an ache. I licked my lips, wanting to call out, but afraid to. “Hello?” I managed at last, still far away, lifting my voice above the crash of the surf.
His shoulders jerked back. His head snapped up. He started to turn.
I knew immediately I’d made a mistake. I scrambled backward, a yell lodged in my chest, desperately wanting to steal back that word, to stop him from turning, because I was sure, in a way that I could not explain or defend, that I did not want him to turn.
Rough hands seized my arm and yanked me around, and now I did yell. A huge man loomed over me, his hand gripping the meat of my upper arm. His face was half-hidden behind a huge gray beard, an orange knit cap jammed down over his blunt forehead.
“You,” he growled, brow knit. “What are you doing out here?” His voice was thick with a Russian accent. He smelled of damp, salty sea spray and stale cigarette smoke. Drops of moisture jeweled the bristles of his beard. A half-healed blister balanced at the edge of his bottom lip. One of his eyes was almost entirely white, the skin around it ropy with a starburst of scarring.
“I—I—” I stammered. Fear surged through me, and my breath caught in my throat.
But fear wasn’t useful. Not now. I shoved it away—not just repressing it, but flinging it away from me, into the void—the other place that was always waiting. It bled away in a rush, and I gave a small shudder of relief.
“Get your hand off my arm,” I said, cold and flat.
He peered at me through his good eye. “Do you know me?” he asked.
“No,” I said, bewildered.
He let go abruptly and took a half step back. I just stared at him. I wasn’t afraid, and there would be a price for that later, but for now I needed the calm. The empty. I did know him, though—didn’t I? It was like I remembered him from a dream. Or maybe a nightmare. “What were you looking at?” he asked, brusque and demanding.
“I saw—” I twisted back toward the water. The man was gone. In his place was a tree that must have been uprooted on some other shore and dragged here by the tides, blackened by the water and pitching as the waves rolled it. Out in the distance, Mr. Nguyen’s boat continued its steady retreat. Not vanished at all. The tree—I’d seen the tree, and somehow I’d thought it was a man.
The explanation leapt into my mind, comfortable and reassuring and false. I swallowed. No. I knew what I’d seen.
“Hey,” someone called.
The speaker was a young man—I blinked in surprise. I hadn’t expected to find anyone my age here, but he was eighteen or nineteen at the most, with black, tousled hair and a lip ring. His skin was light brown, his frame borderline scrawny; he wore a T-shirt printed with a caffeine molecule over a long-sleeved shirt. He loped up the road and slowed as he approached, the slight laboring of his breath suggesting he’d run a fair distance. When he spoke, it was with a British accent. I didn’t know enough to tell what kind, but it made him sound a lot more refined than he looked in this state.
“Everything okay here?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, tearing my eyes away from the ocean. If I said anything about a man in the water, they’d think I was delusional.
“You’re all right?” the boy pressed, looking between me and the big man, who still stood closer to me than I liked. “I heard a shout.”
“I’m fine.” True enough, with my fear neatly excised. But that glassy calm made people nervous, and the young man’s eyes were uncertain as he looked me up and down. I forced myself not to glance over my shoulder. Not to wonder if someone was behind me. “It was just a misunderstanding.”
The big man’s eyes tracked out past me, at the driftwood tree, and he gave me a narrow look. “You two, you should get inside. The mist is coming. It’s very dangerous.”
“Yeah, we’ll do that,” the boy said. The big man muttered something under his breath and walked past us, heading down the road. The boy waited for him to get a good distance away before he turned to me. “You’re the intern, then. Sophia Hayes.”
Sophia Hayes. I’m Sophia Hayes. I’d practiced it in front of a mirror until it felt natural. One of many lies I’d have