“Oh, thank God! I couldn’t tell where I was, and I thought maybe I’d gone way past your cave.” As Dana spoke she still scanned the sea anxiously, though there was nothing to see but the pearly gray blindness of the mist. “I got too scared to keep going. You remember Regan?” Luce had hardly ever talked to Regan, but she nodded. “An orca almost got her, Luce. A few of us were just swimming over to get dinner yesterday, and we weren’t paying attention. It came up so fast, and she actually managed to leap sideways right before its teeth snapped closed, but her fin got torn. They’re really . . . Kayley says there aren’t as many seals as there used to be, so the orcas are getting really hungry. They keep acting crazier all the time.” Dana was so agitated that Luce didn’t have any time to react to this. “And Samantha sure can’t keep her mouth shut, but I don’t know what to believe. But you did something to Anais, right? She was being a total screaming bitch last night. She didn’t seem to care about Regan at all, and the rest of us were freaking out, we were so worried.”

Luce had been so ready to start reciting her story—slamming up into Dorian’s rowboat, dragging him under—that she was almost disappointed to find that Dana didn’t seem interested anymore. “I ran into Anais and Samantha yesterday.”

Dana flashed her a skeptical look. “You ran into them?”

“No, really. It was really by accident, Dana! I wasn’t trying to start anything with them. It just—things got weird really quickly.”

“Okay. They would get weird. You’re going to tell me everything, right?”

It wasn’t the story Luce had expected to tell, but maybe it was better this way. “Let’s go to the beach first, okay? I haven’t had anything to eat yet.”

∗ ∗ ∗

Sprawling next to Dana on a beach, cracking oysters and talking while their tails swished side by side along the seafloor, felt almost like being back in her old tribe. Much as she felt drawn to Dorian, powerfully as she wanted to feel his hands on her face again, Luce realized that his company was never going to stop her from missing being with other mermaids, too.

Dana listened wide-eyed while Luce described her encounter with Anais, stopping her every few moments to ask questions. When Luce got to the part about Anais torturing the larva, Dana gasped and put her hands over her eyes for a moment.

“She held its tail out? Luce, really?”

Luce was relieved. It wasn’t just that Dana had chosen to ignore what Anais was doing, then.