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I thought Callie was crying, but then I saw it was a happy kind of sobbing. Beside me Jess had gone slack, yielding to whatever had unlocked inside her. Priya was crying silently, tears moving down her face like dew from a leaf, and I understood dimly that whatever was happening was happening to all of us.

The surf came in again, softer still. The sea had gone quiet, like it was holding its breath, and the fog around us leaned.

“There,” Aurora said from the shore behind us. Her voice had changed, like something had moved through her, though I couldn’t have told you what. “There you are. All of you. Received.”

Received. The word went into me, just like the warmth, and lay down like it belonged there.

I looked up, and the fog overhead had thinned to a bright smear where the moon was. One moon now, huge and blurred and pale as a face.

Then the warmth crested, rising through my chest and my throat like the tide, and it broke, gently, everywhere, and I almost lost my footing.

Kai must have seen me swaying. He was suddenly behind me, steadying me.

“It’s okay,” he said, and for a long time after that night, I asked myself what I’d heard in his voice. Why it sounded different. Older, perhaps.

I found my balance, my hand on his shoulder, and the Pacific tilted. The cold was now creeping in, under my skin. Aurora’s voice was somewhere behind me, drowned in the surf.

“Come back to the beach,” Kai was saying, guiding me out of the water.

I followed him out, the waves trying their best to tug me back again. The others were already standing on the sand, as dazed and jellied as I was. Aurora was walking from one woman to the next, the hem of her dress dark from seawater, holding something, but in the dark I couldn’t make it out.

Then she was at my side, and I saw she held a wooden bowl and white cloths, three wrinkled in the bowl, a fresh one folded over the edge. She took the fresh one in her hand.

“We don’t keep the mark,” she said, then wiped my forehead. But she didn’t stop there. She wiped the rest of my face, then my neck, then my wrists, like a mother gently wiping down a toddler after lunch. “Saltwater dries the delicate facial skin,” she said.

The cloth came away dark, and even in the low light, I could see that the darkness on it looked like the darkness on the cloths a dentist passes you when something has gone wrong with a tooth.

Aurora put the last cloth in the wooden bowl, handed it to Kai, and didn’t look at it again.

Chapter Four

Iwoke at some black hour with a mouth like a salt flat and an empty water bottle.

The cacao haze had mostly burned off me. What was left was even stranger: a low hum under my skin, warm and thrumming through me like a current. My head was clear. My blood was not.

I remembered there was a jug at the dinner table. I pulled the blanket around my shoulders and went out barefoot into the fog. The fire was burned down to a low orange rubble.

Someone was sitting beside it. A man.

He was on one of the stones, elbows on his knees, turning a stick in the coals. Dark hair, half an inch past orderly. Absurdly good-looking, in a way that’s frankly rude at two in the morning, when a person has no defenses up and a blanket for an outfit. The first thought that came into my head was that he was there as part of the staging. Then I almost laughed at how illogical that was. Aurora wasn’t hiring ornamental men to hang out in case one of us stumbled out of our tents. And then I noticed his body, in a dark Henley that fit him brutally well, and I was even more annoyed that I looked like a Victorian ghost.

He looked up before I’d made a sound.

“There’s water at the table,” he said.

He nodded at the jug. Four enamel camp cups sat next to it. I poured one.

I joined him at the fire because it was warm and the air was not. The hum under my skin had noticed him. I told it to sit down.

“Do you work here, or were you taking a beach stroll in the middle of the night?”

“I’m on security tonight.”

“Does security have a name?”

“Damian.”

Of course Aurora’s unreasonably handsome security guy would have a dark-romance name.