13

The Mirror

Over the next several days Luce started having more trouble being around the other mermaids. When she heard them talking cheerfully about anything, but especially about sinking ships, she had to fight down tears. And Anais chattered so much that hanging around the main cave or the dining beach meant being constantly bombarded by her hard, chirpy voice, her descriptions of diamond necklaces and pop stars. Being reminded of human things only made Luce feel sad. It didn’t help that Catarina hadn’t recovered from the frailty that had afflicted her ever since they’d changed Anais; she was moody and remote and didn’t talk much.

Luce felt happiest alone in her own small cave, singing quietly to herself or making up the songs she would have sung for Tessa if only she had lived. She could lead her voice through soft, flowing formations as complex and airy as clouds, make it spread like feathers, divide it so that she was singing several interwoven melodies at once. Her voice was usually willing to obey her now, as if it also enjoyed the unexpected new songs Luce was inventing. Once in a while it still grabbed hold of her and dragged her into the death song, but that was happening less often now, and Luce had learned to be patient when it did. She’d let the death song exhaust itself, then lure her voice back into spirals like rising smoke, pleats of folded silk. Conjuring new sounds became a kind of game for her: she’d spread her voice out, shake it, make it into falling leaves or crackling ice . . . She had the feeling that she simply must be getting closer to discovering the new and hidden power she’d been looking for; sometimes she could almost feel it, just waiting around the next curl of her song. She could just catch glimpses of it, and it had its own secret shimmering, not as dark as the shimmering around her body: something surprising, eloquent, blue-white and blue-gold.

Luce was lying on her back with her eyes closed, twirling her fins, as she tried a new experiment. She spread her voice out in a single deep note as flat as a sheet of paper, then let it start to curl in on itself, wrapping into a slow aching chord at the edges. Something wet nudged at Luce’s shoulder, and she opened her eyes enough to peer through the fringe of her lashes, still singing. It was probably just a larva; sometimes her singing attracted them, and this cave was easy for them to crawl into.

It wasn’t a larva at all. Instead a stiff, pointed wave was standing next to her, moving in small fidgety, eager leaps as if it couldn’t wait for her to notice it. Luce stopped singing in surprise, and the enthusiastic little wave collapsed with a splash. For a while Luce just stared down at the gently lapping water where the wave had been. It seemed as if the wave had actually been responding to her voice, but of course that was impossible.

At least she hoped it was impossible. It reminded her far too much of the hideous nightmare where she’d commanded the waves to murder her father. Luce didn’t want the ocean to start obeying her, not after that dream, and she told herself that the freakish little wave must have been some sort of aberrant result of water currents. That had to be it. Her voice might be magical, but there was no way it could control something that wasn’t even alive! Whatever the new magic was that she was looking for, it simply couldn’t be this.

Luce repeated these thoughts over and over until she half believed them. Even so, she didn’t try bending her voice in quite that way again, and the solitary cave suddenly seemed too narrow, its dim walls pressing in on her. Before too long she couldn’t stand her isolation anymore, and squirmed out through the narrow passage into the widening green-gold sea. Luce wasn’t keeping track of the days, but she guessed it must be early June, and while the water would still be bitterly cold for a human, it felt luxuriously warm to her.

She drifted toward the dining beach, thinking the whole time of turning and swimming back the other way. She stopped often, lingering to observe orange starfish whose long, tangled limbs were dense with bright spikes, then a yellow warty animal like a rotten banana that crept across a mass of barnacles. She wished she’d taken the time while she was still human to learn the names of the creatures she lived with now.

As she came around the angled cliff that opened onto the dining beach, she could already hear Anais holding court. A cluster of larvae clung to one another, drawn forward by the sounds of laughter and nosing cautiously forward; Luce swam past them and into Anais’s chirpy voice. “Yeah, I wasn’t sure exactly where the yacht went down, but Samantha remembered. I don’t get what you guys were thinking just leaving all that stuff. Like who wouldn’t think that was the whole point? I mean, here’s this, like, really classy yacht for once instead of all the crappy fishing boats and whatever that these losers up here sail around in. And you didn’t even look to see what was in it!” She laughed; the sound of it was raspy, grating. “I mean, yeah, Jenna says, like, the TVs and things wouldn’t work after they’d been underwater. She talked me out of bringing one back. But that one friend of my mom’s had some great clothes . . .”

As always when she heard Anais’s voice Luce felt as if she’d swallowed some slime-covered, rusty lump of metal; it distracted her from paying much attention to what Anais was actually saying, so when she came around the corner it took her a moment to understand what was in front of her. Almost everyone was lounging around in a row at the edge of the beach: the dreamlike, nuanced colors of their tails gleaming through the shallow silver water, their beautiful faces framed by the pale sand behind them and then the steep gray of the stones. But there were other, more jarring colors intruding on the image in front of Luce: Samantha, Anais, and Jenna were all wearing brightly patterned bikini tops under filmy chiffon wraps in shocking shades of lime green, turquoise, magenta. Complicated diamond earrings swung against their necks and gold watches flashed on their wrists; Samantha was wearing a pair of huge sunglasses with baby pink frames, pouting in an exaggerated way and staring into something round and white, then passing it on to Jenna. They were laughing, posing. Jenna was busy applying lip gloss, but it seemed like salt water had seeped into the tube. It was too runny and kept dribbling in a candy pink tentacle down her chin.

A mirror, Luce realized, and in the same moment she felt a stab of inexplicable anxiety at the idea of seeing what her own face looked like now. She hadn’t had a glimpse of herself since she’d changed.

“So, the thing is, there’s still a bunch of stuff none of us really liked, if anybody wants to go back for it. Of course it’s only fair I got all the best things, since it was my daddy’s yacht!”

It was just Anais being stupid, Luce thought. What would a mermaid want with a lot of human leftovers? She felt a kind of sick amusement at the thought of Anais trying to lug a television back through the waves. Vapid as Anais could be, hadn’t she realized that the cave didn’t exactly have electric outlets? Luce waited for someone to tell Anais how clueless she was being.

Instead there was a patter of excited voices, and after a moment Luce realized that half a dozen mermaids were planning an expedition back to the site of the yacht’s wreck so they could search for plunder.

“Want to come, Luce?” Dana called out as she swam up next to her. “Check out what’s left on the yacht? You know what would look great on you, would be if we could get some kind of sparkly barrettes for your hair. Get you styling harder.” Luce was staring around for Catarina when Dana popped the mirror right in front of her face. Reflexively she jerked back, but it was already too late.

The face in the mirror was recognizably her own, Luce realized; she had the same long, charcoal brown eyes and very pale olive skin as ever, even if now that skin gave off a faint greenish radiance. She still had slightly sharp, slightly foxlike features and a broad, smooth forehead under spiky dark hair; her lips were still unusually red. But Luce had never thought of herself as particularly pretty, and the face hovering in front of her was uncomfortably, aggressively beautiful. The sight of her own face was like needles stabbing at her eyes, and Luce found herself thinking that the girl in the mirror had beauty in the same way that someone might have a consuming disease.

She couldn’t have explained why, but Luce knew her inhuman beauty had the color of endless loneliness. She lowered her eyes and wondered if her darkly splendid face had seemed horrifying to Tessa. Maybe that was why Tessa had preferred death to becoming what Luce was now?

“I bet you just can’t believe how hot you are now, can you?” Dana laughed. “I was always pretty hot and everything, but I was seriously blown away when I saw myself. Scoring the mirror was a great idea.” It was out of character, Luce thought, for Dana to be so oblivious to what someone was feeling, but in this case Luce was grateful that Dana didn’t just see through her. Her feelings now were too awful and too private to ever share with anyone.

“It’s incredible,” Luce said; that much was true, at least. “I mean, I wondered sometimes if I was gorgeous now in the way you all are.” Dana smiled sweetly. She seemed gloriously happy, delighted by the soft, swirling breeze and by the newly discovered power of her own face; Dana’s happiness made Luce only more aware of her own aching restlessness.

“You totally are.”

Luce shook her head. “You’re still a lot prettier than I am.”

“Don’t be so sure.” Luce was sure that Dana was just saying it to be nice; Dana’s clear, dark face had a haunting glamour that even Luce’s transfigured appearance couldn’t approach. “You have those amazing eyes. And such great lashes. Maybe we could find you, I don’t know”—s he laughed, too brightly—“ some, like, waterproof mascara? You’re coming with us, right?”

Luce looked for Catarina again, but she wasn’t on the beach. She couldn’t help thinking that Catarina would put a stop to this. It wasn’t exactly against the timahk, maybe, but it still seemed wrong. The clinging larvae had paddled closer now; they massed together like seaweed, except with a scattering of sorrowful human eyes. As they approached the beach a couple of the braver ones began to break away from the group, and Luce noticed that a lot of them were staring at Anais.

“I don’t really want any human stuff,” Luce finally said; Dana just looked uncomprehending. “I mean, isn’t that kind of weird for a mermaid? If we want to be like them, then why do we go around killing them?” Luce knew instantly that she’d said too much. Dana was obviously offended.

“God, Luce. Don’t you think you’re maybe being too uptight about this? We’re just having fun for once.” Dana’s tone suddenly shifted; the flippant irritation was gone, and she spoke in a sudden rush of wistful sorrow. “I mean, whatever, we all have to deal with . . . with all the things we’re never going to have now. Like, I really wanted to go to college and be a pediatrician. I’ll never get to do any of that. And Rachel . . . she just had this one necklace from her mom, and she lost it when we changed. So just because you don’t miss human things, Luce . . . I mean, it’s easy to go around saying we shouldn’t want anything that might, kind of, make up for all that . . .”

Luce wasn’t sure how to answer this, and stared off with her cheeks burning. Maybe Dana was right; if owning a few human objects helped the mermaids ease the ache they all felt, then why shouldn’t they collect whatever they could find? After all, she could comfort herself with her singing, but that wouldn’t work for everyone. She wondered if she should apologize, but Dana wasn’t looking at her anymore, and she couldn’t bring herself to try to break through the awkward silence that had come between them.

She noticed that one fairly large bluish larva had gone nuzzling up to Anais’s satiny cobalt tail, watching the brilliant scales with obvious fascination. Anais was busy chattering and seemed not to see it. As Luce watched, the larva reached out and barely touched Anais’s fins, and when Anais didn’t react the larva grew bolder, and closed its small lips softly on the waving, pink-shimmered tail.

Still Anais didn’t seem to register what was happening for a second. Then she let out a wrenching shriek and flung her tail up in an enormous cascade of water. The bluish larva jerked back and splashed down on its side, waving its stubby arms in fright. It seemed too disoriented to swim away and only gabbled, a bubble of saliva swelling on its pink lips. Everyone cracked up laughing, even Luce.

Everyone except for Anais, that is.

“That is SO not funny! That disgusting thing was actually tonguing me! Oh God, that was just so gross . . .” Anais raised her tail threateningly above the larva, which cowered below her, too afraid to move away. “I should bash its nasty little head in.”

Do it, Luce thought eagerly. Do it, and then we can finally get rid of you. Then Luce saw the helpless terror on the larva’s face and felt deeply ashamed of her wish to see it injured.

Samantha threw herself across the expanse of water separating her from Anais, and caught the blue tail in her arms before it could strike. Anais tried to twist free, and rocked sloppily over into deeper water so that she and Samantha landed in a wet heap. Samantha’s pink sunglasses were knocked off one ear and hung at an absurd angle across her face, and Luce could hear the raspy sound of ripping chiffon. The larva finally had the sense to flop back a few feet, but then it stopped and gawked again. It seemed mesmerized by Anais, by her bland golden perfection.

“Samantha! Why are you trying to stop me from killing that thing? Eeew, we should really kill all of them. If I just had our housekeeper here I’d make her do it. Clean this place up.” Anais sat up, and abruptly seemed to realize that every mermaid there was staring at her in stunned quiet.

“Anais! I’ve told you! The timahk! If you hurt that larva, Cat will throw you out on your own!” Samantha wailed. She was still clinging to Anais’s tail, sprawled across it and pinning it to the seabed. To talk she had to torque her upper body back and crane her neck, barely holding her mouth above water.

“Jeez,” Anais said. “It’s not like Catarina’s even here. She wouldn’t have to know about it, would she?” But there was a dubious look on her face as she glanced around at the circle of mermaids watching her. Samantha finally let go of the sky blue tail and pulled herself upright, straightening her sunglasses.

“You can’t hurt larvae, ever,” Kayley finally said. She sounded nervous, and the words clearly cost her tremendous effort. “Maybe there are a few mermaids here who would lie to Catarina about something really important like that, but most of us wouldn’t even dream of it.” Luce knew Kayley meant it as a dig at her; she clearly hadn’t recovered from her resentment of the time Luce had lied to protect Jenna. Jenna shot Luce a long, contorted, almost hostile look.

Luce found herself wondering what she was doing with them. Had her idea that she belonged here never been more than a fantasy?

“So you’re saying you’d tattle on me, Kayley?” Anais asked disdainfully. “You would never break one of Catarina’s big bad rules, would you?”

“They’re not just Catarina’s rules,” Luce objected, but her sudden discomfort made her voice shrink almost to nothing, and no one seemed to hear her.

There was a long, disturbing pause; Luce was acutely aware of the silvery diamond patterns flowing across the surface of the water.

“Want to head back to the yacht?” Dana asked uncomfortably. “I’d like to look around.” No one answered.

“Who says Catarina gets to be queen, anyway?” Anais snapped after a moment. “Like, how do you guys decide that?” Luce was grateful to see that even Samantha seemed piqued by this. Luce couldn’t understand how Anais could ask that question; Catarina was so savage, so strong and elegant. Who could compare to her?

“Catarina is our best singer! Definitely. You haven’t really heard her yet, Anais—like, you were sort of half unconscious when she was singing to you before—but she’s just—she has the most gorgeous voice! And the things she can do with it . . .” Samantha had begun with enthusiasm but then trailed off enviously and looked away. Anais gazed around at everyone.

“So what? Like, just being the best singer makes you queen automatically? Shouldn’t it be, I don’t know, something that makes sense? Like, whoever was oldest when they changed?” Kayley shot her another look; they all knew that Anais was almost seventeen, three months older than Catarina had been at her transformation. Luce grimaced at the lack of subtlety. But Kayley’s courage seemed to have exhausted itself. A glance shot around the group, passing from one girl to the next before Miriam finally looked up, and Luce suddenly realized that Miriam almost never talked anymore.

“Of course it has to be the best singer who’s queen! That’s how it is with all the mermaids in the world. You can recognize the one who has the right to be queen by her song.”

Anais glared around and seemed to realize that no one disagreed with this. “Okay. You guys say that’s how it is; I guess it must be.” She tipped her golden head and mulled this over. “So, who’s second best here?”

“Luce.” Miriam said it instantly, as if it were simply unquestionable. “She’s amazing, too. Almost as great as Cat is, really.” Luce could see Anais recoil with a look of mingled surprise and irritation, then flick a contemptuous glance in her direction. “You don’t know that, Anais? Luce was the one who helped Catarina change you. If it wasn’t for her you would have died.” There was a cold edge to Miriam’s voice now.

“Ooooh!” Anais said. “Then I guess I owe her a huge thank-you.” Luce had never heard anyone sound less sincere. “Luce, I want to thank you very much for being so brave and wonderful and saving my pitiful little life!” She didn’t even bother to meet Luce’s eyes as she said it, and the stab of queasy alarm Luce had felt the first time she met Anais came back in her stomach.

Luce wasn’t about to answer. She didn’t see any reason to play along with one of Anais’s games.

“Luce! What’s your problem? You could at least tell Anais ‘you’re welcome’!” Samantha sniped. So she was back to being Anais’s sycophant, Luce thought bitterly. “She said ‘thank you,’ like, totally nicely! Don’t you think her feelings will be hurt if you just blow her off?”

Luce gaped at Samantha for a second. Did she really believe a single word she was saying?

“I don’t think it’s possible to hurt Anais’s feelings,” Luce announced flatly. “I don’t think she has any.” Several of the girls gasped and Anais crumpled up her face; Luce knew there was going to be another fit of fake sobbing. Even if Luce had belonged here at first, she thought, maybe she didn’t anymore; there was no way she could belong in a place where anyone took Anais seriously, admired her, much less let her boss them around. At the same time this was the first place where anyone had ever accepted her, where it had almost seemed she might finally have a home; why did Anais have to ruin everything? She knew, too, that nothing was waiting for her in her own small cave except loneliness, and the fear of what her voice might be able to accomplish.

Anais started whimpering, pointing at Luce with a trembling finger while she sank her face against Samantha’s shoulder. The murmuring got louder, and Luce saw Jenna scowling at her, her forehead crimped from anger, her knuckles pale in her brown hands. Luce decided to get away before anyone could insist that she apologize. She spun out into the open sea, rolling her body over and over to try to shake the anger she felt at everyone. How could they possibly fall for Anais? She was so horribly, transparently phony, so obviously out to take over control of the tribe if she could. Why else was she so interested in what it took to become queen?

Something long and bright yellow rocked in a sloppy, haphazard way on the surface a short distance ahead, but the quick rippling distorted it so much that Luce wasn’t sure what it was. A large school of fat, bluish fish suddenly stirred the water in front of her, making it hard to see much besides quick winks of color. Still, she was glad to have something distract her from the seething aversion that made her keep thinking about Anais. She swirled up to get a look at the yellow thing: it turned out to be an empty single-seat kayak, tossed on the waves. It was still right-side up, though, and Luce noticed a bottle of water and a bag lunch tucked at the bottom, along with a single gray man’s sneaker. Whoever had been paddling it hadn’t capsized, then. A neon orange life jacket was floating a few yards away, and Luce had the disturbing sense that the kayaker had stripped off the life jacket deliberately before diving overboard. She knew immediately that there’d been something in the water he’d wanted more than life itself, something with cream-colored shoulders surrounded by drifting rays of red-gold hair, something with a voice like living flames. He’d sunk down held in the arms of the most perfect beauty he’d ever seen, breathing the bubbles she fed him from her lips, until he didn’t breathe anymore . . .

It was much too close to the dining beach, Luce thought. Someone could have heard, someone could have swum out to see what was happening. How could Catarina take a risk like that? Impulsively Luce grabbed the kayak and started towing it away. It would be better if none of the other mermaids saw it; that way no one would ask questions. As she swam on dragging the kayak behind her she found herself roiling with anger. It was bad enough that Catarina had just murdered someone, but did she really have to be so stupid about it? Was she trying to get caught? Luce tugged the kayak a full two miles from shore before shoving it away. The awful image of Catarina surrounded by a pack of indignant mermaids kept recurring in Luce’s mind: Catarina banished and swimming off into gray emptiness while Luce watched helplessly.

By the time she got back to her small cave, Luce was in such a foul mood that she didn’t even bother to control her own singing. She didn’t care if the death song came back, how high and wildly it rose, or where it carried her. She even wanted it. She let her voice stretch out in free, feverish expansion, waiting for that heart-piercing note at the top of the stairs. She waited, but her voice was somewhere lower, smoother. It was the first time she’d deliberately allowed it to do whatever it wanted, and to her amazement it ignored the death song completely. Instead it glossed itself outward, rolled up at the corners . . .

And a feather-shaped wave appeared directly in a beam of brilliant sun: a frond of water, golden green, with a star in its heart. It pranced and waved at Luce as if it was overjoyed to see her, then as her voice tightened in on itself, it gave a little gleaming leap and raced at her. Luce tried to make her voice stop but its hold was too strong, and the tiny, shining wave rose taller and straighter, bobbing a little at the tip. It swayed and waited for Luce’s voice to tell it what to do.

It was real, then. The wave was at her command. It was exactly, exactly like her horrible dream. She must have a secret desire—one she couldn’t even consciously acknowledge—to hurt the people she loved most. She must be just as cruel as Anais, or maybe even worse. Anais had laughed when her father died, but even so, she probably didn’t have dreams about murdering him herself!

Luce held her tail out of the water long past the point where the pain throttled her song. She kept it up, her fins contracting frantically in the cool air, until a scream ripped out of her throat.

It took an hour of lying there, promising herself that she would never, ever allow that particular song to escape from her again, before Luce had the courage to try singing at all. Her voice seemed much more docile now, and by the time she’d spun through a long series of airy, haunting trills, Luce began to feel better. There was evil in her voice, and cruelty, but she told herself that as long as she kept practicing she’d eventually learn to control it; she’d make it into something beautiful and even innocent. She’d change what it meant to be a mermaid, and they could all live at peace . . .

By the time she left her little cave she was exhausted from so much concentrating, and ravenously hungry. Her thoughts were so completely taken up with the prospect of dinner that she wasn’t paying much attention as she wriggled through the cave’s skinny entrance, still humming softly. There was a sudden heave in the water and a splash as if something like a seal had just dove off the rocks right next to her, but when Luce looked toward the disturbance, the thing that had made it was already gone.