Already cold and sick with dread, he followed her into the sea. She swam to the edge of the reef and quickly ducked under a craggy lip of old coral fringed with frond-draped sea creatures and quivering plants. The cold rock scraped hot over his skin as he kept close behind her, down and down into darkness, then up once more toward the pale blue-green light above. They both surfaced, still under rock, to his surprise, but in a cozy underground sphere where the water was faintly illuminated by light from some other unseen opening.

“This was the safest place to keep him,” she explained.

Then Chance saw him, folded and curled up comfortably in the center of the dim light, a tiny specimen in an invisible jar. He looked barely a year old, an age at which it was still easier and more instinctive to swim than to walk. Walking now would be out of the question. The soles of his small feet were as red and raw as the rest of him, and yet no blood tainted the water. Tears ran from Chance’s eyes into his mouth, indistinguishable from the taste of saltwater or blood, but he knew the child was in no pain. Eyes closed, limbs tucked in, the child stirred occasionally in half sleep. A small fist rose for a moment above the surface, coated with a pink, clinging sheen of water that did service in place of the skin that had been taken from him.

Chance inhaled and exhaled painfully. Something in his chest felt broken. He could not forget that this was the kind of thing that had driven him to the false ease of cynicism and contempt and the colder, more dangerous ease of indifference. Witnessing human cruelty had helped make him inhumanly cruel, forget his duty, and rebel against Patience.

The Mermaid watched him as he struggled with the human, unnecessary task of breathing. “Is it only choice that matters? Is power the only thing that makes someone real to you? Is that the only way you can see them?”

“No,” Chance whispered. “He mattered to Galina . . . to you. I can see that.”

“Love matters,” she said with a bitterness that complicated her words, as if the fact did not bring her pleasure but pain.

He did not contradict her; he did not dare. He was not sure what lesson she thought she was teaching him, but he was terribly afraid of appearing to fail.

She stayed stern a few moments longer, sighed, and spoke further. “A friend of mine was hired to be his nurse. She was with him so much that some people thought she was his mother, and I believe Galina preferred it that way. I don’t understand why. Did she hate him because he was her husband’s son or because he wasn’t? But she called him by her husband’s name. She called him Fyodor.”