‘Do you think you’re ready to visit Thomas now?’ Augustine asked the following morning.
‘Almost,’ said Esme. ‘One more practice session, then the real thing.’
She wasn’t quite awake yet. For the second night in a row, she’d hardly gotten any sleep. Esme had dreamed of Mare: Mare befriending her mother, experimenting on her, hovering over her on the Isle of Mists, the faceless boy with the ice Gift at his side.
‘You can give me the pearl now and save your mother, or we can extract it from her frozen digits.’
Esme submerged her hand in the sink. As the ocean bore her into the past, she tried to focus on the case she’d chosen to visit, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Mare. Down she went, down into a dark whirlpool of memory.
The keeper’s treatment room, looking much as it did in the
