34

Healing

Luce sang through her shift automatically. Catarina was dead, a dozen other mermaids were dead, but the war was still a living, lashing thing that had to be fed and tended. She was feeding it her own body and her song, just as earlier that day she had fed it her heart. Inexplicable things had happened over the last several hours. The president had denied responsibility for the attack, even sent her an apology, and the crowds onshore kept screaming her name . . . but none of that changed anything. The war was still famished, endlessly demanding, and she was still its unwilling keeper.

For once her song meant nothing to her, though magic still flowed from it. And at midnight when Cala arrived to replace her Luce slipped silently away. No doubt at the encampment there were friends waiting to comfort her. Yuan and Imani would hug her and assure her she’d done the right thing, the only thing, that she’d had no choice . . . and Luce knew she couldn’t bear to hear any of that.

Instead she swam deep, hugging the shore. For at least an hour she wove randomly between black pilings and lightly brushed the pink kiss of the anemones, stared into bone white sea stars draped across rotten beams. She couldn’t face her fellow mermaids, but something was pulling her along, and when at last she came up near a collapsing pier she knew what it was. That hunched figure sitting at the pier’s end was just as heartbroken as she was. Every line of his back showed it.

Seb, Luce thought with surprise, might understand what had happened that day. At least he might understand it enough. She dipped low again and came up in front of him.

He didn’t seem surprised to see her and raised a hand in greeting. His worn face looked severe and mournful under his uneven hair. His hideous tie flapped in the wind, and he’d pulled his blazer as tight as it could go. For a human, Luce realized, it was a chilly night—in San Francisco even August offered no guarantee of warmth—and there was nothing she could do for him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” Luce said. “To thank you. You did everything right.”

Seb just looked at her then shook his head. “Well, it’s a real luxury, isn’t it, Miss Luce? When you can do the right thing, because there’s one truly right thing to do?”

Luce was suddenly aware of the water cradling her, gently and faithfully. She looked at Seb with gratitude. “Yes. That is . . . a luxury.”

“So maybe I’m the one who should thank you, for giving me such a nice clear-cut right thing to do. Helping the mermaid who saved me when that’s not enough for her and she’s gone and set her heart on saving more than that? That was an easy one, Miss Luce. I haven’t had so many opportunities in my life to do anything as right as that. I’ve mostly been doing something at least halfway wrong, just fighting to get at one little speck of right that was mixed in with it somewhere.” Seb kept on looking at her. For all his tattered absurdity his gaze was as transparent as glass, and grave comprehension shone through it. “And I know you know about that.”

Luce felt something blocky and horrible in her throat. She looked away, unable to answer him, and wrapped her arms around a piling for support. Hoops of apricot light cast by the streetlamps pranced on the water. Luce looked at those beaming rings and thought she might fall through them and plummet into another world. “I killed them, Seb. Mermaids who trusted me.”

“I know you did, Miss Luce. I watched the whole thing on TV, along with practically everybody else on this planet of ours. It was as horrible as anything I ever saw, even in Vietnam, and I’m no slacker where horror’s concerned.”

“I had a choice. I let Catarina die. I decided that.”

“You made a choice. That’s why everybody here in humanland thinks you’re the big hero tonight. They’re taping your picture in their windows. You’re looking out all over, on all the streets, with those sad eyes of yours. It’s gonna change things for sure, what you did.”

“I’m not a hero,” Luce murmured dully. “I never was. Catarina was right about me.”

“I know you’re no hero,” Seb said seriously. “They set you up so you’d be a monster no matter what you did. And now a monster’s what you are.”

Luce nodded. Far from feeling offended, she was grateful and wildly relieved that Seb understood her so well. She looked at him. He was shivering from cold because he’d thrown away those filthy coats he used to wear—thrown them away so he could look better for his role as her ambassador. “I wish I could help you, Seb. I wish we did have treasure and pearls for you. I’m sorry . . .”

“Thanks, Lucy Goose. And I wish you knew that a monster like you is worth twenty heroes.”

Luce leaned her head on the piling and closed her eyes. “Please don’t say that.”

“I’ve known heroes, Miss Luce. Plenty of them. You know I even knew that Secretary of Defense Moreland back when we were both young? Big hero, that one. So I’m kind of an authority on this stuff, and I’m going to tell you whatever truth I’ve got in me to tell.”

She swayed in the darkness. Around her hovered empty spaces shaped like her father, Dorian, Nausicaa, Catarina. No wonder everyone always abandoned her. She was a monster made of nothingness; she was ruin and desolation wearing a beautiful mask. Everyone knew that, but no one would admit it—apparently not even Seb, although she’d thought he understood.

“Hey,” Seb said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

It took Luce a long moment to realize that he wasn’t talking to her.

“Oh, God,” Yuan said. “Poor Luce. She just doesn’t get a break.”

Luce cringed—at Yuan’s presence, at her sympathy, at the concerned looks she knew both Yuan and Seb were firing her way.

“She’s got the shadow sitting on her heart tonight,” Seb said as if that were the most rational explanation in the world. “She’s feeling what it is when you have to know exactly what kind of a monster you are, and you can’t look away from that.”

“She’s going to have to,” Yuan said firmly. “Look away, I mean. I didn’t come searching for Luce so I could try to cheer her up. There’s . . . something she has to deal with.”

“Oh, Lord,” Seb said. “Don’t make her do more tonight! Just look at her.”

“I see her,” Yuan agreed. Suddenly Luce felt Yuan’s strong, smooth hands on her arms, gently unwrapping them from the piling. “I’d let her stay here if I could, Seb. Really. But this is important. Luce?”

Important, Luce thought with grim sarcasm. “What’s so important now?” She barely muttered the question.

“They could be lying,” Yuan conceded. “But if they’re not—and I really don’t believe they are, actually—”

“Yuan,” Luce snapped. “What do I have to do now?”

Yuan’s gentleness was gone in a flash. She gripped Luce by both shoulders, spun her savagely around, and gave her such a quick, jarring shake that Luce opened her eyes in exhausted surprise. Yuan’s golden face appeared, fierce and radiant and loving. “You have to come see your father, Luce. He’s by the bridge. And he is not okay.”

 

With those words everything changed. The night seemed to inhale, to stretch itself wider and darker in all directions.

Luce gave an apologetic wave while Seb sadly watched them from the pier. Yuan was already towing her away and talking as they swam. “Luce, listen, about your dad: it’s bad. He’s not physically hurt, but . . . it might be something a mermaid did to him? And I don’t know, but there’s this nice old guy who brought your dad to the bay, and he keeps saying . . . that maybe you can help somehow? Come on.”

They were already swimming under the water. The darkness ran like quicksilver around Luce and also straight through her veins. She was the pulse in the night, the racing surge, and Yuan’s words seemed to signal her from far ahead, bright and strange in the distance. She drove herself on, faster and faster, until Yuan was trailing just behind her. Past the Embarcadero and its shining clock, below the looming hill with its pale tower. As the bridge neared, Luce lunged for the surface, staring frantically at the crowd onshore. Humans were gathered there in greater numbers than ever; they all seemed to be holding candles and their faces floated on the dark like glowing balloons. Instead of jostling they stood quietly with arms around one another’s waists, staring wide-eyed at the brilliant streaks of reflected light playing on the soaring flank of the water-wall. Many of them were weeping quietly. The rush of mermaid song suffused Luce’s mind so completely that it took her a moment to understand that the humans were all singing too, in a long incantatory drone of rising and falling harmonies. It was their best effort to sing along with the mermaids under the bridge, Luce realized. They couldn’t contribute magic to the mermaids’ struggle, but they could offer compassion and the strength of their hearts. Tears swarmed into her eyes. But she didn’t see her father.

“He’s farther along, Luce. Around the next bend, on the ocean side. We tried to pick a spot where you could have a little more privacy, but it’s still pretty crowded.”

Luce dipped again. On the bridge’s far side was a hill with strange bunkerlike buildings and terraces set into its slope. The singing human crowd had grown big enough now to submerge the bunkers in a tide of bodies: people sat and stood on the decks and rooftops, their candles sending pitching waves of light across their faces. The shore here was paved in cement, defined by a row of large rocks mortared together.

And at the base of one building, very near the water’s edge, was an empty doorway. And poised in that doorway . . .

Her father, but also—not her father. Her father with everything that made him who he was somehow missing. His face and body looked slack and empty, and another man—a thickset, strong-looking man with tan skin and neat silver hair—was holding him firmly upright. Luce swam closer, a strange paralysis gripping her heart, her eyes helplessly drawn by the awful vacancy of her father’s face. To think that she’d blamed him for not trying to see her . . . Even when he’d been snarled in the spirits’ enchantment on that lost island, he hadn’t seemed as profoundly injured as he did now. His body was like a shell for the void.

Even worse, she could hear the strange shapeless emptiness that was waiting for her behind his cinnamon eyes.

Even worse, the void was singing.

Luce was gripping the shore before she even knew what she was doing. Some of the people on the roof had started calling to her, crying out her name. The silver-haired man stepped out of his doorway, Andrew Korchak’s vacant body still sagging against him, and half turned to silence the crowd with a single imperious hand. “General Luce isn’t here for you,” he announced, sharply. “She’s here to see her father, and he’s not well. Please respect that.” He kept on staring into the faces above until they quieted, then he nodded with a certain curt efficiency and carefully lowered Andrew until he was sitting loosely cross-legged just behind the row of rocks that separated him from his daughter. By stretching her arm through a gap between two rocks Luce was able to catch his hand and hold it tight, and all the time she was listening to the void’s slow, musical purr, attuning herself to its thrum and its cadence. To fight it she had to become its intimate, as familiar to it as its own echo.

Who had done this to him?

The silver-haired man sat down too, watching her intensely. Luce didn’t look at him or at Yuan, who’d swum up beside her. Imani was there too, Luce realized dimly, and Graciela, waiting in silence to see what Luce would do. Nothing mattered, though, but the yawning devastation in her father’s eyes. He was so close to her, but his gaze never alighted on her. That gaze went everywhere and nowhere as if it saw everything undifferentiated, as facets of a single complex sound.

“General Luce?” the silver-haired man tried. “I’m sorry that you have to see this, especially after everything that happened earlier. But I thought you should see your father as soon as possible, in case time is a factor in . . . in your ability to effect a cure. Assuming a cure is feasible. The effects of a malicious, deliberate assault by mermaid song . . . well. Dorian insists that you have the ability to heal this kind of damage, although I have to say that seems like a great deal to hope for.”

Dorian’s name was enough to make Luce glance up sharply at the silver-haired man, but only for an instant. Almost immediately her eyes went back to her father’s face, to his head fallen over at a steep angle and his wandering gaze. But looking up, even so briefly, reminded Luce of the crowd watching raptly from above as if they were in some kind of bizarre theater built from night and sea. “I can try,” Luce breathed out. “I can try to heal him. But I’m going to have to sing to do it. I mean sing in ways that might not be safe for the people here. Hearing me—I don’t know what that will do to everyone. They should leave.”

In the corner of her eye, the strange man nodded thoughtfully. But for some reason he didn’t get up and go.

Yuan began swimming back and forth under the pallid bunkers, calling up, “General Luce needs to sing. It could be dangerous. You should leave for your own safety, okay? Everybody please leave!”

Some people started climbing down from the roofs and vanishing behind the buildings. But far too many lingered where they were, and Yuan’s voice began rising in frustration. “We’re trying to be responsible here! We’re asking all of you to GET—AWAY—NOW! Why don’t you all get moving? This is serious business!”

“We just want to listen,” a young woman in a red parka answered from a curving cement roof. “We won’t bother you.”

“It’s dangerous!” Yuan yelled back. “Don’t be stupid! This isn’t a rock concert!”

“I’ll take my chances!”

Yuan wheeled around to look at Luce and raised her hands helplessly. Luce groaned. Her father was as hollow as an open wound, and these stubborn, reckless humans wouldn’t get out of her way and let her help him. Luce gave her father’s unresponsive hand a quick squeeze and swirled back a few feet to look up at the crowd. Her tail coiled around her. “Please, please leave! Now! I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I can’t just keep waiting!”

“General Luce?” It was the man who’d brought her father. “The way you need to sing to your father—it must be a way of singing that’s meant to help, not harm. Isn’t that correct? You won’t actually be singing in a way that would persuade the people here to drown themselves.”

“I don’t think anybody will drown,” Luce agreed. “But I can’t tell; it might hurt them in other ways. I just don’t know, and there’s already been—so many horrible things have happened already—and if anyone else gets hurt because of me—” She closed her eyes in despair. Maybe she should just seize hold of her father and drag him away from here, across the bay. Maybe she could take him to Alcatraz.

“It’s really going to be fine, Luce,” someone said. The voice ached inside her, as warm and reassuring as her own blood, but somehow she couldn’t place it at first. “You can sing without hurting anyone. I know that for a fact. Mr. Ellison? Can we get him closer to her, like on the other side of the rocks?”

Now she knew who was there. Luce looked up again, her vision scattered and silvery with tears. Dorian appeared at the center of a web of light. He was helping the strange man to maneuver her father’s limp body over the line of rocks and into the shallow lapping water where Luce waited.

It was all too much, too painful. Luce closed her eyes again, trying to squeeze the darkness so close that it would never leave her. She caught her father’s lolling head between her hands and held on gently, keeping him from sliding down into the water. And then she heard him trying to speak. The word came out as a lowing, broken note. “Lu . . .” her father half groaned, half sang. “Lu . . . ssss.”

And very softly, very delicately, Luce began singing back to him.

Her voice spread through her father’s mind. He was full of a trilling emptiness, yes—but that void didn’t possess all of him. Instead he was fragmented, torn apart by that darkness. Aspects of him shone far apart in that vacancy like suns separated by the immensity of space. Luce’s voice reached through his strange internal night and gathered pieces of his consciousness, until those suns weren’t scattered but instead hung like apples from a single blazing tree.

Luce heard herself singing slow, high notes that traveled along sweeping curves, touching everything in her father’s mind that had gotten lost. She sang the webs, the reconnections, but her own voice sounded to her like the deepest possible silence. There was still the endless thrum of mermaid voices under the bridge. There was the subtle breathing of the wind. But even in concert with those sounds the silence was perfect, just as actively present as any music. It rose in harmony with the music.

In that silence her father would hear his own thoughts again.

In it he would recognize himself again. And the world, which had been washed away by some uncanny, destructive flood of sound, would come back to him with its sky and its ground and its trees. Those things would seem real to him again, without any music.

By the time Luce let her voice softly die away, she knew that he wasn’t completely cured—but also that he was much, much better.

And so was she. At least she was well enough now to open her eyes and face the world outside her own private darkness.

The people on the hillside were crying silently, each one consumed by a lifetime’s worth of emotions all streaming into wild release at once. None of them spoke.

Dorian was sitting cross-legged only five feet away from her. His cheeks were tear-streaked and his ochre gaze seemed to cradle her face. She looked away from him, suddenly embarrassed.

And her father—he still swayed uncertainly. He looked weak and sleepy. But he also looked like a person and not like a shell filled with yawning night, and his eyes met hers with dreamy recognition. “Hi there, Luce,” he whispered. “I was trying to get to you. I wanted to explain . . .”

Luce hugged him, trying not to break down and sob. “Explain later. You need to go somewhere warm now. You need to get in dry clothes and then sleep for a long time. Okay?”

“That sounds about right,” Andrew Korchak agreed vaguely. He lifted his hand from the water and watched with perplexity the drops falling from his fingers. “How did I get here, Luce? I was just trying . . . I saw you in the water, and I tried to swim out to you. And after that . . . there was that room made out of glass, and I was talking to your friend.”

He was still half-crazy, Luce thought: still shaken and disoriented. “Tell me everything later. And if you need me to I’ll sing to you again, and soon, soon you’ll be okay.” Andrew Korchak nodded hazily, then stood up and clambered over the rocks. He curled in a ball on the pavement and sighed. Maybe he was already asleep.

Luce looked toward the silver-haired man. Like everyone else, he was gleaming with tears that seemed to illuminate something deep inside him. It was only now that Luce realized how much this unknown man had done for her. “I haven’t thanked you yet. For bringing my dad here. And I don’t know your name.”

“I’m Ben Ellison.” He smiled at her sadly. “I’m glad to finally meet you, general. Dorian always speaks of you . . . very lovingly. And now I truly understand why.”

Luce’s eyes went wide as the realization hit her. How could she have forgotten? Ellison, Ben Ellison: this was the same FBI agent who’d tried to make Dorian betray her. Even without meeting Ben Ellison she’d always hated him, always regarded him as an implacable enemy.

But he’d helped save her father, and she couldn’t hate him anymore.

“Hi, Mr. Ellison,” Luce said a bit awkwardly. “It’s nice . . . to meet you, too. I really, really appreciate your helping my dad this way. Can you please take him somewhere safe now? I think I shouldn’t try any more tonight.”

“I have a hotel room waiting for him,” Ben Ellison assured her. “General, I’d very much like . . . to speak with you again soon. Your old acquaintance Anais did this to your father”—Luce jolted, stunned to realize that Nausicaa had been right again, and that Anais had in fact survived the massacre of their old tribe—“and her current whereabouts are unknown. Obviously she could be extremely dangerous.”

Luce nodded, but she was so overwhelmed that she could barely take it in. Anais was still causing extraordinary harm; Anais was still out there somewhere . . .

“Luce?” Dorian whispered. But she couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

“Dorian, are you coming with us?” Ben Ellison asked. “We’re leaving now.” He tried to lift Andrew from the ground, and a few people from the crowd came down to help. In a moment a group of half a dozen was carrying her father, probably to a waiting car. He’d be safe, Luce thought, and eventually he’d recover completely.

“I’ll come later,” Dorian called. Even without glancing at him, Luce knew his stare hadn’t once shifted away from her face. “Luce, I know you must be really mad at me, and you’ve gone through hell, and I don’t blame you if you hate me. But—”

“Not now, Dorian.” The voice was Yuan’s, coming from just behind Luce’s left shoulder. “We all know you love her, okay? And I’ve been really impressed by your whole Twice Lost Humans thing. But this is not the time. It’s not fair to ask Luce anything tonight.”

It was strange, Luce thought. But somehow now that she heard Yuan say it she knew it was true: Dorian did still love her. What she didn’t know was how she felt about that.

Dorian tilted his head toward Yuan. “Who are you?”

“I’m Yuan.” There was a brief pause. “And I’m pretty sure I want the same things you do for Luce. I think we’re on the same side. But everything’s changed since you knew her.”

Dorian gave a kind of abrupt, wheezing laugh. “Yeah. Changed. Yeah, it has. You have no idea, Yuan. While we were on the plane coming here Ben Ellison told me something that’s going to change everything.”

Even Luce looked toward Dorian now. He sat like some wounded prince at the edge of a battlefield, his skin golden and his bronze-blond hair overgrown and knotted.

Yuan stared at him. “Dorian? What are you talking about? Are they ready . . . are they going to end the war?”

“I don’t know about that,” Dorian said wearily. “I hope so. It’s something else—about you guys. About mermaids. You can change back into humans if you want. They’ve found a way. You can all change back, and it won’t kill you.”

Yuan let out a shriek of pure amazement, and an answering outcry poured down from the hill.

At first Luce thought it was a cry of surprise, maybe even of joy, provoked by what Dorian had said. The storm of voices kept getting louder, growing and booming. The sky seemed to thunder with human shouts, and Luce realized that the uproar had spread to the mass of people lining the Golden Gate Bridge, to the hills above them, maybe even to the far shore of Sausalito.

And it no longer sounded like a cry of amazement. The tone had darkened to a howl of fury and dismay. Imani, Graciela, and Yuan rushed close to hold her, tugging her away from the shore in alarm. All of them were buffeted by a torrent of outraged sound. They spun in place, bewildered. A woman was yelling at Dorian. In that vast clamor Luce couldn’t make out what she was saying, but she saw the desperate look that came over Dorian’s face, the way his body wrung with sudden despair as he scanned the water for her.

“Luce! Yuan!” Dorian screamed. The mermaids were floating together thirty feet out, scared to approach any nearer. He caught sight of them and waved his arms wildly; Luce thought he was beckoning them over and shook her head in anxiety. “Get out of here now! Swim away and hide!” Hide? Luce shuddered with the first gasp of understanding. “The mermaids just destroyed Baltimore!”