A bright cone shape stabbed down through the green-shining waves just ahead of Luce. She couldn’t make sense of it at first, but then she realized what it was: a whirlpool made of merged voice and water propelled by the song endlessly tearing from her throat.

Anais was caught in it, flung around in desperate circles, her hands grappling empty space as she struggled to escape. The scream was hers. A few silver fishes spun with her, too stunned even to fight.

Luce gasped in astonishment, letting out a final burst of music. Then everything went utterly quiet. Luce couldn’t tell where the music that had filled her had gone, but the sudden silence left a hollow ache in her chest. The whirlpool fell apart, its force scattered in random swirls. Anais splashed a few feet in confusion and then flopped into Samantha’s arms.

Singing that way had wrenched all the air from Luce’s chest. She needed to breathe. As she surfaced, the first thing she saw was Samantha crying wildly, clutching Anais and stroking her golden hair.

“Is she okay?” Luce felt disturbed by the thought that her singing might have injured another mermaid, even if that mermaid was Anais. She should at least help Samantha pull Anais back to their cave.

“Just get away!” Samantha gagged the words through her sobs. “Luce, just get away from us! No one here wants you! Go back to whatever hole . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Samantha! You know I had to do that. She was torturing that larva; I had to make her stop.” Somehow Luce hoped the other mermaid would see reason. Even Samantha knew that the timahk protected larvae, after all. She knew how wrong it was to hurt them.

“Anais is our queen, Luce!” Samantha yelled it in hysterics. Anais looked like she’d fainted, but Luce wouldn’t have been surprised to find she was faking it. “She can do whatever she wants! What do you even know about anything we do? We got rid of you and Catarina, and now—”

“Now you just torture larvae for fun?” Luce snarled the words, but even so she expected Samantha to get defensive, to say that Anais had just been freaking out, and nothing like that had ever happened before.

“No one cares about larvae! Luce, no one cares!”

Luce opened her mouth to protest, but then Samantha yelled something that shocked her into silence. “Anais has killed like four of them!”

∗ ∗ ∗

Luce watched in numb silence as Samantha swam off, towing Anais in one arm. The queen’s golden head rested on Samantha’s shoulder. It reminded Luce of another time, when she’d pulled Catarina along the surface, away from the frenzied tribe.