Lost Voices

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NOT FOR SALE

A N O V E L B Y

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r t e r

In this dark yet hopeful debut novel, abused girls surrender their humanity in the most dismal moments of their lives and become mermaids.

After her father vanishes in a storm at sea, fourteen-year-old Luce is stuck in a grim, gray Alaskan fishing village with her alcoholic uncle.

When her uncle crosses an unspeakable line, Luce reaches the depths of despair. Abandoned on the cliffs near her home, she expects to die when she tumbles to the icy, churning waves below. Instead, she undergoes an astonishing transformation and becomes a mermaid.

A tribe of mermaids finds Luce and welcomes her in. They are beautiful, free, and ageless, and Luce is thrilled with her new life until she discovers the catch: they feel an uncontrollable desire to drown seafarers, using their enchanted voices to lure ships in to the rocks.

Unlike the other mermaids, who are happy to wreak vengeance upon the humans who terrorized them, Luce wants to retain her inner humanity but going against her new friends could cost Luce her place in the tribe. Will she be pressured into using her extraordinary singing talent to help commit mass murder?

The first installment of a trilogy,
Lost Voices
is a captivating and wildly original tale about finding a voice, the healing power of friendship, and the strength it takes to forgive.

P

e

is a writer, an artist, and a freelance public school teacher.
Lost Voices
is her first novel. Sarah and her husband live in Brooklyn, New York.

ISBN 978-0-547-48250-7

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$16.99 • 5½ x 8¼ • 304 pages

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Ages 12 and up • Hardcover

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Publication date: July 4, 2011

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Photograph © 2010 by Chris Crumley

Publicity contact: Jennifer Taber

Hand-lettering by Georgia Deaver

617-351-3671 • [email protected]

HARCOURT

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Book Group
UNCORRECTED PROOF

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S A R A h P o R T E R

h o u g h T o N M i F F L i N h A R c o u R T

BoSToN NEw YoRk 2009

copyright © 2011 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.

www.hmhbooks.com

Text set in Tk

LiBRARY oF coNgRESS cATALogiNg iN PuBLicATioN DATA Tk

Manufactured in the united States of America Tk 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

45XXXXXXXX

For Maggie cino,

who wandered with me on the beach,

singing back to the mermaids

There’s always a siren singing you to shipwreck.

(Don’t reach out, don’t reach out, don’t reach out, don’t reach out.)
Steer away from these rocks, we’d be a walking disaster.

(Don’t reach out, don’t reach out, don’t reach out, don’t reach out.)
Radiohead, “There There”

1

Lost Voices

“ Lucette? Did you even hear the question?” Luce had been gazing out the window at the darkened sky sinking over the harbor still dotted with rough floating ice, the mountain walls of shadow- colored spruce and rusty boulders under the greenish, glassy dusk of a coming storm. Mr. Carroll’s voice jolted her back into the drab classroom with its tan desks and low scarred ceiling, and she noticed with dismay that half a dozen faces were already turning to stare into the back corner where she sat under a tattered map of the world. None of her other teachers ever called on her. Only Mr. Carroll insisted on trying to make her talk. If only he would leave her alone, Luce knew, the other kids would forget her existence completely.

She tightened her body and stared as blankly as she could at the board as the first giggles started up around her. Her stom-i 1

ach began to twist and her hands turned horribly cold. She squeezed them together under the desk to stop the trembling.

“ Lucette? You should be on page one twelve of your text-book. The third problem?”

She
was
on page one hundred and twelve. She gaped down automatically at the third problem, and she was sure she knew the right answer. It was obvious.

The laughter got louder and faster. It buzzed around her like angry wasps. Mr. Carroll waved a hand to quiet everyone, but it didn’t have much effect. She hated the concern growing in his droopy gray eyes. Luce knew that the quickest way to make them all ignore her again would be just to answer the question.
Parabolic.
She opened her mouth to say the word.

Nothing came out except a kind of faint croak. Everyone could see her now, and almost all of them were giggling. Her hands were shaking so much that she had to sit on them.

Desperately Luce tried to force her voice to shape the word. Just one word and she would be free again.

Her croaking got a little louder. Most of the time she could talk as well as anyone, even if she almost always chose to keep quiet. Lately, though, her voice had developed a habit of abandon-ing her whenever she needed it most. Someone squealed and threw a wad of paper at her, clipping her on the side of her head.

That was enough to knock Mr. Carroll out of his trance.

His wobbly eyes spun away from Luce. His huge round cheeks blushed scarlet, though there was no reason why
he
should feel embarrassed.

“Amber?” Mr. Carroll yelped, too loudly, to a girl sitting all the way at the front. It was almost a shout. It was as if he thought 2 i LOST VOICES

he could cancel out the ugliness of what he’d done, drawing all those eyes down on the skinny dark- haired girl who huddled in the back of his class, struggling with the loss of her voice.

“I have
no
idea what the answer is to this stupid problem, Mr. Carroll,” Amber twittered in her happy voice. “Nobody does except you.” The shrieks of laughter that followed were strangely excited, and Mr. Carroll took advantage of the shifting mood, clowning as he worked out the problem on the black-board. Even now he couldn’t leave it alone, though. He kept shooting Luce guilty looks, pinching his lips together, and of course everyone noticed. Every time he glanced her way, a few more pairs of eyes flocked after his. Luce kept her face down, drawing a thicket of black hatched lines in her book until the ink became so dense that hardly any white shone through.

When the bell finally rang Luce felt sicker than ever. The other students grabbed up their backpacks and raced out, eager to get to the cafeteria for lunch.
Lunch
. Where in that bright blocky room would she ever be able to hide? Mr. Carroll tried to catch her attention as she slipped past him, but Luce pretended not to notice.

“This is, like, eighth grade already,” a boy hissed in her ear.

“You act like some freaked- out ten- year- old.” Luce kept her face blank and unresponsive, even when he prodded her arm.

She slunk after the other students, staying close to the walls. A crack of thunder smacked against her thoughts. It was terrifically loud. The lightning must have struck very close to the school.

Not today,
Luce thought, and all at once she remembered the date again. Her stomach seethed, and she knew that the storm i 3