Authors: Sarah Porter
“Let her say that stuff to my face, then.” Dorian’s smile had a cast of grim determination now. “I’ll tell her she’s right about humans sucking. Fine. And I’ll tell her that my being
human
doesn’t mean I shouldn’t love you!”
Maybe he was being reckless, Luce thought. But she couldn’t say no to him, not when his recklessness was so strong and beautiful. She found herself grinning back at him.
“Let’s go.”
***
Half an hour later they were skimming out across the unstable sea, the water brushed pale green and milky blue by the glowing sky. White seabirds flocked in strange, continually shifting patterns against the delicate blue above, all of them rushing south. The rowboat knocked rhythmically against the low swells, and the water hummed around Luce’s scales and trembled on her bare skin. The haunting soprano moans of the gray whales echoed inside her skull. Now closer and now farther away, their spouts rose in frost-colored plumes, V-shaped, spanning the blue air. Dorian kept twisting in his seat, his face luminous with excitement. All at once Luce had an idea and started laughing.
“I want to try something. Okay? Wait right here.” Luce had almost forgotten that Dorian didn’t have any choice about waiting, until he cracked up laughing, too. She smiled at him and slipped just below the surface, watching the golden light weave through the green around her. She gathered her voice into two narrow, soaring notes, sweet and as focused as twin beams of light, then sent them vaulting into the air above her. Two jets of water leaped skyward in sympathy, and Luce heard Dorian’s shout of astonishment. They weren’t quite as tall or diffused as the spouts of the whales, and they arched as they fell; the result looked more like a fountain in a park, Luce thought. Still, it wasn’t bad for a first try.
She came up thirty feet from the rowboat and grinned at him. “God, Luce!” Dorian shouted; he was out of breath, leaning so far toward her that the boat tipped dangerously. “I know you told me you could do that, but actually
seeing
it, and the way you
sounded
...”
“I didn’t get it right, though,” Luce told him.
“What wasn’t right about that? It was
fantastic!”
“But I’m trying to imitate the whale spouts. Wait, I’m going to do it again. Tell me if I’m close...” She dipped back under, rolling again and again in the green glass brilliance of the sea, then let those bright expansive notes burst up again and spill out through the water. This time the plumes were airier, broader, full of froth and the resonance of mist. She held the song while the jets of water fanned up above her, white and fresh as the clouds of geese flying in formation. She thought the effect was almost perfect, and she let herself float gently to the surface, face-up, watching the far-off shimmer of a million wings.
“Luce!”
She swung around, and her heart stopped when she realized she couldn’t see the rowboat anywhere. Bizarrely, she couldn’t really see anything in that direction: only a gray rolling wall, crusted white with barnacles, like something in a dream. Trying to understand it was like trying to read a book as the paper suddenly darkened and the letters crawled away. And, Luce realized with horror, Dorian was somehow behind this thing, or inside it...
The broad gray flukes cleft the air, lofting a shower of sunlit water with them, and Luce heard her own cry of relief. “Why hadn’t she understood that it was only one of the gray whales, maybe coming over to investigate the peculiar music she’d been making? The rowboat was rocking wildly just behind the place where the whale had disappeared, and Luce rushed over. Dorian was gripping the edge of the boat so hard that his hands looked like knotted rope. His face was white with shock, and he gazed at Luce and then past her as if he could barely comprehend what he was seeing. His breath jerked out, fast and uneven. Luce covered his hands with hers, squeezing gently, and then he finally looked into her eyes.
“Dorian, what
happened?
I couldn’t see you for a minute.”
“It just—” He seemed to be searching for words. “Luce, the way it
looked
at me ... The whale was suddenly right there, and I saw its eye come up, and it looked at me so hard. I mean, I’ve never had a
person
look at me like that. And then your voice was in my head, and it felt like I was exploding...” Dorian shook himself and laughed a little, but he sounded shaky.
“I shouldn’t have left you alone...”
“No, it was fine. It—You know how you said that time that only humans think they’re realer than everything else? The way that whale looked at me, I felt like it was a lot realer than I am.” Golden strands of light reflected off the water and wobbled on the curves of his face; his full lips were parted.
“And that comes as a surprise to you, of course.” Nausicaa’s deep, thrumming voice came from behind Luce’s shoulder. Luce twisted around to see the dark flash of Nausicaa’s eyes—while a few feet farther back another immense gray presence came surging up. Its head was long and tapered, patched with barnacles like pale scabs; its eyelids were thick, lemon-shaped, and as rough as rinds. One glossy black eye pivoted to inspect them with fathomless awareness. Luce gasped a little, suddenly understanding what Dorian had felt. She forced herself to look away so that she could meet Nausicaa’s ironic stare, and all the while she kept her hold on Dorian’s left hand where it gripped the boat. Just in case...
“Nausicaa...” Luce struggled to sound normal, to remember what she was supposed to say. “This is Dorian. Dorian, meet Nausicaa.”
Luce watched Nausicaa calmly twist her head sideways to inspect the indication that flickered around Dorian. Luce hoped Dorian hadn’t noticed.
“Hey, Nausicaa.” Dorian’s gaze was challenging and, to Luce, impressively steady. He actually leaned from the boat to extend his free hand in Nausicaa’s direction. “Luce has told me a lot about you.”
Nausicaa gave the outreached hand a single brooding glance, but didn’t approach. “She has said nothing of you, however,” Nausicaa growled. “Except that she does not consider you a story.”
It occurred to Luce with a jolt that, even if Nausicaa wasn’t exactly being friendly, she was still violating the timahk by speaking to Dorian at all.
The gray whale stayed where it was, gazing into each of them in turn, while another surfaced on the opposite side of the boat. The boat looked so vulnerable between the whales, no stronger than an eggshell. The three of them were drifting inside a huge building with living walls.
“I get that a lot.” Dorian smiled, lowering his hand as if he hadn’t noticed Nausicaa’s rudeness. The boat pitched, and he doubled over, grasping at the seat before he was able to right himself. “Look. You care about Luce, right?” All the flippancy had abruptly disappeared from Dorian’s voice.
“I do,” Nausicaa acknowledged, but she sounded cold. Luce could see the churning pallor of the water where Nausicaa’s tail was stirring. Still, there was a focused brightness in those glittering dark eyes that suggested Nausicaa was more intrigued than she wanted to admit.
“Then why don’t you want her to be happy?” Dorian asked seriously. “She’s going to live for maybe hundreds of years. You really think she should never get to be in love?”
Nausicaa’s stare was acerbic, but Luce noticed that she didn’t even try to answer the question. “I suppose you claim to care for her,
Dorian?”
“I love her.” Dorian said it so fervently that Luce’s heart skipped. His love had never felt so definite to her before, so
real.
She wanted to pull herself into the boat and drown in the warmth of his skin. Meanwhile Nausicaa was skimming closer to them, her bronze-dark face rising and falling with the water in a smooth, hypnotic dance, her black hair cresting over her head in heavy whorls.
“You love her, and yet you promise her a thing you cannot give.” Nausicaa’s voice turned low, meditative; the air seemed to vibrate in time with it. “Why?”
Luce didn’t know what Nausicaa was talking about, but still she started to feel alarmed. What if Nausicaa started telling Dorian about all the other mermaids she’d seen fall in love with humans? From the fierce way Dorian and Nausicaa were staring at each other, it was clear that there was nothing she could do to put a stop to the conversation. They were both determined to have it out.
“I haven’t promised her anything, actually,” Dorian announced; his cool tone sounded a little strained. “But when I do make her a promise I’ll definitely keep it.”
“You give her your promise
now.
“With every breath you promise her that she has found a home for her heart. You promise her that she is no longer one of the lost. And that promise is an unending lie,
human.”
Dorian sat back in the boat, and Luce felt the startled pain in his face reflecting in her own. For the first time she almost hated Nausicaa for being so sure she was right—and for being so merciless. “She
isn’t
lost. I found her.” Dorian’s forced bravado was obvious now. “Or she found me. Has Luce told you how we met? Because it wasn’t
online
...”
Nausicaa didn’t deign to respond to this, just scowled away into the distance. Several gray whales crowded around them now, silently staring, jostling one another so that the patch of open sea around the boat grew constantly smaller.
“I care for Luce enough to offer her the truth,” Nausicaa pronounced at last. She hadn’t so much as glanced at Luce through the whole conversation with Dorian, but now she swung her head and shot her a quick, cutting stare. “She can do with it what she likes.”
Nausicaa dove, but not quickly. Instead her movements seemed deliberately lethargic, her tail swinging in midair long enough that Luce knew it must burn. “Like I haven’t seen any damn mermaids before...” Dorian hissed. Then Nausicaa was gone, with a last hard slap of emerald fins. The gray whales squeezed in so close now that Luce began to feel a little panicked, staring around at the stony banks of their hides.
She
could easily dive and escape, after all, but Dorian?
Luce saw the same idea occur to Dorian; his brows lowered and his eyes flashed around, searching for a way out. There wasn’t one. Luce began wondering if she could possibly raise a wave big enough to carry the boat safely over the back of a whale, steady enough that Dorian wouldn’t be thrown out. But if the whale chose that moment to dive, lashing its enormous muscular flukes into the air, the boat would certainly be crushed and Dorian with it.
A hovering soprano call moved in the water, welling up from the shadowy green below. It was like whale song, but also, Luce instantly realized, utterly different. The black eye closest to her seemed to glow with recognition, and the long head leaned deeper into the sea. Suddenly Luce and Dorian sailed up on a huge billow of displaced water as the whale dipped away, and Luce’s whole body shook to the high pulse of its answering song.
The voice from the deep cried again, in a long, alluring vibrato.
Nausicaa,
Luce realized with amazed gratitude. Nausicaa was calling the whales away so that Luce could get Dorian out of there. And one by one the enormous bodies curved downward, sweeping away in dark arches, plunging like waterfalls. The boat lurched up rising slopes of water, and Luce dipped underneath, supporting the hull with both arms to stop Dorian from being flung overboard. The dim space around her began to brighten as the whales dove away, their huge shapes sailing below her like the shadows of clouds on a hillside. As soon as everything was calmer, Luce surfaced again. Dorian’s face shone with sweet amazement, and Luce felt a kind of joy as acute as grief. And then Dorian was pointing again, out behind her.
Thirty feet away from them one of the grays threw itself high above the surface, its whole streamlined form in one long balletic curve, fins sweeping by its sides. Sunlight sharp as shining wounds flashed in the ruffs of water flying from its tail. Then it curled in space, racing downward into the vanishing green of the deep.
14
Darkness
By late November the sun barely had the strength to heave itself in a low are above the horizon. Even at midday the light looked bluish and tired. The endless, somnolent dusk set in by early afternoon and slowly fell into the yawning nights. It was hard not to get depressed, to feel starved for scraps of daylight. Dorian got used to meeting Luce after dusk, to watching the dim glow of her body parting the smoke-dark water. It was a beautiful sight but also lonely somehow. And it made his time with her seem even more remote from the rest of his life. The rooms of his school and house seemed like brightly lit boxes sealed to keep out the darkness where dangerous secrets leaped and swam.
Today he’d lingered in the village’s tiny library, and now he was running late. All the tenth-graders had been assigned a research paper on an environmental challenge of their choice, but Dorian hadn’t been able to stop with one. He’d begun with problems that affected whales and gone on from there to a whole list of threats to the world’s oceans: acidification, dead zones, global warming ... Already he had almost fifty pages of notes and he couldn’t seem to stop collecting more information. When he glanced up from the computer it was already after four, and he hurried to stuff his books away, bundle himself into his hat and parka, and run to meet Luce.
Luckily she could read in the dark without any trouble, and he talked over his research with her. He’d started to bring her stacks of library books, too, tightly wrapped in layers of plastic so that they wouldn’t get soaked as she carried them home. Even so he’d had some pretty serious fines for water damage, and the librarian had told him to stop reading in the bathtub. A little to Dorian’s surprise, Luce wanted to read his school textbooks, too. But it was a good idea, he realized. That way if she ever turned human again she wouldn’t be too far behind.
Maybe next year she’d even be in high school with him.
All they needed was someone they could trust and who could help them figure out how to change her back without killing her. Someone smart, like a scientist. Out in the street the air itself seemed to be tinted with bruise blue ink, and the cold bit into his face and bare hands. Stretches of dead grass separated the small brown-shingled houses. The printed red roses and blue plaids of the curtains glowed like lanterns, and at the bottom of the street the lights of a few boats tossed gently up and down. Dorian thought the dusk even had a smell; it was like the scent of clay, musty and dank.