“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” Luce said. “To thank you. You did everything right.”
Seb just looked at her then shook his head. “Well, it’s a real luxury, isn’t it, Miss Luce? When you can do the right thing, because there’s one truly right thing to do?”
Luce was suddenly aware of the water cradling her, gently and faithfully. She looked at Seb with gratitude. “Yes. That is . . . a luxury.”
“So maybe I’m the one who should thank you, for giving me such a nice clear-cut right thing to do. Helping the mermaid who saved me when that’s not enough for her and she’s gone and set her heart on saving more than that? That was an easy one, Miss Luce. I haven’t had so many opportunities in my life to do anything as right as that. I’ve mostly been doing something at least halfway wrong, just fighting to get at one little speck of right that was mixed in with it somewhere.” Seb kept on looking at her. For all his tattered absurdity his gaze was as transparent as glass, and grave comprehension shone through it. “And I know you know about that.”
Luce felt something blocky and horrible in her throat. She looked away, unable to answer him, and wrapped her arms around a piling for support. Hoops of apricot light cast by the streetlamps pranced on the water. Luce looked at those beaming rings and thought she might fall through them and plummet into another world. “I killed them, Seb. Mermaids who trusted me.”
“I know you did, Miss Luce. I watched the whole thing on TV, along with practically everybody else on this planet of ours. It was as horrible as anything I ever saw, even in Vietnam, and I’m no slacker where horror’s concerned.”
“I had a choice. I let Catarina die. I decided that.”
“You made a choice. That’s why everybody here in humanland thinks you’re the big hero tonight. They’re taping your picture in their windows. You’re looking out all over, on all the streets, with those sad eyes of yours. It’s gonna change things for sure, what you did.”
“I’m not a hero,” Luce murmured dully. “I never was. Catarina was right about me.”
“I know you’re no hero,” Seb said seriously. “They set you up so you’d be a monster no matter what you did. And now a monster’s what you are.”
Luce nodded. Far from feeling offended, she was grateful and wildly relieved that Seb understood her so well. She looked at him. He was shivering from cold because he’d thrown away those filthy coats he used to wear—thrown them away so he could look better for his role as her ambassador. “I wish I could help you, Seb. I wish we did have treasure and pearls for you. I’m sorry . . .”
“Thanks, Lucy Goose. And I wish you knew that a monster like you is worth twenty heroes.”
Luce leaned her head on the piling and closed her eyes. “Please don’t say that.”
“I’ve known heroes, Miss Luce. Plenty of them. You know I even knew that Secretary of Defense Moreland back when we were both young? Big hero, that one. So I’m kind of an authority on this stuff, and I’m going to tell you whatever truth I’ve got in me to tell.”
She swayed in the darkness. Around her hovered empty spaces shaped like her father, Dorian, Nausicaa, Catarina. No wonder everyone always abandoned her. She was a monster made of nothingness; she was ruin and desolation wearing a beautiful mask. Everyone knew that, but no one would admit it—apparently not even Seb, although she’d thought he understood.
“Hey,” Seb said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
It took Luce a long moment to realize that he wasn’t talking to her.
“Oh, God,” Yuan said. “Poor Luce. She just doesn’t get a break.”
Luce cringed—at Yuan’s presence, at her sympathy, at the concerned looks she knew both Yuan and Seb were firing her way.
“She’s got the shadow sitting on her heart tonight,” Seb said as if that were the most rational explanation in the world. “She’s feeling what it is when you have to know exactly what kind of a monster you are, and you can’t look away from that.”
“She’s going to have to,” Yuan said firmly. “Look away, I mean. I didn’t come searching for Luce so I could try to cheer her up. There’s . . . something she has to deal with.”
“Oh, Lord,” Seb said. “Don’t make her do more tonight! Just look at her.”
“I see her,” Yuan agreed. Suddenly Luce felt Yuan’s strong, smooth hands on her arms, gently unwrapping them from the piling. “I’d let her stay here if I could, Seb. Really. But this is important. Luce?”
Important, Luce thought with grim sarcasm. “What’s so important now?” She barely muttered the question.
“They could be lying,” Yuan conceded. “But if they’re not—and I really don’t believe they are, actually—”
“Yuan,” Luce snapped. “What do I have to do now?”
Yuan’s gentleness was gone in a flash. She gripped Luce by both shoulders, spun her savagely around, and gave her such a quick, jarring shake that Luce opened her eyes in exhausted surprise. Yuan’s golden face appeared, fierce and radiant and loving. “You have to come see your father, Luce. He’s by the bridge. And he is not okay.”
With those words everything changed. The night seemed to inhale, to stretch itself wider and darker in all directions.
Luce gave an apologetic wave while Seb sadly watched them from the pier. Yuan was already towing her away and talking as they swam. “Luce, listen, about your dad: it’s bad. He’s not physically hurt, but . . . it might be something a mermaid did to him? And I don’t know, but there’s this nice old guy who brought your dad to the bay, and he keeps saying . . . that maybe you can help somehow? Come on.”
They were already swimming under the water. The darkness ran like quicksilver around Luce and also straight through her veins. She was the pulse in the night, the racing surge, and Yuan’s words seemed to signal her from far ahead, bright and strange in the distance. She drove herself on, faster and faster, until Yuan was trailing just behind her. Past the Embarcadero and its shining clock, below the looming hill with its pale tower. As the bridge neared, Luce lunged for the surface, staring frantically at the crowd onshore. Humans were gathered there in greater numbers than ever; they all seemed to be holding candles and their faces floated on the dark like glowing balloons. Instead of jostling they stood quietly with arms around one another’s waists, staring wide-eyed at the brilliant streaks of reflected light playing on the soaring flank of the water-wall. Many of them were weeping quietly. The rush of mermaid song suffused Luce’s mind so completely that it took her a moment to understand that the humans were all singing too, in a long incantatory drone of rising and falling harmonies. It was their best effort to sing along with the mermaids under the bridge, Luce realized. They couldn’t contribute magic to the mermaids’ struggle, but they could offer compassion and the strength of their hearts. Tears swarmed into her eyes. But she didn’t see her father.
“He’s farther along, Luce. Around the next bend, on the ocean side. We tried to pick a spot where you could have a little more privacy, but it’s still pretty crowded.”
Luce dipped again. On the bridge’s far side was a hill with strange bunkerlike buildings and terraces set into its slope. The singing human crowd had grown big enough now to submerge the bunkers in a tide of bodies: people sat and stood on the decks and rooftops, their candles sending pitching waves of light across their faces. The shore here was paved in cement, defined by a row of large rocks mortared together.