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.”
9
The Twice Lost
What made it even worse was that there was no way she could tell Catarina the story privately. Other mermaids had gotten interested; they were slipping from their hammocks and flicking closer. The dim glow of their faces dotted the water on all sides. Luce stared around, and everywhere she looked another pair of eyes gleamed back at her. The soft light of their arms curled through the water. There were so many of them, far more than in any tribe Luce had ever seen.
“You know her, Catarina?” It was the Asian mermaid who’d led Luce there, her face a floating golden disc in that crowd of bright faces.
“Yuan! This is Luce. I told you about her.”
“The one who was supposed to be queen? What happened to the rest of your tribe, then?”
“Slaughtered.” Luce breathed it out. “Those divers, with the helmets that block out our songs . . .”
It was obvious from the grim way the other mermaids looked at one another that they already knew about the divers. Luce noticed a few mermaids who were crudely bandaged, their eyes flickering with remembered terror. Refugees. Survivors. That couldn’t explain what all these mermaids were doing here, though, could it? “How did you get away, then?” Yuan asked. “If your whole tribe was killed . . .”
“I wasn’t living with them.” Luce saw Catarina grimace at that, but she couldn’t lie about this. “I had my own cave, down the coast. And . . .”
Yuan nodded at the white scar on Luce’s shoulder. “Was that the divers?”
“Yes. They shot at me, out in the water.”
Now there were too many voices, coming at her from all sides.
“Luce! What do you mean you weren’t living with them? You didn’t leave everyone with Anais!” Catarina hissed with indignation.
“Luce? She’s called Luce? They—those humans—they said that name! They’re looking for her!” one of the refugees trilled, half-panicked.
So Nausicaa almost surely hadn’t come this far, Luce realized, or this strange mermaid would have heard her name before the divers reached her tribe. “The humans are hunting me,” Luce admitted. “If you think it’s not safe to have me here, I’ll leave right now.”
“They’re hunting for all of us!” Catarina snarled imperiously. All at once her arm wrapped protectively around Luce’s shoulders and her eyes flared, daring anyone to contradict her. “Having Luce here won’t make any difference!”
Yuan tipped her head. “We’d better get the whole story before we decide that, Cat. Luce? Can you explain what all this is about?”
Luce stared around at everyone: dozens of mermaids who looked as if they’d come from every country in the world, the tints of their faces ranging from night dark to icy pale. Swimming away by herself would be so much easier than trying to tell this crowd of strangers everything that had happened to her. On the other hand there was Catarina gazing at her with a mixture of anger and—Luce had to admit it—feverish tenderness. Luce definitely owed her an explanation at the very least. “I’ll try. I don’t know where to start, though.”
“Start when I left,” Catarina growled. “Luce, why didn’t you go back to the tribe? You were supposed to be their queen! Oh, I was so sure that once I left you would do the right thing, the only thing, and lead them.”
Luce looked at her and suddenly knew that she was going to say the unsayable. “I couldn’t, Cat. I was furious with them because of what they did to you, but . . . that wasn’t the real reason. I wasn’t worthy to be queen.” Everyone was gaping at her; a few of them had started smiling slyly, as if they were sharing some joke Luce couldn’t understand. “I broke the timahk.”
There it was. Now they would drive her away, and they’d be better off with her gone.
A few mermaids had started laughing in a choked, delirious way. Catarina moaned and Yuan flashed a lopsided grin. “You don’t say. How?”
“I saved a human. A boy.” Luce wished they’d hurry up and tell her to leave. She didn’t want anyone asking questions about this boy; she didn’t want to confess how pathetically stupid she’d been, loving someone who’d betrayed and humiliated her and who clearly wanted her dead. And she definitely, definitely didn’t want to say his name again, not as long as she lived.
“Luce!” Catarina seemed like she was about to cry. “You—oh, I needed you to be better than that. You were always the one, the only one who could save us. Restore our honor . . .”
Luce couldn’t understand why, while Catarina seemed on the verge of hysterics, Yuan couldn’t stop grinning as if her face was about to split open and at least half the mermaids around her had joined in that disturbing laughter. “Yeah, Catarina, this is terrible! What kind of dirty bitch would save a human?” Yuan sneered. Luce looked at her in total perplexity. Yuan met her gaze with a hard stare and smiled with too many teeth showing. “Just a bitch like me, or like Rafa, or like Imani. Nobody ever had any crazy fantasies about us restoring anyone’s honor, right?”
Hazily Luce thought Yuan must be kidding somehow. She knew she wasn’t the only mermaid in the ocean who’d violated their laws, but it couldn’t be true that so many of these girls had failed the same way she had. Could it?
“Luce is—she was always—different from the rest of us, Yuan. She made me believe in . . .” Catarina broke off, glowering through the streaks of her tears. Luce reached out and stroked a tear away, half expecting Catarina to slap her.
She didn’t, but the way the glazed shine of those gray eyes suddenly fixed on Luce’s face felt worse than a blow.
“Believe in what, Cat?” Yuan’s voice was silky, insinuating.
“In purity.”
“Oh, boy. Purity.” Yuan’s face was still contorted by that sarcastic grin. “Might want to forget about that now!”
Luce impulsively pulled Catarina closer and leaned her cheek against her friend’s wet face. All she could see was the fire-colored waves of Cat’s hair. At least the frenzied laughter around them was finally subsiding.
“No.” Catarina’s voice was a blur in Luce’s ear.
“Cat? Yuan’s right. I’m not any more pure or honorable than anyone. I haven’t even believed in the timahk for a long time, and I broke it over and over, and then I didn’t . . . do what I should have done to stop our tribe from getting killed. I did everything wrong.”
Catarina moaned. “Then you’re different because dishonor can’t touch you. You still have your innocence, Luce! I know you do. I heard it every time you sang.”
Luce didn’t know what to say to that. She looked up through soft tangles of Catarina’s hair to see Yuan still smiling cynically. “Guess we can’t talk her out of it, then. Luce, it looks like you’re just going to have to live with being Catarina’s shining star, unless you decide you can’t stand it and ditch. I know what it’s like. My daddy used to cry and sob and say I was so pure and special that I couldn’t lose my innocence no matter what, too. See, that made it okay for him to rape me.”