“You want to know what it says, Luce? You want to know what—whoever this is—this human who’s writing you notes wants to tell you?” The bitterness in Dana’s voice was terrible. Her sobs were tinged with outraged laughter. “Just that he’s going to keep putting drawings of you in the sea unless you talk to him. That you’d better show up if you don’t want your friends to find out what you did. He doesn’t say what that was, but I can guess. Which ship was it, Luce? Where you just decided that the timahk didn’t apply to you anymore?”

Luce choked. There was no way out of this. Dana had the proof right there in her hand. “The one right after Miriam died.”

“Oh, now you admit it! What, was he incredibly hot or something? This is from a guy, right?” Dana’s tone was shifting again, taut with sadness. “You seriously think you’re the only mermaid who wishes she could have a boyfriend?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Luce objected. She was half whispering. One thing Luce knew for certain. She definitely couldn’t tell Dana her real reasons for saving the boy: that he’d had the same dark shimmering around him the mermaids did and that he was the first human who had ever resisted her enchantment. That he was the only one who’d ever been brave enough to sing back to her. All that would just sound like a bunch of lame excuses, and it would only make Dana angrier. “It is a guy, but I wasn’t—it wasn’t like I was planning to ever see him again, Dana.”

Dana stared at her. “You don’t know how lucky you are that I’m the one who found this. Anybody else would have shown it to Anais. Then she’d have a great reason to kill you. Everyone would agree that you were asking for it.”

Luce nodded, slowly. “I know.”

“But I’m going to give you another chance.” Dana shook her head in disbelief, but at least she wasn’t sobbing anymore. “God, Luce, I trusted you! I really thought you were something special—like everything would get better if you were queen. And now, I mean, I just can’t understand. How could you? How could you risk all our lives—not only of our tribe, even, but of all the mermaids everywhere? After all the horrible things the humans did to us, too? Just because you liked some guy?”