They were walking again, but Dorian still couldn’t see Ben Ellison well enough to make out the expression of his face. “If you’re talking about me, I’m totally fine.” Dorian impatiently snapped the words out but then realized that his heart was racing. The hill sloped steeply away at their feet and he felt a rush of vertigo.

Ellison seemed not to have heard him. He was staring at the sea as if he half expected it to come rushing up the hill and engulf them. “Maybe you remember something I told you that time you came to Anchorage. I mentioned then that there have been very few recorded survivors of shipwrecks like the one you were on.”

“So?” Dorian’s voice wavered audibly. They were passing in front of a tiny gray house with brightly shining windows, its curtains drawn back, and golden light spilled over them both.

Ellison abruptly stopped and wheeled toward him, taking him by the shoulders. His broad fingers squeezed in so hard it hurt. “Dorian, you’re frightened. I can hear that you are. And you should be. You still have some instinct for self-preservation, and if you’ll only listen to what your instincts are telling you . . . you might grow up to be a very interesting person.”

Dorian reeled a little in Ellison’s grip, unsure if he should try to pull away. Wasn’t there something skittish, even a little crazy, in the older man’s eyes?

Ellison kept on, his voice hard but also somehow distracted. “I realized that I needed to investigate. To find out what happened to the other people who went through experiences similar to yours. It wasn’t easy. But I did discover—unsurprisingly, I suppose—that most of your fellow survivors have also been young males.” Ellison made a sound that was almost like laughter, but his mouth was twisted downward. He was staring into Dorian’s face without actually meeting his eyes.

It was all so strange that Dorian had trouble processing what Ellison was saying to him. Then it hit him: unsurprisingly the survivors were young men? For some reason Dorian felt offended by the statement.

Ellison let go of Dorian’s shoulders, but he didn’t move out of his path. “In two of the cases where I was able to track down records, the young men in question went permanently insane. Institutionalized. There was a case like that twenty-five years ago, outside Anadyr, Russia—”