And at the base of one building, very near the water’s edge, was an empty doorway. And poised in that doorway . . .
Her father, but also—not her father. Her father with everything that made him who he was somehow missing. His face and body looked slack and empty, and another man—a thickset, strong-looking man with tan skin and neat silver hair—was holding him firmly upright. Luce swam closer, a strange paralysis gripping her heart, her eyes helplessly drawn by the awful vacancy of her father’s face. To think that she’d blamed him for not trying to see her . . . Even when he’d been snarled in the spirits’ enchantment on that lost island, he hadn’t seemed as profoundly injured as he did now. His body was like a shell for the void.
Even worse, she could hear the strange shapeless emptiness that was waiting for her behind his cinnamon eyes.
Even worse, the void was singing.
Luce was gripping the shore before she even knew what she was doing. Some of the people on the roof had started calling to her, crying out her name. The silver-haired man stepped out of his doorway, Andrew Korchak’s vacant body still sagging against him, and half turned to silence the crowd with a single imperious hand. “General Luce isn’t here for you,” he announced, sharply. “She’s here to see her father, and he’s not well. Please respect that.” He kept on staring into the faces above until they quieted, then he nodded with a certain curt efficiency and carefully lowered Andrew until he was sitting loosely cross-legged just behind the row of rocks that separated him from his daughter. By stretching her arm through a gap between two rocks Luce was able to catch his hand and hold it tight, and all the time she was listening to the void’s slow, musical purr, attuning herself to its thrum and its cadence. To fight it she had to become its intimate, as familiar to it as its own echo.
Who had done this to him?
The silver-haired man sat down too, watching her intensely. Luce didn’t look at him or at Yuan, who’d swum up beside her. Imani was there too, Luce realized dimly, and Graciela, waiting in silence to see what Luce would do. Nothing mattered, though, but the yawning devastation in her father’s eyes. He was so close to her, but his gaze never alighted on her. That gaze went everywhere and nowhere as if it saw everything undifferentiated, as facets of a single complex sound.
“General Luce?” the silver-haired man tried. “I’m sorry that you have to see this, especially after everything that happened earlier. But I thought you should see your father as soon as possible, in case time is a factor in . . . in your ability to effect a cure. Assuming a cure is feasible. The effects of a malicious, deliberate assault by mermaid song . . . well. Dorian insists that you have the ability to heal this kind of damage, although I have to say that seems like a great deal to hope for.”
Dorian’s name was enough to make Luce glance up sharply at the silver-haired man, but only for an instant. Almost immediately her eyes went back to her father’s face, to his head fallen over at a steep angle and his wandering gaze. But looking up, even so briefly, reminded Luce of the crowd watching raptly from above as if they were in some kind of bizarre theater built from night and sea. “I can try,” Luce breathed out. “I can try to heal him. But I’m going to have to sing to do it. I mean sing in ways that might not be safe for the people here. Hearing me—I don’t know what that will do to everyone. They should leave.”
In the corner of her eye, the strange man nodded thoughtfully. But for some reason he didn’t get up and go.
Yuan began swimming back and forth under the pallid bunkers, calling up, “General Luce needs to sing. It could be dangerous. You should leave for your own safety, okay? Everybody please leave!”
Some people started climbing down from the roofs and vanishing behind the buildings. But far too many lingered where they were, and Yuan’s voice began rising in frustration. “We’re trying to be responsible here! We’re asking all of you to GET— AWAY—NOW! Why don’t you all get moving? This is serious business!”
“We just want to listen,” a young woman in a red parka answered from a curving cement roof. “We won’t bother you.”
“It’s dangerous!” Yuan yelled back. “Don’t be stupid! This isn’t a rock concert!”
“I’ll take my chances!”
Yuan wheeled around to look at Luce and raised her hands helplessly. Luce groaned. Her father was as hollow as an open wound, and these stubborn, reckless humans wouldn’t get out of her way and let her help him. Luce gave her father’s unresponsive hand a quick squeeze and swirled back a few feet to look up at the crowd. Her tail coiled around her. “Please, please leave! Now! I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I can’t just keep waiting!”
“General Luce?” It was the man who’d brought her father. “The way you need to sing to your father—it must be a way of singing that’s meant to help, not harm. Isn’t that correct? You won’t actually be singing in a way that would persuade the people here to drown themselves.”
“I don’t think anybody will drown,” Luce agreed. “But I can’t tell; it might hurt them in other ways. I just don’t know, and there’s already been—so many horrible things have happened already—and if anyone else gets hurt because of me—” She closed her eyes in despair. Maybe she should just seize hold of her father and drag him away from here, across the bay. Maybe she could take him to Alcatraz.
“It’s really going to be fine, Luce,” someone said. The voice ached inside her, as warm and reassuring as her own blood, but somehow she couldn’t place it at first. “You can sing without hurting anyone. I know that for a fact. Mr. Ellison? Can we get him closer to her, like on the other side of the rocks?”
Now she knew who was there. Luce looked up again, her vision scattered and silvery with tears. Dorian appeared at the center of a web of light. He was helping the strange man to maneuver her father’s limp body over the line of rocks and into the shallow lapping water where Luce waited.
It was all too much, too painful. Luce closed her eyes again, trying to squeeze the darkness so close that it would never leave her. She caught her father’s lolling head between her hands and held on gently, keeping him from sliding down into the water. And then she heard him trying to speak. The word came out as a lowing, broken note. “Lu . . .” her father half groaned, half sang. “Lu . . . ssss.”
And very softly, very delicately, Luce began singing back to him.
Her voice spread through her father’s mind. He was full of a trilling emptiness, yes—but that void didn’t possess all of him. Instead he was fragmented, torn apart by that darkness. Aspects of him shone far apart in that vacancy like suns separated by the immensity of space. Luce’s voice reached through his strange internal night and gathered pieces of his consciousness, until those suns weren’t scattered but instead hung like apples from a single blazing tree.
Luce heard herself singing slow, high notes that traveled along sweeping curves, touching everything in her father’s mind that had gotten lost. She sang the webs, the reconnections, but her own voice sounded to her like the deepest possible silence. There was still the endless thrum of mermaid voices under the bridge. There was the subtle breathing of the wind. But even in concert with those sounds the silence was perfect, just as actively present as any music. It rose in harmony with the music.
In that silence her father would hear his own thoughts again.
In it he would recognize himself again. And the world, which had been washed away by some uncanny, destructive flood of sound, would come back to him with its sky and its ground and its trees. Those things would seem real to him again, without any music.