Then the bulge erupted. Luce went flying up on an explosive jet of foam, surrounded by airborne waves that curved like wings. She twisted in space at least thirty feet above the surface, screaming now from pure exultation, and crashed back down so hard that it knocked all the air out of her. She fell through waves where the bubbles frothed in such dense clouds that all she could see was moving streams of whiteness, letting her tail spin. Her body rolled with no sense of direction. When Luce finally surfaced again her side stung from the impact, but she was laughing too hard to sing.

She’d raised the water before, used her voice to lift curling waves or straight towers of water. But she’d never controlled such a huge volume of water as that, never made the sea leap so high. If only Catarina could have seen it, or Dorian—

Ugh. Why did she have to spoil the exhilaration she felt by thinking of him now? Luce circled wildly in the murky sea until her body lashed the waves into a ring of froth. Vaguely she noticed the island where Dorian’s cruise ship had crashed looming up on her left. Normally the sight of it would have depressed her. Normally she would have worried about slipping into her old tribe’s territory, too. But today she didn’t care about any of that.

She was gasping from swimming so crazily. Luce made herself calm down enough to drift along the surface, pulling in deep inhalations. Seabirds with bright red feet spiraled in the air above her, as free in their breathing medium as she was in her fluid one. Luce wanted to try mastering that much water again, maybe raise it in a single high wall this time, but she couldn’t do that unless she had enough breath to sing with her strongest voice.

She really was getting too close to the old cave, though. She’d thought those were seals popping up for air fifty feet away from her, but now she realized that one had a mushy baby’s face and stick-up tufts of hair. There were a few larval mermaids mixed in with the seals, then, and larvae didn’t usually swim out this far unless they were tagging along after the older girls. Maybe she should slip back down the coast a bit.

“Samantha? You see that? Is that like a rotting porpoise or something?” The voice was chirpy and cold; it would have sounded completely emotionless if it weren’t just a bit too shrill. “I’d say we should drag it out of our territory. Except then we’d have to touch it.”