“This beach,” I say. “The waves…they remind me of something.” And then I remember. “It’s Vidhan’s beach. He surfed here when he was a kid.”

Mother nods. It’s possible, she says. A promise you make to someone. That could mean something here. Or not.

She stands abruptly. The seventh, she says in my head. Is everything you ever wanted. Love. Hate. Truth. And truth, when you find it, can be dangerous.

I look up at the faint outline of a moon in the sky—a ghost—there despite the brightness of the day, sharing the sky with the sun.

Seawater, bright with sunlight, whispers up the beach and the moon sucks it back. I watch the flow, mesmerised. I’m transfixed by a cloudy phosphorescence in the water. The air is warm and I feel salt on my skin. When I turn to look at Mother, she’s gone. I look up and down the white-gold beach and out at sea, to a set of swells rising and breaking far away. When I squint against the sun, I think I see the outline of a surfer, paddling hard, dropping down the face of a giant wave. But it could be a trick of light. I step into the water, guided by instinct.

Up to my thighs.

My hips.

My chest.

A wave breaks, crashes down close to the shore, and I’m thrown off my feet. I’m flipped upside down, spinning, a sea of foam and panic in my chest.

I let go. Let myself become limp. The current carries me.

I feel it pulling. And pulling.

And I allow it.

I’m in the deep sea, on my back, with my arms out-flung, beneath a vaulted metallic-black sky, drilled with a billion stars. The world tilts and the stars are below me now and I fall out of the water into them and float through a wilderness of night, the air cool on my skin. I’m treading water through the stars. The Earth turns. The sun rises. A solar flare arcs across the dark. A bright burst of light. Then whiteness.

—

The next thing I know, I’m standing in front of a terraced house, in daylight, blinking. The street, a cul-de-sac, is empty. I’m alone. Not a single person, not a car, or a cat, or dog in sight. The whole area is deserted. The stillness is immense. I remember the dream I had about walking through an abandoned city. And Bea’s interpretation—virginity. She was wrong. I know the meaning of the dream. It was a premonition. A warning. A dream about death. I look at the house and the hairs stand up on my arms. I feel a prickle at the base of my neck. I know this street, this house. I’ve been here before. Cedar Lane. London. Bea’s house.