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careless and she found her way down into the lab. She’d read enough about the Project on a computer to grasp what we were trying to do. That night Alicia told me she believed the Western Collective would take her sons from her one day, and she desperately wanted at least one of her children to have a chance to be free.” Gillian’s gaze turns distant and sad. “Alicia is my only friend here. In the end, I had to do what she asked.”
    Robry reaches a hand out and touches her arm. “It’s all right,” he says simply. “I don’t want to move inland. Somehow I’ve always known I was going to live in the sea.”
    â€œWell, I’ve never known anything like that,” I fling at her. I draw in a breath to deliver another retort, but I can’t get enough air. I cough and wheeze helplessly, but this is different from a lung attack. This feels like my lungs are stiffening inside my chest.
    â€œWhat’s happening to me?” I manage to gasp.
    My mother is by my side in a flash. “Your gill filaments are starting to swell. We have to get you on oxygen.”
    Quickly, she places a mask over my mouth and nose and dials up the flow from a nearby oxygen tank. Then she holds my hands and anxiously watches my face.
    I suck in three deep breaths. When I don’t feel like I’m suffocating anymore, my panic eases a little. I let go of her hands and snatch the mask off long enough to ask, “What do you mean, my gill filaments are starting to swell?”
    â€œYour lungs are full of dormant gill filaments. That’s why you’ve always had problems breathing when you exert yourself.”
    â€œYou mean, we’re already half fish?” Lena looks revolted.
    â€œI mean we gave you the same respiratory tissues fish have so that someday you could breathe underwater.”
    I stare at my mother in disbelief. “Are we really about to breathe water? Have you ever done this to someone before?”
    â€œThis transformation has been completed successfully hundreds of times,” she says, avoiding my eyes.
    There’s something she’s not telling me, and then I get it. I jerk the mask off. “You mean you’ve never done it!”
    â€œYou’re not helping Robry or Lena here,” she says sternly. “You’ve got to be the brave one.”
    No one asked me if I wanted to be brave. No one asked me if I wanted any of this.
    My gaze falls on Robry. He’s starting to look frightened. I can tell from the way his chest is rising and falling that he’s having problems breathing, too. As I put my mask back on, I decide I can try to be brave, for his sake.
    My mother hurries around, slipping oxygen masks over Robry’s and Lena’s faces and turning on their tanks. Then she places clips over our fingers that are linked to monitors.
    â€œI’m reading the oxygen levels in your bloodstream,” she explains to us. “Even with this rich oxygen, that level is going to start falling eventually. When it gets low enough, we’ll know it’s time.”
    I take the mask off for a second. “Time for what?”
    â€œTime for you to jump into the water and start breathing it instead,” she says coolly.
    My mother is trying to make it sound like it’s no big deal, but I almost drowned once, and taking water into your lungs is not something your body wants to do. Ever.
    A shudder goes through me, and then I realize something else. My skin is starting to prickle with heat. That doesn’t make any sense, because the caves are always cool. I kick off my shoes and roll up my shirt sleeves. I glance across the chamber and see Lena is doing the same thing.
    â€œYour metabolism is changing, too,” Gillian explains to us in her detached, scientist voice. “The three of you have never liked hot weather because your bodies are designed to conserve heat in the colder waters of the sea. Right now your sweat