Again and again Luce drifted into a murky half-sleep, only to catch herself with a jolt as she began to slip from the ice floe that carried her. Sliding into these black, mountain-steep waves would probably kill her. She was so exhausted that she didn’t think she’d be able to keep swimming long before her strength gave out and she sank weakly to impossible depths. Sometimes at the top of a tall surge she’d take advantage of the height by quickly scanning the horizon, but she couldn’t see land anywhere. Nothing but the rollicking waves, the flying gouts of foam and maddened snow.

She fell into a kind of trance, letting her mind lunge and spin with her body. Sometimes she saw white bursts of light on the inside of her closed lids; at other moments she thought she heard Nausicaa’s voice. Her arms were racked with cramps and seemed paralyzed in their endless grip on the ice. Luce couldn’t understand how she still had the strength to hold on, hour after hour. At one point her hands seemed to melt into an icy liquid and she almost let them give way, almost yielded to a fall with no end.

What matters is that you made the choice to save me as you did, Nausicaa whispered in Luce’s ear. Her voice was so vivid and warm that Luce couldn’t tell if it was dream or reality, but it broke through her trance and brought her back to awareness of her loosening hands. She tightened her grip on the floe again until its ragged edges scraped the soft skin of her inner arms.

It also mattered if she made the choice to save herself, Luce thought. And she was sure that Nausicaa would agree with her.

At some point the water turned strangely warm. At some point the floe stopped its feverish lunging and only pranced gently, knocking against a rocky pinnacle that stuck straight up out of the water. The wind still shrieked, but it seemed to pass by above without striking her anymore. More important, the waves barely sloshed across her tail. Luce looked up in a daze and realized that she’d arrived at a small conical island with a few dense patches of steeply leaning spruce and an uneven coast. Everything was padded in thick snow. The island didn’t seem to be part of the Aleutian chain. There was nothing in sight but water, and far in the distance a dark blue line that could be either land or a ribbon of settling storm clouds.

Luce tumbled off the floe into shallow water. She’d barely managed to drag herself to a spot where she could rest her head on the shore before she was seized by sleep.

∗ ∗ ∗