I sat quietly eating the apple Ariel had been so kind to give me. I tried to piece it together in my head: half-breeds, living peacefully together, on an island, but no one knows how to get there. I lifted my head, still a foxcoon, and asked Ariel, "So if no one knows how to get there, how do we even know it's real?"

She looked at me a little shocked, almost like I had said something sacreligious or had crushed some sort of dream she may have had. "Of course it's real," she assured me, "It has to be."

"But until today," I started, "I had never even met another half-breed. I thought it was just something weird in my family. In fact I wasn't sure what to think when your scent led me to a tiger. How can we know that there are others out there who have even made it to Harmony?" I had to stop. I started thinking about my family and was tearing up. The mother I never knew, the father who left us, and the brother who I never heard from again. They, or at least, my brother would have told me that there were others out there. Or would he? I looked up to see Ariel standing over me with a tissue in her hand.

I changed to human form and took it. As I wiped my eyes I heard her say, "There are others like us out there. Like my friend Sky." Her gentle blue eyes glistened while she tried to comfort me.

At that moment, I couldn't help but believe every word she had told me. "Ok," I said as I stood up, "how can I help you figure out the secret to getting to Harmony?"