“Looks like they’re lowering that camera guy over the side. Trying to get some kind of close-up? But it’s just going to look like more water . . .”
The cameraperson was strapped into a harness, and his unwieldy camera was secured to his front with various cables. He clambered up onto the side of the bridge and then dropped slowly, twitching and kicking twenty feet below the line of spectators. They watched as he adjusted himself and trained his camera on the shimmering wall of water.
For a few minutes nothing else happened. There was only the crowd standing bone-still, enraptured by that unearthly music, the swaying figure of the cameraperson, the fractured diamonds of sunlight all over the water-wall. But nothing new was happening, Dorian told himself. The situation might drag on for hours without any change. So why couldn’t they look away?
Then—then something did happen. A small figure appeared at the wave’s base, arms raised as if it were diving. But the figure was inside the water, bending into strange refractions. Then it twisted, leaped upward . . .
And the figure wasn’t human. Even at this distance that was obvious.
The chattering commentators abruptly fell silent while next to Dorian Theo let out a kind of shrill, astonished moan. Of course they’d all watched the video of Luce—but this was different. No one could even pretend to believe that what they were seeing now was faked.
The leaping body on the screen rippled away into a long, lashing tail. The tailed figure vaulted smoothly up through the wave’s core and came to an unsteady stop just in front of the dangling cameraperson. He reeled against his straps, legs flailing helplessly. Then he stopped kicking, seeming to lapse into mesmerized calm.
The newscasters had started babbling again, but they weren’t making a whole lot of sense. “In just a minute . . . waiting for the feed to come in . . . truly an incredib—more in just a . . . bringing you a closer look at . . .”
The mermaid in the wave had something white in her right hand, and she fluttered it as a gesture of reassurance. Her tail looked more or less the right color: a light, silvery jade green.
“Trying to communicate . . . but does that mean . . . does that mean the same thing it would for us? Peaceful intentions?”
The mermaid leaned forward, parting the water in front of her face as if it were a curtain. Dorian’s heart was pulsing so quickly that it felt like some small sick bird spasming in his chest.
Then the image shifted abruptly as the close-up came on. She was wearing a tattered black bikini top; Dorian had never seen her wear human clothes before, only kelp leaves. Her arms and body were crosshatched with razor-fine wounds, there was a scar on her shoulder and a notch missing from her right ear—and she was smiling so sweetly and vividly that Dorian choked.
Luce.
20 Saying Hello
Luce sang through the night, holding herself just below the surface with slight rotations of her fins and only pausing when she surfaced for quick inhalations. She was singing as the military helicopters jarring above them were joined by more and more helicopters with the logos of television networks on their sides. She was singing when the immense wave supported by the mermaids’ voices turned into a furling sail of molten gold with the dawn light. Her voice webbed into the enchantment of those hundreds of gathered voices. Sometimes the music came to her like clouds of exalted laughter, sometimes as grief for the dead. But one thing was clear: for tonight at least they had won an astonishing victory. And as she had promised, they had won it without resorting to murder. Luce knew it was strange, but she felt a sense of profound triumph at the thought that the dead of that night were all her own followers, not more random humans.
Even the human soldiers, with the possible exception of that submarine pilot, hadn’t died. Pharaoh’s army would see that the mermaids weren’t just mindless killers. And they’d see as well that the mermaids weren’t about to wait around passively to get slaughtered. She’d turned her enemies into witnesses, and that was a victory.
It was well into the morning when Luce was shaken from her entrancement. Yuan’s golden face was shining and determined, and her hand was on Luce’s shoulder. “General Luce? You’re off duty.”
Luce didn’t want to stop singing. The brilliance of her voice surging into everyone else’s voices was too great, too astonishing. She kept the song going, her tone like liquefied sunlight.
Yuan looked a touch annoyed, but she was grinning at the same time. “Give it a rest, general, okay? You can come back soon. Anyway, you’re already late for a strategy meeting with all your lieutenants. Except Cala—I’m leaving her in charge for a little bit.”
Yuan’s words reminded Luce that they weren’t just playing at war. But the song was so overpowering that Luce had to struggle with her voice for a few moments before she could force it into silence. The music stopped and started in quick staccato outbursts before she finally mastered it, and Yuan laughed. “Okay,” Luce managed.
“Yeah? You’re all better now?”
Without the song thrilling through her, Luce was suddenly much too aware of the horror of the previous night. “Yuan? Do we know how many of us . . .”
Yuan reached out and hugged her. “We were at five eighty-three before the attack. Only about three hundred made it to the bridge at first, but a bunch more girls drifted back here during the night. We’re at four twenty-two now. But the problem is—with everyone missing, we can’t tell who died and who just panicked and swam off.”
Luce recoiled a little. “I thought—I only saw a few of us get shot. Bex and maybe three girls I didn’t know. I thought we were almost all okay! Yuan . . .”
Yuan hugged her tighter, her arms strong and comforting. “Most of them are probably okay. I mean, they got really scared, but they’ll come back once they calm down. And you have to remember, Luce, almost everybody would have died last night if you hadn’t guessed—I seriously have no idea how you knew those submarines were coming, but I do know for sure that you’re the reason so many of us are still alive. Okay?”
“I didn’t know anything,” Luce murmured. “It just felt like something was wrong.”
“You can be sad later, okay?” Yuan said, but her voice was very gentle. “This is war. We need you to keep it together.”
“Okay,” Luce said breathlessly. “Okay.” All at once she was struck by a realization that should have been obvious: now that the humans knew about them, that immense wave was the only protection they had.
Now that the wave was standing there, it had to stay standing. If there was any lull in the mermaids’ singing, Luce knew they would be massacred almost instantly.
Yuan took her hand and guided her, keeping well below the water, toward a cluster of brick buildings with low docks on the shore of Sausalito.
Twenty of her lieutenants were already waiting in a circle beneath a broad, half-collapsing platform set on pilings. Catarina was there, her blazing hair fanning out across the water and her face blazing even brighter with a kind of exhilarated fury. Imani was beaming, her white lace kerchief tied over her short afro. And there was Graciela, looking almost crazed with joy, next to a freckled strawberry blonde Luce didn’t recognize.
There was a brief pause while they stared at her, and Luce felt a familiar tightening in her stomach. Were they looking at her as if she was a stranger?