“Yes,” Luce said softly. “This is war. They’re trying to kill all of us.”
She inhaled hard, doing her best to gather her strength. In a minute she’d have to start explaining how she wanted to do things. Even if they were impressed by her now, very soon they would regard her as a traitor. The sky above was suffocated by clouds and darkness dragged at the waves.
“And maybe they will, but we’ll take millions of them with us!” Yuan trilled. Her eyes were shining, her movements quickening like fire.
“Luce, is this really . . .” Imani started, and broke off.
“If I’m going to be general, though,” Luce went on, trying not to think about what would happen next, “we need new rules. We need a new timahk, and we’re not going to do things the same way we used to. I’m only staying if everyone will follow my—” Luce couldn’t quite make herself say the next word, but Yuan did it for her.
“War is war! We have to be strict about it! Of course we’ll follow orders!”
“Okay, then.” Luce braced herself. “No killing humans.”
A wild clamor of voices broke out, just as Luce had known it would. Catarina’s eyebrows shot up, Yuan’s mouth gaped as if she was choking, and someone Luce didn’t know was shouting, “She’s crazy! She’s totally crazy!” But Imani was smiling to herself in a way that let Luce know this was exactly what she’d wished for. Not everyone was rushing to condemn her. Some of the faces around Luce were enraged, but others looked confused, or curious, or even hopeful.
“No killing? Just when we’re starting a war?” Yuan shrieked indignantly. “But how?”
“How many thousands of humans have mermaids drowned?” Luce demanded. To her surprise the pandemonium quieted a little. Was everyone actually prepared to listen to her? “We’ve been sinking their ships for centuries now, doing the same thing over and over again, and it hasn’t helped anything, or changed anything, or even made us feel any better! It’s not like we’ve protected other girls from being hurt the way we were, because there are new mermaids all the time! All we’ve done is convince the humans that they have to wipe us out.”
“War, Luce . . .” It was Catarina. “I know you’ve said before that you think we shouldn’t . . . humans . . . I really couldn’t take you seriously . . . But even if you do believe humans deserve to live, well, war is no time to be insisting on this . . . this wild idealism!”
Luce wondered if Catarina was right, but she didn’t care. If leading the twice lost mermaids meant committing more reckless murders, she knew she wouldn’t be able to stand it. “A new kind of war, Cat! We need a way to protect ourselves, and—and I can teach everyone to control the water the same way I do.” Luce desperately hoped she was telling the truth about this, but after all, Dana and Violet had learned. It must be possible. “But if I do that, I have to know no one will use their power to kill unless they absolutely have to, in self-defense, or if it’s the only way to save another mermaid. There can’t be any more killing for fun, or for revenge.”
“This is ridiculous,” Yuan snarled.
“You said you’d follow orders,” Luce snapped back, then had to fight to keep from grinning in surprise at herself. Where had this sudden confidence come from? “You saw what I can do. I’ve proved I have the right to be in charge, and if you can’t accept that”—Luce looked around— “then I’m going. I won’t lead this war in any other way.”
The silence stiffened as Luce waited for Yuan to turn away in contempt, for a clamor of voices to tell her that they didn’t need a pathetic freak like her as their leader and she should just get lost and never come back.
It didn’t happen.
She kept waiting, half-eager for the blasting anger that would free her from responsibility for these strangers. But it just didn’t come.
The crowd of mermaids stayed quiet. Dozens of faces glowed softly, lofting up and down on the foam-streaked waves, and while some of them were biting their lips or grimacing, no one said a word. Luce could hardly believe it.
“Well, generalissima,” Catarina purred sarcastically, “then doing things your way is the only choice we really have, isn’t it?”
Luce’s first impulse was to feel wounded by the edge in Cat’s voice until she saw how proudly her former queen was looking at her. But there was something else in Cat’s gaze as welclass="underline" a tension, a coiling darkness.
“Cat . . .” Luce suddenly felt horribly shy again. “But . . . I mean, I need to know . . . Does everyone here agree? No more killing people?” She didn’t sound anything like a general, Luce thought. She sounded like a nervous child. Luce made an effort to sharpen her tone. “Is there anyone here who isn’t willing to follow me on my terms? Um, raise your hands.”
A few mermaids fidgeted, their elbows shifting up slightly. Then they glanced around and lowered them.
“We need her,” a pale stranger said. “She’s right: until she teaches us how to do what she can, it’ll be a total disaster if they find us! Right now we’re all basically waiting to die.”
Of course; that was the only reason most of them were prepared to go along with her bizarre ideas. Luce wondered if she was effectively blackmailing everyone into giving up killing. But she didn’t see what else she could do.
“Okay,” Luce breathed out. “Okay.” She couldn’t leave now. Nausicaa? Am I finally doing the right thing? Will you find me, since I can’t search for you? “Then we’re starting training tonight.”
11 Tadpole
“Good morning, tadpole.” Sudden light blazed through the tank and its anteroom, until the air appeared brass yellow and solid. As Secretary Moreland had expected, there was no answering flick of her blue tail, not yet at least. “Good morning.” He was bellowing into the speaker until feedback throbbed against the glass; she wouldn’t sleep through that.
Anais’s voice was among the voices on that recording he’d listened to on an afternoon he chose not to remember—except that he remembered it all the time. They’d piped the same music into her tank a few days ago, for the occasion switching off the mechanism set to shock her in response to those particular frequencies, and she’d casually identified all the singers later. Most of them were among those Anais had seen die, but the other possible survivors—Catarina and Dana were the names he recalled—would also be of tremendous personal interest to him if they could ever be captured alive.
This creature in the tank was a source of the musical infestation that persisted in his mind. The limpid trill of mermaid song reverberated through his thoughts as insistently as his own identity, as ineradicably as the word “I.” And even though Anais wasn’t about to risk singing, he could still feel the presence of her voice, her compressed song, whenever he visited her. Blocked and bottled in her throat, it still whined and jarred, fighting to get free. Moreland could practically see it, a kind of mouthy pulse chewing away at nothing just above her clavicle.
He could never allow himself to hear her song again. But he could watch the song juddering away inside that pearly neck, and better yet he could command its owner. “Now, tadpole. If too much TV is what’s bringing on this lethargy of yours, we can take it away. We can take away whatever is necessary to put some spring back into your step.” He leered to himself at his choice of words. “Get over here.”