“Then you’ll realize where I’m going with this. These clusters of unexplained shipwrecks have been occurring for thousands of years. In certain areas ships will start spontaneously slamming into cliffs or occasionally into each other, even in very good weather. And a feature of these shipwrecks is that there are almost never any survivors. You sometimes find the lifeboats lowered but without anyone in them or life jackets drifting around empty. And in most of these cases dry land should be quite easy to reach. That island the Dear Melissa crashed against, for example. No one made it ashore. And the same thing was true for a Coast Guard boat that smashed into the same island several weeks prior.”

Dorian began to think he’d prefer being grilled after all. He didn’t want to think about the number of deaths Luce might be responsible for. “Okay,” he said.

“You’ll admit it was strange? Almost nine hundred people on board, an island right there, and not one person swam to safety? You have to ask yourself if they actually wanted to drown. And our sole survivor turned up a dozen miles away.” He smiled at Dorian as if that was somehow a compliment.

“It’s totally strange,” Dorian agreed.

“So strange that people have come up with all kinds of wild explanations. The Greeks, of course, attributed these wrecks to the sirens, calling mariners into the rocks with irresistibly beautiful voices. You probably remember the episode in the Odyssey where Odysseus plugs his sailors’ ears with beeswax so they won’t hear the songs . . .” Dorian made his face as still and empty as possible while Ben Ellison gazed at him with blatant curiosity. Sirens: wasn’t that really just another name for mermaids? There was a disturbingly long pause. Dorian made a point of studying the map.

“That’s Africa?” Anything to keep the conversation away from sea-girls with magical voices. Ben Ellison only smiled.

“Of course,” he said, just as if Dorian hadn’t spoken, “in a more rational age people turned away from myths as a way of making sense of strange phenomena. In recent years these sinkings have usually been attributed to collective hysteria or mass hallucinations. A sudden fit of insanity that overwhelms the crew and passengers all at once. Sometimes referred to as ‘mad ship disease.’ That’s the black-humor term for it, at least.”

This didn’t add up with what they’d told him earlier. “Smitt—Agent Smitt—he said the Dear Melissa got sunk by extortionists. Like, some kind of gang . . .”

Ellison smiled, but he looked sad.

“Nobody here believes that, Dorian.”

“But Agent Smitt told my guardian—”

“Surely you of all people can appreciate our position, Dorian. It’s not so different from the problem you’ve been struggling with. We have to tell people something. Ideally something that they might possibly believe.”