Luce stared for a moment. “Please don’t compare Catarina to him, then.”
“You don’t like hearing it? Why not? You love Catarina or something?” Yuan suddenly demanded; her voice was changing, turning high and strange. Luce couldn’t help flinching.
“I do. I always did, ever since I met her. Even when we were fighting.”
Catarina exhaled sharply and squeezed Luce tighter.
“Oh, see, but I loved my daddy, too. And the first thing I did when I changed was swim right back to our house and drown him. And my mom and my piano teacher, even though I wasn’t really trying to get them. Too bad for them our house was right on the water!”
Yuan’s eyes were narrowing, and her voice took on a dreamy, obsessive lilt that Luce knew all too well. But it wouldn’t make any difference if someone told Yuan to let go of the past. That wasn’t something you could just decide to do.
“Yuan?” It was a new voice, very low and gentle. Luce looked and saw a mermaid with blue-black skin and soft dark eyes; her hair was short, like Luce’s, though it stood out like a halo around her head. She wore a white lace headscarf and a bikini top that appeared to be made from snow-colored lace as well, though on closer inspection it proved to have been intricately crafted from plastic grocery bags. The blue luminance of her skin reminded Luce of neon reflecting in a street lacquered by rain. “Luce is still just meeting everyone, and seeing Catarina again after a long time. It’s a lot for her to think about. Couldn’t we wait to tell her . . . everything about ourselves?”
Luce smiled gratefully.
“I’m Imani. I’m one of the ones who broke the timahk the same way you say you did. But I don’t think it has to mean we’re dishonored. It can mean . . . we wanted different rules, or we wanted to be honorable in a different way.” Imani’s voice was barely audible.
Yuan laughed nastily. “Try telling that to any queen in the world, Imani. Any tribe! No mermaids would ever accept us! They’d only think of us as . . . soiled. Ruined. And they’d be right!”
For an instant Luce just stared around, uncomprehending. What could it mean to say that no mermaids would accept them when they were living in what looked like the biggest tribe she’d ever seen? But Yuan had said it wasn’t a tribe, and no one seemed to be in charge. Unless, somehow . . .
“All of you?” Luce asked. She could barely hear her own voice.
“Oh, now you get it! All of us except the refugees. And even if we disgust them they don’t have a lot of choice about putting up with us.” Yuan’s strange grin came back. “Yeah, everyone here broke the timahk, one way or another! We all got thrown out of our tribes. Not for the same reasons, though. Tania over there got into a fight, for instance, and Jo was caught trying to call her mom with a cellphone she found on the beach.”
Yuan nodded toward a girl with her hair dyed an artificial ruby red. Jo was wearing a huge necklace made from dozens of algae-slicked plastic toys and tangled string, and she kept squirming and biting the back of her own hand.
“Well, I don’t believe that Jo is dishonored either,” Imani objected. Even when she seemed angry her voice was low and soft, almost cooing. “She’s not soiled.”
Luce looked around. Jo wasn’t the only mermaid there who had strange tics or eyes as restless as swarming gnats. “And that’s why you don’t have a queen?”
“No queen!” Yuan agreed fiercely. “Even if we’re filth, at least we’re free! It doesn’t matter what we do. We can’t be any more worthless than we are already.”
Luce began to wonder why Catarina had been silent for so long. She was still clutching Luce tight in her arms, and her face was hidden against the side of Luce’s neck, but her breathing sounded different now, raspy and somehow thoughtful.
“It always matters what we do!”
Luce looked up, surprised, and suddenly realized that the words had come from her own mouth.
“Not us,” Yuan insisted. “We’re twice lost. The humans lost us the first time, then we were lost to other mermaids, too. Now there’s nothing left to lose us, except life, and the way things are going, that shouldn’t take long either!”
“And the world, which is really in trouble now,” Luce said sharply. She still felt amazed at herself. “And each other, and all those mermaids out there who are getting murdered with no way to even defend themselves. We need to figure out a way to stop that.”
Everyone was staring at her, harder than ever. Luce felt embarrassed, but even more than that she felt possessed by an unexpected urgency.
“We don’t need the timahk anymore!” Luce added. “The timahk doesn’t even make sense now that the humans know about us. Maybe we’re dishonored, but that’s not the kind of honor that matters now! And we don’t need purity either. We just need to change what’s happening.”
For several seconds no one said anything. Catarina finally released Luce from her embrace and dipped quickly under the water before coming up again with streaming hair. Now that Luce was floating alone in the water dizziness rippled through her head.
Why didn’t anyone answer? They must all think she was insane, Luce decided. Even in this band of desperate outcasts she was simply too weird to fit in. There was no place for her anywhere in the world . . .
“We have a queen now,” Catarina announced. Her chin was raised proudly, and there was a calm glow in her eyes even though they were still swollen from crying.
Luce felt confused and suddenly unbearably tired. What was Catarina talking about? What were any of these crazy, damaged mermaids trying to say to her, really? They didn’t understand her, and in fact they made no sense to her, either.
“No queens,” Yuan snarled frantically, and Imani curled a gentle hand on her shoulder. “We don’t need one, and we don’t even deserve—”
“Yuan, Yuan, wait! We’re still mermaids. No matter how many times lost we are, we can’t lose that! You know what that means.” Imani smiled with sudden brilliance. She was so lovely, Luce thought, with her heart-shaped face and up-tilting eyes. But Luce still wasn’t sure what they were arguing about. The whole world was out of joint, so slippery and unbalanced that words couldn’t even hold on to their meanings anymore.
Yuan was gnawing her lip, but she didn’t answer. No one did.
Imani looked around, waiting for someone to contradict her. No sound disturbed the quiet except, very distantly, a chorus of car horns. Then she turned her eyes straight on Luce. “It means we’ll know the one who’s meant to be queen by her song.”
10 No One’s Queen
“Show them, Luce!” Catarina’s eyes flared with pride as Luce looked around, suddenly understanding what they expected from her. She’d fled from the divers and somehow wound up at an audition for a role she didn’t even want.
Luce felt a secret thrill at the thought of how amazed Catarina would be by what she could do with her voice now, and just as quickly stifled it.
“Not here, though,” Jo put in worriedly. She bit her hand again, jogging a plastic duckling at her throat. “We’ll have to swim far out, out where everything is completely empty.”
No one bothered to ask Luce if she wanted to be queen, of course, or if she had other plans. As the mermaids dipped below the surface of the bay, skimming in a long procession back toward the Golden Gate and the open sea beyond, Luce wondered what she should do. All around her mermaids streaked and rippled, dimly shining, until the dark water seemed banded by living light. Streetlamps like flocks of glowing birds crowded the hills on every side; whenever Luce surfaced the droplets on her lashes dazzled her with refracted stars. If they did want her to become their queen, then how could she look for Nausicaa?