Luce looked up, uncomfortable at the sudden change of subject. She almost wondered if Nausicaa was playing with her somehow. “He . . . didn’t actually show up,” Luce admitted, and then tried to cover her embarrassment. “I guess something must have happened so that he couldn’t get away.”

Of course it was ridiculous to try to bluff Nausicaa this way; Luce felt twice as embarrassed as she realized that. Luce watched a quick glimmer of irony pass over Nausicaa’s face before it blinked out again.

“Unfortunate,” Nausicaa observed dryly after a moment. “I’ve been learning so much from the books and from everything he tells you. I would like to see more of what he discovers about the damage humans have done to our oceans . . .”

Luce was still upset by the story about Kumiko and also irritated with Nausicaa for telling it so calmly. “If you’d talk to him yourself, I guess you could ask him to bring you more stuff about the ocean.”

“I thought you preferred to see him alone.” Nausicaa wasn’t bothering to keep the sarcasm out of her voice anymore. “But of course I can speak to him directly if you like.”

Luce jumped a little from sheer surprise. Nausicaa had talked to Dorian once before, though just long enough to insult him, on the day of the gray whales’ migration. But Luce assumed that Nausicaa had been making an exception, doing something she actually considered wrong. “But don’t you care about . . .”

“About timahk, as you call it?” Nausicaa’s sarcasm was gone; she was staring out at the waves rising to meet the seething snow, and there was something wistful in her gaze. “You know I do, Luce.”

“But then . . .”

“You have not seen what I’ve seen. The humans are multiplying wildly. What I thought were terrible crowds of them five hundred years ago, or even fifty . . . that can’t be compared to their numbers now. They are choking the shores, and there are ever fewer places where we can live hidden from them.”

Luce didn’t understand what humans multiplying had to do with talking to Dorian, but she couldn’t help seeing the awful sadness welling in Nausicaa’s eyes. Impulsively Luce took Nausicaa’s dark olive-bronze hand in her own. “Nausicaa . . .”

“And as there are more humans there are also more of us, of course: their cast-off daughters. There are many more mermaid tribes, and larger ones, most full of mermaids too new and too bitterly angry to have any wisdom. Humans’ numbers grow and so do ours, but the world remains the same small tumbling stone.”

Suddenly Luce thought she knew what Nausicaa was getting at. “You’re saying—we might have to talk to them? If the world gets so crowded that humans and mermaids can’t help running into each other?”