Eve swayed toward him out of the shadows, all silk and slink and smile. He’d never seen her wear a low-cut dress, wondered again as ever on this island whether she really was a woman. Pressed the thought down, aside. Didn’t matter. His voice mattered, his voice long lost.

Eve drew near enough to whisper through her smile. “Do you have one more in you?”

“No,” he said through tight dry lips. “But I’ll do it anyway.”

Her nod was all the grace in the world, and when she rounded away from him to the stage’s edge, he followed her body with his eyes. Fear had helped him find his voice before fear and pain honed away his lesser elements until he became a single sound. Where could he find that fear again? In the spotlight. In the heat. In standing blank minded onstage. In the sway of Eve’s hip.

“Back again by popular demand,” Eve announced, her voice big, one arm raised like a torchbearer, “for the third time tonight, let’s hear it for Edmond Margot!”

Applause. He stepped forward, and the spotlight followed him to the edge of the stage. Eve vanished into the wings.

He opened his mouth. Opened his heart.

Nothing.

His scuffed leather shoes jutted over the edge of the stage. Below, the spotlight lit bare sand.

Inhale, deeply.

He closed his eyes.

Nothing new in his mind, nothing new in the whole vast world.

He sighed, summoned another old poem—strange that a poem written two months back could count as old already—

And screamed.

The world tilted sideways. His throat closed, strangling his cry. He hovered weightless before the stage. Images axed through his skull: a surging twisting cobbled street. A Penitent’s great stone hand held him, crushing out his breath. A squat watch station in West Claw, a smeared reflection in a dark window, a girl’s face that was also his. Breath ragged in his ears.

And underneath that breath, that fear … Underneath, he heard the voice of fire. The voice of the long nights of his soul. The voice that was not his, but spoke to him.

But tonight the voice bore no poetry, offered no divine inspiration, no holy dread. A word sliced bleeding letters into his mindflesh.

Help.

Then he hit the ground.