Jessie shot Luce a look; Luce couldn’t tell if it was meant to be defiant or apologetic. Then Jessie gazed down sadly at the water’s surface. Anyone would have thought that she was thinking of something completely different, but Luce could feel the crushing expectation of the mermaids around her. Nails dug into Luce’s arm, and girls pulled in shivering breaths. Jessie’s soft pink lips opened, and the air began to melt like butter. It dripped with sounds too beautiful for any human mind to bear, and Luce glanced back to see her father staggering to his feet. His gaze was veiled, milky, already drowning in impossible dreams. She had only moments.

No choice, Luce thought vaguely. No other way. Her own emotions were rising in Jessie’s voice, higher and fiercer by the moment, and even before Luce had quite realized what she was doing those feelings had transformed themselves into a song of stabbing brilliance, so sharp and piercing that the sun’s glare seemed to dull by comparison. The sea swelled in Luce’s cry. Everything around Luce slowed into a kind of drowning light, but the light was made of pure music, and that music was an unceasing, magnificent scream. The strange mermaids had half a second to gape at her with a mixture of terror and admiration. Then waves like giant hands caught them by their wrists, their tails, wrenching them away from her; fins tumbled, flashing sunset at every turn, and plunged from strange heights. The water seemed to obey her will even before she was consciously aware of what she wanted. Luce felt herself in the sound that cut off Jessie’s singing as a tendril of water wrapped around her neck and silenced her; she felt herself, her music, fused into rolling waters forty feet high that threw mermaid bodies apart.

There was another shriek as the Inuit queen crashed down just in front of Luce. Luce allowed herself one quick glance backwards to make sure her father was still on the raft; his limp body lay face-down on the planks. Then she was hurling toward the island again, fading music curling in her chest and tears she couldn’t control dissolving in the rushing sea. There was no way to guess what that assaulting music had done to her father’s mind and no time to stop and check on him. But she was in so much pain. Her movements were sloppy and unhinged, and already that strange tribe was after her again.

“Wait!” Luce heard someone shouting behind her. The cry shivered and refracted through the water, pounding at her head from all sides, and Luce drove herself on. “Wait up! Queen Luce! We didn’t know it was you!”