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?”