fragile flower,” Moreland agreed, grinning horribly. “I’ll use my most delicate touch.”
The young lab-coated man didn’t look particularly reassured, but he still nodded. “The blue switch controls sound going into her side. The red cuts her off over here. Given the precautions we’ve taken, though—”
“Thank you, Mr. . . .”
“Hackett. Charles.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hackett. I’ll let you know when I need your assistance.”
Anais was tapping, though inaudibly, on her side of the glass. She was supporting herself in the deepest water with a slight circulating motion of her fins so that her face and shoulders floated just above the surface. Her hair rippled and shone around her, and she looked sulky and eager. Hackett gave her a coy little smile and a wave as he turned to leave. “Even
without
any singing,” one of the men observed as they walked to the door, “she’s still remarkably . . .”
“Remarkably?” one of his companions asked archly, eyebrows raised.
“Compelling, I would say.”
“I’d use a different term, frankly.”
Secretary Moreland didn’t watch them go. Instead he was staring fixedly into Anais’s blue eyes, though the look on his face didn’t exactly suggest attraction. It was somewhere between caressing and murderous, and a smirk kept tweaking his lips. Once everyone was gone he reached to flip the sound back on, still keeping his gaze locked on Anais’s face. “Better now, tadpole?”
Anais pouted. Her lips were slick with strawberry pink gloss. “You have a problem.”
“I’d say there are some other—you really can’t call them people—some other nasty animals who have much bigger problems these days. You should be very, very thankful that we’re taking such good care of you. When you could be in the same mess as your little killing-machine friends . . .”
Anais shrugged impatiently, sending a quick surge through the water around her. Her hair lapped at her shoulders. She was wearing a sparkly, sky blue tank top that matched her tail almost perfectly, and diamond studs sparked in her ears. “I don’t care about that! Charlie told me about that boat of yours that got trashed.”
“Charlie?”
“Mr. Hackett. He said there was a big wave that came out of nowhere and, like,
totaled
the boat with your guys on it, after . . .” Anais suddenly seemed a bit uncomfortable. “After . . . I surrendered. I knew you’d want to
talk
to one of us, if we just acted nicer. And—”
“That wave didn’t come out of nowhere, I think, tadpole. You shouldn’t assume that Mr. Hackett’s information is entirely reliable.”
“That’s what I’m trying to
tell
you!” Anais was getting exasperated. “I just didn’t want to tell . . . Mr. Hackett because I didn’t think he could really do anything. I figured it all out. You can go and kill mermaids without the
singing
stopping you now. Right? But you don’t have any way to stop her from bashing your guys with those waves. You
have
to kill her. Soon! Like, right now she’s the only one who knows how to do that, but she’ll probably start teaching everybody else, and then you won’t be able to get rid of mermaids anymore at
all
. . .”
Secretary Moreland was clearly trying to keep his expression steady, but it wasn’t working. Tiny spasms of excitement bent his features and shimmered in his eyes. “So you’re claiming you know the mermaid who committed the assault on the Special Ops boat?” He paused for a moment, assessing. “Several of our men were killed. This isn’t something we take at all lightly. You wouldn’t want to be anything less than perfectly candid on the subject.”
“Of course I know her. We had to kick her out of the tribe because all she did was cause
problems,
but then she wouldn’t stop hanging around . . .” Anais’s tail was swishing faster now, its pink iridescence flashing candied reflections on the glass.
Moreland looked disappointed. “So she wouldn’t consider you a friend? Try to find you?”
“No way! She knows I see right through her. Though she did keep trying to get me to pay
attention
to her.”
Moreland nodded. The sparks in his eyes seemed agitated. “I
see.
But you’ll tell me all about her, won’t you? I’d suggest you start now.”
Anais leaned back from the glass with a motion that suggested someone settling into an armchair, although there was nothing but water around her, and smiled slyly. Her fins lightly stroked across the tank’s blue cement floor. “That depends.”
“
Does
it? On what?”
“On you letting me out of here!” Anais shook her head, golden rays of hair swinging with the movement. “I mean, I know my parents must have left me a
ton
of money. And the house! And there’s a pool, and I could get our servants to come back, and—”
“Tadpole, tadpole . . .” Moreland shook his head, and his smile was much softer, much more slippery, than before. “You haven’t thought this through.”
“I totally have! I—”
“You aren’t
human,
little tail. Not remotely.”