The Twice Lost (21 page)

Her pale yellow kitchen wheeled in front of her. The lilacs in the vase were turning brown, but for some reason she kept putting off throwing them out. The phone emitted what was surely its final ring, and she still couldn’t find it anywhere. Kathleen’s shoulders jerked in frustration. No,
there
it was, half-hidden by that dropped napkin.

A strange number. It
had
to be him, probably calling from some random pay phone in back of a gas station. She could picture him clutching the grubby receiver while the sunset glared off the nearby cars, his frown deepening as she didn’t answer. Kathleen was a little surprised by how hard her heart was pounding; she hadn’t run all that far. “Hello?”

Silence. She’d missed him after all.

Except the silence wasn’t perfect; it had a weirdly bubbly, echoing quality that reminded Kathleen of an abandoned swimming pool. “Hello? Anyone there?”

“Um, may I speak to Kathleen Lambert?” It was a girl’s voice overlaid by a hint of that watery quivering. Kathleen felt an icy tightness in her stomach; she thought it must come from disappointment.

“This is Kathleen.”

“Well, hi.” Now the strange girl’s voice took on a kind of smirking, self-conscious tone that made Kathleen wonder if this was a prank call. “Hi. I’m an old friend of Luce’s. Luce the mermaid? And I need to find her dad? Do you have his number?”

Of course those videos had provoked all kinds of people to e-mail and call Kathleen, to Nick’s utter irritation. Most of them seemed deranged or malicious, but there had been a few who were obviously sincere. Kathleen decided that this girl was probably lying, but she wasn’t completely sure yet. “I’m afraid Andrew doesn’t have a phone. If you’ll give me your name and contact information I could send him an e-mail, though I don’t think he checks it too often.”

“I . . . That’s not going to work!” The caller sounded petulant now, and the bubbling noise surged for a moment. Maybe there was something wrong with the connection? “Are you sure you don’t have a way I can call him? I have something really important to tell him about Luce. Like, I know he’d want to know, okay?”

Kathleen bristled at the girl’s snappish tone. “Andrew doesn’t have a phone,” she repeated. “You can’t call him. And I honestly have no idea where he is now.” The last statement wasn’t entirely true; he’d sent her a brief e-mail two days before from Portland. “Your name is?”

“Catarina,” the girl announced. “Luce was practically my best friend. I know all about her, like how she lived in that van while her dad was still a bum, and how her mom died when she was four. And I know
exactly
what her uncle did to her.”

Much as Kathleen was starting to dislike the caller, this was enough to make her hesitate. Andrew hadn’t mentioned any of that in the video they’d made together, but it did correspond quite well with what he’d told her privately. “I suppose I could give you his e-mail address if you’d rather write to him directly.”

“I need a
phone number,
” the girl sulked. “But—okay, you really don’t have one? I guess I’ll take his e-mail, sure. Maybe they can do something with that. Hold on. I have some paper . . .”

“They?”
Kathleen thought. Then she heard something in the background that sent an unaccountable chill through her heart.

A splash.

Then another one, as if the girl was thrashing around in a bathtub. But it would be absurd to think that . . .

“Where are you calling from?” Kathleen heard herself ask shrilly. All at once her hands were trembling violently, and her body felt cold and hollow and as full of echoes as that watery space where—

“Wait. He said if you started getting suspicious, I should just . . .”

Kathleen’s hands jerked strangely as she tried to disconnect the call.

Her twitching thumb missed the button. The phone dropped and skidded face-up across the kitchen table, coming to rest against the vase of lilacs. And all at once the calm afternoon air was streaked by an unimaginable sound, a terrible metallic sweetness that buzzed through her ears and tore at them.
Power,
Kathleen thought in confusion.
Power to reclaim Eileen, to punish anyone who ever hurt Eileen, anyone who tried to get in our way .
 
.
 
.

Power was beauty, power was the photons pummeling her with astounding vitality, power was her body’s atoms all waking up at once and pealing together like a million bells.

Kathleen didn’t know when she’d picked up the phone again. She squeezed it to her ear until her skull seemed charged by that music, until a stampede of notes bit at her brain and goaded it. It was exhilaration beyond anything she could have dreamed, but it was as intolerable as it was thrilling: intolerable, Kathleen realized vaguely, because she hadn’t yet reached to truly
claim
this power and this brilliance. It was all rightfully hers, every spark of it, though someone seemed to be trying to steal it from her. If she didn’t reach
it
in time . . .

Kathleen couldn’t have said quite what
it
was. She had an impression one instant of a castle made of stinging light, and in the next moment the castle morphed into a sort of crystalline, thundering horse with shifting facets, Eileen swinging on its back and calling to her.

It didn’t matter to her that she didn’t know exactly
what
it was, this electric bliss that the music kept promising her. She knew she had to hurry before she lost it forever. Most important, she knew exactly
where
it was waiting for her.

Out the kitchen door, down the sloping street, why, she was already walking—no, running, no, it was better to walk casually in case anyone else realized what she was after and got there first—the phone still crushed against her ear and the blood in her head throbbing fiercely in time with the song.

Orange sunset light exploding everywhere, astonishment flaring in the trees, wide laughing mouths raining down from the blossoms . . .

Even through the unbearable music pounding at her ear Kathleen could still hear a sound that told her the promise would soon be fulfilled. Waves, she could hear the waves. They were the charging hoofbeats of an infinite horse assembled from moving diamonds. In the horse’s heart Eileen was waiting, whispering.
“Keenie, hurry up hurry up hurry up! I’ve been waiting for you for so long!”

Kathleen turned a corner and saw the ocean as she’d never seen it before: countless blazing geometric planes, all transfiguring into momentary birds and stars and armies . . .

Someone who Kathleen knew had been a close friend of hers quite recently, maybe even yesterday, came up and started yammering stupidly about something and then looked hurt as Kathleen shoved past her . . .

The music and the sea were almost together now. When they finally met they would merge and expand, and Kathleen would ride with her sister in the quick of the miracle. She couldn’t stand waiting anymore; she started running right down the center of the street, dodging cars, then out onto the long dock where she’d had her first glimpse of what
could
be . . .

Just for a moment that astonishing music paused, replaced by a weary sigh from the phone. “I wish you’d finish up,” a girl’s voice complained. “I’m getting
bored.
”

Kathleen veered into a railing, gasped, and looked at water that was suddenly just water. She felt a frigid internal touch; something corrosive and evil fingered her heart. What was she
doing?

The singing started again.

Eileen’s face became as huge as a cloud; it had endless changing angles, all of them sharp with glory; her mouth opened wide in greeting.

Kathleen vaulted over the railing. She felt her sister’s teeth close in.

They were very cold.

***

General Prudowski spread the photos in front of Secretary Moreland—satellite photos of the ocean near San Francisco taken over the previous three nights. The photos were utterly unbelievable; it was an insult to Moreland’s intelligence that Prudowski was forcing these images on him at all, let alone insisting that Luce Korchak must be responsible for those watery, convoluted ramparts rearing out of the Pacific. He began wondering how he might teach the general a lesson.

The general wouldn’t stop jabbering insolently about mermaids working together, and about some
plan
he had for stopping them. Maybe it would be simplest to agree, before his confusion became too obvious.

In a dorm room in Boston a chubby, sweet-faced, gold-skinned girl sat on her bed with her arms wrapped around her knees. She’d cut class that morning for the first time in her life, telling her roommate that she was nauseous and might be getting stomach flu. The nauseous part was true enough, but she knew flu wasn’t the reason she felt so awful.

A camera rested on her bedspread with its pattern of cartoon cats, and Gigi looked at the cats to avoid looking at the camera. For the last seven years she’d managed mostly to ignore the memories of the afternoon her mother had drowned, the afternoon her own life had been saved so inexplicably; at least, she managed to ignore them as long as she worked all the time and blasted abrasive music to drown out the music in her head; at least, until she had to go to sleep.

But now . . .
I bet you don’t want them all dead any more than I do.
Now the scruffy-looking man from that damned Internet video kept talking in her thoughts, trying to persuade her to do something thoroughly reckless.

“They killed my
mother,
” Gigi argued aloud. Her mother had taken her out on a whale watching trip for her birthday, but they hadn’t seen whales. “And their songs—it’s like I’ve had some kind of brain disease ever since. Why would I make a fool of myself in public for them?”

So I’m here to ask
. . .
Then there’d been the unbearably beautiful music that made her want to die from the sheer force of her joy, as if she’d finally understood that the only way to love life enough was to end it. The crash, the wild deep water.
If that’s you, and some mermaid saved your life before
. . .

Gigi thought of the astonishing face that had suddenly appeared next to hers in the water; it had belonged to a girl whose skin gleamed with subtle golden glow and whose body coiled away into a pinkish gold tail. The girl had looked distinctly pissed off, and she’d hesitated for several long seconds as bubbles oozed from Gigi’s lips, staring at her as they descended together. Then with a sudden angry shake the mermaid had grabbed her and dragged her back to the surface, glaring furiously at the other mermaids who still trilled their incantations to the sinking crowd.

“Queen Yuan?” one of them had called out, more bewildered than indignant. “What are you
doing?
”

The mermaid called Queen Yuan hadn’t answered, just taken off swimming with Gigi clutched in her arms. Gigi had gagged up salt water and wrenched her neck to take in as much as she could of the mermaid’s impossibly lovely face. The music still throbbed through her, and it didn’t even occur to her that her mother was dying.

Three of the mermaids followed them, calling to Yuan in coaxing voices. “Yuan, come on! You know we don’t want to expel you!” And: “Yuan, she’s just human! Please,
please
let us drown her. Do it for me?”

Yuan never answered them, just surged on through the waves with a bitter, stubborn expression, her black hair fanning through the pearl gray water. How long had they gone on like that before Yuan shoved her roughly onto a sandy shore, beating Gigi with her tail to make her get up? The golden fins smacked at her face, then her legs, while Yuan snarled, “Run! Stupid human, run! Inland!
Now!
”

Get up on this Internet and say so
. . .

“I’ll never live it down,” Gigi argued back. “I’ll spend the rest of my life being that dumb girl who will make up any whacked-out thing to get attention. Mike will probably break up with me. And, seriously, you think that’s going to help me get into graduate school?”

What price had Queen Yuan paid for rescuing her, though?

Gigi wiped the tears from her face and picked up the camera, balancing it on her knees and staring at the empty black lens. She inhaled slowly twice then tapped a button, gritting her teeth as a small red light blinked on. “Hi. I’m Gigi Garcia-Chang and I’m here to answer Andrew Korchak’s call for testimony from people whose lives were saved by mermaids . . .”

It got a little easier after that.

18

Luce woke up at sunset, when a young mermaid whose name she didn’t know stopped by Catarina’s hammock to give them a small heap of oysters she’d brought back from deeper in the bay. Yuan had given the job of collecting shellfish to crews of the smaller girls, who went foraging every day with scraps of net slung over their shoulders and then came back to distribute their hauls. Cat fell back asleep as soon she’d finished eating, but Luce slipped out from under the warehouse to watch the sun sinking behind the hills and jagged factories of the city. She didn’t know why she felt so sad. Training was going remarkably well, and everyone seemed happier and less anxious. Behind her an encampment that now held well over two hundred mermaids drowsed and chatted and wove more hammocks to accommodate all the new arrivals, and there were many more members of the Twice Lost Army scattered around the bay. Luce couldn’t help realizing how much most of them trusted her. Somehow without even knowing what she was doing, she’d found a kind of destiny.

Luce hadn’t told them what Seb had said about that video she’d accidentally starred in. It seemed like too much to explain, but Luce had to admit to herself that it might be an important development. In fact, she still hadn’t told anyone except Imani about Seb at all.

Millions of people had watched her swimming out from under that dock. They’d seen her hesitate as she considered trying to get a message to her father and then turn back to the sea as she rejected the idea. But maybe, just maybe, her father was one of the millions who’d seen the video. Maybe she’d managed to let him know she was alive after all.