He cast such thoughts aside to focus on the task at hand. This was about her, not his brother. He’d never known his mother, or at least not that he could remember, and yet almost every day the feeling that he needed to know her grew stronger. He’d puzzled over such impulses for days, weeks, months, until he’d finally arrived at the only solution he could think of. He needed to feel what she had felt at THE END. Maybe then he would be able to understand what she went through—what they both went through—on that ill-fated day exactly fifteen years ago.

He left his eyepatch alone and let his head slip under the water. As the cool pond fully surrounded him, he started to count. One, two, three… He opened his eye, trying to see through the gloom. A fish wriggled past with a flash of its silver tail, disappearing as it darted through the plants growing from the bottom.

Eighteen, nineteen, twenty…

He blew all the air from his lungs, his body growing heavier such that he was able to keep sinking, sliding down the mucky slope to the deepest part of the pond’s bed, where the sun couldn’t reach, giving the underwater plants the appearance of being menacing wraiths, swaying and taunting him with their jeers.

Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty…

He was a quarter of the way there. So far, his lungs hadn’t protested in the least. Maybe it was because they trusted him. His father had made both him and Gado learn to swim from a very young age. They’d taken to the water like a pair of gilled, finned fish, and soon they spent their summers barefoot and swinging from ropes tied to the trees adjacent to this pond, not a fear in the world.

Until the next horrible day in his life, one he could remember with the pain of a fiery ember seared into his eye.

“No,” he reminded himself, but all that emerged was a spray of bubbles. Mother, he thought. Mother, mother, mother…

The inner count continued, passing two full minutes. Still his lungs seemed to care little and less that they were being deprived of air. When did his mother change her mind, realizing the mad course of action she’d taken? His father rarely spoke of that day, but whenever he did, he was adamant that she had done everything in her power to save his life, not end it.

Images flashed through his mind—a woman clutching her baby, frantically trying to fight to the surface—but he blinked them away because they were nothing but his imagination conjuring what it wanted to conjure, filling in the big empty spot that his infant mind could never fill. The truth was that no one really knew exactly what she had done on that day, nor why exactly she’d done it.