When Luce woke up the next day she stretched and rolled where she was, acutely aware of the subtle wavering of the water against her scales. The sensation of Dorian’s cheek pressed to hers lingered on in her skin. She felt imprinted by his warmth, and the softness of his touch still breathed through her hair. Luce had been too shy and withdrawn as a human girl to talk to boys at all, much less kiss them. She was still in shock from the sweetness of it all. The timahk, she decided, must simply be wrong. There was no good reason, not really, why she shouldn’t have a boyfriend onshore, at least as long as she could persuade him to keep the existence of mermaids a secret. She remembered how passionately Catarina had warned her against falling for a human, but then Catarina hated humans so much, and so indiscriminately, that it simply made her unreasonable. A lot of humans might be evil and destructive, Luce knew. But there were others, like Dorian, who were warm and brave and open-hearted and who understood how infinite the world really was.

She slipped out to look for breakfast and found the sea blanketed in a dense, sullen fog. Every time she came above water it was as if she were enclosed in a soft gray egg, and even her outstretched hands vanished from sight. Only the rattling of a high wind in the spruce trees told her the direction of the shore. Winter was coming fast. It was going to get colder very quickly now, and there would be ferocious storms. She should look for a better spot where she and Dorian could meet; even if he was exceptionally brave, Luce thought, he was still fragile like all humans, terribly vulnerable to the cold.

Luce swam underwater so that she could see the way to her dining beach; that was the only way she could make out the shape of the coast and spot the familiar rocks going by. When she came up she heard a windy half-song. It wasn’t wind, she knew at once, but another mermaid disguising her voice with the airy call they used to beckon each other when they were afraid of being overheard by humans. The fog was so thick and pillowing that it muffled the sound, and Luce dipped again to try and find the source of it. Whoever it was sounded nervous, she thought, and then the voice began to seem a bit familiar. By the time she caught sight of a distant, coppery flash, Luce had already recognized it: Dana, resting on a sandbar not far from shore. She’d finally come to demand an accounting, then. Luce hurried over to her, rehearsing lies as she swam, and came up ready to pour out the story of how she’d murdered Dorian.