The Twice Lost (37 page)

“Sir? Shall we proceed?”

Moreland began walking automatically, almost brushing against that glowering face as he passed. “What about human activity?” Moreland asked. He knew that asking questions was expected of him, but in this case he also felt an ache of genuine interest. Human rebelliousness would be instigated by that Dorian Hurst boy; it would justify his steadily mounting fury at Anais.

“Human activity?”

“Those self-hating children calling themselves Twice Lost Humans. Any more trouble from them?”

“Yes, sir. There are large demonstrations going on in several cities at the moment. Most without permits. And there was an attempt to build a barricade across Route Sixty-six.”

Unbelievable foolishness. Clearly there was a need for drastic action. General Luce’s movement couldn’t be allowed to disrupt naval traffic in any more cities, and she certainly couldn’t go on attracting human followers seduced by her phony pacifism, her pretended naïve desire to protect the oceans.

The public needed to hate mermaids as much, as implacably, as he did. As for the way to make that happen, well . . .

It was unfair and outrageous that all the real effort, all the imagination and initiative, fell to him. But it looked like he’d just have to take matters into his own hands.

30

“Hey, Luce?” Imani had swum up beside her just after Luce’s shift ended. They were floating together in the low waves halfway between the bridge and the crowd onshore. Luce was watching Eileen, who’d swum over to scan the faces in the crowd; she seemed to spend half her time there, swimming back and forth for hours. Obviously Eileen was searching for someone in particular, and Luce wondered who it was. And there was Yuan, leaning on the shore and talking with her new human friend Gigi again . . .

“Hey, Imani,” Luce murmured. “Everything okay?” In the days since the murder, they’d fallen back into the same steady routine of singing and sleep. Nothing had really changed, except for occasional reports that mermaids in other cities had joined the Twice Lost and renounced killing and raised waves of their own. Nausicaa was doing incredible work, that was clear, and everyone was feeling optimistic. Their friends onshore told them about increasing numbers of humans protesting on the mermaids’ behalf too. Almost everyone in the Twice Lost Army seemed convinced that the eagerly-awaited negotiations would start very soon, now that their movement was spreading and now that more and more humans seemed to be on their side. But as the days went by without a response from the human government, Luce only grew more anxious.

She could understand why so many of her followers were hoping for an easy victory. But this almost seemed
too
easy.

“It’s about Catarina,” Imani began, and Luce groaned inwardly. “She’s completely stopped showing up for her shifts, Luce. And some of the other mermaids over at the Mare Island camp say she’s been getting really angry for no reason and saying horrible things, like that Nausicaa persuaded you to betray everything mermaids stand for. I know she got jealous of Nausicaa, but still . . .”

Luce bit her lip. “Why does Catarina have to go and make
more
problems? Everything’s already so hard, and she’s just making it all worse.”

Imani looked at her for a long moment, her eyes deep and searching. “But Luce . . . you’re still her
friend,
right?”

Luce considered that. Delicate wands of mist stroked over the water, and by the shore it glowed mirror smooth and brilliantly silver. Gigi and Yuan were laughing hard about something, and the sight of their closeness brought tears into Luce’s eyes. Even if Catarina’s constant moodiness sometimes became exhausting, Luce did still love her. Maybe she
should
be the one to try harder, to reach out. “I’m still her friend. I just want her to stop making everything so complicated! Just because Nausicaa’s my friend too, she doesn’t need to go off and sulk and start telling
lies
like that.”

“I think she’s depressed, Luce. She thinks she’s losing you.” Imani’s voice was even softer than usual. “You should go talk to her.”

Luce sighed. The Twice Lost Army had swelled with the addition of refugees and drifters attracted by their fame, and a large mermaid encampment had sprung up under the wharves of the abandoned naval shipyards at Mare Island far in the north bay. The last thing Luce felt like doing was swimming that far, especially when it might mean another argument. But Imani was right: if Luce cared about Catarina’s feelings, she should do something to show it. “Okay. I’ll go. Imani . . .”

Imani only smiled silently, the silver water lapping around her dark shoulders.

“Thank you for . . . for reminding me to do the right thing. You always do.”

***

Luce knew more or less where to find the Mare Island camp, but she hadn’t actually been there before. When she surfaced fifty yards from its shore she was bewildered by the sweep and confusion of the island’s waterfront: rusty cranes painted mustard and navy and dusty green crisscrossed the sky, a row of collapsing barracks stood deep in swaying yellow grass, and graffiti mottled the scaling white warehouses with names densely layered in ruby and silver scrawl. Bridges arched everywhere behind the island, their iron beams a complicated geometric lace against the mist covering the hills. Swallows dipped overhead. It was as lonely in its way as the distant coast of Alaska had been. In that whole decrepit expanse she didn’t see a single human being.

But somewhere under the water, Mare Island wasn’t deserted at all. Luce dived again, skimming along the jagged piers that rambled out into the bay. She could hear voices licking through the water but so bent and trembling that it was hard to tell quite where they were coming from. She was swimming away from the tangle of cranes and desolate buildings, out to where a broad dark pier glowered just above the water’s surface. A charred, half-fallen shed leaned at its end, and as Luce approached it girls’ voices seemed to drift closer to her.

“General Luce! You came to see us!” It was the tan-skinned mermaid who’d sung beside Luce through the night after that shocking murder. “Um, do you remember me?”

“Of course I remember you. I was so sad that night, and hearing you sing—it helped keep me going.” Luce hesitated. “But I don’t know your name?”

“Thanks. I’m Elva.” She suddenly sounded shy. “Did you swim up here for a reason?”

“I have to find Catarina,” Luce said softly.

Elva’s expression darkened as she pointed into the deep shadows under the pier. “She’s back there, all the way at the shore. Look, if she gives you a hard time . . .”

Luce tried to smile, but her insides were tense with dread. “It’ll be okay.” She dived, dipping and weaving her way through a forest of swaying fins. There were even more mermaids here than in the encampment near Hunter’s Point. The low dark space was densely webbed with nets and hammocks. Mermaids curled half-submerged, dreaming or whispering.

Luce found her former queen slumped on her side on the gritty pebble shore. The pier formed a ceiling less than a foot above their heads, its rotting beams glittering with condensation and grubby with soot. Catarina’s arm stretched up the beach, her pale hand emerging from her pooling red-gold hair; she turned her head just enough to glance sullenly at Luce, then buried her face in the fiery tangles again. Luce reached out and lightly touched her shoulder. “Hey, Cat?”

Catarina pivoted her head again. “Hello,
generalissima.
You seem to have gone out of your way for once.”

Luce suppressed an impulse to snap back at her. “Cat, things shouldn’t be like this with us! I don’t really understand why you’re so angry with me, but—”

“Angry?” Catarina raised herself slightly. Her stunning face was oddly blotchy and streaked with black dust. “Is that what I am, Lucette? Angry that you’re still so childish that you can’t see through Nausicaa and her ridiculous flattery? Is
that
what you think?”

It took an effort, but Luce kept her voice level. “I really didn’t come here to fight with you, Cat.” She paused, wondering if she should ask the next question, not sure she wanted to know the answer. “What do you have against Nausicaa, anyway? You said something about her and Queen Marina . . .” Queen Marina, whom Catarina had adored and followed and lost when the queen left the sea out of love for a human and died on the shore. Luce couldn’t quite believe that Nausicaa would have done anything truly wrong to Marina, though.

“Indeed.” Catarina exhaled sharply. “Indeed, just as Nausicaa is doing now with you, Lucette. She appeared out of nowhere, telling her preposterous stories of living with the first mermaids, of spending thousands of years in the sea and escaping death again and again. And Marina believed all of it, blindly enchanted with her. For three months Marina completely forgot the rest of us. She behaved like the tide chasing after the moon.”

Catarina was just jealous, then. “If that’s all that happened, you shouldn’t have made everybody think that Nausicaa did something untrustworthy! Cat, those things you said when Nausicaa came, I mean, all of that
really
wasn’t fair.”

Catarina glowered. “Nausicaa
is
untrustworthy. She abandoned Marina in the night, with no explanation, no goodbye. For so great a queen as Marina, to have her devotion discarded so callously . . . She never fully recovered her former strength of mind, Lucette. She was half-broken, remote. And it was not long afterward that Marina sought consolation by throwing herself into the arms of that
human.
If it hadn’t been for Nausicaa’s heartlessness . . .”

Luce flinched, thinking of how recently she’d woken up to find that Nausicaa had vanished. And then, Catarina . . . “But
you
left
me
without saying goodbye, Cat. Don’t you remember? Up in Alaska I came back to the cave and you were just gone. I don’t see why it’s so different when Nausicaa does the same thing.”

“
I
had no choice!” Catarina snarled. She moved to sit up, but the filthy planks above stopped her. “For Nausicaa
everything
is a choice. Anyone who cares for her is simply a temporary amusement, Lucette. As you will certainly discover! But I had
real
responsibilities. I had to do whatever I could to save our tribe from that
sika
Anais. The only possibility open to me was to leave you, and to trust that you would behave with honor and become their queen!” Catarina laughed bitterly. “I gave you too much credit, it seems. Queen is too trivial a title to tempt you. You require much more than that!”

For a moment Luce was distracted by anger at Catarina’s insinuations. Her tail thrashed the murky water into froth and she looked away into the dimness, fighting to compose herself. Then it hit her: “that
sika
”? Luce was certain she’d never heard Catarina use that word before: the word for a mermaid who’d lost her humanity not through suffering like the rest of them, but simply through her own essential coldness, her utter inability to feel or to love.

Luce had learned that Anais was a
sika
from Nausicaa, in fact, along with everything a
sika
’s nature implied. But Catarina had never even mentioned it as a possibility.

“You knew Anais was a
sika?
” Luce asked. Her voice came out thin and high and oddly detached from her, a rag of sound brushing through the shadows. “Did you know that all along?”

The dim glow of Catarina’s face showed the flickering shifts of her expression all too clearly: surprise, an instantaneous blink of something like alarm, then a slight self-conscious smirk. Streams of copper-shining hair obscured one of her moon gray eyes. “Well . . . I knew there was nothing to see, of course, in the indication that surrounded her. Nothing like a story to be captured with a sideways glance, as I can still observe the story of what your uncle did to you. But as for what that meant . . . I suppose I knew that Anais
might
be one of such mermaids as I had heard described some years before, a
sika.
”

“But if you knew,” Luce began, her voice still that thin strange scrap drifting on the air between them. “Cat, if you knew you should have
warned
everyone as soon as Anais joined us! Why didn’t you . . . we could have thrown her out of the tribe before . . .”
Before so many people died, before the tribe went crazy sinking all those ships, before she killed those larval mermaids. Before she tried to murder Dana and Violet and me,
Luce thought.

Catarina looked away, and all at once Luce knew
exactly
why she hadn’t taken action to prevent Anais from worming her way into the tribe and destroying it.

“Had you learned what a
sika
was from
Nausicaa,
Cat? And because you just didn’t want to believe Nausicaa was right about
anything
. . . you pretended everything was fine with Anais until most of the girls in our tribe were on her side, and it was too late?” Luce stopped talking. She felt as if all the air had been ripped from her lungs, as if her heart was seized in a vice that squeezed all the blood from it and kept it from beating.

Cat still wouldn’t meet her eyes, and Luce knew it was true. Catarina had actually
allowed
Anais to take over the tribe out of the spite and envy she felt toward Nausicaa. She’d willfully ignored the warnings she’d heard years before Anais was even born.

“Cat?” Luce’s voice came out jagged, accusatory. “Cat, is that what happened? You should have driven Anais away the second she showed up, and you just didn’t do it? And then you left me alone to deal with
your
mess?”

Catarina glanced at her for just a fraction of a second. The gray shine of her eyes stabbed through the shadows, flashed away again. “I suppose the question seems so easy to you, Lucette. You would never doubt anything Nausicaa told you, not even the most outrageous lies. After all, if you did, you would also have to doubt the sincerity of her
friendship
for you. But Nausicaa never told
me
lies too charming to question. So why would I believe a single word she said?”