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didn’t even say good night to the bartender. Luce peered back to see the bartender watching them from the door. His forehead was wrinkled with worry, but when he saw Luce looking he smiled at her and waved. Luce didn’t dare to wave back, though. It would only make her uncle angrier, and she was already afraid of what he might do once they reached the house.
    The sky above was vast and dark, but the clouds had thinned enough that a yellowish blot showed where the moon must be.
    Her uncle steered them toward the cliff path while the cold wind buffeted their faces. Neither of them spoke, and the only sounds were the wind in their ears and Luce’s fast soft steps alongside her uncle’s, which came slower and heavier, grinding the pebbles like 32 i LOST VOICES
    teeth. He didn’t let go of Luce’s neck, and she didn’t look at him. Below them a few beacon lights bobbed on the midnight blue harbor.
    After a while her uncle wasn’t walking beside her anymore, but behind her. He still had his left hand in a hard grip on her neck, and now his right hand curled around her shoulder and stroked her awkwardly. Luce didn’t know what to think. Her uncle never touched her except to slap her. She wanted to pull away, but she couldn’t take the risk of enraging him.
    The path turned and led upward, and the harbor was behind them. Now the cloud- dulled moonlight cast its faint haze on crashing waves some eighty yards below.
    They were still walking, but much more slowly. The dreamlike darkness filled Luce’s eyes, and then she felt her uncle’s hands slide down to grab her hips. He pulled her back so she was pressing on his body and rolled himself against her.
    She tried to cry out, then. She tried to beg him to stop. Her voice was stuck deep inside her, and the night filled her mouth like a choking gas and she couldn’t make a sound, not even when she heard the zipper of her jeans sliding down and felt his thick fingers groping hungrily under the fabric. Her legs shuddered the way glass does in the moment just before it breaks.
    He pushed her down on the grass and she started to crawl away, but his hands were on her, pulling her back, digging inside her clothes. She could taste the long grass, feel the jagged stones slicing at her palms. His breath was loud and fast, and Luce gathered all her strength; she was going to at least try to fight, even though he was so much bigger than her. She would rake his eyes out, hurt him as much as she possibly could. Sud-i 33
    denly she didn’t care how angry she made him. She didn’t even care if he threw her off the cliff. What reason could there be for her to stay alive when everyone who’d ever cared about her was dead, lost forever, and she was so utterly alone? With a desperate wrench of her torso she managed to flip herself over and he grappled with her, throwing one heavy knee onto her stomach.
    One leaden hand cracked across her face so hard that her head crunched into the stones, and she heard something pop in her neck. Pain swelled in so many parts of her body that she couldn’t keep track of it all: a dark confusion of aches.
    The clouds tore back from the moon, and golden light spilled across Luce’s face. Her uncle Peter had his back to the moon so that all she could see was the black silhouette of his head and shoulders looming over her. His knee was still crushing into her gut, pinning her down, but after a second she realized that he had stopped yanking at her jeans. Luce’s heart was racing and her breath sounded like tearing paper. They stayed like that for so long that Luce thought it couldn’t be real, that she must have fallen into some other world.
    “Alyssa?” her uncle finally whimpered. He sounded baby-ish, weak. “Alyssa, I didn’t mean it.” He staggered up onto his feet and stood there for a minute staring down at Luce sprawled on the grass, his giant’s body wavering as if he wasn’t sure what to do.
    “I’m not her, ” Luce rasped. She barely