28

Acts of Grace

The air was still surging with Luce’s scream as a gray-haired man in a dark business suit lunged at the killer from behind, flinging one arm around his throat and slamming the gun from his hand. It jumped into the air, a blurry blackish shape, and then clattered down the rocky embankment and into the bay.

Luce, Imani, and Yuan were pressing forward to reach the dying mermaid, but their tails were tangled and some of the girls in their way were too stunned to move and only screamed or gaped, their breath coming out like torn rags. By the time they managed to break free of the crowd the humans were already there, and for once the police didn’t stop people from clambering down into the water. The dead mermaid’s head slumped sideways, her wound a deep crimson crater surrounded by a drifting corolla of red-brown hair. Dark spatters of brain soiled her ivory cheek, and her green eyes were wide and empty.

To Luce’s amazement half a dozen humans were on top of the killer, pinning him face-down on the pavement. Many of them had been friendly enough, but it still astonished her that they would turn against one of their own kind for a mermaid’s sake.

Yuan cried out as the humans began to lift the mermaid from the water. “Luce, stop them!” But there such obvious tenderness in the way that old woman cradled the devastated head, such care in how those two tough-looking teenagers gathered the still-twitching tail in their arms.

“It’s okay, Yuan,” Luce said impulsively. “It’s too late to save her, and . . . they’re doing the right thing.”

“She belongs in the water! Even dead! Don’t let them take her!” Five people were now holding the mermaid at different points along her slim body, carefully climbing back ashore with her. Her scales already had that papery, faded look Luce had seen once before, and reddish flecks began to dance in the somnolent breeze. Someone spread a black coat on the asphalt. They laid the mermaid on top.

“They have to. It’s about . . . about their kind of justice, too.” Would the humans really punish that young man in the trench coat for what he’d done, or would they decide a mermaid’s life didn’t matter? After all, she’d admitted to killing in the past herself.

Then Luce heard humans crying out in dismay and amazement. The mermaid’s dull ruby-silver scales were curling up, fluttering, peeling away. Even as they peeled they were somehow disintegrating into a kind of speckled reddish smoke that shone slightly against the gray air. Then, like something emerging from a mist, Luce caught the shape of a foot with tightly curled toes . . .

And the body resting on that black coat wasn’t a dead mermaid any longer, but a dead human girl. The skin on her legs looked damp and smeary and long-unused, and her empty green eyes were suddenly less vivid. All around them humans had started gagging and sobbing and sinking to their knees.

Of course, Luce realized. She knew perfectly well what happened when a mermaid died—but the humans crowding the shore hadn’t known. Luce heard a yowl of despair so loud that it cut through the rest of the clamor and then saw that it had come from the killer, his head craned to see the dead girl as he struggled in the handcuffs one of the police must have clapped on him. His handsome face had turned crimson and blotchy. “Well. That’ll make it easier to convict him of murder,” a police officer announced morosely.

“Murder? It wasn’t murder! Murder means killing a fellow human being, not a thing!” the young man in the trench coat yelled back at him.

“A human corpse proves a human was killed, I’d say.”

The same gray-haired man who’d tackled the killer was tugging off his suit jacket. He kept his eyes carefully averted from the dead girl—out of respect for her nakedness, Luce realized—as he spread his jacket over her body. Hiding it from the crowd. From the absolute silence of the mermaids around her, Luce knew that they were touched by the same thing she was: the kind, dignified generosity of that gesture.

This was why humans were worth saving. No matter what evils they committed, they were also capable of such unexpected sympathy, such grace.

They were worth saving. Even if they had to be saved from themselves.

Luce noticed that Yuan was crying. “I thought they’d all just ogle her, paw at her,” Yuan whispered. “I thought they might do things to her body.”

Imani hadn’t spoken once throughout the whole awful event, but now she turned and leaned her head softly against Yuan’s tear-streaked face. There was a glint of something metal in the human crowd and Luce spun toward it, afraid that it was another gun. But no, it was just a camera. There seemed to be quite a few of them, actually.

“Doesn’t this show that Secretary Moreland was lying just now?” a woman asked. “On television?” No one answered her. The breeze dragged steadily across their faces, drying the tears of humans and mermaids alike.

“We have to get back to work. No matter how we all feel. It’s way after six; the singers from the last shift have been going for way too long,” Imani murmured the words even as tears were still welling in her midnight eyes.

“We’ll sing for her tonight, though,” Luce said gently. “All night. We’ll sing to the water as her . . . her . . .” she couldn’t remember the word at first. “Her elegy.”

Imani nodded. Wearily the mermaids slipped away from shore, heading out to take their places in the ranks under the bridge, while the mermaids who were finally off-duty streaked below them, their dimly phosphorescent skin glancing through green waves.

 

The singing of the mermaids under the bridge sounded sad and strange that night, without its usual undercurrent of sweet shared delight. As Luce dropped under the surface the line opened to welcome her: two mermaids she didn’t know took her hands, one on each side, and squeezed them. Actually, Luce realized, she did recognize the blond girl: wasn’t that Opal, who had traveled here with Nausicaa? Opal’s voice had a slow, ghostly vibrato. The mermaid on her other side looked Hispanic, and she sang in such a sweet, lambent voice that Luce was surprised she wasn’t a lieutenant.

The evening felt endless, and yet all its many moments seemed somehow to be the same moment infinitely repeating. The lights from the bridge slit the water above them with a thousand bladelike lines of light, and once a dolphin swam close enough to nose curiously at their fins.

As the song soared endlessly onward, surging from her core and up to merge with the rising water, Luce couldn’t help thinking of the last time she’d sung in mourning over a mermaid’s death. It had been that horrible dawn when Miriam had committed suicide by crawling onshore—when, in the frenzy of their grief, her tribe had sunk the cruise ship that was carrying Dorian’s family as well as Dorian himself, and Luce had seen him for the first time, staring down from the ship’s railing and singing back at her in cool defiance. At least this time the mermaids weren’t expressing their sadness through more murder!

Luce felt selfish for even thinking of Dorian at a time like this, but as she sang on and on into the light-slivered night she found herself wondering again if it was possible that Yuan was right. Could it really be that he’d marched on behalf of the Twice Lost, even worn that T-shirt, as a way of trying to tell her he was sorry for breaking her heart? Had he broken up with Zoe? And after all the callous, uncaring things he’d said to her, was it really possible that he wanted her back? The fused voices of hundreds of mermaids eddied through Luce’s mind and sent her thoughts spinning on dizzy trajectories.

She caught herself thinking that Dorian really had looked beautiful at the head of that march, with his hair dashed by the wind, his expression so strong-willed and serious.

Was it possible that he still loved her?

When her shift finally ended Luce kept on singing. New mermaids arrived and took the places beside her; Luce barely noticed Opal and the other singers leaving to go back to their encampments. She sang well past midnight, then on into the new dawn, even when her tail began to tremble from exhaustion.

She had too much emotion to contain in her small body; she had to let it out somehow, turn it into music, and she could never stop. Luce’s voice was roughening, crackling, but she drove it up to meet the vibration of the water above her.

Then Yuan was there, her hands on Luce’s shoulders, actually tugging her out of the line as Graciela arrived to take her place. Luce strained back, but now that she saw the expression on Yuan’s face—a mixture of strict and concerned and mocking—stopping began to feel a bit more manageable than it had moments before. “Come on, general-girl. You’re going to go home and sleep whether you like it or not. And eat, a lot. And maybe talk to me about all that stuff we saw on the news last night. Okay?” Yuan shook her a little.

Luce’s voice ebbed away. Without the song sustaining her she was suddenly unbearably hungry and so tired that she was tempted to simply collapse on the nearest beach. “Okay. Okay.” Yuan towed her to the surface, and Luce breathed deep and stared around at the dawn-smeared bay in a daze. Far away Alcatraz sat in a slick of lemon-colored light so brilliant that the whole island appeared to be levitating. “Thanks, Yuan.”

“Oh, my pleasure. Somebody’s gotta make sure you don’t go off the deep end, right?” But Yuan suddenly sounded a little distracted. She was looking toward the shore. At this distance the humans and their posters looked quite small, and Yuan was squinting at them. “Uh, Luce, what does that look like to you? I mean, it couldn’t be . . .”

Luce saw what Yuan was talking about. “That poster on the right? That does look like you! But Yuan . . .”

“It couldn’t be someone from my family! It’s been—God, almost fifteen years or something? And then—” Yuan looked down. “I mean, I used to get grounded if a boy called me up or anything. You’d think killing both my parents would be enough to get me disowned!” She gave a heart-rending laugh.

Luce focused on the image. “I think it might be a picture of you as a mermaid, actually. And it says—it says Queen Yuan. No last name.”

Yuan visibly relaxed. “Probably just another guy with a mermaid fetish, then. What a relief! Want to go tease the groupies for a minute? Could be fun.”

“It looks like a girl.”

Tired as she was, Luce was too curious not to swim a little closer with Yuan in the lead. People started waving to them, but Yuan’s eyes remained focused only on the human who had come for her. Then she stopped and grabbed Luce’s arm. “Oh, God. Oh, Luce, I wish that was my aunt or something! Anything would be better than—”

Luce could see the girl more clearly now. She was chubby and pretty and had golden skin that beamed orange in the dawn glow. “Do you recognize her?” Luce asked. Then the girl spotted them. She dropped her poster and started waving both arms wildly in midair.

“Yuan! Queen Yuan! It’s me!” the girl shouted. And all at once Luce understood.

“That’s her?” It was the girl Yuan had saved, the girl Yuan had despised herself for saving, the one whose survival had cost Yuan her tribe and her role as queen.

The girl who was both Yuan’s secret heart and the crack in her heart.

“Oh, God. She’s gotten so much older. But I have to talk to her. Do I have to talk to her? Luce!” Yuan’s nails sank deeper in Luce’s flesh.

“Queen Yuan! You saved my life! I came all the way from Boston to thank you!” the girl called out. She was looking around at the police, as if she might be considering making a leap for the water.

Yuan’s face looked greenish, her stare confused.

“You don’t have to talk to her if you don’t feel like it, Yuan. If you want I’ll go over there and tell her that . . . that you don’t think it’s a good idea,” Luce whispered.

Yuan shook her head. “I have to. It’s my fault she’s alive at all! I feel”—she gave that strange laugh again—“responsible.”

Luce considered that. “I felt that way too.” She hesitated. “With Dorian. Like I was tied to him somehow.”

Yuan’s grip on her arm eased, leaving deep red crescents where her nails had been. She groaned. “You get home safe now, general-girl.”