Then all Luce could hear was the howl of enraged voices. They pounded into her head, opened like gashes in her brain. A cloud of sand and shredded grass rose in her eyes, blocking her father from view. She kept on yelling into the storm, though she could hardly make out her own voice. “I’m Luce! I’m Lucette Korchak! You think you can keep me as a memory, but I’m here NOW, and I’m going to make you know who I am!” The pain rose in her head, and with the pain came a violent urge to flee, to dash away from the suffering she felt, make it stop. How much longer could she endure it?

Luce thought of her dream, and her mother’s dreamed voice sighed in her mind. Forget me just enough . . . It eased the pain a little, and Luce gathered her strength again, pulled in a long breath full of grit and twisting wind. She had to do this for Alyssa. Even as she insisted on forgetting her mother she had to honor her memory in the one way she still could, by saving the man her mother had loved so completely . . .

“FORGET ME!” Luce screamed. The scream ripped up through her chest like a whirling knife, cutting through the clamor of the voices around her. Slashing them apart . . . Luce’s mind seemed to burst into streamers of pain. Something like a wall hit her forehead, hard, and her hands flailed out against a cold rocking mass of stones. The whole world pitched below her, beating to a revolting rhythm, trembling like the skin of a drum. Luce’s stomach turned, and acid rose in her mouth and overflowed. She coughed and gagged and felt tears drenching her face as if something had ruptured inside her.

But, she realized, the world was finally getting quieter. Either that or she was going deaf.

“We know you . . .’’ the old voice said wonderingly. “We know you!”

“Of course you know me,” Luce rasped back. “You’ve been living off memories of me for two years.” She squirmed down the unsteady beach, dragging herself away from the puddled vomit on the stones. The beach seemed to lunge at her face again, and she clung to it in an effort to stop it from slamming around.

“We know you, and you are not the memory . . .” Even as the voice spoke it was changing. It sounded warmer, more alive: it was almost her father’s voice now. But it was also fading. Winds no longer seethed around her. “Lucette?”

Sunlight flashed on the wet rocks inches from her eyes. Luce saw a few dots of blurry red and realized that she was bleeding.

“Lucette?”