Cala wanted to say something playful and comforting in response, but she couldn’t think of anything that would make Yuan feel better. “I’ll report back as soon as I can.”
There were mermaids chatting with the humans onshore, and Cala headed over there to look for volunteers. In some cases mermaids were kissing new human boyfriends. Late as it was Helene and Ray Vogel were reading aloud from a huge illustrated volume of fairy tales to a circle of the youngest mermaids. From the longing on their small faces, Cala knew that many of them had never had anyone read them stories before.
“Hey,” Cala called, too softly. No one turned around. “Hey, I need help! Luce is missing and she might be in trouble!”
That got their attention. Ten minutes later Cala had managed to get three small groups together and sent them out to search in different directions: along the north and south sides of the bay, with the third group heading out into the open sea.
Cala thought of how Luce had looked just after she’d signed the treaty—her blank, faded gaze, her forced smiles, her air of weary abstraction—and wondered if the search would prove futile.
“What a scrap she is,” a gruff voice said nearby. “A rag of skin and scales. Easily destroyed, easily thrown away.”
Even though someone was speaking, Luce supposed that she was still in the ocean. The medium that contained her was cold and terribly heavy; it ebbed and pitched. And yet somehow it felt not like the Pacific on a chill night in early September but like everywhere and always. It felt like the place where days and years burst their membrane-fine skins and poured into a single fluid sphere. The forever world, Luce thought vaguely. She thought of continents and seas ripped into confetti and gusting out of the map. She could see nothing, not even darkness.
“To what purpose?” This time the voice was a girl’s. “What we have before us is the rag, but is that rag truly Queen Luce? Or is Queen Luce the changes now wrought on the world?”
Luce felt an icy current wrapping her body. It was strong enough to bind her arms to her sides. Then with a kind of contemptuous flick it sent her rolling, and seized her again.
“She should end here. Her every act has been defiance.” A pause. “She has led all your kindred into defiance. And so I choose to lead her to these depths, here to abandon her. Her mermaid’s form is forfeit, and she will die very soon once I take it from her.”
“Children do defy their parents,” a different girl observed cynically.
“They may, when those parents are human,” the low voice rumbled in annoyance. It sounded half sea.
“No. When the children grow up. When their ideas are no longer only the ideas their parents have offered them. When they think beyond what they’ve been taught.” She paused. Luce had the sense that this unknown girl was about to give voice to something she found difficult, even frightening. “For these thousands of years the mermaids have been your obedient children. Perhaps it was time for one of us to change that.”
Luce felt her muscles squeezed and buffeted. Whatever held her pressed in with bruising force. Her eyes merged with the endless nowhere.
“I saved her!” The sea voice was now a roar. “I saved her and I offered her great gifts, and she repaid me with this rebellion, this contempt.”
“She repaid you by leading the mermaids into a future you never imagined for them,” the first girl said coolly. “Everything between mermaids and humans is different now. Queen Luce has repaid you with transformation. Surely that is your own coin?”
The deep voice growled. “You listen to Nausicaa too much.”
Luce tried and failed to cry out at that. Nausicaa? Where are you?
“I listen to what my own long experience tells me. So does my sister. Even the sea is too confining when your destiny is settled for you, and when that destiny describes so small a circuit.” The girl paused again. “Queen Luce should be with us. She’s earned that choice.”
“She’s earned nothing but death!”
“We claim her. Luce is ours. As we were first, so is she the first of the mermaids as they will now become. And we refuse to see her harmed.”
The sea rumbled in Luce’s head. Her whole skull roared like the inside of a seashell. There was a sound like vast currents quarreling. Sheets of water seemed to grind against one another until they squealed like iron; Luce’s empty eyes suddenly poured down tracks of blue phosphorescent flame.
Then, very quietly, she was no longer everywhere. Though it was impossible to guess precisely what had changed, Luce could sense that she was now somewhere quite specific. Her body was a point in space, it was enclosed in latitude and longitude, and the world was again banded by magnetic pull.
The time was no longer always, but now. She was weak and nauseous and—though she knew beyond all doubt that she’d been hopelessly far from the surface when her consciousness had merged with that strange forever—a cool breeze was brushing across her face. It took her a moment to understand that, and to remember to breathe.
Everything was dark, but that was because her eyes were closed. The process of opening them seemed confusing at first, but with an effort she managed it. Dark sea, towering night, and in the distance a star of piercing radiance high on a cliff. Behind it rolling tree-fringed hills. To the star’s right a long expanse of beach shone like a pale fissure in the darkness. “Is that light the Cliff House?” Luce asked aloud.
She felt a quick swish of displaced water as someone nearby spun around in surprise. Ten feet away from her a dark head swung to see who’d spoken.
Luce had never imagined that it would even be possible for Nausicaa to look so utterly discomposed, so flabbergasted. She grinned at her friend’s dropped mouth and rounded eyes; Luce couldn’t have explained why, but she wasn’t surprised to see Nausicaa at all. She’d just emerged from the always, after all, and Nausicaa was Luce’s private always, the ocean continually cresting in her heart. “But . . . Luce?” Nausicaa stammered at last.
Luce laughed and swam over to her, then realized again how weak she was. “Let’s swim to the beach. I think I might faint soon.” She leaned her head on Nausicaa’s shoulder.
“Luce!” Nausicaa hugged her tight and looked around. “But where . . . are we?”
“That looks like the Cliff House. I thought I went farther south than that, but . . .”
“Near San Francisco, then?” Nausicaa was regaining a hint of her usual poise, though she still seemed uncharacteristically shaky.
“I guess so. Where do you think we are?”
Nausicaa gave a crazed laugh. “When last I knew where I was, I was watching from a distance as the lights came on for the evening across the vast city of Alexandria. In Egypt, Luce. It might be ten thousand miles away from this place. I had just left the Twice Lost mermaids there.” She shook her head, her dark curls ruffling. “I thought that was only moments ago. But perhaps . . .”
Now it was Luce’s turn to be unsettled. “Egypt?” She thought for a moment. “Then . . . did you go through a place that didn’t seem like it was anywhere exactly?”
Nausicaa bit her lip. “I heard myself speaking. How did I hear that, Luce, unless it was a dream? I heard myself in conversation with the first mermaids, the Unnamed Twins. But I often dream of them, of course; they were my dear friends when I was newly in the sea.” Nausicaa stared, searching through billows of memory. “But now I think this was no dream. There was a discussion . . . about you. And I believe that they . . . extended an invitation, Luce. To the two of us.”