Luce woke to another clear morning. She still felt hopelessly weak and drained, but her tail flipped at the thought of getting back to Dorian. Something thwacked on a rock near her head, and Luce opened her eyes to see Sedna offering her a mussel. Luce noticed that three fingers were partly missing on the hand reaching toward her; they looked hacked-off, the stumps oddly angled, though they had clearly healed long ago. Luce and Sedna were alone together, and Luce wondered hazily where the other girls had gone.

“Hey, Luce. How are you feeling?”

“Awful.” Luce smiled at her and sat up, taking the food. She was so hungry that it felt like a kind of illness. “Thank you, Sedna.” They watched each other for a minute: a little warily, but Luce knew they were already friends. “You said you know Nausicaa?” Sudden hope rose in Luce. “How about Violet and Dana?”

“Violet and Dana? I don’t think I’ve heard of them, no.” Luce stifled her disappointment as Sedna went on talking. What had happened to the two fleeing mermaids? “But I’ve known Nausicaa for a long time. Like maybe every ten or twenty years she comes through my territory, and she usually stays awhile . . .”

Luce had assumed that Sedna was a fairly new mermaid, but clearly that wasn’t true. “You’ve been in the water that long?” Luce was still a little wobbly. It took an effort to stay focused.

“Well, not like Nausicaa long.” Sedna smiled. “But born-1852 long? Kidnapped-by-sadistic-fur-trappers long? Yeah. And I’ve been queen south of here for at least sixty years.”

It was funny, then, that Sedna’s way of talking was so modern. Probably it was something she did on purpose; maybe she thought it was important to stay up to date. Sedna watched her, black eyes deep and alert, black hair glossy in the fresh sunlight. Her skin was a lush, glowing gold, almost the color of a dawn sky.

“I said, ‘south of here.’ On the far side of the Aleutians, like pretty near Canada even. Most of the tribe is still there now.”

Luce was confused. “Okay.”

“Don’t you want to know why we’re so far out of our territory?”

Luce ran a hand over her face. “I already know. You’re chasing Anais. Maybe the rest of my old tribe, too . . .” It was coming back to her. “They must have run into you after they migrated down the coast? You said Anais murdered Jessie’s sister.”

“That doesn’t surprise you? Fiona was just a larva, but she and Jessie changed together, and we’d kept Fiona safe for years. You can believe a mermaid—even a sika—would do something so outrageous? It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from humans, and not even all of them . . .”