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not bothering with any singing games this time, and popped up fifty yards from the cliffs. She was careful to hold her face lowered toward the water, to keep him from seeing a telltale patch of pale skin out on the dark waves. Luce hovered in place with just a slight rippling of her fins, comfortable with the steep lift and fall as her body rode the swells.
    His voice was very faint at this distance, a melodic scratching on the wind, but he was there. Luce was incredulous, again, at just how terrible human singing was, but he was clearly doing his best to reproduce the song Luce had used back when she’d lured humans to their deaths. Really, he sounded even worse than last time, as if he’d sung his throat raw. The notes croaked and sputtered, flapping awkwardly over the sea like wounded crows. She didn’t know whether to think it was funny—or horribly, wrenchingly sad.
    His voice was thick with heartsickness, Luce realized, with icy grief and loneliness as blue-black as the Alaskan sky in deep winter. And all that suffering was her fault. As she kept listening, she noticed a new emotion seeping from that voice as well: frustration and the beginnings of rage. He was getting furious with her for failing to appear. He wouldn’t just give up, Luce suddenly realized. Instead he’d only turn crazier, more extreme...
    Didn’t he understand that she couldn’t talk to him? The timahk stood between them, of course, along with the risk that her old tribe would discover them together, but there was also the whole untamed vastness of the sea. Luce remembered reading somewhere that the sea covered two-thirds of the earth. To humans the sea was only an afterthought, but in reality it was the dominant force, the roiling mind of the planet, and she was a part of it now. As far as the sea was concerned, human life —his life—was filthy and insignificant. Just a source of leaking poisons.
    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