Luce dove down again, giving herself up to the glassy dimness of the water. It was an impossible situation, and any choice she made would be wrong one way or another. She couldn’t talk to him, but she could hardly leave him in so much pain either. He was maddened by a song that had pierced into him and stayed there, barbed deep into his flesh. Luce twisted in the water, her chest tight with worry. Torment would drive him to do something crazy . . . Luce fought down a sudden, vivid image of his body snapped and bleeding on the rocks. Maybe the simplest solution would be to talk with him, just once, but it was hard to see how that could resolve anything. Schools of shimmering fish fanned through the greenish black water while the brilliant stars refracted into pale writhing blobs on the restless surface overhead.

Only the rare occasions when she skimmed up for a breath gave her any sense of passing time; she swam along in a blur of night and the liquid movements of the animals that shared the depths with her. Luce was so absorbed in her thoughts that she didn’t notice how long she’d been swimming, or how quickly. She recoiled in surprise when the coastline suddenly bent into familiar shapes: a deep cove dipped away on her right, and she noticed a certain odd, sofa-shaped rock now almost completely submerged by the tide. She was at her old tribe’s dining beach already; that rock was the one where Catarina always used to sit. It loomed in front of her, a lonely slab of darkness interrupting the rippling starlight. But the strange thing was that the rock wasn’t the only patch of black standing out against the shining water. A shape pitched up and down five yards away from Luce to the left. It took her a moment to recognize what it was: a small boat, painted jet black, and anchored in the inlet’s mouth with its engine cut. Luce darted deeper underwater and curled behind Catarina’s rock, peering around the edge at the boat in total perplexity. The moving water made the image curve and ripple, but she could still see it clearly enough. It was so bizarre, Luce thought. Humans never came to this place.