The Twice Lost (16 page)

“I mean when I saved that girl.” Oddly, Yuan lifted her hand and stared into the palm as if it were a mirror. “I didn’t even
try
to hide it, Luce. Can you believe that? I saved her right in front of my tribe, like ‘hell with all of you’! They were too shocked to try to stop me or anything. But the whole time I was dragging that lousy human through the water I
hated
what I was doing, I
hated
that I couldn’t stop myself . . .”

Luce didn’t know what surprised her the most: that it was a girl Yuan had saved or that rescuing someone had wounded her so terribly. “Do you know why you did it?” Luce asked softly. “There must have been—or, well, was there a reason why you chose her?”

“A
completely
pathetic reason.” Yuan shook her head in impatience. “She looked like my best friend from when I was—from
before.
I knew it couldn’t be her, like this girl wasn’t even old enough, but I couldn’t stop myself from acting like it was her anyway.”

Luce thought she was about to say the wrong thing, but somehow she’d stopped being able to keep her feelings secret. “Yuan? It
was
her.”

Yuan smiled ruefully. “I knew you were crazy.”

“No—I mean, that girl you saved, she probably meant as much to someone else as your friend meant to you, right? So it was the same as if you’d saved your friend, only for—for whoever cared about that girl. You kept
somebody’s
heart from getting broken.” Luce stopped, surprised by the thoughts racing through her mind.
That girl was starred by love, just like your friend. The love is the same, so it doesn’t matter who’s feeling it.

Maybe she could have said something that weird to Nausicaa but not to anyone else.

Yuan made a face. “You almost sound like you think humans are the same as us. Like what they feel
counts
the same way.”

Luce didn’t answer that. Her thoughts were still with the girl Yuan had saved; she could almost see her hair trailing through the water, her face thrown back toward the sky. “Did you see her again? The girl?”

Yuan looked shocked. “Of
course
not! Making friends with some human—what do you take me for?” Luce didn’t say anything but her expression gave her away, and Yuan’s cheeks flushed. “Uh, sorry. If you did—after everything I’ve done in my life, I guess I couldn’t blame you for . . .”

Luce’s face was blazing and she looked away. “Can we please not talk about it?”

Yuan hesitated. “You said it was a boy, right? The human you broke the timahk for?”

“It was a boy,” Luce agreed stiffly. “Yuan, I actually—I really need to talk to you about something else, okay? I wanted to ask you a favor.”

From the corner of her eye Luce couldn’t help noticing how fixed and curious Yuan’s gaze looked. She wasn’t going to stop wondering about Luce’s past. “What favor?”

“Well—you said there are a lot of other mermaids. Living around the bay? It’s not just the girls here, right?” Luce made herself look back at Yuan, though hot veils of shame still seemed to press on her face.

“Tons. A few actually came out last night when you were singing, didn’t you notice? And somebody was telling me that a whole new tribe just turned up this morning, like somebody came and warned them but they didn’t know where else to go.”

Luce felt a surge of gratitude at the thought that they’d been warned by J’aime, still struggling to save as many mermaids as she could. “I wanted to ask if you would go talk to them. To the other mermaids around the bay.” Luce hesitated; it seemed so presumptuous. “Ask them if they’d like to join us for training tonight.”

“You mean—if they’ll promise not to kill humans in exchange for learning what you can do?” Yuan thought about it. “You even want me to ask the crazy ones?”

“If . . . if that’s okay with you. I mean . . .” Luce tried to shake off her embarrassment. “I think we’re going to need as many mermaids working with us as we can get. If we’re really going to stop the humans.”

“So you’re not just talking about teaching everyone? You’re talking about . . .”

“About asking them to
really
join us. Yeah.” Luce considered the question then straightened herself. “Please tell them that General Luce is inviting them to join the Twice Lost Army.”

13

“Hi,” Andrew Korchak said as the door swung open. He’d arrived at a small, white, extremely pretty house, its yard a jumble of vivid flowers and its windows set with panes of stained glass. He couldn’t help feeling out of place there. “Um, I’m Andrew. We talked on the phone?”

“Of course. Very glad to meet you.” The woman stepping back to welcome him in was also small and pretty, with light brown hair in a ponytail and soft blue eyes. “I’m Kathleen, and this is Nick.”

Andrew shook hands with her and then, a bit less comfortably, with her angular, balding husband. “I really appreciate you both agreeing to see me about this. I don’t mean to impose.”

“Of course not! After what you told us, we wanted this meeting just as—well, I’m sure not as
much
as you, I don’t mean—but it feels very important to us also.” Kathleen was leading the way down a broad hall lined in books, with small twisty tables displaying collections of seashells. Andrew couldn’t help thinking how the sight of all those books would thrill Luce if she were here with him. “You can imagine, we’ve received some pretty peculiar messages since we posted that video, but yours— I knew right away that it was something different.”

“I know I must sound like a nut,” Andrew said defensively. “I’ve got the photos right here. I’m sure you want to see for yourselves—that this is for real.” They walked into a kitchen where, to Andrew’s surprise, a large wooden table was set with plates and glasses, a salad and cheese and fruit. The warm, yeasty smell of fresh bread mixed with the scent of roses gusting through the window. Heavy lilacs swooped from a vase. “Oh—I didn’t mean for you to go to all this trouble! I’m . . .” He wasn’t sure what to say. He’d been hitchhiking for days, not eating much, and it was all he could do not to lunge for the food. “I’m real grateful.”

“Our pleasure,” Nick said behind him; a little primly, maybe, but it didn’t sound hostile. “But I
would
like to see those photos, Andrew, when you get a chance.”

He was already pulling the pictures out of an inside pocket, spreading them out to show his hosts. What would he do if they decided it was all a lie? “This one—you maybe can’t see so good that it’s the same girl. She was only three there, with her mother. But this one right here . . .”

Kathleen had turned greenish white and she teetered a little. Nick moved to put his arm around her. “Oh, Nick. Oh my God, it’s her!” The words came out in a long moan.

“It certainly—if that’s not the same face we saw, there’s an impressive resemblance at least.”

“It’s
her.
It’s even the same expression that she had when she looked at me! You could see in her eyes that she’d been through things that, that no one should ever have to . . .” Kathleen’s voice was breaking, and she bit her lower lip.

“It’s my Lucette. It’s the same girl who you all filmed out in the water. And—there’s some terrible things happening, and—I didn’t do enough to protect her before, but now . . .” He broke off when his view of the sunny room started rippling in the tears filling his eyes. He was longing to tell Kathleen everything, but he didn’t feel as confident about trusting her husband.

Wordlessly Nick pulled out a chair for him, and he slumped down. Kathleen dealt with her emotion by swinging into energetic movement, bustling to fetch a bread knife and ice and a pitcher of lemonade. Andrew watched her dart around the kitchen in her jeans and pale blouse, her ponytail lashing.
This
was how he should have brought Luce up, in a house just like this one. He pictured Alyssa’s dark hair tumbling as she bent to lift bread from the oven.

“So,” Nick said, and Andrew jumped at the sound of his voice, “assuming you’re both correct about the identity of the mermaid we saw—and I have to say I think that’s a
huge
assumption for all of us to make—there’s still a question I’d like answered, if you could.”

Kathleen smacked the cutting board down hard enough to make the silverware rattle, and thumped the bread on top. “Would you please not condescend to me! It’s not an assumption!”

Nick smiled over at him in a way Andrew found vaguely irritating, as if he’d be sure to agree that Kathleen was just one of those high-strung women who have to be humored. “All right, darling. Let’s say that the mermaid’s identity is an irrefutable
fact:
she is Lucette, and the earth orbits the sun. It still leaves us with one unavoidable question, doesn’t it?” Kathleen was slicing bread more vigorously than seemed strictly necessary. “Why was it a
mermaid
we saw and not a teenage girl in a swimsuit? Do you think that’s something you could resolve for us, Andrew?”

“When you wouldn’t even
admit
that we’d seen a mermaid at all until we watched our
own
video ten times, I don’t think you get to lay claim to some kind of higher rationality!” Kathleen fumed. She slathered butter on a hunk of bread and flung it on Andrew’s plate in a way that made him grin uncontrollably.

“It’s okay,” Andrew said softly. “I can answer. But it just . . . it means getting into kind of a long story, and a lot of it . . . it might be hard for me to say. Or for you to believe, really. I’ll do my best, though.”

“Please,” Kathleen said. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her. Whatever you can tell me, it would mean so much! Right now all we know is what Chrissy told us.”

“Chrissy?”

“The neighbor’s little girl. You can see her in the video too. She said she talked to the mermaid under the dock and brought her some food, and that the mermaid was very nice and told Chrissy not to trust magic things, and that she’d been bit by a squid.”

“And you believe every word Chrissy said, because seven-year-old children
never
invent stories like that?” Nick asked.

Kathleen looked like she was on the verge of an outburst, and Andrew tried to deflect it. “That rip in Lucette’s ear? Must have been a pretty big squid.”

“Oh.” Kathleen sounded distracted. “Maybe one of the Humboldts. They’ve been showing up here recently. Andrew, I’m sorry. You were about to tell us about you and Lucette.”

“Yeah. See, the thing is I wasn’t around when she changed, but she told me about it later.” Andrew barely remembered to eat as he told the story, trying to keep it as short as possible. He left out some things, like how he’d made his living during their years on the road; he didn’t want his hosts to start worrying that their credit cards would disappear. But he tried to be honest about the rest of it: how Alyssa had died as a result of their rambling life, how he’d finally moved to Alaska to give Luce some stability, then how his fishing boat was destroyed in a storm not long afterward, drowning almost everyone onboard. How he wound up marooned on an island in the middle of the Bering Sea, leaving Luce alone with her alcoholic uncle . . .

He tried to stay focused on Kathleen, but he couldn’t help noticing the incredulity twisting through Nick’s face. He decided to limit his explanation of how he’d survived on that island to the parts that wouldn’t sound too crazy, like relying on the geothermal springs for warmth in the winter and hunting seals.

Even so the story sounded dreamy, fantastical. And he hadn’t even gotten to the part where his daughter showed up but transformed into a mermaid.

Andrew heard Nick’s chair scrape back and turned to look as the other man stood up. “This is all very interesting, but there’s a lot of yard work I still have to get done today.”

“Nick,” Kathleen objected, “this is important. It’s important to me to understand as much as possible, and I really think—you need to hear this too.”

“The only reason I agreed to go through with this was that I was hoping you’d find some closure, Kath!” Nick’s knees were trembling, and his voice grew sharper with every word. “I’m waiting for you to put this—this senseless episode behind you, and stop
dreaming.
And now this man comes in here and starts spinning these fairy tales, and I have to watch you sitting there and swallowing every preposterous word without the slightest sign of critical reflection!”

Andrew couldn’t resist defending himself. “A lot of what I’ve said you can double-check that it’s true. That the
High and Mighty
vanished, and I was on it, and that I was presumed dead along with everybody else. All that’s public record; you can check . . .” Andrew’s voice trailed away.

“Not interested,” Nick growled. “Kath, come get me when you’re
done
here.”

“You’re not interested, because you don’t
want
to know the truth!” Kathleen snapped. Then she turned pointedly away from her husband, her lips compressed. “Andrew, I’m so sorry about the interruption. You were saying?”

“I’m thinking . . . maybe I should leave?” Andrew asked.

“Only if you want to leave me seeing her in my mind all the time, and
wondering,
” Kathleen said. “Something—the sense that I’m really connected to my regular life, I guess—it feels broken. Once you know that something so extraordinary is that close . . .”

Nick stalked out of the kitchen and through a back hallway. They heard a door slam. “I’m real sorry,” Andrew said. “I didn’t mean to start any kind of trouble for you.”

“You didn’t,” Kathleen breathed. “The trouble was there already. Nick wants to believe that it’s all because of your daughter, but really . . .”

Andrew didn’t feel particularly sorry at the news that Kathleen’s marriage was troubled and then noticed how not sorry he was.

“Anyway,” Kathleen went on, “please tell me your story.”

Andrew did: how Luce had found him and how he’d refused for months to believe that the mermaid in the water was really his daughter and not some kind of delusion. Then, once he’d accepted it, what Luce had told him about the reasons for her change. Kathleen listened intently.

“So—is she the only one? Or is this . . . this transformation through trauma something that happens to . . .” Kathleen’s eyes went wide. “Oh, no.”