8

Golden Gate

That evening Luce stared across the ocean at the lights of what looked like a good-sized town. Rows of golden windows and streetlights tangled like vines through the dusk, and there were a few bonfires out on the shore. Things hadn’t gone so well the last time she’d slept under a dock, but even so Luce realized that the margins of human towns were the safest places for her now. Those divers would probably be searching any caves they could find along the waterline, any secluded coves: the kinds of places mermaids usually lived. They’d be a lot less likely to come waving their huge black guns through clusters of people laughing and toasting marshmallows out on the beach.

She swept closer, keeping under the water as much as she could. There was some kind of boat club up ahead, with ranks of yachts parked along neat piers. She slipped below and found a quiet spot on the shore, a ceiling of planks only a foot above her, beer bottles and rusty chains scattered on the sand. She could hear human voices nearby; it sounded there was a small party going on, with soft, delicate music. Luce slept for a long time, and no one disturbed her.

Being so close to human habitations made her self-conscious about her nakedness. Normally clothes weren’t something she thought about at all, but now when she found a tattered black bikini top wadded on the shore, she smoothed it out and tied it on.

This was the best way she could travel, Luce realized: swimming as far from shore and as deep as she could manage during the day, sleeping under docks at night. For the next week or more she kept going like that, surprised to find herself enjoying the water and even her own solitude. Human towns used to make her so nervous; now Luce realized that she liked hearing people talking or laughing around her. It was oddly comforting. It almost made her feel the way she had as a little girl, drifting off to sleep in the back of her father’s van while chatter and music softened the night’s harsh edges.

Listening to the ordinary happiness of strangers, she could almost forget that the divers were after her. That the mermaids were still being slaughtered.

 

The coast turned wilder, full of cliffs and twisty inlets and beaches closed in by pinnacles of rock tufted with wildflowers. Even from a distance Luce could hear children squealing as they played in the water and the roar of motorcycles swooping along the winding roads. The town where she found shelter that night was small, but its gardens were so thick with flowers that even the dimness under the docks breathed with their perfume. And there were many more living things around her now: seals and sea lions sprawled on sandbars with their spotted bellies exposed, fins flashed in the water, and so many hawks wheeled above that they almost seemed to be gears turning in an immense blue clock. Whenever she swam near the seafloor tall anemones pulsed their wispy fronds in the current and enormous sea stars spread their radial arms. The animals crowding the bottom all seemed to have invented new and fantastical sunset colors for themselves: they came in peach-speckled lilacs, rose-spined saffrons, peculiar moody pinks. Luce could barely feel worried in this outpouring of vibrant beauty.

Light wings of fog settled over the water as Luce swam on the next morning. She began to wonder if the black-suited divers had given up searching for her. After all, there had been no sign of them for days. Maybe she could try to find other mermaids and ask them for news without inflicting danger on them. Luce was wondering this as the green house-dotted cliffs to her left rolled back, disappearing completely behind hovering cloud-fronds, and something huge and airy and geometric loomed above the mist. It looked so familiar, but for a fraction of a second Luce couldn’t place it. Its two metal peaks were dully red, high and elegantly curved.

Then she recognized it. It was the Golden Gate Bridge.

Luce could hardly believe it. She’d swum all the way to San Francisco. She remembered it from when she’d briefly lived there with her father: a dreamlike city with, Luce recalled, a lot of rundown and half-abandoned areas along the waterfront. She could remember slipping with her father through a gap in a chainlink fence to explore a cavernous building with soaring walls of milky glass panes; it had once been used for building ships, he’d told her. She remembered the rusting hulks of forgotten boats, an inlet mysteriously heaped with dozens of barnacle-crusted shopping carts where herons perched. All around the network of bays tucked behind the Golden Gate there were places like that, he’d told her, partly wild and partly ruined.

Luce couldn’t help grinning to herself as she realized what was in front of her.

For a mermaid in desperate trouble, this city was the perfect hideout.

 

For the rest of the day Luce lurked under the dock of what looked like an unused vacation home near a town she guessed was Sausalito. Sailboats swept nearby, voices shrieked with laughter. Even if she was careful to keep well below the surface, it was clear that staying in San Francisco Bay meant that she could go out only at night. But it was hard to keep calm as she waited for the darkness that would free her to go exploring. She needed somewhere sheltered and lonely without too many boats around, and especially she needed to find someplace with a reasonable supply of shellfish. Hunger needled at her, sharp and insistent.

Even more unbearable than hunger was a new idea that kept intruding on her mind, no matter how many times Luce told herself she was being irrational. She couldn’t help imagining Nausicaa’s greenish bronze face looking up in warm surprise, her wild black hair cascading back from her face as she dashed grinning through the water to pull Luce into her arms. Her friend might be somewhere in the bays in front of her. Luce wouldn’t have to explain anything because Nausicaa would already know; she wouldn’t have to think about the horrors she’d witnessed. The ancient mermaid would know exactly what they should do, and Luce would help.

At least that was the fantasy. The problem with going out to search, Luce realized, was the way she’d feel if the fantasy proved not to be true. Outside her hiding place the fog receded, and Luce could glimpse a bit of the gray mass of skyscrapers prickling upward along the far shore of the bay. An endless procession of ships heaped with neatly stacked cargo containers skimmed below the bridge and out to sea.

When night finally came it was starless, smoke black, the water crisscrossed by a thousand streaks of light thrown by the shining towers of San Francisco. Luce found a patch of oysters nearby and ate them under her dock, then headed across the bay, aiming toward the left of downtown. She thought it was somewhere over there that she’d gone exploring abandoned piers with her father. Sometimes from the corners of her eyes Luce caught distant flashes of diving shapes that looked about as big as she was: probably seals, though they seemed fast for seals. Enormous stingrays wrapped the depths in their black wings and leopard sharks ambled sleepily just below her. She didn’t pay too much attention. The black water was much smoother and calmer than she was used to while overhead the reflected lights of the city formed a ceiling of prancing dots and beams of gold.

Deeper into the bay, though, the light became sparser. As she went on the darkness of the water was broken by rows of pilings like rotten teeth. She passed a pier so decayed that it slumped into the water, its wood beams gone soft as rope. There were still warehouses set back from the water, but they had a decrepit look and no light glazed their windows. Only, here and there, a streetlight stood in a lonely haze of apricot-colored glow. Luce hovered fifty feet from shore with her head just above the surface, watching and listening. There was a stench of rust and pollution, and the water felt oily and warmer than she liked. Still, maybe under that pier she could make a temporary home for herself? She’d pictured somewhere wilder, but at least there didn’t seem to be any people around.

No. There was one. A man was walking out on that decayed pier, so drunk that his whole body pitched like a wave. Luce noticed the man’s filthy layered overcoats; the rags around his feet; the sad, sick way he staggered. It reminded her a bit of the way her father had looked when she’d found him living as a castaway, his body swaddled in sealskins. Luce stopped where she was. The thought of her father opened like a wound in her chest, the shape of an intolerable absence. Where was he now? Had he recovered from all the terrible things he’d gone through?

The man swayed faster, his body doubling in the middle as if he were about to be sick. He was standing right at the pier’s edge, one foot curling into empty space. Now he didn’t remind Luce of her father but of her uncle Peter. Reeling, pitiful, and broken, although Luce thought furiously that he’d actually broken himself. That was how Peter had looked in the moments just before he turned vicious, smacking her or knocking her down. Her stomach tightened with disgust. Maybe that was Peter, homeless and stinking, wandering across the wasted margins of a beautiful city . . .

The man still hadn’t straightened, but he wasn’t vomiting, either. Instead he just wavered, his torso tipped precariously toward the water, one hand pawing the air in slow circles. Then he tried to step back, wobbled sharply, and pitched headlong into the bay. The splash blinked white against the darkness.

For several seconds Luce waited for him to surface. He could swim for the shore, or he could grab hold of the pilings and pull himself back up. She watched the water where he’d fallen: at first the glossy surface was rocking, but gradually it calmed until there was nothing but a scattered hoop of froth. His head should emerge from the froth at any moment, sputtering angrily.

Nothing happened. Where was he? Luce swam closer. There in the gray dimness under the pier she could just make out his ragged, flailing shape. His waterlogged coats splayed out around him like pinwheeling wings, but they were only dragging him farther down. He twisted randomly, as if he couldn’t guess where the surface was, and Luce understood that he was drowning. His eyes bulged and his lips were moving fast, bright bubbles leaping out like silent words. There was still something he needed to say, Luce thought. For some reason she thought he was trying to tell someone how sorry he was. To ask for forgiveness.

Without thinking about what she was doing, Luce started singing. The water stopped dragging on the tangled coats. Instead it moved in Luce’s song, and the wide wings of fabric formed a kind of cradle tugging him back toward the surface. The man gagged, thrashing in astonishment as the water shuddered with unimaginable music, carrying him up . . .

Up into the night air, where the enchanted water seized him in the curl of a tall wave that stood alone above the black glass surface of the bay. Luce sang a sustained note that held him there in space for a moment, his body slowly rotating as he wheezed and stretched out his hands, water spilling from his mouth and sodden clothes. She thought of teaching him a lesson by sending her song into a high spike of sound and then breaking off abruptly, letting him crash back down onto the pier so hard that his teeth would jar from their sockets. Just because she’d gone and saved his life for no good reason, that didn’t mean he deserved any kindness from her.

Then, almost in spite of herself, Luce let the note fade slowly. The homeless man landed on the planks so lightly that there wasn’t even a thud.

She was only twenty feet from him now, still glaring at him as he scrambled onto his knees and gaped at her. Of course he wasn’t really Peter. He was much too old to be Peter, probably at least sixty. Just another idiotic drunk who’d destroy anything he could get his hands on, even if that meant he only wound up destroying himself.

“You’re shining . . .” the man croaked. His hair hung in grayish clumps around his face, but his eyes were bright with longing. The cold water and the shock of almost dying, not to mention being rescued in such an unfathomable way, seemed to have sobered him up.

“You need to quit drinking!” Luce rasped out furiously. Her nails were digging into her palms and her tail was lashing. “I don’t know why I saved you! Why did you have to go and get so wasted, like you don’t even care what happens to you?”

Luce was too enraged to think clearly or to control the wild spasms of her tail. It kicked above the surface, sending droplets spinning out across the night. A trace of mist hung in the air, and the glow of the streetlamps floated like dandelion puffs.

“You’re . . . a mermaid? And you did that to the water, didn’t you? You saved me. You’re a—”

“Well, you’re a drunk,” Luce snapped. “This is the only time I’m going to save you, okay? If you ever do that again, I swear I’ll let you drown!”

“Hey,” the man said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Stay and talk to me. Please.”

“No!” Luce shrieked. She was already backing away.

“At least tell me your name. I want to know . . . who saved my life. You saved my life. Beautiful . . . your voice was so beautiful! I need to know . . .” He was kneeling on the pier’s edge, one hand stretched helplessly toward her.

Luce didn’t think that deserved a response. She’d already wasted too much time on him, she thought, and of course she shouldn’t have let some human see her at all. She turned to go.

“I’m always here!” he cried out after her. Even as the water closed over her head, Luce could still hear him shouting. “I’m always here! I’ve come so far. I’ve been a stevedore, and a soldier and a ghost, but I’m here now!” Luce was still angry, but she felt the light touch of another emotion she would have preferred to ignore. Maybe there was something sweet about this old man. “Hey! Mermaid, listen up! If you ever want help with anything, you know who to ask!”

 

Luce kept swimming south. All at once she was overcome by weariness and shame, but she didn’t know why. Of course, she’d broken the timahk again by letting a human hear her sing without killing him, even by talking to him at all, but so many things had changed that the timahk didn’t seem to matter much anymore. Before she’d swum far, Luce realized why she felt so sick with herself: it hadn’t been fair of her to hate that man because of what Peter had done. It wasn’t his fault. That old man had never hurt her; she couldn’t have any idea of what he’d gone through, the events that had left him so broken.

Why should she care, though?

The water around her seemed alive, but Luce didn’t pay much attention. Something faintly luminous darted below her, torqued itself, curled upward. All at once Luce recognized what it was and reeled back, startled.

“You know this is a lousy time to be pulling that here!” a voice snapped. “Now you want to risk them noticing us? Don’t even think about trying that again!”

A strange mermaid furled her pinkish gold tail in front of Luce. She was older and Asian, her long hair clouding black around the creamy golden shine of her skin.

“I . . .” Luce started, but she was too surprised to know what she should say.

“ . . . just offed some homeless guy, right? Fantastic. When the bay’s practically the only safe place left!”

“I didn’t kill him,” Luce said, though of course that wouldn’t help. The strange mermaid glowered, disbelieving. “You . . . I actually didn’t know there were other mermaids here. I’m . . .”

The girl’s face softened slightly. “One of the refugees? Or were you just kicked out of your tribe? Look, I guess there’s room for you, but you really can’t go around singing like that!”

“I won’t,” Luce promised, but her thoughts were racing. “Are there a lot of mermaids here? It’s a big tribe?”

“You are new here! No tribe.”

“But . . .”

“No tribes, no queens. But yes, tons of mermaids. More every day now.”

“Where?”

“All over the place. A bunch of them you should just kind of leave alone—they’re too crazy—but you won’t see them much. There are a lot of us under the old factories before Hunter’s Point, though. You coming?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, and Luce went swimming along beside the stranger. They skimmed between angled pilings then beside strange crenelated metal walls that stood in the water with ships docked between them. It seemed like a peculiar place for mermaids, gritty and mournful, though it had a lonely beauty of its own. “Do you know a mermaid named Nausicaa?” Luce asked at last. “I’m trying to find her.”

Luce half expected the stranger to jerk back in astonishment at Nausicaa’s name; she was disappointed to find that this gold-shining girl didn’t react at all. “Um, I don’t think I know her. But there are a lot of us out here I don’t know, so maybe she’s around someplace.”

Maybe Nausicaa hadn’t been here, then. They skimmed up for air and passed a spot where a cement-walled creek released a plume of revolting fresh water into the bay. A seal bobbed and then vanished. Then they reached salt water again and dipped under a vast ruined factory propped on a forest of upright logs. It was dark apart from a scattering of long, dimly shining forms far back in the shadows, and even though the dark didn’t stop Luce from seeing, she still had trouble recognizing what was in front of her. The water lapped gently at the pilings, and stretched here and there between them was a network of what appeared to be enormous drooping webs, each web set on a slant so that one side trailed into the glossy skin of the bay. And in their webs those glowing things were figures, some chatting quietly to each other, the subtle gleam from their faces dabbling on the water like bits of melted star.

Then Luce understood. Of course there were no suitable caves here. Instead the mermaids had adapted, stringing up half-submerged hammocks woven from old scraps of fishing nets, plastic bags, algae-slimed ropes. Luce noticed one hammock that appeared to be made from dozens of pairs of pantyhose knotted together. They could sleep here with their tails under the water, their heads above, in the last place humans would ever think to look for them.

“New girl,” the Asian mermaid announced tiredly to no one in particular. “Don’t know how long she’s staying.”

Luce looked around the black mazelike space under its low ceiling of boards just in case Nausicaa was there somewhere. She didn’t feel much hope of that anymore, but maybe . . . Condensation gleamed on the tar-smeared trunks around her. A few mermaids leaned in their nets to get a better look, though they didn’t seem particularly interested. In one of the more remote hammocks Luce noticed three mermaids laughing together. One of them tipped forward as she laughed with a voice that was at once harsh and delicate, and Luce saw her red-gold hair flaring in the dimness like a match before it vanished again behind one of the pillars.

Luce’s heart stopped. She couldn’t let herself believe it. The mermaid beside her was still talking—something about where Luce should sleep—but Luce couldn’t focus enough to make out the words. There it was again, red-gold hair suffused with its own light, and Luce was flinging herself across the water. It wasn’t what she’d hoped for, but if it was true it was almost as wonderful. A long, wordless cry rushed from Luce’s throat. Girls turned to stare at her in surprise as she dodged wildly around pilings. She smacked into someone and reeled away, gasping a vague apology, while red-gold light came tumbling toward the water just ahead. Bronze fins brushed Luce’s shoulder. Then two moon gray eyes were staring at her, wide with disbelief, and Luce finally managed to form her outcry into a word:

“CAT! Cat, Cat, it’s . . .”

“LUCE?”

There was a light splash, and shining hair radiated out through the water, rushing closer until Luce was surrounded in fiery waves. Pale hands reached up, grasping randomly at Luce’s shoulders, squeezing her face, and Catarina’s eyes gazed fiercely into hers.

Luce couldn’t even speak at first. Her whole chest heaved with sobs as Catarina’s cool fingers sank into her short hair. Then they were holding each other so tightly that Luce’s ribs ached. “Lucette,” Catarina was murmuring, “my Lucette, my crazy little Luce. Thank God! All this way. And after everything we’ve heard . . .” Catarina touched the notch in Luce’s ear, then brushed her fingertips across the imperfectly healed cuts in her cheek and the white scar on her shoulder.

“Cat, I can’t believe you’re here! Everything’s been so terrible.” Luce breathed the words out between half-sobs, but she’d started smiling now too. She was holding someone she loved again, a friend whom she was now completely sure loved her back, and that almost made the horror and loneliness of the past weeks disappear into a cloud of warm relief.

“Where is everyone else?” Catarina leaned away to look at Luce, her eyes shining with unbearable hope. “Are they with you? Are they coming?”

Sudden dread coated Luce’s insides like cold oil. She didn’t know how she could begin to tell Cat what had happened. And all of it was her fault: if she’d only become queen the way Catarina wanted, the tribe might have survived. “Dana—and Violet—and a few of the little ones. They’re the only ones . . .”

Luce broke off. It was too horrible to say out loud.

Catarina’s lovely mouth pinched with dismay, but for some reason the eagerness in her face was still stronger. “The only ones? Luce, tell me! It’s so horrible to think . . . Dana . . . Oh, but I was afraid it would be so much worse than that!” Luce stared at her, starting to understand. Her mouth opened but no sound would come. “Luce? That’s what you’re trying to tell me, isn’t it? You mean those are the only ones who died?”

Luce shook her head. “No. Cat . . . No.” The words came out in a croak.

“LUCE!”

“Cat . . . I mean . . . those are the only ones besides me who might still be alive.”