The room is murky, tinged in blue. Pale, moldy tile, cold beneath me. An ocean is pouring in. The stink of terror and lust. My head goes under. I cough up salt and blood and oily harbor water. A smooth-faced, dark-haired boy is tearing at my shirt, shredding my pants. Another like him holds me down. A third yanks at his drawstring while a fourth looks on, eager . . . so eager.

“Glim? Hey!”

I’m hauled upright, shaken, then bent, shoved over hard, head forced between knees.

“Breathe, dammit! What are you doing? Breathe!”

A pounding on my back. So hard, it hurts.

But the pain is real. It yanks me forward to the here and now. At the edge of consciousness, I breathe.

Vast haling gasps. Air rushes into my lungs like a rip tide, a typhoon, a tsunami. The images coursing through my brain—the sinks, the tile, the dark-haired boys, the roaring, inundating wave—crystallize into meaning. The door to my past flies open.

And stays open.

The force of it slams me against the inside of my head. And it keeps coming, rushing like the surge.

Can one small skull contain so much memory? Yet I am hungry for it. Ravenous.

I hold myself still. The slightest move might jog the door, swing it shut again.

When it does, my brain is full to bursting and I am grateful for the reprieve.

The pounding has stopped. The pushing, pulling hands are gone. Voices remain, but only in whispers, querulous and urgent. They also are here, not there. Now, not then.

I hover in between.

Lizzy?

A woman is calling.

Lizzy, have you done your homework?

I am a long-ago child, stretched out on deck, staring up at a rare blue sky.

Lizzy!

The voice is my mother’s.

“Coming, Mom!”

Then, very quietly, so not to disturb the whisperers, I let myself weep.

TWENTY-FOUR

“What’d she say? Something about her mother?”

Lizzy!

With the name came so much history. Not a straight through-line. More like islands of recall in an ocean of days and months, of past years lost to me since Abel’s Wave. I could’ve floated a long, long time on those waters, in between then and now, the calm after the storm, island-hopping from one memory to another. I wanted to.

But with the name came a doubled self, not yet fully merged, containing both past and present, both Lizzy and Glimmer, like conjoined twins. Like being poised between the dock and the boat in a swell, unsure where to put your weight next.

With the now demanding my attention.

“Glim? Are you with us?”

I needed time. To absorb. To draw my two selves closer together. Wasn’t going to get it. Not yet. The whispered summons became a hand on my shoulder, shaking me gently. It was dark. Unclear where I was, or why. Something about danger. Survival might depend on being functional. Or at least, pretending to be.