Free Girls Day Out: A Syrena Legacy Story by Anna Banks Page B

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 screwups 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 were pillow cases.”
    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 as an insult. 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 halfway 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 and 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 one of her shoulder blades. “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