“Or, you know? Maybe that black mermaid is even hotter. Yeah, check out that blue tail!”
“Theo?” Dorian snapped. “Could you possibly shut up?”
“I see no call for such an uncouth remark, good sir. I was merely expressing my sincere desire to send those exquisite mermaids a hot, cheesy pizza.”
“It’s a war!” Dorian growled. “Luce is wounded, okay? Her friends just got shot. She doesn’t need your fucking pizza!”
What Luce needs, Dorian realized, are allies.
And he was ready to join her war.
A hazy pink glow filmed the water, slivered with turquoise by the ripples flowing smoothly toward the shore. Bell-shaped scarlet flowers cascaded down the cliff, lush mosses dripped, and a tiny waterfall raised a perpetual shimmering froth where it splashed into the cove. But for all the fantastical beauty around her, the emerald-tailed mermaid leaning on the shore looked somber and a little bored. Coils of black hair snaked thickly around her dark bronze shoulders, and her greenish black eyes were glazed with sadness. She’d already seen every possible permutation of beauty the world had to offer far too many times.
If the friend she was missing had been there with her, then she could have experienced this sunset as if for the first time, seeing the world with borrowed freshness and enthusiasm. But the odds that that particular friend was still alive were admittedly poor.
The waterfall’s sleepy percussion changed its tone. The mermaid looked, without much interest, at a sudden fervor of bubbling, a slippery confusion of crosscurrents that beat and rose and gathered form . . .
This too was something she’d seen plenty of times before. The mermaid waited with morose patience for what she knew was coming. A new mermaid was about to appear, a metaskaza, stunned by the transformation and the devastation that had provoked it.
New fins flashed into existence under the water’s disordered surface, and with them there appeared a girl with a long tail that swung erratically. Her scales were a lovely color somewhere between dove gray and lilac, gleaming with pearly iridescence. The tail went well with the metaskaza’s coloring. She was a very pale blonde with deep gray eyes, and she sat up with her hands scrambling wildly into empty air. Her breath was heaving with terror and shock, and a single impossibly sweet note tore from her lips and ended in a sudden gasp.
The dark observer thought she might as well do the helpful thing: stay and talk this newly transfigured mermaid through her inevitable reaction to the change. The girl would be overwhelmed by denial, hysteria, grief . . .
She was genuinely surprised when the metaskaza displayed none of those emotions. Instead the blonde gaped wide-eyed at her own tail, hefting it uncertainly and letting it fall back again once, twice, three times. She looked amazed, yes, but not devastated or incredulous.
That was unusual, to say the least. Of course, if this girl was sika, someone born cold and void of true emotions, then she might not be capable of the usual responses. The dark mermaid twisted her head to check up on that possibility, peering from the corners of her eyes into the dark shimmering that winked around the blond girl’s head. With a normal mermaid you could see the terrible incident that had chilled her heart to the point where she let go of her humanity; with a sika, cold from the beginning, there would be nothing to see.
The blonde wasn’t sika. She’d been altered by one of those horrors that her observer regarded as simply wearisome routine.
“Oh my God!” the new mermaid exclaimed shrilly. “It’s just like on TV!” Then she noticed that there was another mermaid watching her. “It is, right?” she asked. “This is just like on TV. And that video. I knew it was real!”
This situation wasn’t just unusual, the green-tailed mermaid realized. It was utterly unprecedented. And she adored anything unprecedented no matter what it involved. “I don’t know this video you speak of. But certainly, all of this is real.”
“You have to know!” the metaskaza squealed. “And—oh, wait, can we swim that far? We have to get to San Francisco! How fast can we swim there?”
“To San Francisco? I can help you do this, yes. But why?”
“Like on TV yesterday! Didn’t you see it?”
“I don’t watch a great deal of television,” the dark mermaid observed dryly.
She watched as realization, then embarrassment, flickered over the blonde’s face. “Oh. Oh. Wait, so are you saying you don’t know what’s happening? You haven’t heard about the Twice Lost Army?”
Things were only getting more interesting. “I’ve heard nothing of this, no. What is this army?”
“And you don’t know about General Luce? We have to go help her!”
For the first time in several centuries, the green-tailed mermaid was briefly rendered speechless from astonishment. Her jaw dropped and her eyes widened. Within moments, though, she had recovered most of her poise. “General Luce?” Her look of surprise was rapidly mutating into one of absolute delight. “General Luce? So she still refuses to be called queen?”
“She’s leading this mermaid army to stop the government from killing them. And there’s this wave, and they’re holding it up by singing, and she said on TV that they need other mermaids to come and help. Please . . .”
“Of course, you are right. Of course, we must rush to aid General Luce! With the next ship! I will show you how we can ride across unseen.”
“Can’t we just swim?”
“Not so far. We would drown. The first thing you must learn is that you still need to breathe, and to breathe while you sleep. You must be careful of how deep or far you swim. Many new mermaids die of their ignorance. How are you called?”
“Oh. I’m Opal Curtis.”
The green-tailed mermaid smiled at her warmly. “Welcome, Opal.” She already liked Opal, quite a bit, for her impassioned, spontaneous loyalty to Luce. “My name is Nausicaa.”
22 Reaching Out
For the next twenty-four hours the mermaids were preoccupied with figuring out the details of their new struggle. Luce was more grateful than ever for Yuan’s help. Under Yuan’s direction the mermaids were organized into two groups; each group would sing for two six-hour shifts every day in order to keep the wave up nonstop. It wasn’t far to the clock tower at the Embarcadero, and a small mermaid was dispatched to keep track of the time. Once they divided the army in half that way it became clear that they didn’t have quite enough mermaids to sustain the wave at its full force, but they didn’t want to risk a disastrous collapse. Yuan was the one who got the idea of removing the singers one by one, letting the water adjust for a few moments before she beckoned the next mermaid out of the line. She posted guards, choosing those mermaids whose voices weren’t as strong to keep watch.
Half of their force proved to be enough to keep the wave going, though not quite at its previous height. It wasn’t ideal, but they had to hope that it would be enough. And as Yuan had predicted, many of the Twice Lost mermaids who had scattered in terror were starting to drift back, drawn by the faint resonance of the music stroking through the water. The wave swelled higher as they poured their fresh voices into the effort. Then in the early evening a new tribe of refugees showed up, and Imani immediately set to work on training them to join in.