Luce spent the next several days circling the island, getting her bearings and searching for the man she’d seen. Her memory of hearing her father’s voice mingled with the muttering voices of the island, blurring and shifting until she wasn’t sure what to think. Maybe the voices had unsettled her mind, colored her thoughts, tricked her. Probably that hadn’t really been her father’s voice at all, and the castaway living here was a stranger. After all, it seemed crazy to hope that her father could have made it to this obscure island after the High and Mighty went down. And even if he had, what were the odds that she’d have somehow washed up in the exact same spot? But if there was any chance, however slight, that Andrew Korchak was miraculously still alive and that she’d found him again—Luce could hardly let herself think about it—she’d do whatever it took to bring him safely home.

Sometimes she’d catch sight of the man in the distance, his shapeless figure perched on an outcropping of rock or pacing along a beach. But by the time she’d raced to the spot he was always gone, always climbing inland where she couldn’t follow, and she’d go back to exploring. It was something to do, something to keep herself from thinking too much and sliding into alternating bouts of frantic hope and sluggish moodiness.

The island wasn’t all that big, really, and the temperature of the water surrounding it varied from patches of uncomfortable, upwelling heat to areas that were almost as cold as it had been in her home territory. It was warm enough, though, that the shores were free of clinging ice. Ice floes drifted past, but there was none of the rubbery nilas that had formed in her old cave. It took Luce a day to realize that there must be underwater volcanic vents and that the steam she saw rising between rocks high on the island probably came from some kind of hot spring. The tiny waterfall she found in a bend of the coast was much warmer than the surrounding air and gave off an unpleasant mineral stench she couldn’t identify.