He saw it, at last, nestled at the back of a dresser drawer behind a pastel cotton shirt. It was a tiny plastic vial about the size of a film canister, unlabeled. In the opaque hollow of it, something rattled.

He pried up the lid with his thumbnail.

The odor was faint, pungent, attractive. He rolled out a tiny black pill onto his palm. The pill was resinous with age; there was only one.

It was something she had saved, he thought. A kind of insurance; or a proof of something, an object lesson.

He touched his finger to the oil at the bottom of the vial and raised it to his tongue.

Bitter, astringent taste. But the faintest sense of well-being swept through his body.

Enkephalins, he thought. In potent concentration.

He tumbled the pill back into its container, snapped shut the lid.

For the second time, he smiled to himself.

2. Her dreams were worse after Keller left.

The little girl again, of course. But the tone of the dream had changed. She had learned too much from the Pau Seco stone. The little girl appeared against a terrifying montage of the fire: flame, smoke, and frightened faces. Her eyes were wide and soot-streaked, and she was alone, cut off from the mainland, afraid for her life.

“I need you,” the girl said. “I saved you once! It’s only fair! You can’t let me die here!”

But in the dreams she could only turn away.

The dreams left her sweating. She woke up alone at the back of this new balsa deep in the Floats, lost a moment in the darkness, the unfamiliar spaces. Byron slept in the front room, which doubled as kitchen; she slept in the back. Stirring, she felt as hollow as a bottle tossed up from the sea. The floor rose in a momentary swell, as if a hand had lifted the boat. She closed her eyes resolutely and prayed that she would not dream again.

Morning came hours later, a lightening at the room’s single high window.

She sat up, wrapped a robe around herself, drew a deep breath. Since Belem she had felt mostly numb. Numb and rootless and empty. The way Keller felt, maybe. Angel fugue. Except she was not an Angel. Only herself, moving through this fog. Periodically she would ask herself how she felt, how she really felt, but it was like tonguing an abscessed tooth: the pain overwhelmed the curiosity.

She moved to the kitchen and fried an egg for Byron over the old electric grill. It was the last of their food.

Byron was wearing khaki fatigue pants and his moth-eaten combat jacket. She looked at him but could find nothing to say. She had not talked to him much—really talked—since Belem. Some barrier of guilt or shame had come down between them. She hadn’t even hinted at what she had seen in her ’lith trance, the complexities of time and history, the world’s or hers. When he finished eating, he stood up and hooked his eyeglasses back of his ears. He was going out, he said.

“Where to?”

“Making contacts,” he said vaguely. “We need cash if we’re going to stay here. There are people who owe me.”

“You have to go?” He nodded.

“Well,” she said. “Be careful.”

He shrugged.

Being alone was the worst thing.

It surprised her, how much she hated it. Better to have things to do. Keeping busy helped.

Byron had left her grocery money. So she would shop, she thought, wander out along the market canal to the big stalls by the tidal dam. That would be good. She tucked the cash into her shirt pocket and buttoned it. Check the cooler, she thought. Cheap rental cooler, came with this cheap pontoon shack. There was a bottle of fresh water, a loaf of stale bread. They needed, let’s see, fruit, vegetables, maybe even a little meat. Something to keep body and soul together.

She had skipped her own breakfast.

The market canal, then. But first she stepped back into the small room she had made her own, regarded the tousled bed and, more carefully, the antique Salvation Army dresser. Idly, she pulled open the top drawer.

The Brazilian stone was inside.

It looked small and unprepossessing in a nest of her clothes. Ordinary… until you looked closely at it, allowed its angles to seduce the eye, stared until you couldn’t stop staring. A part of her was tempted to pick it up.

A part was not. She slammed shut the drawer.

She had regained a sense of its alienness. It was the stone, she thought, that had driven Keller away. In that moment in the hotel room in Belem, she had seen into the heart of him, the terrible guilt he had hoarded all these years. The dying woman in Rondonia: Meg, her name was. His hesitation. Worse, the caustic sense of his own cowardice.

She understood, of course. It was not a difficult sin to forgive.

But he could not bear that she had seen.

And there was the rest of it. The little girl, the fire, the terrible man Carlos. She had lost so much: not just Ray but a sense of purpose, her intimacy with the stones, the idea of a future…

She put it out of her mind. She would think about it later. She left the float, double-locked the door, joined the crowds on the pontoon walkway beside the big canal. The sun was bright and she held up her face to it, eyes squeezed shut. She wished she could see the ocean.

Walking felt so good that she forgot about the shopping. She walked past the big stalls with their colorful awnings, past the market boats moored against the boardwalk, turning instinctively toward the sea.

The walkway looped north and parallel to the seawall. She climbed a set of chain-link risers until she was level with the broad concrete lip of the dam. Public Works property, isolated in its churning moat of floodwater, huge turbines down there somewhere. To the south she could see a line of abandoned factories and warehouses, waste stacks starkly black against the cloudless sky. To the east, across the tangle of the Floats, a hint of the mainland; the razorback San Gabriels. North, more boat shanties … the tidal dam tapering landward. And to the west there was the sea.

Gulls circled overhead and dive-bombed a refuse boat.

The wind smelled of salt and sea wrack. She should have brought a sweater.

Keller was gone, of course. The scary thing was that she both knew it and understood it. Because of what she had seen, he could not bear her presence. It was logical and inevitable.

But she felt the loss more deeply than she could have anticipated.

Funny how things changed. For a while she had known what she wanted. She had wanted the mystery of the dream-stone; she had wanted a door into her past. But it was like that proverb about answered prayers. She understood more about the Exotics, probably, than anyone outside the federal research programs: their origins, their history. They were vivid in her mind even yet. But there was still something fundamentally alien about them, some profound dissonance between their world and hers. She felt it, a stab of poignancy inside her, a silence where there might have been voices.

The mystery of her own past was just as obdurate. She was the little girl, of course: the little girl was Teresa. Teresa before the fire. She knew that now. But knowing was not enough. Memory was the memory of old pain. What she wanted, she realized, was healing. But the ’lith couldn’t do that. The stone only remembered. Healing, it seemed to imply, was up to her: some act of reconciliation she could not begin to imagine.

Maybe there was no such thing. Maybe the past was always and only the past. Taunting, fixed, unassailable. You couldn’t talk to the past.

She walked north through unfamiliar floats. She was not sure where she was going. She just walked—“following her feet,” Rosita used to say. Her feet carried her down pontoon bridges, past crowded market stalls. She paid no attention to the Spanish and English voices swirling around her. She thought a little about wanting and getting. The paradox of it. Wanting the dreamstone, she had found Keller. Now she wanted Keller… but the stone had driven him away.