“You know I’m not going to stop bugging you, Luce. About the whole queen thing. Now, you just know you want to take that screwy blond bitch down! Admit it!”

Luce burst out laughing. Then she realized with a hard jolt of sorrow that it was the first time she’d laughed in three months.

∗ ∗ ∗

It was already twilight by the time Dana left, and Luce drifted over to the nearby beach where she usually foraged for dinner. Tall rock formations protruded from the water there, sheltering her from view in case any boats came by. They were at that juncture in the early Alaskan autumn when the night began to swing as if it were on hinges, closing steadily in on the daylight. By December the days would be no more than a dim grayish haze seeping through as the door of night was briefly knocked ajar. It was the first time Luce had really wondered what it would be like to spend a deep northern winter out in the sea. She’d only been a mermaid since April, after all, but she had a vague recollection of Kayley saying that in years when the ice got bad the tribe would be forced to migrate south for a while, out past the Alaskan Peninsula, slipping through the Aleutian Islands. She could just make out the Aleutians from here, a dark uneven band wrapping the southern horizon. Maybe she should just leave now and look for Catarina.

She knew she wouldn’t, though. As she leaned between two boulders and cracked oysters for dinner, Luce admitted to herself that there was still something holding her here. Not that she had any reason to believe that the boy with the bronze-blond hair would have stayed in the area. It was highly unlikely, in fact. Assuming his parents had been with him on the cruise ship Luce’s tribe had sunk in their furious grief over Miriam, then the boy would now be one of the lost kids, just as Luce herself had been, dumped on whatever grudging relatives could be persuaded to take him in or else passed around from one foster home to the next. He could be anywhere in the country. What were the odds, after all, that he’d have family on this desolate stretch of the Alaskan coast? She should picture him living in Montana or New York or Georgia: anywhere but here. That was simply logical.

But she couldn’t shake the sense that he was still somewhere nearby. Wishful thinking, Luce knew. The kind of lonely delusion that would send her out of her mind if she let it. She wasn’t sure which was stupider: imagining that someday she’d see the boy she’d saved again, or wanting to see him. He must hate her utterly, and it would be a violation of the timahk, the mermaids’ code of honor, for Luce to speak to a human at all.