Anais stared at him, simultaneously wary and petulant. “Of course I’m bored.”
“Of course you are,” Moreland simpered. Anais only looked more frightened in response. “That’s why I’m going to give you the opportunity to do a new, exciting job for me. Broaden your horizons, help your country, and”—he leered—“have fun doing it.”
Anais swished with ill-concealed dismay. “What do you want me to do now? I’ve told you everything I know, and you still won’t let me go home!”
“Charlie is going to give you my present later. It’s a cell phone.”
Anais suddenly brightened. “Really? Then I can call my friends in Miami! I can—”
“For the moment, little tadpole, it’s been programmed so that it can only dial a single number.” He felt a restless thrill below his heart as Anais’s happiness collapsed again. “You’ll make a call this evening, say around nine o’clock. Your first job is to collect some information. If a man answers or if you get voice mail, you should hang up. But if a woman answers, you’ll follow the instructions we’re about to go over together.”
Anais considered this, her head bowed so that waves of hair obscured her face. “Then will you let me go?”
“No.” Moreland smiled at her. “You’ll do this for the sheer pleasure of it, my dear. Because asking a few questions is only the first of your responsibilities.”
“I don’t want to do anything for you, then! I’d rather be bored. I don’t even care if you turn my TV off! I’ll just stare at the walls.”
Moreland had to admit it to himself: he adored Anais like this: childish and surly and deeply depressed. It was a shame, in a way, that she would genuinely enjoy her new assignment. “Oh, tadpole,” Moreland whispered, “don’t be silly. This will be fun for the whole family.”
“I don’t care anymore! I—”
“Tell me something, Anais. Don’t you miss your singing?”
16 Joining Voices
Seb watched from the pier as Luce waved good night to him, a little awkwardly, and headed out into the wild night. She had a long swim ahead of her before she would reach the spot where the Twice Lost gathered to practice. As their numbers grew, they all worried more about the risk that someone would spot them from a boat or a plane. Every night they traveled a bit farther from the coast, settling into remote waves and yet still feeling terribly, helplessly exposed. They put as much loneliness around them as they could, as if the night itself could be their shelter.
Even from a distance Luce could hear the music: long, thrumming, sustained tones, scatterings of brighter notes along the surface. The voices had the distinctive, oddly smooth sound that mermaid voices took on when they called to the water, coaxing and caressing. All around Luce the water shivered, and she whipped along in excitement, ducking below hunting sea lions and spinning silver balls of frightened fish.
Soon the water above her head was thick with swinging, glimmering fins, and Luce surfaced. On the dark sea the Twice Lost Army floated. Luce caught sight of Yuan, busy organizing the newer members into small groups under the command of former queens; of Imani, working with a few of the girls who’d been having trouble. As Luce watched, one of them—a mermaid with thick light brown curls and an anxious expression on her china-doll face—lost control of her voice completely. All at once the night throbbed with savage enchantment as the mermaid’s death song took over and leaped higher and brighter. The curly-haired mermaid flung herself backwards in a panic, gasping and thrashing as she struggled to regain mastery of the notes tearing from her throat. If any humans had been unlucky enough to be within earshot, Luce knew they would have had no chance at all of surviving.
Luce was about to race over to her when she saw that she wasn’t needed. Imani was already hovering just behind the frightened mermaid, her dark hands lightly resting on those heaving shoulders. The vehement music calmed a little, and the doll-faced mermaid’s spasmodic movements slowed. Imani was singing in her ear, a soothing, whispering resonance, luring the maddened song back down into a single note, soft and peaceful. A docile little wave curled up in front of them. And then . . .
Then Imani’s voice changed again, bending into a low, bubbling harmony. Her song caught the frightened mermaid’s voice in a way Luce had never heard before. It was as if Imani’s song had entered into that other song and opened it like a flower opening in the core of another flower, forming a concentric swell of music that was somehow greater and sweeter than the sound of any mermaid singing alone.
And the wave in front of them doubled, trebled in size, then abruptly shot skyward and wavered in a gleaming wall with gracefully fluted sides. The moon’s light refracted in each curve until a hundred long golden eyes winked out at them. Everyone stopped practicing and watched in silence. The china-doll mermaid stared in disbelief at the result of her strange duet with Imani, then let out a little shriek. The spell broke, the water tumbled . . .
And Luce’s voice entered the night and caught the falling wave again. Imani glanced over at her, eyes shining with a kind of serene exaltation. Luce could feel Imani’s voice singing into hers and feel her own song blossoming in Imani’s. The sensation was entirely new to her, and also entirely wonderful. The wave-wall grew higher and smoother, its upper reaches forming dancing pinnacles, bright corkscrewing vines.
It took all of Luce’s concentration to stop herself from bursting out laughing in delirious joy. This was what happened when the mermaids merged their power. Her voice felt lighter inside her, and the immense force of that music was much easier to sustain than it had ever been when she sang to the water on her own. Singing together in this way, they seemed to multiply their individual power into a marvelous synergy.
A few other mermaids seemed to catch on and joined in. Water rose again, sleeked up through the darkness, then again . . . The sound pulsed through Luce’s head and body until even her bones seemed to sing like the strings of a guitar. She was the heart of the song, but so were all the other singers, and the curling wave-walls bent the night on all sides until they were surrounded by a bright castle made of water and sound at once.
Like Imani had said, it was a miracle: their own miracle, their personal creation.
Luce had long since given up singing humans to their doom, but she had never forgotten the addictive thrill her death song always provoked in her. But this new feeling, she thought, was even better. She was lost in the sound, her thoughts weaving through all the voices at once; only the gentle loft and fall of the waves gave her any sense of passing time. It was impossible to guess how long the strange new song went on, but when the music finally began to fade, the immense golden moon was rolling into the horizon, its disc misshapen by rising fronds of mist. The watery castle seemed to melt very slowly with the lowering music, its walls bowing out and then gently petaling downward.
Quiet; it was quiet. Only the dreamlike roar of the ocean and, far away, the plangent cry of a whale.
And around Luce hundreds of drifting, dimly luminous faces moved with the waves. For a few minutes it was hard to imagine that any of them would ever speak again. They had all known one another more deeply through their shared song than they ever could through words.
“War, Luce?” Imani murmured at last, and laughed a single breathless laugh. “How can this be war?”