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.

“Dorian. Lindy said you might be here, so I thought I’d see if I could catch you.”

Dorian had already recognized the voice before he turned to look. It was Ben Ellison. Dorian hadn’t heard from him for a few weeks. Seeing that broad brown face in the blue dimness provoked a mixture of feelings in Dorian: anxiety that he couldn’t get to Luce right away but also a strange sense of comfort. He couldn’t tell Ellison about the mermaids, of course. But unlike everyone else Dorian knew, Ellison would believe him if he did tell the truth. He felt sure of that, and it almost made him think of Ellison as a kind of fellow conspirator. This was someone who understood about secrets. “Hey.”