The first time Paul washed up on these shores, his body came back to him first, then his mind. He knew the precise balance of his physiology before he knew his own name, the mechanisms of survival imprinted on him since before his birth rising to life to do exactly what they were meant to do.

This time, his body has been a stranger, and there has been no respite from his mind. As he clings to Gideon, in the circles within circles of her comfort (and he knows them, he knows her), his abstracted observational self wonders at the extent of his adaptation.

It would have ruined him to know himself the first time. It would have drowned him to feel this in the rotting ruins of the beach: the way he sinks back into himself and finds the wreckage waiting for him.

Grief is an echo in every hollow space. Grief is opening the door of the home the storm drove you from and finding nothing behind it but crumpled debris. Grief is a salt-scour, a dark and crushing wave, a gravitational collapse. Grief is hot and wet around his eyes as he shudders like a thing coming apart, held together only by Gideon's anchoring arms.

"Palamedes is gone," Paul says, in his own voice, and then, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," and, finally, as if surprised, he starts to cry - shaking, near-silent, as pulsing and uncontrolled as blood flowing from a wound.