The woman agent’s name was Emily James. Probably they’d done that on purpose, too. Probably Emily wasn’t even her real name. She came back at nine the next morning and took him to a diner for breakfast. Unlike Ben Ellison she didn’t ask him anything about the Dear Melissa. Instead she just made friendly conversation about school, his interests: the kinds of things a dentist might ask to distract you from the fact that you were about to get your teeth drilled. Still, Dorian talked: he’d played basketball but not that well. He wanted to be a comic book artist. Back in Chicago he’d been in a band, but they were kind of half-assed and didn’t practice much. She told him all about her brother, who was an illustrator. He kept sneezing. It wasn’t too surprising that getting dragged through the Bering Sea had given him a cold.

Then Emily James took him back to the same room in the same white building. Dorian felt the tension all over his back and shoulders. He wasn’t going to even consider telling them anything, at least not until he had a chance to talk things over with Luce more. He’d be calm this time. Friendly but quiet. And he wouldn’t take anything to eat or drink unless he knew where it came from.

Ben Ellison seemed completely together again, too. He looked up at Dorian with a smile that was oddly warm, considering how things had gone the day before. “Hello, Dorian.” He was opening a laptop, and the movements of his lumpy brown fingers were surprisingly deft and graceful. He looked somehow older today, and his heavy body sprawled wearily in its chair. “I thought you could use a break from all the questions today. It seemed like it might be a better idea to go over some of the background behind this investigation instead.”

“Okay,” Dorian said. That was definitely an improvement. He wouldn’t have to talk too much. He was pleased to see that Smitt was nowhere around, too. He sat at a right angle to Ellison, who turned the laptop so they could both see the screen.

“I realized that you might have a mistaken idea. You might think that what happened to the Dear Melissa was somehow new or anomalous. But the fact is that there have been similar shipwrecks through all recorded history. Have you read the Odyssey yet?”

“Last year,” Dorian said. The screen showed a map, but it wasn’t of Alaska. He thought it might be the coast of Africa. In a few places there were patches of red dots.