There was only one explanation for his absence that seemed at all likely to her. It must be that he enjoyed playing with her emotions. Maybe this was his way of getting revenge. And to make matters worse Dana was going to show up sometime, and Luce would have to show her Dorian’s jacket and rattle off a whole series of lies straight in her old friend’s face. Luce had never felt so stupid before, so demeaned. Obviously Dana had been right. Obviously Dorian was treacherous and cold-hearted, and the smart thing would have been to drown him without caring at all. Luce couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in such a foul mood. The day seemed mockingly bright and beautiful, with an azure sky and satiny breezes, with water that thrummed to the distant, booming calls of whales, their pitch so deep that it made her scales vibrate.

She hadn’t been working enough on her singing, Luce decided. She’d let herself get distracted by some human boy instead. She couldn’t do anything about Dorian or about the fact that she’d acted like an idiot. But she could at least develop the one power that was absolutely hers.

She swam out into deeper waters. Even when she had practiced singing recently, Luce thought with disgust, she’d just been playing pretty little games, sculpting blobs of water in midair, making tiny pirouetting fountains and arches. Clearly it was time to get back to using the full force of her voice. Time to remind the waves who their queen really was . . .

The waves were rough and high, the currents so strong that she had to flick and dance her way between them, slicing back with her tail each time the water grasped at her. Did the sea really think it could push her around like that? Luce dove down and gathered her voice into a long, driving note, slamming it right back into the face of one especially fierce current. Her voice fused with the water. It became a creature of living sound. Luce held the current where it was for a moment, then her unwavering pitch pulsed higher, shoving the immense pressure of the flow back on itself. She blasted the note until it was almost a scream, and for an instant the water in front of her surged in crisscrossing directions. Just above her head Luce saw the surface of the sea starting to bulge in a glassy dome, a swelling tumor of sound. A few porpoises approached, stared at Luce and the misshapen water forced up by her high, pounding outcry, and then rushed off in fright. Luce didn’t care. The swell made by the two battling currents rose higher, and Luce was lifted inside it. For a few moments she hovered in tremulous space, gazing down through water like a huge curving window onto an unsettled sea.