Her cousin cried. “Elyssa!”

Elyssa’s face throbbed like she’d been punched. God, how long had it been? It was impossible to trip underwater. She pushed up to her knees and touched her face. No nosebleed. “I’m fine.”

“Come here.” Aya helped her up, covered her with a huge towel, and squeezed her with a worried hug. “Welcome back. You’re a day late.”

“I’m slow.” She released Aya and adjusted her blanket-sized towel more securely.

Soren hulked across the deck completely naked.

Aya’s eyes followed his huge form. “What are you doing here? Where are the rest of the Sea Opals?”

He growled. “I do not answer to you.”

Aya stiffened.

Elyssa defused the tension with a calming hand on Aya’s arm. “I’ll explain.”

Aya glared at Soren and turned away. “Fine.”

Funny how Elyssa had been naked for a month and felt perfectly normal, and she’d been out of the water two seconds and felt all exposed. “How are you? Are you okay?”

“Of course I am. What about you? Come get dressed and let’s talk.”

Aya led her inside to a dining galley. Elyssa pulled on a matching jumpsuit and chowed down on the foods she had requested that last night at her parent’s house — a peanut butter sandwich, jumbo Dr Pepper, and buttery, gooey squares of her step mom’s rice crisp treats. Her dad had put in a postcard from their homeowner’s association, in case she forgot what the gated community looked like, and scrawled, “The morning crossword seems quieter without you. Hope you’re having a great time.”

Tears sprang to her eyes. She swallowed hard and placed the card on top of the lovingly plastic-wrapped treats.

Aya had put on her reading glasses. She sat across from Elyssa in the private booth and arranged a mini satellite, recording equipment, and lights around her laptop.

“We’re just about ready. Do a test. Tell me one interesting thing you saw yesterday.”

“I saw Moby Dick,” Elyssa said. “That was amazing. Oh, actually the same day, I saw a giant octopus. Kadir got hurt saving me from needlefish, which is why he’s not here. Oh, tell Lucy I can make my fins go! But only when I stop thinking about them.”

“Great.” Aya adjusted some dials, totally focused on the screen. “Give me one more minute.”

Heh. She was the same old Aya after all. Everything had to be scientific, in its place, and done properly. No last-minute interruptions, forgetting something at home, or unwelcome surprises.

“While we’re waiting, fill out the questionnaire.” Aya pushed a five-inch-thick stack of papers at her.

Elyssa flipped through the stack.

“We’ll also take your vital signs and tissue samples. You said you could make your feet into fins? We’ll get a sample of that tissue too.”

Elyssa picked up the pen. “It’s not going to hurt, is it?”

Aya stared at her blankly. “The sample?” Something flashed on her computer screen and she looked away. “I’ll spike your Dr. Pepper.”

“Aya!”

She snorted.

Oh. Ha ha, funny joke.

“No, it shouldn’t hurt at all. We’re taking a swab. I’m expecting dead skin cells from the top layer, or,” she wiggled her brows, “scales.”

“I don’t have scales,” Elyssa promised, tapping the pen against the paper stack, “but I’ll do whatever I can to help you uncover the mysteries of the mer.”

They spent until dark with Aya interviewing and recording. It was obvious when Soren hulked in the background. Aya’s gaze wandered and she forgot her question.

They’d offered him and the other guards food while they were waiting, but Soren snapped that it wasn’t necessary, and the other guards did not surface for Elyssa to ask herself.

By dark, Elyssa felt tired and wired. Probably it was the rice crisp-and-marshmallow sugar high after a month on the sushi-and-seaweed diet.

“Your transmitters went out,” Aya told her when they were reaching the end. “We lost them at a thousand feet. Here are replacements that go deeper.”

Elyssa took off the broken transmitter earrings and put in the new ones, screwing on the backs to make sure they stayed in. “Do these make a high-pitched squeal too?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

Hmm. Elyssa didn’t either. Maybe she sensed the whine with her mermaid powers. She’d find out in the water.

Aya picked up the old ones and studied them with her reading glasses. “Okay, let’s drill deeper into this conundrum. If we know more about how the Life Trees grow, perhaps we can grow our own. How deep are you?”

“Forever deep.”

“Are you in the Sunlit Zone or the Twilight Zone? Or is it the Midnight Zone?”

“I really don’t know.”

“Is it bright out, or does everything have bioluminescence and it’s dark?”

“I don’t know,” Elyssa repeated patiently. Aya sometimes got so focused on a problem she didn’t actually hear the answer. “Everything’s bright underwater. It’s like being in a football stadium, except you can see about a million miles in every direction, including down.”

Aya raised a brow. “A million miles? Elyssa, this is for science.”

“It’s crazy. You can see forever. Way farther than on land.”

A chime sounded on Aya’s laptop.

She sucked in a breath, straightened, and tapped the keyboard. “That’s time.”

“Today went by so fast.” And Elyssa still hadn’t gotten the chance to ask Aya about the Sea Opals. She shifted on the hard plastic bench.

“Maybe we can move the platform.” Aya hummed as she studied the maps and reviewed Elyssa’s directions. “Which direction is the current?”

“I can tell you when I’m in the water again.”

“Oh, of course. We’ll track it on your transmitter.” She closed the laptop, removed her glasses, and smiled. “We need the Sea Opals by the next meeting. It’s the last time I can put it off. Make sure King Kadir provides.”

And that was it.

Aya took a deep breath and started to rise.

“Um.” Wow, how to ask this? There was no way to sugar-coat Elyssa’s counter-request. “I’m actually hoping for an advance on more brides.”

Her smile flattened. “What?”

“Well, a lot of mermen really deserve a chance to start their own families. The earlier the better.”

“Kadir hasn’t even paid off you!”

“And I also don’t think it’s fair to ask for so many Sea Opals just for one person.”

“Yes. It is.”

“Van Cartier Cosmetics already owns the world market.”

“Do you know how much it cost to put this together?” Aya gestured at the laptop, the platform, the rice treats. “Do you know how much these military-grade transmitters are worth? Two sets of them?”

“But it wouldn’t cost much more to support a second or third bride.”

“Impossible. The legal fees alone—”

“Don’t you want to be a mermaid?” Elyssa pushed. “Wouldn’t you do it for free?”

Aya stared over Elyssa’s shoulder. The night was dark now and the windows only reflected their image inward. She looked back at Elyssa, made her lips into a flat line, and shook her head. “I could never be a bride. Not for all the Sea Opals in the world.”

That was what Aya had said on the shore, on the dock the day Elyssa left. Even now, it sounded crazy. “I don’t believe you.”

“I’ve thought about this a lot since the bride pageant.” Aya toyed with her manicured nails. When they were kids, she used to bite them down to the quick. Now, the acrylics were smooth and beautiful. “Why I wasn’t chosen. The reason is that I don’t have the ability to love.”

What the heck? What had Chastity Angel been telling her while Elyssa was gone? “Yes, you do.”

“I’ve never even had a pet. I couldn’t give my love to a child. Especially when things went bad and I was forced to give my child up.”

“You’d never have to give your child up!”

“Read your contract. If you can’t remain in the relationship, you give up all rights to your baby. It’s the same as their old covenant. You’re no more than a merman’s surrogate.”

Elyssa sat back in the cold plastic seat. This was what Aya had wanted to tell her. She knew that Elyssa would have agreed anyway because Elyssa was born from a surrogate.

Elyssa’s biological mom had viable eggs but no womb. Aya knew that in the worst case, if everything between her and Kadir was destroyed, she would never deny him their baby.

The thought made a dull pain in her heart.

If Kadir blamed her for the accident at the ruin like Soren, if she failed to earn the respect of the warriors, if she caused another problem with the Life Tree…

She rubbed her chest. “I still see Helen off and on.”

“Your family isn’t normal. When a relationship dies, there are usually no survivors.”

She couldn’t think this way. “It will work.”

“How will you handle visitation? Do you really think you can cross two separate worlds? You’ll be left with nothing but memories, just like all the other brides.”

Her fear was natural. After Aya’s parents split, her father wouldn’t even cross Miami to see her. Elyssa never met him once, not at a single birthday or swim meet or graduation.

The mer were different.

“Kadir went every year to the surface to see his mother, even though he never went to the shore.”

“Isn’t that more evidence of how impossible it is to sustain a relationship? You’re too different.”

“Aya.” Elyssa put her hands on Aya’s cool fingers, stopping her stream of fears. “I love Kadir.”

The feeling of love swelled in her chest. She did love Kadir. That was how she knew everything would be okay.

Aya’s brows drew together. “But does he love you?”

Oh. Wow.

Aya had a point. It was one thing for Elyssa to love him. He was intense and honorable and loving. When he pressed her against a wall, she felt the power of his devotion. But was devotion the same as love? She wanted to say yes. But what if she was wrong?

She didn’t know what to say. “It hasn’t come up.”

Aya nodded slowly, distractedly. The project notes spread out across their table. She pulled her hands free of Elyssa’s and studied graphs, charts, tables. “I want this program to be successful. I knew the instant you came up without Kadir that there would be no Sea Opals today. I just don’t see how we can support more participants.”

Right. Back to things that she did know. “The brides of the past asked for only a single Sea Opal.”

“And theirs are starting to show up on the market too.” Aya tidied the files. “We’re holding the interest of investors now, but we won’t be able to start clinical trials for another six months. The regenerative properties are just amazing. We’re talking ‘cure cancer, regrow your dead liver’ amazing. Sea Opals have the potential to be not just a pretty face cream, but an actual fountain of youth. If you have the right response. You know.” She trailed off.

She still felt awkward about the incident the last time they’d worked together. The one where Elyssa’s parents got bought off and Elyssa gave up all credit for the discovery because she would never do anything important.

“Resonance?” Elyssa supplied.

Aya pushed past the sudden awkwardness. “Yes. Resonance. People who are resonant…the sky’s the limit.”

So, maybe the Life Tree could heal Kadir’s punctured heart without surgery.

“But we’ll need the supply for mass production,” Aya said. “The Life Tree of Sireno overflowed with Sea Opals the size of boulders. A hundred is nothing.”

Okay. Time for a hard truth.

“That’s because the Sireno Life Tree was much older. The Atlantis tree is a wee little baby. Its Sea Opals are like seed beads.”

Aya frowned. “Kadir already supplied us with thirty reasonably sized Sea Opals.”

“They came from the other cities, the older Life Trees. We don’t have any more.”

Aya’s chin dropped. “What?”

“Kadir was injured trying to find more in the old city wreckage.”

Aya rested her forehead in her hand. “You’re kidding.”

“No.” But Aya was devastated. Elyssa touched her forearm. “What’s wrong?”

Aya laughed painfully and rubbed her forehead. “Agh. I was supposed to ask if you could give us an advance on the next bride’s allotment. Like, in addition to the rest of your own. I’m not kidding. We need these Sea Opals now to draw in big investors while the public interest is still hot.”

Van Cartier Cosmetics was poised to explode past the competition and become the name brand Aya’s grandmother, its founder, had always wanted it to be. Sea Opals were their big ticket, and Elyssa had just told her the treasure they thought they’d found was an empty chest.

But her loyalty lay with her warriors.

“You’re talking about money,” Elyssa said gently. “These are people’s lives.”

Aya frowned and picked at her acrylics. The paint was chipping off her ring finger. “But we need these now.”

“Then you need to approach Sireno.”

Aya snorted. “After what Blake pulled there? We can’t get them to answer a single request and trust me, I’ve been broadcasting underwater all over the Gulf of Mexico for months.”

Lucy and Torun should have been only the first of many mer-human couples after they met in the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately, Lucy’s ex-husband Blake had desecrated the Sireno mermen’s sacred cave of Sea Opals and tried to shoot the mer army that surfaced to recapture them. The whole thing was caught on Lucy’s cell phone and posted to Facebook. Elyssa and Aya had flown in by helicopter to arrest him. He had been stopped (and fired), but the damage had been done. Even though their sacred brides had left them desperate for more than two decades, Torun’s home city of Sireno refused to answer any human broadcasts.

Blake was currently rotting away in a Mexican prison.

And good riddance. Before all this, Elyssa had been pressured to invest in the official Van Cartier Cosmetics expedition with Blake at the helm. She heard him talking about how he found Lucy’s first Sea Opal, the largest gem ever discovered. Elyssa had studied Lucy’s discovery extensively and knew that was a lie. When she confronted him at a company party, he’d gotten this mean look in his eye. Like he wanted to cut her. Even though they were in the middle of a crowded room, it gave her the shivers.

She’d poured her money into Lucy’s expedition so fast, her bank had to call to check for her authorization.

Yes, it was a good thing Blake was locked away.

“Try Dragao Azul, maybe,” Elyssa said. “I think it’s off Portugal. That’s where Kadir and Soren are from.”

Aya wrote it down. “Off Portugal? Can you be more specific?”

“Nope.”

Aya sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“You have a submarine so it shouldn’t be too hard.”

Aya looked up. “What?”

“I could hear it for miles. And man is it loud.”

“That’s not ours.”

Weird. “Soren said it was. It’s tethered to the underwater platform that’s also connected to this ship.”

Her gaze seemed to turn inward, and whatever she saw there only made her grim. “I’ll look into that.”

“Good luck.”

Aya studiously made notes.

“Really, though, don’t get your hopes up. Atlantis is the only city that’s trying to find modern brides. Everyone else wants to wait and get them from their old sacred islands, which are mostly empty.”

Aya chewed the end of her pen shrewdly. “How would they feel if I repopulated their ‘sacred islands’ with new colonies?”

See? Aya was so creative. Elyssa would never have thought of that. “You can try it. If Jolan is still king of Sireno, he’s trying to challenge the Council to accept modern brides like Atlantis. Repopulating the sacred islands with modern brides might be the compromise they need. Torun would know the location of Sireno’s sacred islands.”

“They can’t all have sunk into the sea,” Aya muttered. “Second option: We can grow our own Sea Opal tree. Do you have any seeds?”

Ack. “Um, I kind of broke off the one flower that might have turned into a seed.”

Aya looked up from her “solutions” document. Her brows drew together. “Elyssa….”

“I know!” Elyssa rubbed her forehead. “I felt so bad. I still don’t know how it happened. I got in a ton of trouble for it. Oh! Here.” She felt the wilted petals in her hair. “Oh god. Get me a glass of seawater!”

Aya raced to the galley and returned with a clear, glass mug full of liquid from the seawater tap.

Elyssa dropped in the fragile flower. It fell to the bottom. RIP.

“Oh no,” Aya said.

Elyssa grabbed the clear mug, closed her eyes, and breathed. Feel the power of the Life Tree flow through you. The electric lights and the chilly breeze and the skritchy blanket and the hard booth chair disappeared. She meditated. Breathe.

“How?” Aya whispered.

Elyssa opened her eyes.

The petals had unfurled and the blossom floated in the middle of the glass, twirling gently, like a miniature water lily.

She gave the mug to Aya.

Aya didn’t take her eyes off the flower. “Did you just bring this back to life with your mind?”

“It’s the resonance,” Elyssa said, really grateful for practicing, and also that it worked. God, if she’d killed the flower after all this time, she’d humble herself before Soren for the whole swim back to Atlantis and never leave her castle again. “I’m connected to Kadir’s Life Tree now, and this is part of the Life Tree too, so it responds.”

“Magic,” Aya breathed.

“Yep.”

Aya grinned at Elyssa. Her eyes sparkled just like when they were children, pulling on their swim tails and diving like little mermaids in the clear water.

Then, her smile faded. She looked down at the flower with sorrow. Her thoughts almost seemed to broadcast to Elyssa. This will never be me.

Elyssa reached out to her. “It will be you, too. Believe.”

“I wish I could believe.” Aya straightened, business-like again. “The Sea Opals are a serious problem. I will try these other avenues, but you have to convince Kadir to come up with the rest. Steal them if you have to.”

“We can’t steal them. We’re barely able to keep others from stealing us.”

Aya double-checked the recording equipment was shut off. She glanced behind her, then leaned in and held Elyssa’s gaze. Deadly serious.

“If you don’t, all this,” she gestured at the platform, “goes away. You get pulled out and sent home.”

“But I don’t want to go home!”

“I get fired. That’s only the beginning.” Her voice dropped. “We’re not the only ones fishing in this ocean, Elyssa. The other fishermen are more deadly than you can possibly imagine.”