It wasn’t the same pool, the large, deep pool where she had spoken to the Mermaid, the pool where the Mermaid had died. It was smaller and warmer. She should have felt safe. She gripped the edge with both hands and moved her feet cautiously, going deeper while the therapist walked alongside her. She felt her body lift as the water closed around her. The lightness was disconcerting, the buoyancy gently stretching joints and vertebrae that had been compressed for a long time. It was almost pleasant, but then she understood that what she was experiencing was not pleasure but a lessening of the constant pain that had become a part of her very self, an extra layer of being over sense and sensation.

She smiled tentatively at the therapist, who smiled back. “It’s not so bad,” she admitted.

Dangerous words. A slicing, shattering pain seized her. She cried out and reached desperately for the side, falling slowly through the water, her ankles suddenly too weak to bear her up. It’s not the same pool! her mind protested as she tried and failed to banish the image of the Mermaid sinking gently into oblivion. But injustice haunts people, not places.

Behind her closed eyes, the darkness flickered and became dominated entirely by a flat stone path that coiled haphazardly over hard-packed earth for as far as she could see.

She found and gripped the edge just as the therapist took hold of her arm. “Sorry,” she said, her voice hoarse and shaking. “I lost my footing.”

“Open your eyes,” the therapist said gently.

She did so, blinking and glancing around at the walls and ceiling.

“What are you looking for?” the therapist asked.

“Spiders,” Miranda whispered without thought, then tried to backtrack. “Sparkles. I mean . . . you know how your vision gets those funny sparkles just before you faint?”

“Let’s get you out of the water,” was the immediate reply.

With the hydrotherapy session cut short, there was nothing for her to do except wait in the main reception area for a half hour more until Khabir’s driver came to take her back to the villa. She was particularly surprised, then, to see Khabir appear at the entrance of the hospital. Her first thought was that the therapist had, counter to her request, contacted Khabir at work, but then his eyes met hers with a look of equal surprise. He wavered visibly, then came over to her.

“I thought you’d still be in therapy,” he began.

“Yes,” she said quickly, cutting him off before he could proceed to the logical How did it go, a question that she did not want to hear, much less answer. “But what are you doing here?”

“I’m meeting with Dr. Boadu,” he replied, lowering his voice and looking away from her.

“This is in connection with the Mermaid?” she asked. “May I come?”