When he had us thoroughly familiar with the beast, he helped Sharrol into the cavity, waited to be sure she was hooked up, and closed it. That made me nervous as hell. She climbed out a day later claiming that she hadn’t felt a thing, wasn’t hungry, didn’t even have to use the bathroom.

The ’doc was massive. I had to really heave against it to get it moving, and then it wanted to move along the shore. I forced it to turn inland. The proper place to hide it was in the lamplighter nest, of course.

I was gasping like death itself, and the daylight had almost died, and I just couldn’t push that mass uphill.

I left it on the beach. Maybe there was an answer. Let my hindbrain toy with it for a while.

I trudged across sand to rough coral and kept walking to the peak. We’d picked the island partly for its isolation. Two distant yellow lights, eastward, marked two islands I’d noted earlier. I ran my mag specs (the side that worked) up to 20X and scanned the whole horizon, and found nothing but the twin lamplighter glows.

And nothing to do but wait.

I sat with my back against the lip of the dead lamplighter pit. I pictured her: she looked serious, a touch worried, under a feather crest and undyed skin: pink shading to brown, an Anglo tanned as if by Fafnir’s yellow-white sun.

I said, “Sharrol.”

Like the dead she had slept, her face slack beneath the faceplate, like Sleeping Beauty. I’d taken to talking to her, wondering if some part of her heard. I’d never had the chance to ask.

“I never wondered why you loved me. Egotist, I am. But you must have looked like me when you were younger. Thirty years underwater, no sunlight. Your uncles, your father, they must have looked a lot like me. Maybe even with white hair. How old are you? I never asked.”

Her memory looked at me.

“Tanj that. Where are you? Where are Tanya and Louis? Where’s Carlos? What happened after I was shot?”

Faint smile, shrug of eyebrows.

“You spent three weeks unconscious in the ICC followed by ten minutes on your feet. Wrong gravity, wrong air mix, wrong smells. We hit you with everything it might take to knock a flat phobe spinning. Then blam and your love interest is lying on the sand with a hole through him.

“Maybe you tried to kill her. I don’t think you’d give her much trouble, but maybe Feather would kill you anyway. She’d still have the kids…”

I slammed my fist on coral. “What did she want? That crazy woman. I never hurt her at all.”