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planet!’” he said, mimicking the show’s intro perfectly. “Right?” A wide grin spread on the cameraman’s face as he remembered the early color TV series, to which he had been addicted as a boy.
    Nell nodded. “Yeah. You remember the show?”
    “Hell yeah! It brought full-color underwater photography to TV for the first time! It’s pretty legendary among my kind. So, why isn’t your name Nell Planet?”
    Nell laughed. “Our last name didn’t play well on television.”
    “So you’re following in your mom’s footsteps.”
    “Except that I chose botany,” Nell protested, parrying with her fork. “Plants never eat people.”
    “Right on.” Zero snagged a glass of iced tea from the tray of a passing server and raised a toast to her. “Conquer your fears, right?”
    Nell toasted him with her water and frowned at the dark horizon. “Something like that.”

AUGUST 23
6:29 A.M.
    She sat in the blue glow of the TV screen, holding a strange flower in her hand.
    An image of her mother coalesced on the swollen fish-eye lens of the television, dressed in khaki and a pith helmet—Saturday morning cartoon clichés in degraded 1970s color stock, a sick subconscious rerun remarkable for its budgetless sprawl.
    Behind her mother swayed a cartoon jungle of leaves, thorns, fur, eyes, pulsing, breathing, all of them melting together in a running liquid of anatomy. The jungle congealed into a giant face, and the face seemed like it had always been there. Her mother kept waving while the mouth in the jungle face opened behind her like a midnight sky.
Just as it always did.
    Nell screamed, soundlessly—the whole dream was profoundly silent, except for the clicking sound of her nails on the glass. Her mother always reached out to her, but she could never touch her through the screen. Suddenly, Nell knew she could break it…
    Nell swung the flower in her hand at the screen like an ax, andthe Monster howled in rage as its voice shrank into the clock radio alarm, beeping beside her.
    Nell jerked awake and bashed the beeper off, irritated at its complicity.
    She rose on an elbow and squinted at the dim rays streaming through the portholes of her cabin. Her neck and chest felt cool with sweat.
    So, she thought, recalling the dream, she’d had a visit from the Monster.
    Nell hadn’t had this dream for many years. Yet it still crushed her under the same debilitating fear she had felt when she was ten and dreamed it nightly.
    Today, on Henders Island, she
would
find a new flower—and she would name it after her mom. And she would finally lay her to rest, in a private ceremony so appropriately far from home.
    And with that flower she would finally slay the Monster, too— by giving it a new, and beautiful, face.
12:01 P.M.
    A sliver of shimmering light appeared on the horizon, and then the guano-crowned cliff began to rise from the ocean like a snow-capped ridge.
    Nell and the others gathered on the mezzanine deck to watch the island as it was raised.
    “What a wall!” exclaimed Dante De Santos. The muscular twenty-three-year-old cook’s assistant had Maori-style tattoos on his tanned arms, and jet-black hair combed back from a pugnacious face and tiger-opal eyes.
    Nell remembered that he was an amateur rock climber who had been itching to pull out his gear and give it some use.
    “I could make that ascent, no problem, if we can’t find a way to land, man!” he bragged. “Remember to tell the captain for me if we can’t get ashore, OK, Nell?”
    She smiled. “OK, Dante.”
    Nell watched the wide wall of Henders Island rise more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty from the horizon. The monolithic palisade seemed so lonely out here in the middle of nowhere, where so few had ever set eyes upon it. She was reminded, with a pang of uneasiness, how very far away they were from everything.
5:48 P.M.
    Revving boat engines echoed off the rock face of a cove as four Zodiacs raced toward a crescent beach.
    Two