8

The Jacket

When Luce woke up the next day she stretched and rolled where she was, acutely aware of the subtle wavering of the water against her scales. The sensation of Dorian’s cheek pressed to hers lingered on in her skin. She felt imprinted by his warmth, and the softness of his touch still breathed through her hair. Luce had been too shy and withdrawn as a human girl to talk to boys at all, much less kiss them. She was still in shock from the sweetness of it all. The timahk, she decided, must simply be wrong. There was no good reason, not really, why she shouldn’t have a boyfriend onshore, at least as long as she could persuade him to keep the existence of mermaids a secret. She remembered how passionately Catarina had warned her against falling for a human, but then Catarina hated humans so much, and so indiscriminately, that it simply made her unreasonable. A lot of humans might be evil and destructive, Luce knew. But there were others, like Dorian, who were warm and brave and open-hearted and who understood how infinite the world really was.

She slipped out to look for breakfast and found the sea blanketed in a dense, sullen fog. Every time she came above water it was as if she were enclosed in a soft gray egg, and even her outstretched hands vanished from sight. Only the rattling of a high wind in the spruce trees told her the direction of the shore. Winter was coming fast. It was going to get colder very quickly now, and there would be ferocious storms. She should look for a better spot where she and Dorian could meet; even if he was exceptionally brave, Luce thought, he was still fragile like all humans, terribly vulnerable to the cold.

Luce swam underwater so that she could see the way to her dining beach; that was the only way she could make out the shape of the coast and spot the familiar rocks going by. When she came up she heard a windy half-song. It wasn’t wind, she knew at once, but another mermaid disguising her voice with the airy call they used to beckon each other when they were afraid of being overheard by humans. The fog was so thick and pillowing that it muffled the sound, and Luce dipped again to try and find the source of it. Whoever it was sounded nervous, she thought, and then the voice began to seem a bit familiar. By the time she caught sight of a distant, coppery flash, Luce had already recognized it: Dana, resting on a sandbar not far from shore. She’d finally come to demand an accounting, then. Luce hurried over to her, rehearsing lies as she swam, and came up ready to pour out the story of how she’d murdered Dorian.

“Oh, thank God! I couldn’t tell where I was, and I thought maybe I’d gone way past your cave.” As Dana spoke she still scanned the sea anxiously, though there was nothing to see but the pearly gray blindness of the mist. “I got too scared to keep going. You remember Regan?” Luce had hardly ever talked to Regan, but she nodded. “An orca almost got her, Luce. A few of us were just swimming over to get dinner yesterday, and we weren’t paying attention. It came up so fast, and she actually managed to leap sideways right before its teeth snapped closed, but her fin got torn. They’re really ... Kayley says there aren’t as many seals as there used to be, so the orcas are getting really hungry. They keep acting crazier all the time.” Dana was so agitated that Luce didn’t have any time to react to this. “And Samantha sure can’t keep her mouth shut, but I don’t know what to believe. But you did something to Anais, right? She was being a total screaming bitch last night. She didn’t seem to care about Regan at all, and the rest of us were freaking out, we were so worried.”

Luce had been so ready to start reciting her story—slamming up into Dorian’s rowboat, dragging him under—that she was almost disappointed to find that Dana didn’t seem interested anymore. “I ran into Anais and Samantha yesterday.”

Dana flashed her a skeptical look. “You ran into them?”

“No, really. It was really by accident, Dana! I wasn’t trying to start anything with them. It just—things got weird really quickly.”

“Okay. They would get weird. You’re going to tell me everything, right?”

It wasn’t the story Luce had expected to tell, but maybe it was better this way. “Let’s go to the beach first, okay? I haven’t had anything to eat yet.”

 

Sprawling next to Dana on a beach, cracking oysters and talking while their tails swished side by side along the seafloor, felt almost like being back in her old tribe. Much as she felt drawn to Dorian, powerfully as she wanted to feel his hands on her face again, Luce realized that his company was never going to stop her from missing being with other mermaids, too.

Dana listened wide-eyed while Luce described her encounter with Anais, stopping her every few moments to ask questions. When Luce got to the part about Anais torturing the larva, Dana gasped and put her hands over her eyes for a moment.

“She held its tail out? Luce, really?”

Luce was relieved. It wasn’t just that Dana had chosen to ignore what Anais was doing, then.

“Really, Dana. I saw her do it, and the larva started screaming ...” Luce told the whole thing, including the moment when Samantha blurted out that Anais had been murdering larvae. When Dana heard that, she choked, then went quiet for a while.

“I’d wondered about that. It seemed like too many of them were getting washed up on the beach, way back from the water, too. But, Luce, I didn’t actually know! I would have at least tried to stop her ... and I would have told you what was going on.”

“It’s way too sick to believe,” Luce agreed, then considered for a moment. “I still don’t want to believe it! Dana, you think she’s been throwing them onshore?” They both knew what that meant. The larval mermaids had all died in unspeakable pain, writhing and juddering until their hearts stopped. Then tiny human legs lay on the beach where their tails had been before.

For a few minutes they sat silent together, clouded in cold fog and a few spatters of rain. Wind sawed at the trees until they moaned like violins.

When Dana finally spoke again, it was to ask Luce about the whirlpool that had caught Anais.

“How did you do that, anyway? Have you gotten that insanely powerful?” Luce shook her head, remembering the deep trancelike feeling that had possessed her as she’d sung those unearthly scales.

“I’m—I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do that again, actually. I’ve gotten more control over the water and everything, but that—it didn’t even feel like the song was coming from me, Dana. It was more like I was so upset that I called to a bigger song, and it came through me somehow...” Luce realized from Dana’s expression that this sounded utterly crazy to her.

“It was completely you. It was just you and them there, right?”

“And the larvae.”

“Whatever. You know larvae can’t sing at all.”

“I’m not saying there was another mermaid singing, though!” Luce didn’t know how to explain it, and Dana’s gaze was mocking, even if she also looked impressed. “I’m saying I don’t actually have as much power as it sounds like, from what happened. I heard something singing with my voice, but it wasn’t exactly me.”

Dana smiled at Luce with a funny, disbelieving look on her lovely brown face, and lifted both arms over her head to stretch. Luce was just cracking another oyster when Dana brought her hands down into the water so suddenly that the splash soaked both of them, and as Luce yelped in surprise Dana twisted her tail around Luce’s and flipped her sideways. When she came up with sheets of water tumbling over her face, Dana was already ten feet back and barely visible through the fog, laughing, but with her hands raised to ask for a truce.

Luce lunged through the water to tackle her anyway, but Dana spun to one side and caught Luce’s shoulders between her cool hands. “Wait, wait, Luce! Wait, okay? I’m trying to tell you something, but you’re not listening to me. I had to get your attention somehow!”

Luce drew back, wary, half expecting Dana to flip her again. “What’s so important, then? That you need to tell me?”

“That you’ve always been scared to death of how powerful you are.” Dana suddenly sounded completely serious. Luce gaped.

“What makes you think I’m scared? I’m just—I’m trying to be honest about it, Dana!”

“Because! Because even if you were, like, calling up some bigger force, you were still the one who was doing the calling! No one else was there, Luce. And I’d be scared, too, if I could do that, but sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with it!”

“I bet you could learn how to do it. I don’t think there’s anything I can do that you couldn’t.”

Dana just shook her head. “You just don’t want to face up to it. You ... I don’t want to say you don’t have an ego because you do. But sometimes I think you’re basically hiding from yourself. That’s the real reason you don’t want to be queen!”

Luce was astonished. “How can you even talk about me being queen? I mean, now that you know...”

“About that guy?” Dana ran one glossy hand over her face. “It still kind of blows my mind that you did that, Luce. I wish you hadn’t, I mean, so I could still think of you as being—I don’t know, the one who’s always so serious about the timahk and all intense about what it means to be a mermaid. Even if I told you off for being uptight about it before ... I really liked believing I could count on you that way. But our tribe hasn’t done such a good job of sticking to the timahk anyway. We’ve all kind of screwed up. So it’s not really fair for me to hold that against you, right?”

Luce sat silent for a moment, resting her fingertips on the milky gray whorls of out-rushing foam. Someone had to stop Anais. On the other hand, living on her own made it a lot easier to slip off without anyone noticing. As queen of a tribe, sneaking away every evening wouldn’t really be an option. Before too long she’d get caught in Dorian’s arms.

“Luce?” Dana’s voice was suddenly shy.

“What?” Luce’s thoughts were far away, and it took her a moment to focus on Dana again. When she did Dana’s brown doe eyes looked tentative and sad.

“You did drown that boy, right?”

“Yes,” Luce said. The lie was like a cold stone jammed in her throat. “I took his jacket. Just in case you wanted to see.”

“I don’t want you to think I don’t trust you or anything...” Why did Dana’s voice sound so mournful? “But I guess, sure, I should look at it. Like, for the record.”

Luce noticed that Dana stayed nearby as they made their way back to her cave and that she kept almost herding Luce so that they hugged the shore as closely as possible. Luce had to maneuver carefully to keep her scales from getting grazed on the rocks. That orca attack had really rattled Dana, then. Luce couldn’t blame her. She’d seen orcas leap herself, seen the sea tint red with blood.

Luce had left the jacket wadded up in a corner of her cave in a deliberate show of indifference. Dana smoothed it out with delicate movements, turning it from side to side in the dimness. She caught sight of the writing on the sleeve.

“Dorian. You think that was his name?” Luce was amazed to hear Dana’s voice cracking.

“Maybe. That or it was some band he liked.”

“Have you checked the pockets or anything?” Luce hadn’t. She’d wanted to make sure everything looked perfectly untouched. She tensed as Dana’s graceful fingers began sliding through the many pockets, pulling out bits and pieces of Dorian’s life: a pencil stub, some gum, coins, a thick black marker. Then something shifted in Dana’s face, and Luce knew she’d found the drawings. They were folded in a white square, stiff with salt. There was something strangely gentle in Dana’s movements as she unfolded them. Luce was shocked to see a single gleaming tear curve down Dana’s cheek then land with a tiny splash on the pebbled shore.

“Look, Luce. They’re all pictures of you!” Luce tried to keep her expression calm as she slipped closer to Dana. It had never occurred to her that Dana might cry over the death of a strange human, and for some reason the sight of it made her nauseous with guilt. What would happen if she told Dana the truth? “Wow, he could draw! And he must have been so obsessed with you...” Luce appeared again and again on the sharply creased pages: her body curled inside a wave, her face and shoulders as she towed a dazed-looking Dorian in one arm.

“He had the indication around him. The sparkling.” Luce knew it was a mistake to tell Dana too much, but somehow the words escaped her anyway. Dana looked up sharply, tears streaking her full glossy cheeks. “He was a metaskaza, Dana, except that he was a boy. You remember how Catarina told us it was impossible for them to change?”

“That’s why you saved him?” Dana didn’t seem angry about that anymore.

“Maybe.” Luce was suddenly close to tears herself. It almost felt like Dorian was really dead. “I don’t completely know why I did it, but ... that was probably the reason.” She still didn’t want to talk about Dorian singing her song, not to anyone. It seemed too personal. Dana looked down.

“I mean ... did you really like him, Luce? Like, seriously?”

“Yes.” Was it wrong to admit that?

“Then do you hate me for making you do that? You ... you know I had to, right? If we let him live...”

“I don’t hate you,” Luce insisted. Dana was crying harder now. She buried her face in her arms. “Dana, you were right! I don’t hate you at all.” Luce could barely keep going. It was monstrous to lie to her sobbing friend this way. “You forced me to do the right thing, Dana, okay? Please don’t blame yourself for that!”

Dana looked up, her eyes blurred by tears, and pulled Luce into a long hug.

 

Luce came back from accompanying Dana almost as far as the tribe’s cave that afternoon. The fog had pulled back, and a sluggish, clammy rain had started falling; the fresh water felt slick and repugnant wherever it touched her skin, and Luce realized, a human wouldn’t like it any more than she did. Dana’s nervousness had gotten to her, and Luce hugged the coast much more closely than usual. More than once when she surfaced, dim scythelike shapes were faintly visible through the silvery strands of rain: almost certainly the dorsal fins of orcas. Luce began to wonder if they were shadowing her, just waiting for her to drift a bit farther out. She hadn’t bothered exploring the coast much recently, and there were bends and shelves of splitting stratified rock that she’d forgotten. At one point she noticed a shallow cave, not much more than a deep dent in the cliff with a peaked overhang of rock reaching into space above it. It was squeezed between low points of rock capped by wind-thrashed spruce. Erosion had ripped the ground partly away from beneath the spruce trees, and a snarl of bare roots protruded overhead, clawing at the empty air. A fallen tree spanned the shallow water, its bark worn away and its stripped branches as pale and smooth as a skeleton.

Luce kept thinking of Dana. Mermaids never talked about their human lives, so Luce had been surprised that afternoon to hear her murmuring, between her sobs, about her early childhood. Dana and Jenna had still lived with their mother then, and Dana had told how their mother had sewn matching purple velvet dresses for their sixth birthday, how she’d sung them songs in a language Dana didn’t know so that the words seemed to melt into the music. Luce had listened in silence, stroking Dana’s hair, until she’d finally calmed down.

Back in her own cave she fidgeted. She tried singing for a while, but the fluid beauty of her song didn’t absorb her attention the way it always had before. She raised a wave with one thrumming, endless note and sent it winging in circles through the shadows, but somehow her heart wasn’t in it and after a minute she let the wave collapse with a disconsolate splash. Evening seemed so far away, and with the weather so dismal Dorian probably wouldn’t show up anyway. Knowing that didn’t stop the twisting sensation in her chest every time she thought of him. She gave up trying to practice and sprawled on the stones, gazing at Dorian’s drawings. Dana had smoothed them all out, and they lay in a row just above the tide line. The paper was warped and buckled from its long submersion in the sea, crisped by dried salt, but other than that, the drawings were undamaged. The images were so beautiful, so dimensional; Luce especially admired the way Dorian had drawn dozens of broad curving strokes that followed the contours of each wave. It gave an amazing sense of depth, and it added to the surprising effect of her own pale face breaking through. It was impressive that he’d captured her so well from memory, too, as if her face had burned its way into him and these drawings were the scar...

Luce kissed the paper, soft and slow, glad that no one was there to see her do it. After she’d stared at the pictures for another hour she dug a shallow pit in the loose pebbles of the shore, as far above the tide line as she could reach, and carefully tucked the folded jacket and the drawings inside. Then she covered everything with a flat stone. There was no guarantee, after all, that Anais or one of her followers wouldn’t find the cave sometime.

***

Before she went to look for Dorian, Luce tied wide leaves of brown seaweed across her breasts in a kind of improvised bikini top so that she wouldn’t have to feel self-conscious around him. Then she started wondering if the seaweed looked ridiculous. It felt a little foolish to be worrying about that, though, when she was almost certain he wouldn’t be there.

As she’d expected, the beach was gray, dull, and empty, the failing daylight the color of slate. Rain slashed down like millions of tiny silvery fish, then burst into gray stars on the rocks. For an instant Luce had the strange idea that the endless rain might somehow erase her from the world, as if she were no more substantial than one of those hurtling drops. She tried to stifle her disappointment. Wouldn’t it be unfair to expect Dorian to come out in this weather? But on the other hand, she’d come out, and it wasn’t like Dorian was the one who had to worry about getting snapped in half by an orca either. Her tail swung out of the water in a sullen flip, sending up a high cascade of water. She turned to leave.

“Luce!” Hard steps came rattling down the beach. “Hey, wait! Oh, I almost didn’t see you.” He had a new jacket, Luce saw, a navy blue one this time, and he was holding a flag-sized slab of tattered tarp up over his head. His eyes were wide and darkly golden, and for the first time Luce saw something hesitant in his expression, as if it had only occurred to him now that she might be some kind of mirage. He glanced at the bikini and smiled strangely. “‘Sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown...’” Luce didn’t know what to say to that. She was somehow too sad to respond, but he didn’t seem to notice. “So. How’s the being mythological going?”

It was uncomfortable to hear him sound so clownish, so awkward. He seemed to be trying to hide a spasm of embarrassment, and Luce noticed, he didn’t splash out to hug her the way he had the day before.

“I don’t feel any more mythological than ever,” Luce snapped. It came out more sharply than she’d intended; for some reason she was annoyed with him, even as he stood bedraggled and gawky under his dripping tarp. The slope of the beach was steep, and since Luce was sprawled stomach-down against the shore his face seemed much too far above hers. “Just grossed out by all this stupid rain.” Why was that what she said when there were so many more important things she wanted to tell him?

“Water bothers you?”

“Rain is fresh water. It’s different.” Suddenly she had an idea. “Dorian? Can you swipe that rowboat again?”

“Want to take another crack at me?” Dorian was almost sneering, and Luce stared at him, too hurt to react at all. He saw the shocked look on her face, and for a moment they just gazed at each other, his ochre eyes wary and hard.

Luce tensed with the urge to turn away, and suddenly the tightness in Dorian’s face unraveled and he fell to his knees, leaning over so far that he lost his balance and one hand splashed down into the water. “Oh, Luce, I don’t actually mean it! I’ve been freaking out all day. I keep thinking the same shit over and over, and none of it makes any sense.” He reached to touch her face, and Luce stiffened but didn’t pull away. Dorian’s eyes went wide and bright, almost desperate-looking. “I’m really, really glad you came. I’ve been going crazy waiting to see you all day! Don’t get mad at me.”

“Don’t say stuff like that to me anymore, then!” The words burst out of her, raspy and wild, even as it occurred to her that she couldn’t really justify her fury. He might truly be worried that she’d try to kill him again. “Dorian, I’m sorry I ... helped sink your ship. I can’t take it back, though. So if you hate me just don’t talk to me anymore!”

Her face burned even through the streaks of slippery rain, and Dorian caught her wrist and held it tightly. She’d known that he would, really. In her heart she’d known perfectly well how dismayed he would be at the thought that she might disappear from his life.

“I need to keep talking to you, though! Luce, I really ... I need it more than anything. Like, you’re the one who isn’t supposed to be real, right? But you just make it seem like everything else is fake instead.” From something in his voice Luce could tell he’d thought those words over and over, maybe even whispered them to himself in private. His face was much closer to hers now, and the tarp was slipping back from his shoulders. Rain twisted in long streams from the tips of his trailing hair.

“It’s only humans who go around thinking they’re supposed to be realer than everything else,” Luce said. The words were still angry, but her tone was softening, and in spite of herself she reached to stroke the rain from his face.

“So, where do you want to go?” Dorian asked.

Luce looked into his eyes, disoriented. He was so close she could feel the faint cloud of warmth that breathed from his skin.

“You said to get the boat, right? Doesn’t that mean you want to go somewhere? I can probably get away with borrowing it whenever we want. It belongs to my—to the people I’m staying with, and they never use it.”

“Oh.” His cheeks were bright from the cold, his breath misty and scented with coffee. He had such a beautiful mouth, Luce thought, especially when he smiled the way he was right now. “I was just going to take you somewhere out of the rain.”

Suddenly his lips were on hers, hovering so lightly that it was barely a kiss. Why couldn’t he just make up his mind how he felt about her, once and for all?

“I’ll meet you.” Then he was up and running again, the tarp flapping above his head, flinging loose streamers of water. Everything about him seemed so quick, so fluid, at least by human standards.

Luce was possessed by a sudden impulse, and she slashed deep underwater. There might be humans around the dock at this time of day, even in the rain, so she swept along in the low green regions where the light graded away and she could hide in the dimness. She didn’t start to slip closer to the surface until she sighted the gray blot of the rowboat just above her. Too many boats jostled overhead, and she could hear faint human voices; she wished Dorian would hurry. After several minutes his steps came urgently pounding along the planks, beats of vibration transmitting through the water and around Luce’s skin. She had trouble stifling a laugh as he caught the rope and the rowboat jarred closer to the dock; of course he never suspected that she was lurking just below.

Dorian thudded down into the boat, off-balance and out of breath, and untied the rope, absently letting it slide down into the sea. He started carefully turning around to settle in without tipping over. The next second the boat was whipping away from the dock so quickly that he almost tumbled backwards off the seat. Luce heard him yelp with surprise and laughed loudly enough for him to hear her. The rope was in her hand and her tail spiraled out, driving her through gray-green shade, through long pale streaks of bubbles, past pollock and the glassy reddish blots of jellyfish, and Luce noticed with sudden delight a sea otter that briefly tried to keep pace with her then danced away.

Behind her, Dorian whooped. They were going faster than any motorboat now, and Luce drove her tail harder, smiling at Dorian’s breathless laughter. He must be watching the cliffs jumbling by, the trees blurring blue-green, while his hands clenched hard on the boat’s rim. She rolled onto her back and streaked up to the surface just long enough to grin into his halffrightened, half-thrilled face, water slicing around her shoulders like a trailing dress. Then she vaulted herself up in a backwards arc, her long tail breaching and twisting in the air, brash with silvery lights. She just had time to hear Dorian crying out before she was under the waves and racing on again.

Just before they reached the shallow cave Luce began to slow, sending pulses of water backwards with her tail to counter the boat’s momentum. At least here they’d have some shelter from the wind, the rain. Stands of rock broke the waves so that the sea only flicked gently at the stones. Water dripped from the tangled roots overhead, and a curtain of rain cut off the world beyond. Dorian clambered out of the rowboat and flopped onto the shore while Luce tied the rope to a spiky branch of the fallen spruce tree. “Jesus, you scared me!” The words gasped out, but he was smiling at her.

“It kind of serves you right.” Swimming so quickly had streaked the tension out of her, though. Dorian stretched out near the edge of the water, and she swam close to him and let him slide his hands into her hair. After a moment she rested her head on the beach, her face inches away from his.

“If I keep kissing you all the time we’re never going to talk.” His voice was warm and already going throaty. “But it’s hard not to.”

“I don’t even want to kiss you now.” Luce was surprised to hear herself say it, especially in such a strong tone.

“Because I said one stupid thing? And it might not even have been that stupid, anyway. Luce, I mean, how am I supposed to know—”

“No. Because it’s too hard for me that you’re always changing how you feel about me.” His fingers were still curling back and forth across her cheeks, brushing against her neck. Almost against her will she found herself leaning into his touch. The warmth of each caress washed through her skin.

“That’s not true.” He sounded so serious that Luce let her hand drift up to touch him back. “Luce, I mean ... I’ve been getting freaked out because it doesn’t change. I’m way too into you, and it doesn’t ever stop. You don’t know that? And I hardly even know you. I don’t even know what you are, really.”

“You hate what I am.” Even though you’re one of us, Luce thought. You just don’t know it. “You think we’re all evil, and you’re still talking about going to the FBI, even though that would make them start coming after us—”

“Most of you are evil! You said your friend Dana is one of the nicest ones, and she tried to get you to kill me.” Dorian halfway laughed. “You can’t say that’s not—some pretty warped shit.”

“I showed her your jacket.” This was what she had to tell him, Luce realized. He needed to understand. “You were right. She completely believed me that you were dead. She was even embarrassed to be asking me about it at all.”

“Good. We fooled the bitch.”

“She couldn’t stop crying. For hours. Dorian, she never even met you, but she couldn’t stop crying thinking about it, and I had to sit there and keep lying to her...”

Dorian’s eyes went wide and uncertain. He was too startled to answer her at first, but his quick breath fluttered on her mouth. “Why do you guys keep doing it, then? Killing people? Luce, I don’t want you to think I’m, like, rubbing it in ...” He gave a sick, airy laugh. “But what the fuck?”

She had to face it, Luce realized. They’d just keep going in circles until she did. “You mean, why did we sink the ship your family was on? The Dear Melissa?”

“Oh, for example ...”

“My friend Miriam had just killed herself. The Dear Melissa ran into—” Luce tried think of a way to explain it. “It was Miriam’s funeral. “We were all singing for her, and then the ship was almost on top of us. And our law is that humans aren’t allowed to live after—”

“After they’ve heard you.” Dorian was biting his lip, and his hand had stopped stroking her face. It was almost completely dark now. The only lights were a few faint sparks of green phosphorescence where the water licked the shore, the dim luminosity of Luce’s skin.

“Yes.”

“It still doesn’t make any sense, though. I mean, who gave you that law to start with?”

As soon as he said it, Luce couldn’t understand why she’d never asked herself that question. “It’s supposed to be ... They told me it’s the same for all the mermaids in the world. That we all have the same laws.”

“But do you actually know where it came from? Like, who the boss is?” Dorian asked. Luce was flummoxed by the idea that there might actually be a boss. The mermaids were so free, the timahk so impersonal and strong. But, she realized, he had a point. The timahk must have come from somewhere. It must have a beginning, and she had no idea what that beginning might be. Dorian sat up abruptly and coaxed her head up onto his knee. “Luce, okay, this is going to sound crazy. But I have this theory, and I can’t stop wondering if maybe I’m onto something...”

“What theory?”

“I mean...” Dorian seemed embarrassed, but he pushed ahead. “What if you used to be human, and you just don’t know it? Because I realized there are all these things that don’t make sense, like you knowing how to read, but they would if ... like, if the mermaids are the ones who are really enchanted? If, okay, if somebody is using all of you.” Luce was glad that she was lying down. The words swam through her, bright and swarming and unmanageable. He was so close to the truth, but also so wrong...

“What makes you think I’m enchanted?”

“Well, I mean...” He was definitely embarrassed now. He looked away, deep blue shadows and the dim reflections of the water curling around his face. “It’s exactly like a story, right? The boy who falls in love with a mermaid?” Luce felt her heart start to race. What was he saying? “So in a story—if you were, like, under a spell...” Dorian suddenly stared down at her, his face wild with longing.

“What then?” It was awful, Luce thought, but maybe she couldn’t avoid telling him the whole thing much longer.

“Well, then it would be my job to break it, right? Like, kill whoever enchanted you?” Dorian looked so hopeful as he asked this that Luce ached inside.

“There’s a big problem with that.” Luce shuddered a little as she remembered that terrible night on the cliffs when her uncle had tried to rape her, then left her alone and howling. When the change had started to come over her, she knew, she did have a choice, even if she didn’t understand what that choice was going to mean.

“What problem?” Dorian was getting too excited, and Luce cringed. “You know who did it, don’t you? And you think he’s too, like, powerful for me to fight—”

“No! Dorian, it’s not like that!” They were gaping at each other, and Dorian’s hands squeezed her shoulders convulsively. “I did used to be human, Dorian. But the trouble is—

“But if you were human before, then—”

Luce cut him off. “But nobody enchanted me! Or maybe I did it. I enchanted myself!”

Luce had never seen anyone look so completely astonished. Dorian gaped and seemed as if he was trying to say twenty things at once. Crosscurrents of emotion surged in his face, and his nails sank into her shoulder.

“Luce!” It was the best he could do.

“I didn’t know I was going to turn into a mermaid or anything. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but I still let it happen...”

“Oh my God!”

“I didn’t want to tell you. That I was ever human. Because I knew you’d flip out...”

“But how can you be sure there’s nobody else behind it, Luce? Behind whatever did this to you? Because if there is then maybe we could...” Luce knew what he’d been about to say: “Maybe we could turn you back.” How could she tell him that she didn’t think she would want to turn human again, even if it were somehow possible? It was terrible to realize what he’d imagined: stabbing some wizard or demon, the enchantment vaporizing as it died and the mermaids all miraculously restored to human form. And in his daydreams she was so grateful to have legs again, to be rescued from her life in the sea...

To be stuck in foster care somewhere, to lose her freedom and her wildness. Even worse, to open her mouth and hear those thin, clacking squeaks humans called “singing” coming out of it.

Luce sat up and wrapped her arms around him, scattering soft kisses around his face. He was trying to be heroic, to risk death out of love for her. It was just a kind of heroism she didn’t want.

“Is it okay if you’re out late? Because I think I’d better tell you what happened, and it’s a really long story...”

“I don’t care about getting in trouble.” His breathing was labored, and Luce felt a tremor in his back. She desperately wished there was some way she could make it all easier for him.

Luce sighed. There were so many things she didn’t want him to know about, and she was going to have to start with some of the worst of them: her father’s death, her uncle’s beatings, and the attempted rape. Oddly, one of the things that worried her most was what he’d think of her father. Dorian gave the impression of being one of those kids from a big, elegant house, the kind with packed bookcases and a rose garden and art objects brought back from distant countries. And boys like that didn’t have anything to do with girls whose fathers were petty thieves, girls whose bedrooms were just a sleeping bag thrown in the back of a red van.

Maybe that was the real reason she hadn’t wanted to tell him the truth?

Luce kissed his mouth, and he tipped back to gaze at her with frantic eyes. Then she began at the beginning.

***

As hard as it was for Luce to tell him, it was even harder for Dorian to hear it. He wanted to hurt her uncle somehow, so Luce refused to tell him what town she’d lived in or what her last name had been. Dorian had too many emotions that he didn’t know what to do with, and Luce was afraid they’d goad him to do something crazy. As the story went on she felt him falling into it, as if they were both sharing the same dream. How she’d sunk her first ship completely by accident, how Catarina had found her and saved her life, the living magic of tall gray waves and ferocious music...

The rain died down until there was no sound beyond the sullen drip of water from the roots above, but still the story went on. He interrupted her a few times; he seemed especially interested in what Luce told him about the dark shimmer around each mermaid and how it revealed the private horrors that had turned each one of them from human girls. He asked her more than once about Catarina, who had always refused to let anyone look into the nightmare images of her own transformation. Something about the topic seemed to make him uncomfortable.

When she described how she had come to help Catarina with the sinking of the Coast Guard boat, Dorian made a rough, strangled noise, and snapped, “Are you saying you murdered people because of peer pressure?”

“Partly. But it was more like if they were going to die anyway, I didn’t want them to die with so much pain. Not when I could take it away just by singing...” It was hard to overcome the impulse to justify herself, but at the same time she didn’t want to sound like she was making excuses.

She told him about the coming of Anais, her own fights with Catarina, the terrible moments that had led up to Miriam’s death. Dorian became very still and so quiet that Luce was momentarily afraid he’d stopped breathing. Her own voice quieted, too, into a numbed chant. They both knew what was coming next, and Luce thought this might be the end for them. Dorian had said he was in love with her, but that didn’t mean he’d be able to forgive her once he knew the whole truth. Probably nobody in his position could forgive something so awful; probably she didn’t deserve that much generosity from anyone. Luce tried not to think about how he’d react, to keep the story coming as steadily as falling rain. It was his life, too, and he had a right to understand as much of it as possible.

She came to the first moment when she’d seen him, his bronze hair flicking in the golden dawn glow. She described it all: how he’d sung back to her and then she’d seen something sparkling in the air around him. Like a cloud of black mica or like tiny glittering insects...

“No,” Dorian said. His voice was cold.

“But you do. You have the indication, so I thought in a way you were one of us.”

“I’m not one of you. There wasn’t anything like—like with your uncle. There wasn’t anything that sick at all! My parents were really great people, Luce. Like, maybe you just want to believe they deserved it, but...”

But I’ve seen what they did, Luce wanted to say. You know I’ve seen the whole thing! Then she noticed the way Dorian’s face was shutting down, closing like a door, and stopped herself just in time.

“I mean, I know all the other mermaids, like, even Anais, can just look over at me and see my uncle—everything he did. I was afraid at first that you’d be able to see it too...” Luce said it as gently as she could.

“I can’t see anything. I just know what you’ve told me.” He sounded very stiff, and he wasn’t looking at her anymore.

“But you know everything now, and you’re going to keep thinking about it—”

“I know because you told me. You didn’t have to. You could have made up a different story and I never would have known.”

Luce was quiet for a minute. She wanted Dorian to say that of course he was like her, that he was basically a merman stuck on land. But he couldn’t give her that, she realized. The idea hurt him too much. Just like Catarina, he couldn’t stand to have anyone know the truth.

“We don’t need to talk about it again, Dorian,” Luce said softly. He kissed her, and each kiss was as lush and slow and thrilling as a flower opening inside her skin.

She was amazed to find that he could touch her so tenderly—that he could stand to touch her at all, really—even now that he knew her story. Although whenever they paused for an instant, she noticed that he seemed to be having trouble meeting her eyes.

Maybe he did really love her, then, even though he knew he was supposed to hate her ... Dorian had even more reason to despise mermaids than the rest of humanity did. If he could truly forgive her for everything, even for his little sister who’d been left to decay at the bottom the sea...

If he could yield up his heart like this, it must mean that she was actually forgivable, and that all her fellow mermaids were, too.

Maybe other humans would also see the situation that way, someday. And maybe the mermaids could even forgive them in return.

His hands stroked through her hair like waves of possibility. Like hope.

The broken world might yet be whole again. She twisted closer, kissing him more deeply still, and softly bit his lower lip.