“Oh, Luce,” Catarina interrupted. “That doesn’t matter much, does it? I certainly would have killed him, with great pleasure, if I’d come across his boat. He was lucky.” Cat gave an odd grin. “If it weren’t that I’ve accepted—for now—your perverse insistence on sparing human lives, I might still. Not if I knew it was your father, I suppose . . .”
Luce decided not to let Catarina provoke her. “Then are you mad at me about something else? I keep feeling like you are. I don’t know; it’s the way you look at me.”
“You’ve certainly been full of surprises, Lucette. I’m frightened by what you’re doing. I’ve told you that. And I’m extremely worried about you.”
Luce felt an unexpected flash of pride. “Do you still think everybody is going to turn against me?” The mermaids seemed so strong now, and in her heart Luce knew that strength resulted from the decisions she’d made. Even Yuan seemed to have let go of her obsession with the past, caught up as she was in the elation of their new challenges.
Catarina only shrugged dismissively. “Oh, for now, of course, you’re the hero. The great mermaid general, upsetting all the rules, bringing them the gift of a new way of singing, making everyone believe that they have a magnificent cause to live for.”
Luce flared up at this. “They do! We’re finally doing something better than just thinking all the time about what humans did to us, and killing . . .”
“They’ll follow you, and they’ll trust absolutely in anything you decide, Lucette. Until you fail, that is; until you disappoint them. Then, of course, they’ll go back to their old ways with a vengeance. And their hero will become to them the lunatic who led them into hell.”
What makes you think I’ll fail? Luce wanted to ask. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t ask that because she knew with painful clarity how horribly unlikely it was that she would succeed. The Twice Lost were holding the human military at bay for now, and they were making what Luce believed was a truly valiant effort. But in the long run . . . she had to admit that their prospects were still grim.
“This is why you need me, Luce. Because I don’t see you as a hero, and I don’t even believe in your cause. If we’re going to fight we should fight the way we always have, and the way they do: with death. You must have noticed when you were trapped in that horrible net that the humans hardly share your qualms about murder!”
“They will, though. They’ll see . . .” Luce trailed off, unable to completely believe in her own assertion. Would they even care that the mermaids wanted peace?
“Your followers trust your judgment, Lucette. Foolishly, I think. But I don’t trust you at all, and that makes me more valuable to you than any of them”
Luce tipped her head, wondering what Catarina was trying to tell her.
“I don’t trust you, Luce,” Catarina repeated. “I love you. As the naïve mermaid I once rescued from drowning, and as my true sister. I’ve tried to see you as my queen, but I can’t, not when you violate every rule a queen should uphold! No: to me you are not our great leader, but only my strange little Lucette. And that means—unlike everyone else here—I can never lose faith in you.”
Luce looked at Catarina’s gray eyes, but they were gazing away into the blue rim of daylight beyond the pilings. Fiery hair sleeked around her pearl-colored shoulders. Luce wasn’t happy with everything Catarina was saying to her, but as she looked into her former queen’s face, she felt the almost infinite sadness there as if it were welling in her own heart.
And, Luce had to admit, it was a relief to think that there was somebody who didn’t see her as a leader. Luce hesitated, then reached out and hugged Cat tight. “I . . . love you too, Cat. Even though we don’t agree about a lot of stuff, and I’m going to keep doing things you think are totally crazy.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Catarina said again. “What matters is that I stay near you and keep you as safe as I can.”
“I . . . don’t actually need to be safe, Cat. If I can stop the war, then I don’t really care what happens to me.”
Catarina ignored that. Her attention had turned toward a mermaid Luce didn’t recognize: a too-skinny Asian girl, perhaps twelve or thirteen at most. Luce saw at once that this young mermaid was one of the hopelessly deranged ones. She kept writhing with a kind of exaggerated seductiveness, thrusting out her childish chest and licking one finger. Her behavior was sad and repulsive and almost impossible not to watch; it was a tic, Luce thought, like the way Jo was always gnawing on her own hands. “Like me,” Catarina said. Her voice was oddly flat.
“But she . . .” Luce didn’t want to say that the girl was clearly insane.
“She was sold. Like me.”
Luce understood—and at the same time she struggled not to understand. Could a girl that young really have been sold to be used in that way? When Luce stole a quick glance at the young girl from the corners of her eyes, what she saw in the haze of dark shimmer around that sleek head was too sickening to be borne. No wonder Catarina thought that Luce’s decision to protect humans was so indefensible.
“Luce?” Cat’s voice had turned thin and strange. “Try to sleep. I’ll wake you when . . . when it’s time.”
Luce obediently closed her eyes. Then through the dark fringe of her lashes she watched Catarina approach the young mermaid. Catarina whispered to the girl, her voice a steady, half-musical lull, and cradled her softly until her awful wriggling calmed.
23 The Letter
Just after midnight the little-girl mermaid who’d been appointed timekeeper came rushing up excitedly, saluting everyone she met as she told them their shift was over. One by one the mermaids under the bridge were replaced by fresh singers just returned from sleeping in odd corners of the bay. Then a few of the smaller girls returned from the south bay with their nets bulging with shellfish and promptly got into a squabble over whose turn it was to have the honor of giving the off-duty lieutenants their dinner. The little mermaids looked abashed and stopped bickering as soon as Luce smiled at them.
“So,” Yuan said, “got plans tonight? I heard about the new ambassador, Luce. I know we don’t have a ton of options, but the dude does sound like kind of a joke.”
Luce felt an unexpected impulse to defend Seb. “I think he’ll do fine, actually. At least you should give him a chance before you go around calling him—”
“Hey, general, I wasn’t trying to piss you off! Okay, he sounds outstanding. Better?”
“We do have plans,” Luce said shortly. “I need as many of the lieutenants as you think we can spare, Yuan. Because we have to write the humans a letter, and I want to make sure—that everybody basically agrees on what we should ask for.”
“I thought that was the easy part,” Yuan observed sardonically. “Like, oh, ‘We’d be ever so obliged if you gracious humans might consider, perhaps, refraining from making lethal holes in us with pointy objects? Thank you quite a lot, The Mermaids.’”
“I think . . . it shouldn’t be just about us. I mean the war.” Luce looked off at the skyline. Slices of their giant wave were reflected on the glassy sides of skyscrapers, creating the illusion that there were waterfalls frothing brightly in the center of downtown.