There was a dull rattling noise. Luce shook herself, annoyed at the sound’s intrusion on her sleep. She wanted to dream on, unmoving, for a hundred years. Her cheek squeezed harder against the pebble shore as if that could make the sound go away. That seemed to help, and Luce drifted again, dimly aware that there was something strange about the air here, the wind. The warmth of the water soothed her, and there was a vague whispering licking in and out of the breeze. There were sounds that were almost words, but she couldn’t make out what they were trying to tell her. She slept on, dreaming that she was pressing her ear against the page of a whispering book, unable to understand the story.

The crunching noise came back, and this time her irritation was sharper. “Cut it out,” Luce murmured. It was a regular, repeating sound of small pebbles grinding together. Then her eyes flashed wide open, taking in the feeble daylight, and she froze. That was the sound of human footsteps, and they weren’t so far away. As lightly and silently as she could Luce slid back under the water, her heart throbbing frantically. There was no way to tell if she’d been seen. She skimmed behind the rocky pinnacle she’d knocked against the day before and then let her head glide upward very slowly until her eyes hovered just above the glinting skin of the water. She kept her movements as light and soft as drifting seaweed so that she wouldn’t attract attention and peered around the edge of the rock.

A hunched human figure stood on the beach some thirty feet away from her. Clumps of brownish hair hid his face, and his tall frame was so heavily swaddled in crudely stitched-together seal skins that he barely looked human at all. His feet were wrapped in strips of fur bound together with grayish strands that Luce realized were probably dried intestines. He walked with a slow, shambling gait, his matted beard swaying. If he’d noticed Luce he gave no sign of it. Instead he just shuffled tiredly to the water’s edge and stood there, staring down with sullen concentration.

The murmuring in the wind seemed to gather itself just a bit tighter, knot into sounds that were somehow closer to becoming actual words, though Luce still couldn’t make them out. An electrical prickling brushed through her skin. Whatever it was she was hearing, she was sure she wasn’t imagining it. The tone became a little softer, more like a whirl of blurred human voices; it sounded like a troop of invisible dancers who kept whispering insistently as they spun. Luce thought there was something disturbingly familiar about those voices. Hearing them felt like trying to recapture a lost memory. The memory kept purring and buzzing and hinting at itself but always stayed just out of reach . . .