“Residual. Just residual.”

“Still, you admit it.”

“I admit I don’t know why the living fuck you’re holding a gun to my head!” he shouted. Had Ghost Bird heard nothing, or was she pretending to sleep? And there, as if to call him a liar anyway: what Ghost Bird called “the brightness,” curious, interested, questing. It rose now as a tightness in his chest, a spasm in his left thigh as he remained on all fours being interrogated by his assistant director.

A pause, an increased pressure of the muzzle at his head; he flinched. Then the pressure was gone, along with her shadow. He looked over. Grace was back against the wall, gun still in her hand.

He sat up, hands on his thighs, forced a deep breath in, out, and considered his options. It was the kind of field situation his mother would’ve called “an either without the or.” He could either find some way to smooth it over or go for the rifles against the wall. Not a real choice. Not with Ghost Bird out of action.

Slowly, carefully, he picked his three Whitby pages off the floor, willed himself to move past the danger of the moment: “Is that your usual welcome?”

Her face a kind of impassive mask now, daring him to challenge her. “Sometimes it ends with me pulling the trigger. Control, I am not interested in bullshit. You don’t have any idea what I’ve been through. What might be real … and what might not be real.”

He slumped against the wall, holding Whitby’s pages against his chest. Was there something in the corner of his eye?

“There’s nothing to this world,” he said, “but what our senses tell us about it, and all I can do is the best I can based on that information.” Even though he didn’t trust the world anymore.

“There was a time I would have shot first, before you even left the boat.”

“Thank you?” Putting as much punch into that as possible.

A curt nod, like he was serious, and Grace shoved the gun back in its holster on her right side, away from him. “I always have to be careful.” He noted the tension in her upper arm and heard the sharp click as she toyed with the clasp on the holster. Opening it. Closing it.

“Sure,” he said. “I see someone got to your big toe. That kind of thing could make a person paranoid.”

She ignored that, said, “When did you get here?”

“Five days ago.”

“How long since the border shifted?”

Had Grace lost track of the days out here, by herself? “No more than two weeks.”

“How did you get across?”

He told her, omitting any detail about where the door under the sea might lie. Omitting, too, that Ghost Bird had created it.

Grace considered all of that for a long moment, nursing a bitter smile that rejected interpretation. But he was on high alert again; she’d taken out her gutting knife with her left hand and was creating circles in the dust beside her. This wasn’t just a paranoid debriefing. There were higher stakes and his own analysis to undertake: Had Grace just been rattled by something here on the island, or suffered the kind of shock that rearranged your thought processes, forever impaired your judgment?