Free The Twice Lost by Sarah Porter Page B

had left at this point. Together maybe they could come up with a plan: some way to stop the slaughter of the mermaids. Maybe even some way to make peace with the humans, as impossible as that seemed. After all, any mermaids who survived these massacres would only hate humans more than ever. The idea that she of all people might somehow manage to persuade them to stop killing, well . . .
    It was preposterous. But it was the only idea she had.
    Luce set out again at dawn. Swimming was still painful, but the ache in her bruised midriff was starting to dull a bit and her torn ear barely hurt anymore. Risky as it was she paused at a beach and ate as many shellfish as she could manage, constantly scanning the golden waves for any hint of a black boat with silent engines. Then she went on, sweeping at least half a mile from the shore. She didn’t know what kinds of predators she might encounter out here, but she had a feeling they couldn’t be as dangerous as humans firing razor-sharp blades. And at least animal predators wouldn’t be hunting specifically for her.
    Still, she kept a close watch for any creature that appeared too big or too hungry. It was strange, though: she didn’t see anything big at all. In fact, as she went on there weren’t even any fish, apart from some jellyfish and unusually thick smears of bright green algae when she surfaced. It didn’t make sense. Luce paused, breathing, wondering why the sea was so oddly empty. There weren’t even any birds.
    And, Luce thought, the water felt a little different on her skin, though not in any way she could identify. It didn’t feel like fresh water, but it definitely felt wrong, almost sticky. Or somehow
slow.
Somehow breathless, sad, inert. The morning sun swayed in brilliant flags along the water’s surface, and Luce felt overwhelmed by solitude so immense that it crowded the sky.
    Except for, far in the distance, a single dark boat. Luce couldn’t hear an engine.
    It was too far away for her to guess if it was the same as the boats that were hunting mermaids, but even so her heart went cold, its rhythm fast and light and whispery. She dived, hurtling deeper than she would ever normally choose to swim, so deep that the water’s gray weight squeezed in on her and the light deadened into a hard slate dusk. She could see the seafloor from here; it must be relatively shallow.
    The seafloor looked all wrong. Bone white, with nothing moving, with none of the usual grades and variations of color.
    Her instincts told her not to go any deeper than she was already. The pressure was too much, and she’d be too far from the air. Instead she needed to concentrate on going as far as she could at a depth where the boat couldn’t find her.
    Luce went down, her better judgment screaming in protest. But there was clearly something very wrong here. The sea had never looked so forlorn. She had to know what was happening here, to understand . . .
    There! Something was moving. Luce’s pulse quickened with hope until she saw the limp, lifeless way it drifted. It was something pale, spindly, and complicated, skimming over a plain made of impossibly spiny, whitish stones. A large crab, Luce realized after a second, but it was clearly dead. Its splintered claws trailed over the weird stones of the seabed, clacking softly.
    No. It
couldn’t
be. Those things she’d thought were stones . . .
    Dead crabs. Many thousands of them lay packed together in all directions for as far as Luce could see, heaped and askew, their jointed limbs slopped across one another’s shells. Matted weeds; decayed fish; rotting, fluctuating ribbons that were once gigantic worms. All of them were thickly covered in fuzzy, whitish slime, a carpet of disease.
    What
was
this place? What kind of world allowed such a sweeping destruction of life? Luce reeled in place, her body lurching through the water, her tail suddenly lashing senselessly. Horror choked her; she felt crushed and airless.
    She needed to