The Twice Lost (47 page)

Now it was Moreland’s turn not to understand. “No?” He stared at her. The front of his white shirt was tinted pink with bloody water. “No? Anais, I’m sure you don’t mean that!” His awful, whimpering laugh disgusted her. “What could possibly make you happier than killing me?”

“I said NO!” Anais whined. She
really
wasn’t feeling well now. She needed a nice soft bed where she could sleep. “I don’t
care
about killing you. And I’m sick of doing what you tell me!”

Moreland gaped at her for another long moment. His face seemed oddly blurry and the sunlight was much too bright. Pink-tinged water jostled around their shoulders as his caressing hands slid with a slow, contemplative movement toward her neck. His thumbs brushed her windpipe. “Sing to me, Anais!”

“I already told you no.”

There was just a hint of pressure on her throat now. She thought she might fall asleep right there in his hands.

“You
will
do what I tell you! Anais, we don’t have much time!” He was trying to stay calm, but his voice lurched into high, trembling notes. He shook her, quick and sharp. “Sing to me now!”

Anais closed her eyes. The sea inside her seemed as red as jam; it was full of layered crimson lights that throbbed like jellyfish. “I don’t
care
about you,” Anais slurred. His hands were tightening on her throat. It felt awful and constricting, and she made a drowsy effort to pull the hands away, but somehow when she grabbed for his wrists she kept missing. “I don’t care what you do. Whatever.”

She barely heard Moreland’s strained cry as he threw himself from the submerged pier, still choking her, and tried to drive his way deep below the surface. He thrashed down a few feet, keening desperately the whole time, his suit-clad legs kicking wildly at her gashed scales. Anais flopped limply, her closed eyes consumed by that deep red sea. Her mind was dissolving, becoming part of the ruby water. In a remote way she was aware that they weren’t far from the surface. No matter how Moreland thrashed, the two of them formed a buoyant tangle that refused to sink, and Anais’s fins curled like a sail and resisted the water.

Her body floated like a raft, belly up in the harsh summer sun. Moreland flailed and wept and splashed, driving his knees into her stomach to make her sink. They went down and wavered back up into the air again and again. Anais’s golden hair spread into a second sun on the ruby water.

He’d been right, she thought. It was all over. And then even that final drop of awareness poured out to join the sea.

36

Imani’s voice was so soft that Luce didn’t understand at first how effectively her friend was taking charge. “Graciela, you need to swim as fast as you can to the Mare Island camp. Wake up everyone there and tell them it’s time to evacuate. Get everybody here right away, okay? But you need to keep calm so they don’t panic; we don’t know for
sure
yet that the humans will attack us. And Yuan, I think you’re the best one to go to all the little hidden camps; you know better than anybody where all of them are. We need to get every mermaid in the bay inside the wave or under it, now. That way we’ll all be close to open sea, and the humans won’t be able to trap us in here. Okay?”

Graciela looked at Luce for confirmation of these unexpected orders, and Luce nodded heavily. “I think Imani’s right. That’s the best thing we can do.” It
was
a good plan—and after everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours it was an immense relief to have someone else assume the work of leadership. Graciela and Yuan saluted and darted off, their quick forms gliding under the water-wall and back into the far recesses of the bay.

“Luce?” Imani murmured. She was gently leading Luce forward. The smooth, ascending wave rippled gracefully, whorls of wandering light caught inside it in glimmering suspension. “I hope you don’t think I was out of line, I mean by giving orders that way? I didn’t mean to act like
I
was the general. I just did it because, after everything you’ve been through, I thought you probably needed a break.”

All Luce wanted was to lean her head on Imani’s shoulder and forget the world. “Thank you, Imani. You were right.” Luce hesitated, watching the golden curls cast by far-off streetlamps climbing high through the towering water-wall. The sweet vibrato of mermaid song mingled with the disturbing clamor of humans weeping and shouting on the bridge above. Luce had briefly lived in Baltimore years before, and she pictured the city reduced to sea-battered ruins. With the time difference it was probably well after dawn there, and the morning light would sharply expose the full extent of the destruction. “Imani, I don’t think I
should
be general anymore. I think I’m . . . really broken now. After . . .”

Luce couldn’t finish the sentence, but Imani’s dark eyes flashed with understanding. “If you were broken you wouldn’t be able to heal anyone else, Luce. And you just did.”

Strangely, Imani’s words provoked a kind of rebellious weariness in Luce. Those kind words struck Luce as almost disrespectful, as if they showed that Imani didn’t take Catarina’s death entirely to heart. Imani was still guiding her forward and now the vertical sheets of water gleamed only a few yards ahead.

“Hey, Luce?” Imani asked softly.

Luce turned. The expression of Imani’s mouth was uncharacteristically mischievous, but her usual deep tenderness still glowed in her midnight eyes. “Yes?” Luce asked.

“Are you serious? You want
me
to give the orders tonight? Because if you mean it, I’ve got an order for
you
right now.”

Luce tipped her head, feeling weak and incredulous and—in spite of herself—quickened by curiosity. “What is it?”

Imani’s grin widened impishly. She looked lovelier than ever, Luce thought, even if her delight seemed incomprehensible. “That’s what I like to hear! Okay, I don’t want you to sing to the water tonight, Luce. I have a
way
more important job for you. It’s something only you can do too.”

Luce waited. The vibrancy of Imani’s smile was starting to affect her just a bit, as if flecks of joy dappled the surface of her despondency.

Imani raised one arm and pointed high above. It took Luce a moment to realize that Imani was indicating the raging human mob lined up along the bridge. “Don’t sing to hold up the wave. The rest of us can do that. Sing to
them
instead.”

Luce swayed from disbelief. “Imani! There’s no way—you
can’t
mean—” When their situation was so sad and desperate, when the humans might attack at any moment, how could she be so irrepressibly gleeful?

Imani laughed. “For real, Luce? You really thought I wanted you to
kill
them? Of course not. I want you to sing to them the way you just did to your father. They’re all suffering tonight; can’t you hear it?” Imani paused. She had the exhilarated look of someone who had just made a tremendous discovery. “I want you to
heal
them.”

Luce stared. “It’s too dangerous, Imani! It’s too
much
for them, too beautiful for them . . . to absorb.” She was thinking of Dorian, his crazy otherworldly rapture when she used to sing for him—and he had much greater resistance to mermaid song than any human Luce had ever met.

“It didn’t seem like it hurt those people who were listening to you on the bunkers just now,” Imani argued. She was still beaming. “And anyway I
need
to learn how you do that, and now seems like a fantastic time to get started, right? I’ll come up to the very top of the wave with you and I’ll just listen, and listen, until I can feel exactly what you’re doing.” And then Imani burst into a peal of blissful laughter.

It was too much for Luce. “I don’t understand how you can act so
happy,
Imani. Even if they won’t attack us as long as we’re in the wave, we still have to sleep
sometime.
Soon they’ll start searching for our camps. And you’re acting like this isn’t serious at all!” Her voice wavered.

In reply Imani caught Luce’s wrist and spiraled her tail, launching both of them upward through the wave’s glassy core.

They vaulted through a high upward dive, the dancing pane of water across their eyes making the skyscrapers flutter like wings and furl like rising smoke. Even in her grief and fear, Luce was consumed by the beauty in front of her. It didn’t matter if she died, since this splendor would live on without her. And still Imani’s tail was flurrying and still they were shooting higher and higher inside the wave, looking down on houses scattered like confetti across the distant hills and the bay’s variegated shades of smoke and dust and moon all joined into a single rippling symphony.

When they broke through the wave’s crest the girders crossing the bottom of the Golden Gate Bridge loomed only few feet above their heads, and the air popped and reverberated with stamping feet and raspy human cries.

“We loved the mermaids! We trusted them; we
marched
for them! And we believed them when they told us they’d given up killing, and now—now there are at least ten
thousand
people missing in Baltimore,” someone howled immediately overhead. “General Luce needs to answer for this!”

She
did
need to answer for it, Luce realized. But she couldn’t answer with words. They’d never believe her.

Luce and Imani looked at each other. Imani’s dark heart-shaped face had lost its giddiness; instead she was intent, rapt with concentration as she stared into Luce’s eyes. The droplets in her dark hair held the first hints of dawn in a crown of radiating rose-colored sparks. “Luce?” Imani whispered. “You asked me how I can be so happy now? After so many mermaids died yesterday and now that Baltimore’s flooded and all these people hate us?” Luce nodded slowly, unable to look away. Imani was illuminated by a kind of transcendence that Luce had never seen before. “I’m happy because we’ve
won.
The Twice Lost have won, and the war is over.”

The madness of Imani’s words left Luce paralyzed, silenced. The water frothed and gurgled around their chests, and they bobbed and fell with each tiny variation of the music swelling below them. “Imani . . .” Luce finally managed. “That’s not
true.
There’s no way we can win, not now that mermaids have destroyed a human city! They’ll
never
stop thinking of us as monsters now.”

Imani was unperturbed. She reached out with both hands and squeezed Luce’s shoulders. “No, Luce. I knew we’d won as soon as I heard you singing to your father back there. I knew we can do exactly what it will take. There’s only one way you can answer for what happened and that’s by
singing
it.”

“Imani . . .”

“Trust me, Luce. You know I’ve always trusted you. I
promise
you they’ll understand.”

“It seems
crazy,
” Luce objected. But somehow she’d started smiling. Imani might be out of her mind, but in this strange transported mood she was also magnificent.

“You get started, general. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I have to go give some orders.”

Luce shook herself as Imani streaked back downward. Luce watched Imani’s dusky blue fins flicking away. Above her people stomped and wept and moaned, their voices beating the air into agitated rags.

Luce thought of Dorian: of how he’d fought for her, of how he’d worked to help save her father, and how he’d come here to find her. She thought of how she used to sing to him beneath the undulating green of the aurora while the harsh Alaskan nights lingered on, and the taste of love turned to music on her tongue.

And then the memory became a living sound in her throat: a single low note that brushed the shrieking faces above her like a rain of light kisses, like a wind that could carry away all their tears.

A thousand distraught voices fell silent together as Luce’s voice rose. They couldn’t see her, positioned as she was directly under the beams supporting their feet, but they still recognized at once that the music streaming from her was entirely different from the kind of mermaid song they’d grown used to hearing. It was new, with a magic that wasn’t meant to enchant the water at all. It wasn’t even meant to enchant the humans who heard it.

Instead it was a song that wanted only to join with them, to share in their grief and terror and then, by sharing those unbearable feelings, to let them spin away in notes as fine as strands of drifting silk.

As she sang to them, Luce began to understand. With absolute tenderness she accepted the hatred and rage of the people above her. She turned those tortured emotions into music, let them expand and float in vibrating sonic clouds. And as she sang that darkness, the crowd on the bridge discovered that darkness was no longer
necessary.
They could let it go.

A shadow seemed to press down on her. Luce glanced up in momentary alarm and saw the bridge’s planks were only a foot above her head. The wave was rising higher. In a flash she understood that more mermaids were singing to the water now. The first of the mermaids gathered by Yuan and Graciela had arrived, and they were merging their voices with the bewitching chorus below. That was why Imani had gone: to gather as many voices as possible, to swell the wave in a show of strength.

Luce leaned back, letting herself drift toward the frothing edge. The wave was wide enough to support her beyond the dark roof formed by the bridge. As she approached the drop, the currents became choppier, more effervescent, and it took increasing concentration to maintain her balance with subtle loopings and flicks of her fins. She was still singing.

It occurred to her that, if any of the humans on the bridge had a gun, they might well open fire to avenge the dead of Baltimore. For a fraction of a second she hesitated, imagining the way her heart would feel as a bullet winged through it like some bright metallic bird with sharply bladed wings.

Then she gave a last slight kick of her fins, and propelled herself out where the crowd on the bridge could see her.

Some of the faces were still crumpled with anger or slack with confusion but others were crying or simply staring into her face with wide, accepting eyes. Luce felt a kind of jolting in the wave around her. Its crest cleft into two long parallel waves, still rising, and fanned out to enwrap the bridge’s roadway without engulfing it or spilling more than a few droplets onto the people squeezed against the railings. Luce was lifted high enough that she could feel the air around her cheeks warmed by the crowd’s mingled exhalations. Some of them reached out to touch her, and Luce reached back, her fingertips grazing theirs as she swam slowly along a wave that echoed the bridge’s form.