I’m flying, she thought giddily, and who cared if the sea below her was pink and the air around her smelled of sugar and strawberry syrup? Who cared? The school had a turtle pond and bathtubs big enough for her to sink down to her nose, only the small islands of her knees and the peak of her belly standing above the surface, but there was no pool, there was no ocean. She hadn’t been swimming since she’d left the Trenches, and every molecule of her body yearned for the moment when she would be surrounded by the sea.

They hit the surface all at the same time, Kade and Christopher with enormous splashes, Rini and Sumi with smaller ones, and Cora slicing through the surface of the waves like a harpoon, cutting down, down, down into the pink, bubbling depths.

She was the first to burst back into the air, the force of her mermaid-trained kicks driving her several feet above the pinkish foam as she sputtered and exclaimed, “It’s soda!”

Rini laughed as she came bobbing back up. “Strawberry rhubarb soda!” she cheered. One of her ears was gone, following her fingers into nothingness. She didn’t appear to have noticed. “We’re home, we’re home, we’re home in the foam!” She splashed Cora with her remaining hand, sending soda droplets in all directions.

Kade was sputtering when he surfaced. Sumi’s bones simply floated to the top, buoyant beyond all human measure.

Cora frowned. “Where’s Christopher?” she asked, looking at Kade.

“What do you mean?”

“I saw where everyone was when we were falling.” She had been the only one composed enough to check. The others had been panicking, or plummeting, not trying to get their bearings. She couldn’t blame them. Everyone’s lives prepared them for something different. “He was right next to you.”

Kade’s eyes widened. “I don’t know.”

There wasn’t time to keep talking: not if she wanted this to end well. Cora took a deep breath before she dove, wishing briefly that she had a hair tie, or better yet, that she had her gills.

The sea of strawberry rhubarb soda—and who did that? They were all going to get horrible urinary tract infections after this—was translucent, lighter than normal water. The bubbles stung her eyes, but she could deal with the pain. Chlorine was worse.

(It was hard not to think about the damage that sugar and carbonation might do—but Rini wasn’t worried, and this was Rini’s ocean, in Rini’s Nonsense world. Maybe things worked differently here. Things seemed to work differently everywhere she went. Anyway, things had to be at least slightly different, or they wouldn’t have been able to stay afloat.)