“Maybe.” Luce was suddenly close to tears herself. It almost felt like Dorian was really dead. “I don’t completely know why I did it, but . . . that was probably the reason.” She still didn’t want to talk about Dorian singing her song, not to anyone. It seemed too personal. Dana looked down.

“I mean . . . did you really like him, Luce? Like, seriously?”

“Yes.” Was it wrong to admit that?

“Then do you hate me for making you do that? You . . . you know I had to, right? If we let him live . . .”

“I don’t hate you,” Luce insisted. Dana was crying harder now. She buried her face in her arms. “Dana, you were right! I don’t hate you at all.” Luce could barely keep going. It was monstrous to lie to her sobbing friend this way. “You forced me to do the right thing, Dana, okay? Please don’t blame yourself for that!”

Dana looked up, her eyes blurred by tears, and pulled Luce into a long hug.

∗ ∗ ∗

Luce came back from accompanying Dana almost as far as the tribe’s cave that afternoon. The fog had pulled back, and a sluggish, clammy rain had started falling; the fresh water felt slick and repugnant wherever it touched her skin, and Luce realized, a human wouldn’t like it any more than she did. Dana’s nervousness had gotten to her, and Luce hugged the coast much more closely than usual. More than once when she surfaced, dim scythelike shapes were faintly visible through the silvery strands of rain: almost certainly the dorsal fins of orcas. Luce began to wonder if they were shadowing her, just waiting for her to drift a bit farther out. She hadn’t bothered exploring the coast much recently, and there were bends and shelves of splitting stratified rock that she’d forgotten. At one point she noticed a shallow cave, not much more than a deep dent in the cliff with a peaked overhang of rock reaching into space above it. It was squeezed between low points of rock capped by wind-thrashed spruce. Erosion had ripped the ground partly away from beneath the spruce trees, and a snarl of bare roots protruded overhead, clawing at the empty air. A fallen tree spanned the shallow water, its bark worn away and its stripped branches as pale and smooth as a skeleton.

Luce kept thinking of Dana. Mermaids never talked about their human lives, so Luce had been surprised that afternoon to hear her murmuring, between her sobs, about her early childhood. Dana and Jenna had still lived with their mother then, and Dana had told how their mother had sewn matching purple velvet dresses for their sixth birthday, how she’d sung them songs in a language Dana didn’t know so that the words seemed to melt into the music. Luce had listened in silence, stroking Dana’s hair, until she’d finally calmed down.