Rayna swims over to me looking like a US Marine with a fin. Seriously, the only thing she’s missing is heat-seeking grenades and camouflage war paint. She’s got a rope-o-goodies slung over her shoulder. The first thing I notice is that two home-made spears are secured to it with complicated-looking knots. I wonder if she dipped the tips in lionfish venom like Mom showed her—if so, how does she expect to give me a piggyback ride with lethal weapons dangling everywhere? Um, no. Also, what the crap would we even need those for?

Plus, she’s brought snorkeling gear. Two sets, complete with masks, snorkels, and flippers all hitched together with rope laced through it. A mermaid. With a snorkel set.

Finally, there’s a freaking dead fish flapping behind her, tied through the tail, staring at me with frozen horror and shock, all mouth open and unblinking eyes and loosely swaying body. Obviously a snack, but for real? A dead fish is going to be slapping my arms every five seconds while we travel? This is where I draw the line. “Eat the fish now or lose it forever.”

“I’m the one swimming for two here. What if I get hungry?”

“I assume that’s what the spears are for.”

She shakes her head. “What if we come across sharks? Boats always throw their chum overboard. It attracts all sorts of predators.”

“Hi. I’m Emma. I have the Gift of Poseidon. Possibly you’ve heard of it?”

Rayna crosses her arms. “Sure, you could just order the sharks away. But wouldn’t you rather spear one?”

“Nope.”

“And if I want to?”

“Hope you can hit a moving target, because I’ll be making sure it swims away. Like, fast.”

Rayna’s whole face puckers into a pout. “This promises to suck.”

I’ve never heard her use the word “suck” before; I wonder if she’s testing it out on me. But I’m not about to teach a chic-fish grammatically correct human slang. Especially not this one. Her screw ups are bound to be entertaining if she continues to be all proper with it.

I wait for her to remove the spears and poke them into the sand. Then she sets the dead fish to sea so it can be someone else’s snack. She eyes the snorkel gear. I shake my head. “What’s it for?”

“So we can act undercover. Like we’re snorkeling instead of treasure hunting.”

“We’re in swimsuits. Swimming around. And besides, it’s not illegal to be treasure hunting.”

“This could have been a fun day,” she mutters, removing the rope altogether. “But nooooo. Princess Poseidon is allergic to fun.”

“And Princess Triton is allergic to traveling lightly.” Okay, that was stupid, but I had to say something. “You told me all we needed was a pillow case.”

She turns and shows me her back. I know she wants me to grab her shoulders so we can go, but the way she’s turned away from me is meant for insult, too. Like a shunning or something. I latch onto each of her muscular shoulders and squeeze, hoping to at least get a reaction from her. But my hands are too weak, her skin is too thick, and her stubbornness is too strong to solicit any kind of acknowledgement from her.

So we travel in silence, gliding through the water, staying close to the surface. We pass fishing boats and ocean liners, but so far we haven’t come across our cruise ship, The Enchantment (Rayna swears she knows the difference between the bottom of a cruise ship and the belly of a freight ship, especially this particular line of boats). Not that we’re expecting ours anytime soon; Rayna says we’re more than half way to it, and no other cruising vessels should be in the vicinity. So it should be easy to spot and easy to follow.

This is the first time I’ve realized that treasure hunting might be boring. I mean, we’re not looking for buried chests of gold or scavenging through underwater archaeological tombs. All we’re doing is chasing The Enchantment, a cruise line’s version of a floating casino/resort, hoping someone drops something more significant than a flicked cigarette over a balcony railing.

And I told Galen I would be home late for this? I’m missing out on Galen time—for this?

What made me think this could be fun? Fan-flipping-tastic.

“There it is,” she says after a while.

I squint into the distance catch a glimpse of a black object slicing through the surface. “That’s too small,” I say.

I can practically hear her roll her eyes. “It’s still far away from us. But that’s it. See how it’s getting bigger the closer we get?”

“Bigger” is an understatement. The Enchantment is ginormous. The specs online said it holds over three thousand passengers. Surely one of them wants to throw something overboard in the next few hours. I try to dismiss the swirl of excitement in my stomach, telling myself that it will most likely be a quarter or a penny or something. They’ll use the Atlantic Ocean for a giant wishing well. “Have you ever thrown anything back?”

Rayna stops and my chin slams into her shoulder blade. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, when they throw something overboard, have you ever thought of throwing it back just to freak them out?”

This elicits an evil grin from her. “I can’t believe I’ve never thought of that. You’re going to be useful after all.”

Rayna is the queen of underhanded compliments.

We skirt the belly of the ship, changing sides often. “It’s slowing down now,” Rayna says. “We’re probably coming close to port.”

“Port? The Bahamas?” How long have we been gone? Does riding the current really give you that much more speed? I’m used to traveling faster with Galen, of course—sometimes his speed forces me to close my eyes against the momentum—but Rayna is no turtle either, apparently.

She doesn’t answer me, but slows her pace. We fall slightly behind the ship. “Sometimes people toss things off the back—” And that’s when something hits the surface. At first it whirpools in place, tossed about by the ship’s wake. Then it floats at the top, pale and listless. When it absorbs more of the ocean around it, when it starts to sink, that’s when I figure out what it is.

A rag doll. When we get closer to it, we discover fire red yarn hair, big brown embroidered eyes, and a yellow floral dress complete with little ruffled white apron.

“Wow,” Rayna breathes. “No one’s ever tossed one of these.” She snatches it out of its churning descent to the bottom. She turns it over and over in her hands as if she’s never seen a doll before. As if her bed at Galen’s house isn’t lined with dolls just like this one. Prettier ones,though.

“Can I see it?” I say, grabbing it from her. She fully intends on keeping it, I can tell. But we can’t. “This wasn’t thrown overboard on purpose,” I tell her. “I’m betting this was dropped accidentally.”

She shrugs, snatching it back. “Finders keepers.”

I snatch it back, and quickly pull up the dress. There is a hand-sewn inscription on it. “See?” I say. “It says ‘To Caroline, From Mommy’.”

“Mommy?”

“That’s what some human children call their mothers.”

Rayna is irate. “So her mother gave this to her? And she lost it?”

“If she’s carrying a doll like this around, she’s probably very young. She probably didn’t know better. She was probably showing her doll the waves or something.”

 “Dolls aren’t alive.”

“I’m sure she was playing pretend, you know?” I can see that she doesn’t know. Rayna understands what’s real and tangible, not what’s imaginary and whimsical. She doesn’t even play with her own dolls; she simply views them as things to be collected. She was never told fairytales growing up—she was taught the laws and the ways of the Syrena, and any stories that were told to her were true ones passed down through the faithful memory of the Archives. Of all the things she has as a Royal, an imagination isn’t among them.

“She was pretending that it could see, I’m sure, and she dropped it overboard. On accident.”

Rayna looks really disgusted with Caroline right now. At least, that’s what it looks like, until she says, “We have to give it back to her.”

“Um. Huh?” Say what?

She nods. “We have to find her and give it back to her. You shouldn’t lose things your mother gives you. What if her mother—what if she doesn’t have her mother anymore? We have to give it back to her.”

Understanding pulls on my heartstrings. Rayna’s mother died when she was younger. Galen told Rayna used to go to the Cave of Memories where her mother is entombed every day for a long time after she died. He says she sometimes still cries about it when it’s just him and her alone.

I swallow the lump in my throat. “How do you propose we do that?”

“We’ll wait until they port, then sneak on.”

“You have to have a passport to board the ship.”

“A what? Did you hear me? I said we’ll sneak.”Oh geez. I think I agree with Rayna: This promises to suck. But how can I say no?