There was an unevenglop. I sat up, wincing as every muscle tightened.
Ripples spread across the water beside us. Something—or someone—had just been here. That must have been what woke me.
Rubbing my neck, I looked down at Lysi. She slept quietly, face relaxed.
I dipped my hand in the water and felt movement on the current. I concentrated harder, closing my eyes. An aura tickled beneath my skin. It was a mermaid. She was swimming away.
After congratulating myself for being able to identify her, I frowned. What was she doing way out here? Why was she alone?
She moved quickly. Without pausing to consider, I slid into the inky depths before I could lose track of her. Maybe she was a Reina. Maybe she could help us find Kori Maru.
As soon as I hit the water, the mermaid sped up. I put on a burst of speed, throwing caution aside.
“Wait!”
She didn’t slow down.
“I just want to know if you can help me!”
It took every effort to keep up. My body protested with each beat of my tail.
I chased her for at least a couple of minutes before she gave up and stopped.
I caught up to find a small blonde with a northern appearance like Lysi and me. She wasn’t a Reina. The iron scars across her body led me to believe she’d endured many of Adaro’s battles against humans.
She held out a spear with a stone tip, stopping me from coming closer. She was in demon mode, ready for a fight.
I raised my palms in a gesture of surrender. “Do you know where I can find Kori Maru?”
The mermaid backed off more. I wondered if asking for directions to a shipwreck was a strange thing for a mermaid to do.
“Half-tide that way.”
She pointed northwards, a little further west than we’d been heading, and made to leave again.
“Wait.”Half-tide?What did that mean? I knew tides worked in day-long cycles, but then there were high tides and low tides—so did a half-tide mean twelve hours, or six? Why hadn’t I asked Lysi about this?
The mermaid stared like I was something foreign. Which, to be fair, I kind of was.
But I couldn’t let her leave yet. This was the first non-threatening mermaid we’d come across. Given that she had a spear pointed at my face, that was saying something about the last few days.
Several questions occurred to me at once. Desperate to keep her from leaving, I blurted the first thing that came to mind. “Where did you come from?”
The mermaid narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“We’ve been travelling and haven’t heard any news about the war.”
Her face hardened. “Find someone else to ask about that.”
“Please.” I moved closer. She kept me at the end of her spear. “You were looking for a place to sleep, right?”
She didn’t answer.
“You can share the raft with us, if you could just answer my questions.”
We hovered for a moment in the blackness. I hoped I came across as honest and not completely desperate.
“I’m coming from Japan,” she said eventually.
