By the time Luce let her voice softly die away, she knew that he wasn’t completely cured—but also that he was much, much better.
And so was she. At least she was well enough now to open her eyes and face the world outside her own private darkness.
The people on the hillside were crying silently, each one consumed by a lifetime’s worth of emotions all streaming into wild release at once. None of them spoke.
Dorian was sitting cross-legged only five feet away from her. His cheeks were tear-streaked and his ochre gaze seemed to cradle her face. She looked away from him, suddenly embarrassed.
And her father—he still swayed uncertainly. He looked weak and sleepy. But he also looked like a person and not like a shell filled with yawning night, and his eyes met hers with dreamy recognition. “Hi there, Luce,” he whispered. “I was trying to get to you. I wanted to explain . . .”
Luce hugged him, trying not to break down and sob. “Explain later. You need to go somewhere warm now. You need to get in dry clothes and then sleep for a long time. Okay?”
“That sounds about right,” Andrew Korchak agreed vaguely. He lifted his hand from the water and watched with perplexity the drops falling from his fingers. “How did I get here, Luce? I was just trying . . . I saw you in the water, and I tried to swim out to you. And after that . . . there was that room made out of glass, and I was talking to your friend.”
He was still half-crazy, Luce thought: still shaken and disoriented. “Tell me everything later. And if you need me to I’ll sing to you again, and soon, soon you’ll be okay.” Andrew Korchak nodded hazily, then stood up and clambered over the rocks. He curled in a ball on the pavement and sighed. Maybe he was already asleep.
Luce looked toward the silver-haired man. Like everyone else, he was gleaming with tears that seemed to illuminate something deep inside him. It was only now that Luce realized how much this unknown man had done for her. “I haven’t thanked you yet. For bringing my dad here. And I don’t know your name.”
“I’m Ben Ellison.” He smiled at her sadly. “I’m glad to finally meet you, general. Dorian always speaks of you . . . very lovingly. And now I truly understand why.”
Luce’s eyes went wide as the realization hit her. How could she have forgotten? Ellison, Ben Ellison: this was the same FBI agent who’d tried to make Dorian betray her. Even without meeting Ben Ellison she’d always hated him, always regarded him as an implacable enemy.
But he’d helped save her father, and she couldn’t hate him anymore.
“Hi, Mr. Ellison,” Luce said a bit awkwardly. “It’s nice . . . to meet you, too. I really, really appreciate your helping my dad this way. Can you please take him somewhere safe now? I think I shouldn’t try any more tonight.”
“I have a hotel room waiting for him,” Ben Ellison assured her. “General, I’d very much like . . . to speak with you again soon. Your old acquaintance Anais did this to your father”—Luce jolted, stunned to realize that Nausicaa had been right again, and that Anais had in fact survived the massacre of their old tribe—“and her current whereabouts are unknown. Obviously she could be extremely dangerous.”
Luce nodded, but she was so overwhelmed that she could barely take it in. Anais was still causing extraordinary harm; Anais was still out there somewhere . . .
“Luce?” Dorian whispered. But she couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
“Dorian, are you coming with us?” Ben Ellison asked. “We’re leaving now.” He tried to lift Andrew from the ground, and a few people from the crowd came down to help. In a moment a group of half a dozen was carrying her father, probably to a waiting car. He’d be safe, Luce thought, and eventually he’d recover completely.
“I’ll come later,” Dorian called. Even without glancing at him, Luce knew his stare hadn’t once shifted away from her face. “Luce, I know you must be really mad at me, and you’ve gone through hell, and I don’t blame you if you hate me. But—”
“Not now, Dorian.” The voice was Yuan’s, coming from just behind Luce’s left shoulder. “We all know you love her, okay? And I’ve been really impressed by your whole Twice Lost Humans thing. But this is not the time. It’s not fair to ask Luce anything tonight.”
It was strange, Luce thought. But somehow now that she heard Yuan say it she knew it was true: Dorian did still love her. What she didn’t know was how she felt about that.
Dorian tilted his head toward Yuan. “Who are you?”
“I’m Yuan.” There was a brief pause. “And I’m pretty sure I want the same things you do for Luce. I think we’re on the same side. But everything’s changed since you knew her.”
Dorian gave a kind of abrupt, wheezing laugh. “Yeah. Changed. Yeah, it has. You have no idea, Yuan. While we were on the plane coming here Ben Ellison told me something that’s going to change everything.”
Even Luce looked toward Dorian now. He sat like some wounded prince at the edge of a battlefield, his skin golden and his bronze-blond hair overgrown and knotted.
Yuan stared at him. “Dorian? What are you talking about? Are they ready . . . are they going to end the war?”
“I don’t know about that,” Dorian said wearily. “I hope so. It’s something else—about you guys. About mermaids. You can change back into humans if you want. They’ve found a way. You can all change back, and it won’t kill you.”
Yuan let out a shriek of pure amazement, and an answering outcry poured down from the hill.
At first Luce thought it was a cry of surprise, maybe even of joy, provoked by what Dorian had said. The storm of voices kept getting louder, growing and booming. The sky seemed to thunder with human shouts, and Luce realized that the uproar had spread to the mass of people lining the Golden Gate Bridge, to the hills above them, maybe even to the far shore of Sausalito.
And it no longer sounded like a cry of amazement. The tone had darkened to a howl of fury and dismay. Imani, Graciela, and Yuan rushed close to hold her, tugging her away from the shore in alarm. All of them were buffeted by a torrent of outraged sound. They spun in place, bewildered. A woman was yelling at Dorian. In that vast clamor Luce couldn’t make out what she was saying, but she saw the desperate look that came over Dorian’s face, the way his body wrung with sudden despair as he scanned the water for her.
“Luce! Yuan!” Dorian screamed. The mermaids were floating together thirty feet out, scared to approach any nearer. He caught sight of them and waved his arms wildly; Luce thought he was beckoning them over and shook her head in anxiety. “Get out of here now! Swim away and hide!” Hide? Luce shuddered with the first gasp of understanding. “The mermaids just destroyed Baltimore!”
35 The Sea Inside
If it had not been for the vast tumultuous crash that turned the inside of the harbor into slashing crosscurrents as strong as waterfalls, for the shock waves slamming forward with irresistible violence, for all the froth and the mermaid bodies hurled in disorder, Anais wouldn’t have had the slightest chance of escaping. She was sent tumbling with the rest of them through a labyrinth of foam that rose in veils and hid them from one another. A surge like an angled geyser caught Anais and shot her up and over. Strange green fins smacked at her face; a hand wriggling like an anemone burst out of a wall of crystalline foam and grasped her wrist. Anais craned forward and bit the hand savagely, and it let go. Then she was speeding away, although at first she was too disoriented to guess at her direction. When she surfaced she saw cars drifting like bubbles where the freeway had been minutes before, an off-ramp snapped in two halfway up its arch, buildings slumped over into heaps of angled walls and rubble while high wild waves leaped through the city streets.