The voices had retreated a few feet up the beach, and suddenly Luce caught the thread of a different voice: not at all the gruff, crumbling voice that had spoken to her earlier, but a woman’s, relaxed and sweet and confident. Luce knew from the first instant that she’d heard it many times before, long ago but also perhaps more recently. “If we get a little girl,” the voice said clearly, “what would you think about calling her Lucette? Carly told me it means ‘little light’ and that’s just what she’s going to be for us. Our own little light in a world that . . . isn’t necessarily the brightest place.”

Luce felt a painful stillness seize hold of her heart, and all her efforts at self-control gave way as hot tears welled in her eyes. She understood at once what she was hearing. It was her mother. Actually, she realized, it was her father’s memory of her mother talking to him before Luce was even born. This was what her father meant when he’d said that the voices had been “feeding on his brains,” what the voices themselves meant when they told her that they had his memories . . . Luce went stone still, yearning only to hear more, to forget the world around her completely. “Oh, now, that’s real pretty,” her father’s voice answered out of the invisible swarm. “I’m not as crazy about Lucy, though. Had a probation officer called Lucy once, and she was a serious nutjob. So if were gonna call the little one something for short . . .”

“Luce,” Alyssa Gray said, and Luce jumped with the longing to answer her. In the next instant, though, she realized that her mother wouldn’t hear her no matter how she called. The voice she’d heard was trapped in the past, but now the past was all Luce wanted. She waited in frozen silence for the conversation to continue, but it seemed to be breaking up, sinking back into senseless mutterings, scattered half-words. The whirl of voices was sliding closer to her again, but this time Luce was eager to let it come. Her lost mother was in there somewhere, the mother she barely remembered, sweet but also unexpectedly cynical. Even if Alyssa was no more than a memory, an empty wraith, Luce might finally get to know her in the only way she still could.

It wasn’t Alyssa’s voice that emerged from the swarm. “Child of Proteus,” the old, laborious voice hissed. “Leave.” Now its tone was high-pitched and questioning and maybe, Luce thought, just a little scared. It was begging her to go.