The man on the pavement had stopped listening. The sky’s blue blast was louder than words.
Then he felt a sudden grinding pain and heard himself shout. His body curled involuntarily, bringing his head and chest up into shadow-damp air. He didn’t know it, but someone had accidentally stepped on his hand. The pressure pulled back, and his hand hurt much less.
Another cry came, not his own. And the man on the pavement discovered that the cry came with a face: tan, with large, sympathetic brown eyes and silver hair. It came attached to a name.
He didn’t seem able to speak. Instead he sang the name, slowly, groping his way through the syllables with raspy music. “Ben . . . Ell . . . iss . . . son?”
“Andrew! Good God, you’ve been here in this alley all this time?”
He couldn’t answer that. But it didn’t matter.
The wonderful thing about music was that whatever was true was also obvious: as obvious as those large hands grasping him and hauling him to his feet.
“Anais.” Moreland breathed her name out, hard, as he climbed into the back of the truck and then pulled the heavy doors shut behind him. Was she finally awake? He was hot-faced and palpitating; his jowls trembled, pale lilac in the blue skeins of light from the narrow upright tank where she floated. He was standing somewhat below her in a channel the same width as the tank, high walkways on either side of him and, far up on the left, a lever that would swing the glass open and send the water, and the other contents, flooding out.
He’d been driving up and down random streets or sometimes just sitting in the parked truck for hours, in DC and later in Baltimore, through the previous evening, then on through half the night. They’d given her too strong a dose of sedatives; she just couldn’t seem to come to. But surely by now . . .
Someone had fitted inflatable water wings of the kind used by swimming children on both her pearly arms to prevent her from drowning while she was unconscious. A single bulb shone just above her. Her golden head flopped and her long hair spread through the water like radiant yellow veins. He caught a gleam of sleepy azure as she gazed at him from the corner of her eyes and then closed them again. “Anais, my precious one, you want to talk to me. Now, even if you’re still feeling poorly. You do. I’ve brought you here,” he gasped out, “to offer you your freedom.”
She raised her head and stared at him, her skin blanched and ashy in contrast to his damp flush. “I don’t trust you,” Anais slurred. “I don’t. There’s some kind of trick.”
At least she was talking again. “No trick, beauty, I assure you. But a price, of course. There’s always a price, isn’t there?” Unbelievably, in the far-off city of San Francisco , the wave still shimmered in an upright mirror below the Golden Gate Bridge. He’d expected mobs in the streets screaming for mermaid blood. Instead the crowds filling blue suburban parks, dark highways, and city bridges across the country were calm and quiet, their faces gilded in the cupped light of candle flames. They sang in mourning for the mermaids who had died that day: died so that thousands of humans would live.
Worse, they were acclaiming General Luce as a hero.
And as soon as the missing secretary of defense was located, President Leopold would surely demand his resignation. But his own destruction hardly mattered as long as he could leave a solid record of accomplishment behind him. “Not so high a price, Anais, I promise. Nothing you can’t do in a few hours.”
“What kind of price? You’ve already made me work so hard, and I’m tired, and I don’t even care about getting my house back anymore! I just want . . .” She leaned her face on the tank’s wall, her mouth a compressed pink blob on the glass, her cheek a slick pale dab.
“To be the way you were, free and blissful in the ocean. Of course I understand that, dear one. Of course. To be the way you were before you sold yourself to us. I suppose, relatively speaking, you were innocent then.”
Anais didn’t answer.
There wasn’t enough time left for him to indulge her self-pity. “You bought your life from me, Anais. Now buy one more thing. You only have to complete one final task, and you’ll have your freedom again forever. Even your humanity and your inheritance from your parents, if you decide you want those things. I can arrange it all for you,” Moreland lied. “But there’s always a price, isn’t there, for anything worth having?”
The Twice Lost Army was still spreading to other cities around the United States; it seemed there was a new blockade every day. Half an hour after General Luce’s astonishing act of resistance he’d heard the first reports of a wave rising outside of Liverpool in England. Tomorrow the Twice Lost might appear in Holland, then in France, then possibly on the north coast of Africa.
This wild expansion of their movement was the Twice Lost Army’s greatest strength, but it also might be their downfall. If General Luce had proved stubborn, well, she was only in San Francisco Bay. And it wasn’t as if mermaids on the opposite side of the country could telephone her for instructions.
“You want me to drown someone else for you?” Anais asked. “And then you’ll let me go?” She tilted her head, gazing blearily at the truck’s dark metal walls.
“Anais,” Moreland scolded. He waved a finger at her. “Do you think you’re worth so little to me? Do you really imagine I would give you up in exchange for a simple murder? And whenever I begin to forget how deeply your last effort disappointed me, that humanity-hating boy radical always seems to pop up on TV again at the head of another march, declaiming this, that, and the other. After that, Anais, do you think I would rely on your competence as a killer?”
Anais didn’t seem to be listening. She reeled slightly under the impact of his voice, but her eyes stayed dim and insensate. The neon orange water wings held her arms sloppily akimbo so that they dangled from the elbow. “Where?” Anais started vaguely. “Wait, where are we? Why am I, why did you . . .”
“You’re here to do something that could make a real difference in the world.” Could she pull it off? Suddenly he wasn’t entirely sure, but she was the only hope he had left. His voice thrummed; his heart heaved and stammered in his chest. “We’re two miles from Baltimore’s Harborplace. As I said, this a chance for you to earn your freedom. You’ve been so sad locked up, haven’t you? Promise me you’ll do this one thing for me, and I’ll—” He hesitated, nauseous at the prospect of losing control of her. But if everything went well tonight they would only be separated for a few hours, just a very few, and then . . .“I’ll release you into the harbor. You’ll do your job, and then you can choose the life you want next. Human or mermaid. It’s simple.”
Once everyone discovered he’d personally orchestrated the attack on the Twice Lost Army earlier that day, he’d assuredly lose much more than just his job. But Anais knew nothing about that, and in any case his plan would render such considerations quite irrelevant.
Her head rocked a little. “Baltimore? Can’t we go to Miami?”
“No, tadpole, we can’t. The mermaids of Baltimore only declared themselves members of the Twice Lost Army two days ago, and they’ve raised a feeble little excuse for a standing tsunami, at least compared to the one in San Francisco. They seem weak and disorganized, which suggests they might very well listen to a charming girl like you. And our intelligence network believes they haven’t contacted the local human population yet. It’s the best opportunity we could have. With any luck you’ll find them entirely ignorant of what happened today.”