Lena dropped me off at the aquarium at two in the afternoon the next day. It was downtown—about a twenty minute drive from Wrightsville at best, and luckily she and Tess were planning on hitting up the boutiques and cafes anyway. 

The aquarium where Max worked wasn't the national aquarium, but was a smaller one funded as a side-project of some elite billionaire whose company worked on submarine technology, I guess as some kind of hobby. It still had a lot of fish and some penguins, and there was also a cafe on the first floor, which was enough to satisfy most who walked through its doors. 

Max was waiting for me in said cafe, his shirt turned inside-out since he was on his break. He wasn't scribbling in his journal this time, he was alert, knees bouncing and hazel eyes burning as he locked eyes with me. I put on my best smile and tried to forget the weirdness of last night as I slid into the seat across from him.

"Hey, stranger," I said. "You wanted me to meet you here?"

"Yeah." He paused, the intensity faltered. "I'm sorry, I was a big jerk last night, I don't know what got into me."

He paused and looked out the large glass window that oversaw the busy street outside. "Did you know that guy, last night?"

"No, I don't think so." I shifted uncomfortably. I didn't want him to be weird again, or to remember how a fun evening had been so quickly ruined. "What did you want to ask me about?"

"Oh, right, that." He opened his notebook and pulled out his phone. "I just wanted to do a brief interview, check in about what's been going on with the mermaids."

I couldn't help it, I glanced around at the other patrons in the aquarium cafe. They were too focused on conversations or reading on their phones, but I still didn't like it.

"Do we have to do this in public?" I dropped my voice low. 

Max shrugged as he glanced over the open pages of his notebook. "It's my break, it's what I've got, Mika."

"But couldn't we do this when you're off your shift or at home or—" I stopped, the look he was shooting me was cutting. "Never mind."

I glanced at the phone. "Is the recording really necessary?"

"It's just to fill in the gaps when I'm going over this later, since transcription in the moment is difficult." He waved around his pen for emphasis. "Don't worry, I'll delete it later."

"Okay." I scooted forward in my chair. 

"Have you been out in the ocean again?" 

"Yeah." I considered saying something about the mermaid transformation, but I decided against it. I didn't have to tell him everything, even if he was my friend. "I met the same group of mermaids again, and I saw one of their villages."

"Their villages?" His eyebrows shot up. "Tell me more."

"It was protected by this magical barrier, like, everything looked like normal ocean right?" I couldn't help but move my hands as I talked. "But then you went through, and it was a village, right in the middle of the ocean."

He nodded. "Tell me more about the architectural styles."

Once I'd exhausted every detail I could recount and Max had to go back to his shift at the aquarium, I texted Lena to pick me up. She and Tess weren't done shopping, though, so I had to tag along for the last few boutiques. 

We went to this cute little place downtown, where there were gorgeous beach dresses, frilly shorts, and light boleros to tie over pastel t-shirts with Taylor Swift lyrics printed on them. It was strange, how my relationship with clothes had changed. I'd gone from not really caring more than what color an item was, to now analyzing it for how it made me feel, if it made my features shine, what it told the world about me.

All of this was second nature to Lena, as all in the world of glitz and glamour was. She denied it, of course, claimed that it was a skill she'd learned like any other. And maybe that was true. But there was something innate, an instinct that could not be learned in the way she hunted through the racks. She was thinking about all that and more—trends, what was in-season, prices, the longevity of it in the fashion cycles. I could hardly fathom it. It felt hard enough to articulate what I actually like on myself and not just on the hanger.

That was why I'd given up before when faced with the clothing aisle, just picked out what I knew felt comfortable and left it at that. 

Now I had opened myself up to a whole new world of fashion, one where I could look like my favorite Barbie doll as a kid, or however I wanted at all. In some ways, it was overwhelming—but more than anything, it was a kind of freedom. 

I observed Tess too, while we shopped. She wasn't quite like Lena—who could measure up to her, anyway? But she had her own way of going about it, with her headphones in and humming an off-key melody as she methodically went through every rack, touching every metal hanger as she gave a quick but thorough overview of each piece. 

I eventually ended up choosing a lavender maxi-dress with a purple starfish pattern enhanced with silver sequins, while Tess bought some shorts and Lena had a whole heap of garments she'd picked up from the clearance section.

"Some of them are for you," she told me as we waited for the poor cashier to ring it all up. "Consider it a little help. And incentive to do the dishes for me for the next month."

"You've got it," I agreed. 

"Anything for me?" Tess teased.

Lena rolled her eyes and grinned. "Of course."

She looked back to the counter, and something sad clouded her dark brown eyes. "I'm going to miss this boutique."

She was talking about the end of the summer, when she'd go to Meredith College in Raleigh to pursue her fashion merchandising degree. Dad had some concerns about it being frivolous or limiting, but having seen Lena in her element—and Legally Blonde at least fifty-six times—I knew it would be a good fit for her. 

That was something the supposedly older and wiser couldn't see about my sister. They dismissed her as vain and flighty and frivolous—she'd toss it all over her shoulder with her hair and claim it didn't bother her. But I could see the fire in her eyes, that it did hurt—but she put everything into seeming bulletproof. And so she was pretty much as good as bulletproof in my eyes. And seeing her consider all her factors told me that she was going to be okay and find her way somehow. 

I placed my hand on her shoulder, a silent reassurance—and for once, she seemed to get it, and smiled. That is, before she rolled her shoulder out from under my grasp.

"Enough of that." She shook herself off and smiled. "Let's hit the beach after this, yeah?"

Kei and two friends were waiting for me at the usual place in the Undersea. One I recognized from my first adventure into the deep blue—Jewel, with the pearls in her hair. My breath hitched when I saw the second one. 

It was the boy from the bonfire on the beach last night, with those same aquamarine eyes. And seeing him underwater, in context, jogged my memory further—he had been the boy who had saved me the night I fell off the Sirena.

I opened my mouth to speak, and he shook his head ever-so-slightly. 

"This is Talu, he works with Jewel as a Treasure Diver for her mom's company." Kei introduced him blithely, with no idea of the secret message passed between us, or that we had in fact met before. "They recover junk and materials from shipwrecks and ruins on the ocean floor."

Talu smiled like he did at the beach bonfire. "It's nice to meet you. It's Mika, right?"

I smiled back, in the way only a those who share an in-joke can. "Yeah."

"Kei told us about what happened with the sea-witches," Jewel said. "Dominique and Lumi are busy with some tasks for their apprenticeships—but Kei insisted on waiting for you, and we thought we'd come along to meet the enigmatic stranger again."

I blushed. "Thanks, I guess."

"Oh, there you are, Pearly." Kei turned to greet a little ivory reptile with fringe on its back and tail like sea-grass, a bright-sea green. It had a pearl embedded into its forehead that glowed—the origin of the nickname, I suppose.

"What's that?" I asked as the creature dropped a piece of driftwood in front of Kei. 

"Oh, Pearly." Kei scratched the back of his neck. "She's a dragonling. I named her when I was still a really little kid, hence the name—"

"A dragonling?" I interrupted. 

"Like, a little dragon," Jewel said. "They've been our pets and companions for thousands of years."

I considered this. "Does that mean that there's big dragons?"

"Once." Talu was so solemn and quiet, I thought maybe I'd heard a little current in the water instead of his voice. "They could shift between the forms of large, majestic dragons, and humanoids not so different from you. But they're gone now."

I frowned. "What do you mean?" 

"It's an old story," Talu said as Kei threw the conch shell back into the blue. The dragonling went zooming after it, leaving a trail of bubbles in its path. 

"Treasure Divers like us know it well." Jewel winked.

Talu ignored her, staring out at the trail of bubbles Pearly the dragonling had left behind. "It was said that the sea-dragons once lived in a palace at the bottom of the ocean, where they crafted pearl-magic and wove spells out of moonlight."

Jewel blinked. "That's actually kind of poetic."

Talu ignored her and continued. "They say that a tragedy befell their civilization, their palace was lost and the survivors scattered, integrating with the mermaids. No pure-blooded dragons remain in the world."

"So it's a sad story," I muttered.

Talu shrugged. "History often is."

Luckily Pearly returned, sparing me the struggle of figuring out what to say to that while sounding as witty and cool and fun as I did at the party. 

"So those aren't like real dragons then?"
Kei patted Pearly on the head. "No, not quite. I don't really know where they come from—but Pearly is my oldest pet. She's still just as lively and playful as the hatchlings born this spring."

"He has a whole menagerie of them." Jewel wrinkled her nose. "Lava-leviathans and sea-turtles and just about everything you can think of."

"Don't be like that, they're my friends you know." Kei spoke light-heartedly—you could tell that they'd had variations on this conversation before. "Besides, they're really useful. Scales detected that one cave-in on that shipwreck you and Talu were working on a while back."

"Scales?"

"The lava leviathan," Talu answered, which gave me nothing really. 

"That's how I met Lumi, actually." Kei's eyes went all soft and glazed over as he stared off after Pearly again. "Pearly's shedding fringe and scales all the time, and those can be useful in potion-making and spell-crafting. I was getting more than I knew what to do with, so my mom suggested I take it down to the sea-witch village. Naturally, I did, and the first mermaid I saw, right through the window—"

"—Was Lumi," Jewel interrupted, a mischievous twinkle in her eye as she lightly elbowed him.

"Yes." He turned his head, but not fast enough for me to see his face turned red.

"You like her," I blurted out. 

He was quiet for a moment. "Yes."

"Does she know?" I asked.

"Absolutely not," Talu snorted. 

"Madam Rhine would kill me." Kei was unusually serious. "She hates me, almost as much as she hates Lumi."

"She hates her?" I was confused now. "But isn't Lumi her niece and apprentice?"

"Maybe, but you haven't really seen how she talks to Lumi." Kei shook his head. "I don't know the full story, but I don't think either of them really wanted the arrangement. Lumi tries to make the best of it, and she won't talk badly about Madam Rhine—but I can see it's not a good situation."

"You want to save her, don't you?" I asked softly.

 "First she has to want to leave," Talu pointed out.

Kei said nothing to all of this. Pearly returned and plopped onto the bank of sand alongside Kei and let out a long sigh, typical of an aging pet. Kei sat on the sand beside her, flipping his fins for a moment. 

"Maybe one day, she'll be free of her apprenticeship contract and will want to see the seven seas," he said. "I just want to be there to help her when she's ready."

We sat there in silence for a time, the four of us. We watched fish swirl past in their rainbows, the underwater grasses rippling in the current. Eventually, we were joined by two more—Lumi and Dominique. But both looked incredibly grave.

"What's wrong?" Kei asked as they approached.

"Granny Noemi sent us, she said it's time." Dominique's cryptic words weren't helpful.

Lumi, for her more openly worried expression, gave me a better idea of what was going on. "The Queen wants to see you—immediately!"