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“Better.”

I didn’t want the approval to warm me like a hug, but it did.

“Fourth,” he said, “Don’t follow everything you see.”

I glanced at the cave again. “What does that mean?”

“It means fear makes you obedient. But you can’t allow yourself to be controlled.”

“So what do I do?”

“You wait for what you came for.”

“And if it isn’t Clemency?”

“Then give it nothing. You don’t owe the dead anything.”

The wind died down. The beach was too quiet.

“And whatever you do,” he said, “don’t let it give you comfort.”

“Comfort?”

“Yes.”

I hated that idea even more. The thought of it landed like a putrid lick across the face, something that would soothe me and caress me with its hideous gnarly fingers, until it swooped in to knock the air right out of my lungs.

“Anchor yourself to the fact that I’ll be right there,” Damian was saying, still holding me, “just outside the circle, the cave, wherever we are.”

He looked at me like he was waiting for it to all click.

“Okay,” I said. “But what if it doesn’t work?”

“Then stop.”

“But—”

“No, Marlowe. You can stop before we begin. You can stop halfway through. You can walk out, and no one’s going to say you failed.”

I nodded and turned toward the cave.

“I’ll be right here,” I heard him say.

The cave breathed cold air over my face. The tide pools lay black at my feet.

This is fine, I told myself. People do this for fun. People squeeze themselves through wet, lightless crevices for sport and then buy commemorative T-shirts.

Three feet in, I stopped.

The dark swallowed the beach behind me almost immediately. It took the sky first, then the cliff, then the thin line of dusk at the cave mouth, until the only thing left was the briny rot the walls breathed out with me.

I kept walking, slowly and evenly. Damian was outside. The entrance was behind me. The tide was low. I had time.

The sand gave under my boots, uneven and slick. My foot slipped into a tide pool and cold water swallowed my ankle, the sand sucking at my heel so suddenly I gasped before I could stop myself. I held still. Feet first. Breath low. I pulled free, and the sound of it was obscene, a wet release the cave echoed back to me.

When I turned, the way out was gone. The bend in the rock had hidden it. There was only a dull paleness on the wall where the last of the outside light had gone to die.

The tide moved in quietly behind me, thin silver fingers curling over the rock, touching my boots, withdrawing. Still too small to call a wave. Just the sea remembering the path.