“You know they made us read a poem in class today?” The question was oddly bland, everyday-ish, but that only made the poisonous grief in his voice seem worse. Did he really not know that she was just below, listening to him with a sharp ache tearing through her heart? “It was a poem about you, or anyway about mermaids, and I completely lost it. They make it sound like hearing the mermaids sing is this beautiful, incredible experience, when really, even if you live . . . You know your song is stuck in me? I’d be better off dead than hearing something like that all the time, and there is nothing that will ever make it go away. And your face . . . Maybe the most evil thing about you isn’t even that you kill people. It’s what you do to the ones who survive.”

But it’s the same for me! Luce wanted to tell him. You’re stuck in me, too, and you’re not even magic. You’re just totally, boringly human. And wasn’t that even worse, in a way?

Luce really understood, for the first time, why the timahk had that rule, that insistence that no human who heard the mermaids sing could ever be allowed to live.

It was so much easier to forget them if they died.

The moon floated up over the horizon. It hung just above a distant island, immense and sullenly, gloriously golden. Its light reflected off the water so brilliantly that Luce seemed to be surrounded by an armada of burning paper boats.

She leaned away from the rocks, pushing back with slow swirls of her tail. She didn’t know when she’d started crying. She closed her eyes and slid up the curl of a wave on her back. Darkness swayed in her head, and everything was cold apart from the hot stripes of her tears.

“Oh my God! Wait!” It was the bronze-haired boy yelling down at her. He was leaning recklessly far out now, his slim body curved like the sail of a ship. Only the hand still clutching the spruce trunk kept him from tumbling down the slanted cliff. Luce gazed straight up at him in shock, wanting to scream at him to be more careful, but her voice knotted in her throat. How could she say anything to someone who felt such perfect loathing for her?

It had been so thoughtless of her to show herself, stretching out on the water like that. She should dive deep under the waves, vanish and never come back. But his eyes fixed on hers pinned her where she was. She hadn’t really expected she’d ever see that face again, those ochre-gold eyes set far apart, that bronze hair, longer than it was last time, flicking wildly in the wind.

“Look. I need to talk to you, okay? You owe me!”