After a handful more feeble attempts at conversation—which Coco shut down with an ease and efficiency I admired—Angelica cut straight to the heart of it. “We have a long walk ahead of us to Le Présage, daughter. I should like to know you better, if you are willing.”

Coco scoffed and kicked an algae-covered rock. It plunked into the water, splashing my ruined hem. “Why? You said you’ve been watching me. You should already know everything.”

“Perhaps. I don’t know your thoughts, however.” Angelica tilted her head to the side, lips pursed, as if debating something. After another few seconds, she said, “I don’t know why you wear my necklace, for example.”

Subtle as a brick.

“I wonder what that’s like,” Coco mused bitterly, still watching the golden fish. “Wanting an explanation and never receiving one. It’d be horribly frustrating, don’t you think?”

Angelica didn’t force any more horrendously awkward conversation after that.

As for myself, I tried not to think. Angelica had said Reid’s injuries weren’t fatal. She said he would wake. And Isla—though I knew little about the mysterious woman they called the Oracle, she would make a powerful ally against Morgane and Josephine. With our other allies occupied, it made sense to indulge Isla. Josephine clearly feared her.

I didn’t know how much time passed before my heels began to ache. It could’ve been moments. It could’ve been hours. One second, the moon shone directly overhead, limning Reid’s silhouette in silver, and the next, it had dipped below a wall of water, bathing us all in shadow. Only then did I notice the strange phosphorescent glow emanating from the waters.

“What is that?” I whispered.

“A special kind of plankton,” Angelica said, her voice equally soft. “Though here we call them sea stars. They light the waters around the city.”

The bluish glow reflected in Célie’s wide eyes. She reached out to the wall nearest us, where thousands of nearly indiscernible specks of light swirled together to form one bright, pulsing wave. “They’re like fireflies.”

Angelica smiled and nodded, lifting her chin for us to look down the footpath. What appeared to be a golden gate bisected it, colossal and ornate, expanding into the empty plains of water on either side and rising to the sky. If not for the algae growing along its whorls and spikes, it could’ve been the gate to Heaven.

Beyond it, there seemed to be no water at all.

“Behold—Le Présage.” Angelica’s smile widened as we drew to a unanimous halt. “And there, in the center, Le Palais de Cristal.”

We all stared, necks craned, at the orb of dry, mountainous terrain in the heart of L’Eau Mélancolique. Huts had been carved into the rock along the city’s edge, into the very mountainside, as the seafloor rose to one tumultuous peak. At the top of that peak, spires of sea glass rose—cruel and sharp and beautiful—from the ruins of an enormous sunken ship. Its broken masts and shredded sails glowed blue in the light of the sea stars.

“Is it—is that dry land?” Beau glanced from Coco to me and back again in search of an explanation, but Coco didn’t seem to notice; her mouth had parted slightly as she gazed up at the city, and her free hand had risen to grasp her locket once more.

“I . . . I remember this place,” she breathed. Those dark eyes sought mine, brimming with sudden certainty. With hope. Grinning, I released her arm, and she took a stumbling step forward. “I’ve been here before. Le Présage.” She said the words as if tasting them, returning my smile. Her anger, her resentment momentarily forgotten. Memory was a strange and wonderful thing. “The Oracle City. Le Palais de Cristal.”

Angelica shadowed her movements, close enough to touch. She still didn’t dare. “You were born there.”

Coco whirled to face her, nearly breathless in her anticipation, and the dam finally burst. “How? How was I born here if you can’t leave? Is my father a merman? Is my father Constantin? Why is the Oracle City built on dry land? How is there dry land in the middle of the Wistful Waters?”

Angelica laughed at Coco’s outburst—it really did sound like bells—and gestured us onward toward the gate. The sea stars followed in our wake. Though they didn’t speak, though I could hardly see them, they seemed almost . . . curious. Sprite-like. “It isn’t always dry,” she said. “I told you. Melusines are courteous to a fault. They wouldn’t want their guests to feel uncomfortable.”

“So they drained their entire city?” Beau asked incredulously. “Just for us to breathe?”

Even Angelica’s shrug articulated elegance and grace. “Why not?”

“Does that mean they can walk on land?” I asked, sticking a finger into the waters on impulse. The sea stars clustered around my knuckle, illuminating the shape of my bone through my skin. I flexed it in fascination, watching as they swirled and eddied, desperate to touch me. They left a cold, tingling sensation in their wake.

Angelica’s smile vanished, and she slapped my hand away. “Stop it.” She lifted my finger to eye level, revealing thousands of tiny bloodred pricks. Teeth marks. “They’ll eat you if you let them.” I snatched my hand away with an outraged sound, wiping my blood on my chemise and glaring at the carnivorous little beasts. “And we are not on land,” she continued, resolute. “Make no mistake. We remain on the seafloor, where melusines are free to grow legs.”

“Grow legs?” Beau’s face twisted in disgust as a handful of humanoid shadows swam toward us from along the gate, their metallic tails flashing. I inched closer to Reid. “Like frogs?”

Angelica’s expression grew stony as the melusines’ faces took shape through the waters. Three women and two men. Though their bodies ranged in shape—from broad and coarse to fine and delicate—they all seemed somewhat longer than human, as if their limbs had been stretched, and each moved with a sort of liquid grace. Their colors varied from the palest of silver to the deepest of ebony, but all shimmered slightly, monochromatic and dusted with pearlescent scales. Their webbed fingers wrapped around what could only be described as spears. Perhaps tridents.

Whatever they were, they gleamed wickedly sharp in the phosphorescent light, and I had no interest in meeting the receiving end of them.

“Beau,” I murmured, smiling pleasantly at their hostile faces as they swam closer. Closer still. “Apologize, you blithering idiot.”

He backed into me, nearly breaking my foot. I stomped on his toes in return. He swore roundly, snarling, “They couldn’t have heard me.”

Coco spoke through her own fixed smile, imitating Célie, who curtsied low, and elbowed Beau when he didn’t do the same. “Good idea. Let’s risk it.”

“It was an honest question—”

The melusines didn’t pause at the walls of water, instead gliding seamlessly through them and stepping—actually stepping—onto the footpath, their split tails transforming to legs before our very eyes. The scales on their fins disappeared, and glistening skin wrapped around feet, ankles, calves, thighs, and—

A beat of silence passed as Beau’s alarm promptly vanished, replaced by a wide, shit-eating grin.