“I can read Nilus’ mood so much more easily than yours.”
“Nilus is your family.”
“But you and I are …” Heat crept into my face. “I thought there would be a special connection between us.”
“Life is not that poetic.”
I rolled over, studying the sky, searching for constellations that wouldn’t appear. I hated this lack of nightfall and wondered how anyone got a proper sleep all summer around here. I was both exhausted and wide awake.
“You’ll be able to pick up everything more easily in time, Mee. You can’t expect to be an expert at this right away. It’s all a practiced skill.”
“I guess.”
Lysi shuffled around a bit. Her face appeared in front of mine. “What do you say we practice some other skills?”
I laughed. “Smooth.”
I pulled her towards me.
We slept for three hours at most before continuing northwards, swimming between a steadily rising floor and thickening ceiling of ice. Our meals consisted of whatever clams and shrimp we found along the bottom.
When the depth grew so shallow I could see both surface and floor, Lysi stopped. Nerves twisted my gut. The army would be close, now.
“We need to climb, don’t we?” I said.
The ice had grown thick enough to support us, though it was broken and necessitated careful navigation.
Lysi reached for my hand. Without another word, we found a crack and hoisted ourselves out.
The above world was flat and empty. Beneath the moaning wind were gentle creaks of broken ice and waves glopping below.
We pulled ourselves across, balancing on the unsteady floes.
Feeling like I was navigating a minefield, I prayed that all the natural movement and groaning ice worked in our favour. Maybe our relatively small bodies wouldn’t be noticed from below.
“Let’s decide now what we’re going to tell Medusa,” said Lysi with the air of someone playing a game of distraction.
“Sure,” I said casually, as though I hadn’t been obsessing over this since we left.
“I’ll tell her how Adaro’s closing in on the Atlantic,” she said. “The locations of all his armies.”
“Make sure you tell her everything you can remember about your time serving. Attack plans, strategies. Plus we can relay everything Kori Maru had on that stone table. We know exactly where he’s been and when. That’s a lot of valuable information.”
“But it’s like Dione said, isn’t it? We know where he’s been, but not where he’ll go.”
“But we still know more about Adaro’s strategies than most. We would be like the queen’s spies.”
Lysi didn’t share my enthusiasm. “We need more than that if we want her to ally with us.”
“Can’t we ask for her help in exchange for this information?”
“Mee, the Atlantic Queen is not going to strike a deal with two mermaids from the Pacific, even if we do have information about Adaro’s movements. She owes us nothing, and she definitely won’t send her armies to battle based on that.”
When she put it like that, my optimistic little fantasy sounded stupid.
I sighed. “Fair point.”
We were quiet for a few minutes while we pulled ourselves along. The waves rose and fell, sending long ripples beneath the broken sheets of ice.
