I stopped.
Yep, you’re dying, I thought.Now you’re hallucinating unicorns.
“What’s wrong?” said Lysi.
I squinted ahead, not wanting to voice what was happening in my brain.
“Oh, that’s nothing to be scared of,” she said. “They’re narwhals.”
I looked at her sharply. “So they’re real?”
She cracked a smile. “Yes.”
“And they’re breaching?”
“Told you we’d make it.”
She’d barely finished the sentence when I took off, clambering towards my unicorn saviours with every last bit of energy.
“Mee, wait!”
I ignored her. My skin seared. I needed to get back into the water.
“Meela!”
Whatever she had to say could wait. She had just told me narwhals were nothing to be afraid of.
Below, the dark shape of the seal was still racing towards the hole.
The narwhals must have felt me coming because they submerged. All of the horns disappeared so abruptly that I wondered if Lysi and I had shared the same hallucination.
I was a few lengths from the hole when fingers clamped around my tail. I shrieked in surprise—and a bit of pain—and rounded on Lysi.
The pressure built in my eyes as they filled with blood. “What’s the matter with—?”
The ice vibrated. I whirled. Something heavy, four-legged, bounded towards us.
A puff of air sounded as the seal poked its nose up.
In a blink, a polar bear pounced on the hole and its head disappeared beneath the ice.
Red bloomed across the surface. The bear withdrew its head, jaws clamped around the seal’s neck. It lifted the limp seal from the water and dragged it across the ice, leaving a streak of blood across the snow. The red was blinding against the stark white surface.
Lysi grabbed my jaw and turned me to face her. Her eyes were red, her teeth bared. “You need to wait, Meela! How many times do I have to tell you to use your brain before you do something stupid?”
I pulled away. “Would you stop smothering me? It’s not like it would’ve killed me. Only iron can—”
“You can still be killed by a predator!”
I opened and closed my mouth.Oh.
“Fine,” I said stubbornly. “But I still wish you’d back off a little.”
“Don’t listen to me, then. It’s not like I know what it’s like to be a mermaid.”
The polar bear continued to back up, dragging the seal away from the hole. Behind it, two cubs gambolled out from a snowy mound. They were new, no bigger than raccoons and clumsy on their paws.
My anger melted.
