He dug deep in one of his many pockets, pulled out the brass case, fiddled with the catch, opened it. The blonde curl, the woman’s eye, the two grey tears. He was not sure if Medina had seen him palm it. “Did you?” he asked, his voice part of the night breeze through the marram. “Did you see me, you sly dog?” And he grinned and thought, I’d give it to him now, if he was here, if he wanted it.

He wound himself down into the sand. It wasn’t cold, or not especially so. He held the brass case in his hand. The painting was of some dead man’s squeeze, the woman dead herself no doubt, hence grief, hence the cutting of the neck, hence a grave at the edge of nowhere. But she looked on him with a kindness he relished and he gazed back until, fading with the fading light, the eye seemed to close. He pulled his coat up around his cheeks and closed his own eyes. He readied himself for a dream of his mother—not his actual mother, about whom he knew nothing at all, but one of that troupe of dream women who, once or twice a year, stood over him in sleep. Tonight, perhaps, she would walk out of the sea. She would cross the beach and find her son sleeping in the open without as much shelter as a dog. She would bring him something, a gift, he didn’t know what, a suit of magic armour perhaps, leave it heaped on the sand beside his head. He readied himself, he thought he was probably lost enough, that he’d earned it, the apparition, the ghost mother with her ghost love. Instead, he dreamed, briefly and powerfully, of Ernesto Medina stretched out on the grass and through his white shirt, the skin of his face, two dozen crimson flowers coming into bloom.

When he woke he lay in a perfection of readiness, eyes wide, breath slow. With finger and thumb he tested the darkness like a cloth. Not quite night, not quite day. The edge of both.

He listened, leaned himself against the door of the world, heard all the subtle graduations of nothing. Then he heard again the voice that had woken him. The rising and dipping of a song. Some man flying his voice like a kite.

Where was he? Measure distances, Calley. Be certain.

He shifted in the sand, raised his head so that he could turn it—a little this way, a little that. The voice was not behind him, where he might have expected it, nor was it on the beach in front of him.