As Luce drew near the cave that had once been her home the water changed. It felt subtly unclean, sticky, and it licked her with a faint, sweet, metallic stench. It was disgusting. Had Anais dragged back so much garbage that it had actually begun fouling the sea? The water looked murkier, too, with a brownish tint, and it only seemed to get worse as Luce slipped into the deep underwater tunnel that led to the cave. Now the water didn’t just stink. It tasted vile, too, with a slick tang, a raw-meat flavor as if a seal had just been torn apart. It was so revolting that Luce could hardly make herself keep going. How could the other mermaids stand it?

Hadn’t she once tasted something like this before? Luce fought down the hideous memory, water stained and sticky as orcas leaped, as a tiny hand floated by . . .

Maybe the tribe had deserted this cave, though. It was oddly silent as Luce reached the spot where the rocky walls widened. The pollution was getting thicker, too: the water was actually red.

Luce gasped with the first shock of understanding, then gagged as the blood-drenched water flooded her mouth. She broke the surface sputtering, spitting, trying to get that taste out . . .

It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t.

A milky leg floated right in front of her, toes wrinkled and grayish pink. It was bobbing by itself in the filthy water, and Luce saw the ragged flesh where it had separated from its body, pale bone protruding like a snapped-off branch. Luce spun, trying somehow not to see—

That open neck, blood still burbling slowly up through dark tubes. A pink, gleaming bubble swelled at the top of one tube, filled by the air still rising from a dead girl’s lungs. Luce twisted again.

Rivulets of crimson dripped down the rocks. A chest wound gaped wide between flat, childish breasts; Luce thought she saw the heart . . . There, a pile of intestines hung from a pale brown stomach . . . Inches away two blue eyes stared into nothingness, but the face below them was missing . . .

There were no tails anywhere, though. For half an instant Luce persuaded herself that no mermaids had died, that Anais had ripped apart a group of humans. Luce was still telling herself that when she turned and jumped wildly back as she saw Rachel’s weak, babyish face. It was split open down the middle, fragments of her skull sticking to her cheeks, and her blond hair was clotted with blood. That elegant brown foot belonged to Jenna; those pale curls led to Samantha’s severed head . . .

No, Luce thought. It couldn’t be true. The mermaids could defend themselves. If anyone attacked them they would sing. Their enemies would all drown . . .

Get out of here, Luce told herself. Get out get out get out. She couldn’t move, couldn’t scream.

They’ll come back! Lucette, go!