“Wait up!” I call.
“She’s fine,” Linus says, pitching his voice so I can hear him easily over the surf. When we fall into step together, he dodges lightly around me to walk on my left side.
“So I can see you,” he says.
I put a hand on his arm and make him stop so I can look at his eyes again, this time more carefully. In the brightness by the water, the difference between his eyes is more pronounced, and the fixed, glassy black dot over his left pupil is distinctly bigger than his right one. His good eye, his right, looks far more alive. From now on, I’ll make a point of looking directly at that one.
Suddenly, I register the frank way he’s watching me back.
“It’s all right. Look your fill,” he says.
My fingers tingle. I’d love to cover his left eye with the palm of my hand like I did in my vision. Will I ever do that in real life?
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “My depth perception is off, but it’s getting better as I get used to one eye. I have another appointment with the doctor in September. She’s supposed to take the camera out then. If it works, I’ll be back to normal.”
“Really? That would be great,” I say.
“It would,” he says, and starts walking again.
Glancing ahead to see that Dubbs is fine, I go with him.
“I’m sorry I was so suspicious of you back when we realized about your eye,” I say.
“It was a lot to take in,” he says. “After you left me, I went back to town, and the first thing I did was pick up a patch to cover my eye. I thought it would help, but it only made me more conscious every second of everything the spy was seeing, all the minutia. I went to help Parker shave, and I thought, The spy knows about this. I didn’t want to believe it, but it was the only thing that made sense.” He shakes his head briefly. “The spy knows about this. The spy knows about that. It infuriates me when I think about it too much. I’m still hyperaware of everything I’m doing, like Berg’s a filter over my vision even though I’ve blocked him out.”
“You have a phantom audience,” I say.
He frowns at me curiously. “How’s that?”
“It’s not quite the same,” I say. “I think yours is worse, far worse actually, but people who’ve been on Forge keep feeling cameras watching them even after they’re not on the show anymore.”
“It’s intolerable.”
The coldness of his voice startles me, and I feel my tension returning. “I’m really sorry,” I say.
“It’s not your fault,” he says. “You know, saving your parents isn’t going to be enough. You said it yourself once. If we don’t get rid of Berg, you’ll never be free of him. Neither will I.”
I’m shocked to hear him say it out loud. “You’d actually kill him?”
Linus turns his face away, squinting toward the horizon. “I don’t know what I’m saying.” A long moment later, he returns his gaze to me and smiles oddly. “Do you ever wonder if The Forge Show was just practice for the real world?”
“Like we’re still on the show, only now it’s everywhere?” I ask.
He nods.
“Yes,” I say.
I’m still processing the way he implied he’d be willing to kill Berg. I keep thinking I know Linus, but I’m not sure what this says about him.
I glance toward the cliffs, gauging them for possible cameras, but that would be absurd. Fifty yards ahead, a fence and a tumble of wooden beams scar a patch of the steep slope, and it’s easy to guess that a cottage once clung above the tumble. The beach below, however, is perfectly clear. The ruin has been fully swept away by long-gone waves.
I look ahead to where Dubbs is playing, and I twist my feet in the sand as we follow.
“As soon as Lavinia returns, I want to go back to Grisly and look for my parents,” I say. “What do you suppose is keeping her?”
“I don’t know.”
Beside me, Linus pauses to look at something on the bottom of his foot. Then he keeps walking. “If you want to talk about your dad, I’ll listen.”
“You mean my real dad, or Larry?”
“Either,” he says.
I can still barely believe what Thea told me. I don’t want to go there. When I got upset before, it helped Arself come forward.
“There’s nothing special about Larry,” I say. “He’s just a dick.”
“Then what did Dubbs mean up there, before?”
I was afraid Linus caught that. It’s hard to figure out what to say. I don’t know if Linus remembers, but he asked me once before if Larry ever hit me. I lied then.
“He hits me some,” I say. “He has a temper. He’s the reason why I couldn’t wait to leave home.”
Linus comes to a stop, and I know he’s looking at me, but I keep my gaze down the beach, toward Dubbs.
“Does your mother know?” he asks.
“Yeah. She tries to stop him, but she thinks I aggravate him.” I let out a laugh. “I do, by existing.”
“This isn’t good,” Linus says.
Tell me about it, I think. The breeze blows a strand of hair in my mouth, and I pull it out, tasting salt.
“I’ll beat his brains out if he ever touches you again,” he says. “But you still want to save him?”
I shrug. “Maybe he’ll be nicer after I do.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I don’t know,” I say, and nod in my sister’s direction. “Ma loves him and he’s good to Dubbs.” I really don’t want to think about him and I’m glad Linus doesn’t press me further. “Let’s catch up.”
When we do, Dubbs has collected a little pile of smooth, black stones, and she passes me a cool one that fits in the inner circle of my palm. It triggers a sense of familiarity, and a second later I recall picking a similar stone out of the box in DeCoster’s class at Forge. Burnham chose the same kind, too. Funny. I recall how I wanted to visit an ocean then, and now, here I am. How strange the way things loop around.
“Take a picture,” Dubbs says.
“I left my phone upstairs,” Linus says.
“That’s okay,” she says, and tosses the stone aside. “We’ll just remember.” She runs off ahead of us again, never going too far. She’s the very picture of a free spirit, with the sunlight in her hair and her skinny, limber limbs. I glance back the way we came on the chance Lavinia has arrived and come looking for us, but the beach is bare.
“You like the shore?” Linus asks, lifting his face to the sun.
“It’s gorgeous.”
“My family used to visit the shore back in Wales,” he says. “We’d take a picnic and spend the day making castles and telling stories. I loved that.”
“What kind of stories?” I say.
“Made-up ones.”
“Like what? Tell me one.”
His mouth smiles while his eyes frown, and then he takes my hand in his.
“There once was a fish that lived in the sea, back when the sea was new,” he says. “That’s how my dad always began.”
“I’m impressed already.”