The world, of course, was full of coincidences that seemed too good to be true, but that didn’t mean they weren’t real. Was this one of them?

Then again, people made their own realities. Charles Darwin would never have found the Galapagos Islands had he stayed home in England. He found them because he went looking for them—or a place like them.

Rad eyed Marty, who was organizing travel plans with Jacky. Marty…who lived on a multi-million-dollar state-of-the-art research vessel…who went on week-long sojourns to map the ocean floor and record the sounds of what lurked beneath the waves…who spent nearly every waking hour of every day analyzing that data.

You’ve been such a fool, she thought. A blind fool.

She made a short, strident sound that might have been laughter.

Marty stopped midsentence and glanced at her curiously. His eyes were bright, alive, the bluest she had ever seen them. He seemed ten years younger than he had an hour ago back on the Oannes.

“What time’s the flight tomorrow morning?” she asked him.

“Seven o’clock,” Jacky said.

“I’ll book my ticket now,” said Marty, and began tapping on his phone.

“You don’t think the skull is real, do you?” Jacky said to Rad.

“Real? Yes, I think it’s real. I mean, I don’t have any reason to believe it’s not real. I just…I suppose I don’t know…what to make of it.”

“That’s what I meant. You don’t think it’s a mermaid skull?”

Rad considered her response. “I believe I have a pretty open mind. I’ve traveled all over Asia for my TV show, often to remote locations. I’ve seen the entire spectrum of primates, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and fish up close and personal. I know—better than most—how diverse and wonderful and weird life on this planet is. And I’m not naïve enough to believe we’ve seen all that Mother Nature has to offer. I know there’s so much out there yet to be discovered—especially in the unexplored depths of the oceans.”

Marty looked up from his phone to listen to her.

Rad continued, “Look, I’m not trying to be profound or anything. I’m just saying that…well, I should be open to the existence of mermaids. I want to be. I want to be as excited as both of you obviously are about the skull. But I’m just…not. How about I leave it at that?”

“I think it’s a perfectly reasonable answer,” Jacky said.

“You’re safely on the side of ninety-five percent of the scientific community,” Marty said.

“That’s sort of what I mean,” Rad went on. “You would think if mermaids existed, they would be known to science by now.”

Jacky said, “Like you mentioned, the world’s a big, unexplored place, especially the oceans.”

Marty said, “Not to mention, we have identified them. They’ve been referenced ever since ancient Mesopotamia and classical Greece, from almost every corner of the world. Once you start keeping track, it’s astounding how ubiquitous merfolk sightings have been throughout the ages. There’ve been dozens of eyewitness accounts of merfolk by local Sri Lankan fishermen in the last twenty years alone. It’s why I began my search here.”