37

Aftermath

Luce had been battered by too many overwhelming emotions not to collapse into numbness at the first opportunity. As the news began to come in, as it became clear that the humans weren’t going to attack, Luce couldn’t even feel surprised. And when the reporters gathered jabbering onshore and asked for her reaction to the torrent of astonishing information coming from Washington she could only offer them drowsy, irrelevant replies. Soon Yuan and Imani were doing most of the talking. Half of the Twice Lost Army was still singing below the bridge, but everyone who was off-duty seemed to be too excited to sleep. The bay was full of darting, leaping figures, and their fins flashed colored reflections across the water’s glossy skin.

Luce slumped in the shallows near the bridge’s base with her head leaning on a rock while her friends spoke and gestured vivaciously beside her, only occasionally nudging her when the reporters bought up issues they weren’t sure about. Behind the reporters a crowd of humans pressed and shuffled, but all those people didn’t seem to be frightened and enraged anymore. Instead the mood was peculiarly light, even buoyant. People cried for the dead of Baltimore, but they also cried from relief: like Imani, most of them seemed to believe that peace was finally at hand.

“Yes. That’s Anais,” Luce confirmed sadly when they showed her the photo of the dead golden-haired girl with a badly bruised throat who’d been found naked and hopelessly drained of blood in the secretary of defense’s clinging arms. “We were in the same tribe once, up in Alaska. She was . . . really dangerous . . . but still . . .” Luce went back to staring at the late-morning sunlight speckled across the bay’s low waves.

“Secretary Moreland confessed to sending her out as an agent provocateur with instructions to trick the Baltimore Twice Lost into attacking. Can you tell us something about Anais that might help explain why she would agree to do that?”

Since Luce was looking away the reporter had addressed Yuan instead. “Well, Luce is the one who knew her; I never actually met—”

“She was a sika,” Luce murmured vaguely. She didn’t look around.

“A seekah?”

“Oh—yeah.” Yuan took up the question in authoritative tones. “See, a lot of mermaids are angry. But a mermaid who’s a sika isn’t angry, just empty. They’ll do anything because they can’t really feel, so it’s like they have to do evil, crazy things to feel anything at all, and nothing means anything to them.”

“Similar to what humans would call a psychopath?”

“Pretty much, I guess.”

The conversations went on and on. Luce couldn’t understand why this Secretary Moreland guy—wasn’t he the same one who’d said on TV that she was impersonating the real Luce Korchak?—hated mermaids so much that he was ready to sacrifice thousands of human lives simply to persuade the world to share in his hatred. But, unfathomable as it was, that appeared to be precisely the case. The tapes of his conversations with Anais certainly proved he was a madman, capable of extravagant evil. On the news they said Moreland was delirious now, gibbering, but telling everything over and over again as if he couldn’t believe it himself. He’d admitted that he was the one who’d sent out the helicopter with the net too. Catarina and the other mermaids caught that day had died because of him. And he’d also arranged for the murder of certain humans, ones he considered his enemies. That part was on the tapes: they revealed that he’d been using Anais as an assassin.

He didn’t care if everyone knew the truth, not now that he’d lost Anais, now that he’d been pulled off her floating corpse by the first rescuers to arrive at the scene. He only wanted to die, and to die by a mermaid’s enchantment. He was begging the mermaids to show him that mercy in gratitude for his confession.

Luce didn’t think any of them would.

Poor Anais, Luce thought. A gray glaze seemed to cover the water, or maybe it only covered her eyes. She felt sick and achy. Her head seemed to be drifting by itself down to Imani’s shoulder.

“When Dorian Hurst of the Twice Lost Humans started claiming he’d been subjected to an attack by a mermaid assassin via telephone and that he’d fended her off by singing back to her, his story struck most people as pure fantasy. But now it appears that Hurst was in fact targeted by Secretary Moreland,” someone said loudly onshore.

Luce jolted out of her hazy half-sleep and sat up, her mouth suddenly opening in wordless indignation. Anais had tried to kill Dorian? How dare she?

“That got a reaction from you,” Yuan observed, smiling slyly at her. “You know that while you were singing on top of the wave earlier, Dorian was here the whole time? He wanted to go up on the bridge and jump off into the wave so he could see you. God knows how he thought he was going to squeeze through that crowd up there, but anyway. I told him no, to just let you do your thing, and he could come visit you at our camp tomorrow.”

Luce was now so wide awake that her eyes ached. Everything felt cold and sharp even though it was a beautiful warm day, and she found herself sitting bolt upright. “You told him what?”

“He’s earned it, Luce.” Yuan was firm. “I know he hurt you, but he’s earned a chance to make his case. Maybe he’s earned more than that.”

“But I—” I can’t see him, Luce thought. I can’t face it.

“And maybe you’ve earned some happiness too. I mean, the war might be over for real soon. There are just too many humans on our side now for them to keep on fighting us, right? And you know Dorian had a lot to do with that.” Yuan was watching her with an expression Luce couldn’t decipher. “What did you think about what he told us, anyway? That mermaids can turn back if they want to now?”

Luce shook her head. It felt like her skull was filled with loose silver sparks. She was beyond exhausted. “Yuan! We don’t even know if that’s true. And even if it is . . .”

“I’ll be the first in line!” Yuan grinned in such a strange haphazard way that Luce couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.

Either way, her thoughts were still on Dorian. “There’s no way he’ll be able to find our camp,” Luce murmured. It sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

“Oh, I think I gave him pretty good directions.” Yuan was still smiling. “Don’t sweat that part, general-girl.” An outcry started up in the parking lot behind them, and Yuan jerked around, raising herself as far as she could in her effort to see through the clustered humans. “Whoa, Luce. Look! What the heck?”

All the mermaids along the water’s edge turned to look. As usual the parking lot next to the bridge’s base was packed with people, sitting or standing, some with signs or cameras, singing or debating the latest electrifying fragments of news. That was normal. What wasn’t normal was that for once many of the people there were climbing back up onto the road above, shuffling and scrambling onto the hillsides as they tried to clear a path . . .

A path for a chain of black-windowed limousines. The cars advanced patiently, solemnly, but they were obviously determined not to stop before they reached the land’s limit.

Imani caught Luce’s hand and squeezed it.

Soon the limousines stopped. Doors opened, and a dozen men and women in dark, crisp suits stepped out. For all their poise, they seemed a bit uncomfortable as they looked around at the water-wall still glimmering like an immense ghost under the Golden Gate Bridge, at the jostling crowds and the wide expanse of the bay. They didn’t seem to notice the watching mermaids, low down and half-concealed by the line of rocks. “We’re here to speak with General Luce,” a man called out.

“I bet you are!” Yuan called back. “She’s right here!”

The man started apprehensively, caught sight of them, and assumed a professional smile. He was very handsome, slim and straight and black-haired, with vivid blue eyes. Luce sat up as far as she could without exposing her tail to the warm air. The black-haired man walked forward to meet her; Luce was suddenly aware of her ragged bikini top, her scars, and the missing notch in her ear. “Hi. I’m General Luce.”

“General.” He nodded, looking her over in exactly the way Luce had feared he might. “I’m Ambassador Prescott, authorized by President Leopold of the United States of America to formally request negotiations with representatives of the Twice Lost Army.” His mouth tweaked a little as he tried to repress a smile of amusement. Yuan’s forehead looked tense. Luce thought that he was having trouble taking her entirely seriously; after all, to him she must look like a child.

For a moment she was almost cowed. For a moment she almost saw herself through his eyes, as an absurd, pretty little schoolgirl with a tail like shiny mint candy—but with enough power that she had to be humored.

And then she remembered who she really was, along with everything she’d gone through to become who she was now. This ambassador was in no position to condescend to her, and she knew it.

“I speak for the Twice Lost Army,” Luce said. She kept her tone as calm and straightforward as she could manage. “Does President Leopold want peace?”

Ambassador Prescott looked a bit graver now. “He does. He’d like to meet with you in person to negotiate a treaty.”

Imani squeezed Luce’s arm, hard. It was only then that the enormity of what was happening sank in. Her mouth seemed clotted with ashes and her heart drummed.

“We’re ready to negotiate anytime,” Luce told him carefully. At first all she’d seen in Ambassador Prescott’s eyes was crystalline blue vanity, but now she began to see the possibility of something better than that. “We want peace, too.”

Prescott nodded so soberly that even Yuan stopped glaring at him. “We believe that you do, general.”