“I hope you will defy, not only Proteus, but everything I know of the world. Everything I’ve seen in my three thousand years. I hope you will be the one who discovers the strength to make a different choice. Then someday, dearest Luce, I will find you again . . .”

All Luce could see through her tears were bright webs of blue glow. Her cheek was suddenly cold where Nausicaa’s hand had been, and the icy wind buffeted her shoulders, tossed her short hair. She didn’t hear a splash, but even so she knew that Nausicaa was gone, and gone forever.

Her parents couldn’t help dying, Luce told herself. They’d left her for somber regions she knew nothing about, but they hadn’t wanted to go. But Nausicaa had abandoned her here on this cold beach voluntarily, purely because Luce wasn’t doing what Nausicaa wanted her to do. Luce heard her own sobs merging with the larva’s wails.

∗ ∗ ∗

Later that day Dorian met her in the rowboat, and she towed him through the daytime night to their secret shallow cave under the overhanging roots. But it hurt Luce to be there. It was incredible to think that only yesterday she’d sat on these stones listening to Dorian and Nausicaa talking, feeling annoyed and left out of the conversation. Now, of course, she would have given anything to have Nausicaa appear and interrupt their privacy. The sea seemed so brutal, so infinite in its rough indifference, like a monster that would only talk to itself. Dorian held Luce tight—she could hardly feel the shape of his body through all the winter layers—and stroked her hair while she cried.

“I was just getting to like her,” Dorian observed wryly. “At first I thought she was such a bitch. But, Luce, listen—”

“Why didn’t she understand that I can’t leave you? It seems so unfair . . .” Luce was dimly aware that she was being a little childish, but she couldn’t help it. She felt as if her father’s ship had just vanished, as if she’d watched her mother dying a second time, as if Catarina had run away from her again, all at once. She just couldn’t stand to lose people anymore.

“Luce? Baby? Listen. I know you don’t want to hear it, but I swear it’s better this way.”

Luce looked up at him, outraged. Was he still resentful of the time she’d rushed off to save Nausicaa’s life? “Just because you had to row home that night, and you got, like, jealous—”

“Not because of that,” Dorian sighed. He was still gently caressing Luce’s back and hair as he spoke, and her face rested on his shoulder. “I admit I was a jerk about that. Okay? But Luce, Nausicaa didn’t mean to, but she’s kind of been holding you back.”