The Twice Lost (25 page)

“This is our chance!” Luce said, so suddenly that it took her a moment to realize what she’d meant.

“Our chance to do what, Luce?” Imani said softly just beside her, and Luce reached out and squeezed her shoulder.

“Our chance to talk to
all
of them,” Luce explained. All her joy rushed back at once. Maybe there was loss and terror and trouble all around them, but she suddenly felt absolutely certain that the Twice Lost Army was doing better than anyone could have dreamed possible.

“Talking to
more
humans? Luce, can’t you control yourself?” Catarina snapped.

“Talking to them is the whole
point,
Cat!” Luce’s tail gave an abrupt swirl of excitement, and she grinned around at everyone, almost quaking with the force of her inspiration. Now that she knew exactly what she needed to do, she wasn’t about to let Cat talk her out of it. “Hey, Imani? Do you think I could borrow your scarf for a few minutes?”

“Are you
serious,
Luce?” Imani asked. But her black eyes were gleaming with delight.

“One thing I know about Luce”—Yuan laughed—“if she says something that crazy, you better believe she means it!”

Almost everyone was giggling now, half-nervous and half- delirious. It was all just so
different
from anything mermaids had ever done before. It was strange to feel such happiness in the middle of a war, but Luce couldn’t stop herself from laughing along with the others in sheer astonishment at her own daring.

“Of course I’m serious,” Luce managed through her laughter. “I’m going to go up there and say hello
.
To every single human who’s watching this!”

Extraordinary as that night and morning had been, Luce thought that what came next was the most wondrous thing of all. And yet it was so simple: just the glow on Imani’s face as she reached back and untied her headscarf.

“Tell Pharaoh’s army I said hello too, okay?”

“If you want to, Imani,” Luce told her, “you can come up and tell them yourself.”

***

Luce launched herself into the heart of the rising wave.

She rose above San Francisco Bay, her view of it wrinkled and disturbed by the glassy curves passing in front of her eyes. Skyscrapers warped and shimmered to her right, glass panes glittering like fish scales. The power of the mermaids’ singing propelled her upward, and she had to use her tail only for balance. Tiny currents torqued and jarred around her, and she had to concentrate to keep herself from being flipped through complicated somersaults. She didn’t want the humans to get the impression that she was out of control in any way. So much depended on the coming moments, and she had to be strong and graceful and persuasive.

After all, she was there to represent the Twice Lost Army.

Luce twisted to a halt ten feet in front of the cameraperson, jouncing a little with the water’s irregular impulses. The man yelped and thrashed against his ropes as he caught sight of her. Luce couldn’t help grinning to herself at his eyes rounded into astonished Os, his legs kicking as he tried to run through empty air. Funny as his panic seemed, she felt enough compassion to wave the white scarf. She didn’t actually want him to be afraid of her.

In the widening sky behind him a dozen helicopters stuttered, but none of them appeared to be the heavy military helicopters that had attacked the night before. Luce looked again and saw that they were all pointing cameras of their own.

The cameraperson had stopped kicking and instead flopped weakly in his harness. But he wasn’t looking at the white scarf; his eyes were locked on her face. The hungry adoration in his gaze almost sent Luce diving back to her friends, but then she remembered why she was there. She tipped her upper body forward until the water-wall sliced open around her face. It felt sleek and cool, like bubbling silk against her cheeks. Her fins flicked continuously to hold her in place.

“Hi,” Luce called, raising her voice to be heard over the mingling rush of water and song.

At the sound of her voice his eyes bulged and he twitched again, his lips moving around the shapes of silent words. Then he seemed to find his own voice and screamed.

Luce jarred back in shock before she understood what he was shrieking: “A mike! A mike! Get me a microphone down here! Get a mike! Carol! Sam!”

This is our chance,
Luce reminded herself.
This might be the best chance we’ll
ever
have. If there’s ever going to be peace .
 
.
 
.

Was peace enough, though?

Now that the opportunity was in front of her, shouldn’t she try to save more than just her fellow mermaids? The mermaids weren’t the only thing in danger, after all. She thought again of that field of death she’d seen on the seabed.

Above her there were confused shouts, a clatter of equipment, and then a jointed metal stalk leaned out into the air. It crooked halfway down like an insect’s leg, and at its tip there was a large black microphone coming straight toward her face.

If she chose this moment to let her voice spiral into her death song, Luce realized, it could easily have an effect equal to a nuclear bomb going off. What was happening now was so extraordinary that countless humans must be watching her. If she sang that particular lethal melody, literally millions of people would probably drown themselves. The human governments would agree to whatever she asked out of sheer terror. Mermaids all over the world would expect nothing less of her. It would be terrible—but wasn’t it possible that more lives would ultimately be saved if the war ended
now?

The microphone lurched awkwardly forward, brushing right against her lips.

“Hi,” Luce said again, her voice clear and definite—and completely free of any music. “We’re not here to hurt anyone.”

Something swished through the corner of her vision, and Luce noticed that she wasn’t alone in the wave anymore. Imani was pirouetting in slow, elegant spirals on her right, and incredibly enough Catarina had swum up too and was hovering a few yards to her left.

Luce was looking to the cameraperson for a response, so she was surprised when the reply came from above her head.

“Who are you?” a woman’s voice boomed, and Luce gazed up to see a carefully coifed woman in a cobalt blue suit bent over the railing clutching a megaphone. She looked both terrified and fascinated. Luce suddenly felt sorry for the woman, and a little heartsick that she’d even contemplated killing people like her.

“I’m General Luce. We’re the Twice Lost Army. And these are two of our lieutenants, Catarina and Imani. We don’t want to hurt anyone, and you don’t need to be scared.”

“Are you mermaids?” the woman bellowed back.

This was such an absurd question that Luce couldn’t bring herself to answer. Instead she let her long body catch the movement of the water. She swam in suspended, curling loops for a few moments then pulled herself through the wave’s flank to face the microphone again. Then she realized that the question was actually important: it was another chance to make the humans understand.

“We’re mermaids now,” Luce explained, “but we haven’t always been. All of us used to be human.”

That seemed to cause a minor uproar. Luce couldn’t quite make out what the people above her head were saying; without the megaphone their voices blended with the babble of the water and the rich swell of music. But it sounded like there was some kind of debate going on.

“Why are you doing this?” the woman finally called. “You say you don’t want to hurt anyone, but this wave is threatening San Francisco. How can you claim that’s not an act of war?”

Luce thought about that for a moment and decided that her best choice was to be honest. “It
is
war,” Luce agreed. The microphone swayed in front of her face, dark and somehow disquieting. “The human government has been killing mermaids all over the West Coast. Maybe in other places, too. They attacked us last night with submarines and helicopters, and some of us were machine gunned. We had to do something big to defend ourselves, to make them stop
shooting
at us . . .” For the first time since she’d faced the camera, Luce remembered the mesh of fine wounds covering her skin. “If we lower the wave now, they’ll kill us all. We don’t have any choice!”

Again there was consternation above her. The cameraperson squirmed, wide blue space crossed by bridges and hills glowing behind him.

He looked stunned by what she’d said. Maybe even appalled. Would other humans feel upset about the mermaids being gunned down too?

“So you aren’t going to send this wave at San Francisco?” the woman yelled. Her hair was so stiff with gel that the wind only made it fidget a little.

“Not on purpose,” Luce explained. “But if they attack us again we probably won’t be able to stop it. We have to keep singing all the time to hold the water up.” She spotted one of the military helicopters hanging far back against milky smears of cloud and nodded at it. “It looks like they already figured that out, right?”

More mermaids had joined Luce in the wave now. Delicate fins brushed Luce’s shoulder as Yuan swept in a high arc above her head.

Now that they weren’t keeping themselves secret anymore, the Twice Lost were obviously enjoying showing off for all the flabbergasted humans. Luce found herself grinning at the idea too: how the amazing beauty and power of the mermaids with her must be affecting their human viewers. Magic had ruptured the surface of their everyday world, and that magic was quick and alive and
talking
back
to them.

The next moment, though, Luce was just as surprised as the humans must be.

“Do you know someone named Andrew Korchak?” the newscaster shouted.

Luce lost her balance in the wave and dropped a dozen feet. A writhing current caught her off-guard and flipped her before she was able to recover herself and swim up to the microphone again.

Her father just wasn’t the kind of person most people
knew
about. Hearing his name from someone like this overly polished woman—that didn’t make any sense.

“He’s my dad,” Luce finally managed—and then she glanced over at Catarina’s outraged face, suddenly acutely aware that she’d never told Cat the story of how she’d found her father alive. “Is he okay?”

The woman ignored Luce’s question. “Andrew Korchak issued a statement claiming that mermaids drown people. Is he telling the truth?”

Luce reeled in the wave’s core, though this time she somehow kept herself from tumbling. Her
father
had said that? Her adored father was going out of his way to persuade everyone to hate mermaids, including his own daughter—just when the mermaids most desperately needed his help? The pain in Luce’s chest and head was so wrenching, so
physical,
that her vision blurred for a moment. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do next: scream out against his betrayal or crumple into heartbroken silence . . .

There’s no reason not to speak of the truth,
Nausicaa’s remembered voice murmured in Luce’s mind. And wasn’t that all her father had done? Speak the truth?

But
now,
Nausicaa?
Luce answered in her thoughts.
How could he do that to us now?

Speak of the truth, Luce,
Nausicaa told her.
If you want to save us, speak of the truth.

“General Luce?” the woman bellowed. “Our viewers are waiting for your answer.”

Luce pulled herself straight and looked into the camera. How could she make herself say this?

“It’s true. Most mermaids do drown people.” Luce hesitated then made a wild leap of faith. “If my dad says something, you can believe him. But
we
don’t kill. The mermaids of the Twice Lost Army all promise never to kill humans except in self-defense. If we can change, that proves other mermaids can change too!”

“So you admit that mermaids are murderers. Why should we believe that you and your followers are any different?”

Luce glowered at the woman. “You can believe it because you’re
alive
to believe it!” She almost pointed out how easily the Twice Lost could destroy every human within earshot then decided not to say anything about that. The impulse seemed less than diplomatic.

There were tears on her face, Luce noticed. That was all wrong. She shouldn’t let the humans see her crying. Maybe, maybe, they’d think her tears were just droplets from the wave.

Voices buzzed chaotically above her. All she wanted now was to get away: away from the cameras. Away from the thought that her father might hate her. Away from Catarina’s glare, and from the possibility that she’d let her army down by saying too much . . .

“General Luce?” the woman called again. “Obviously emotions are running very high at this . . . this historic moment.”

“We have demands,” Luce snapped. She felt half-sick from grief; the interview was getting to be more than she could bear. “We’re keeping the blockade up until our demands are met. Until then everyone had better keep away from our camps. And”—she felt another stab of inspiration—“if any other mermaids out there hear about this, we could use your help! Join us.”

“What are your demands? General Luce . . .”

Luce looked up at the woman with her rigid hair and shell-shocked expression. At this moment humans seemed pitiful to Luce, but they were also pretty infuriating.

“We have to think about it,” Luce announced. “We’ll send you a letter.”

“But—”

Luce plunged. Her serpentine body flashed through what felt like a rising waterfall.

“Hey!” Imani called brightly into the mike. “I just wanted to say hi to everyone too!”

21

Secretary of Defense Moreland was standing slack-jawed beside the president, a dozen generals, and half the members of the Strategic Affairs Council. He felt a shiver of icy anticipation as the microphone curved through blue air toward Lucette Korchak’s face. He was sure she would sing. She would kill them all, and his heart felt both frozen and boiling at the prospect.

He told himself that it was too late to do anything about it. Sweat sleeked his palms and his mouth seemed to be crowded with brittle leaves.