His head breaks through, shattering the water’s surface. He rubs at his eyes and smiles at me. “Ad, you scared me. What are you doing here?”

“I see you found swimming trunks,” I say. I’m not ready to address the real reason that I’ve come.

“Sort of. I’m using the fishing-village version,” he says. His arms perch on the side of the pool, and his eyes are as bright as the brilliant tiles.

I slip my shoes off and roll down my stockings. “And what does this version consist of?”

“Sorry,” Erik says, pretending to fan himself. “You’re distracting me. What did you say?”

I frown at him, sitting down and dipping my feet into the water. It’s warmer than I would have expected.

“When I was a kid, working the fishing boats in Saxun, we took off as much of our clothes as possible, without revealing our, uh, treasure, and jumped in,” he says, his lower lip inching up into a crooked grin.

“You have a treasure?” I say, widening my eyes in feigned innocence.

“You gonna pillage it?” he asks.

“I walked into that one,” I admit with a groan.

“Yes,” Erik says, “you did.”

His finger traces a spot on my calf, leaving a trickle of water on my bare skin, and I swat his hand away.

“That’s one huge scar,” he says. I frown and look to see what he means. A thin, pale line slants across my leg. “Where did you get it?”

“I don’t know,” I say, drawing my knees up and clutching them to my chest. “It’s probably from my retrieval night. They used a claw to pull me out of the escape tunnel. The renewal patch must have left a scar.”

“It shouldn’t have,” Erik says, squinting to get a better look at it. I don’t care about the scar. It’s only a remnant of a past life.

“Erik.” But I stop on his name, searching for the right way to ask him about what Dante told me about the tracking device. It doesn’t take me long to realize there is no right way.

“You’re going to chew off your lip,” Erik warns me, and I relax my mouth into a tight line. “Just ask me.”

“I want you to tell me how you wound up at the Coventry, how you got out of Saxun,” I say. The words jumble into one long exhalation.

“Why?” he prompts, seeming to disappear from the conversation. I know he’s upset. Erik distances himself, asking questions, when he feels cornered.

“I need you to tell me the truth,” I say in a quiet voice. He’ll vanish entirely if I push too hard.

“I can’t,” Erik says.

“Why? I promise it won’t change anything.”

Erik turns from me and stares up at the glittering ceiling. His arms spread wide against the the lip of the pool, revealing the sharp sinews of his upper body, built by years of handling fishing boats. “You can’t promise that. It will change things between us, Adelice. There are things in my past that I’m not proud of—”

“You think I don’t have regrets, too?” I ask. “My father was murdered. My mom is a monster. My sister is in Cormac’s clutches as we speak. And that all happened before I got to the Coventry and started messing things up.”

“This is different. Those things happened to you, Ad.” Erik hesitates, pausing to look at me for a fleeting moment before he turns away again. “The things in my past—they’re choices I made. I can’t blame anyone else for them.”

“You aren’t going to tell me?” I ask. I swish my feet through the water, watching the bubbles swirl around my toes. I know what he’s hiding, and he has to know that, too. He sees right through my feigned interest. He knows I want to catch him. If Dante’s theory is correct, Erik’s secret breaches our trust completely. If he could be honest now, we can rebuild it.

But he doesn’t want to.

Neither of us speaks, the silence extending so long that my toes shrivel and pucker in the water. “I know.”

“Know what?” Erik asks casually.

“I know that you can see the strands. I know that you can touch them.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Erik says.

“No, I know it does, and I’m hoping you respect me enough to tell me what it means.” I wait for him to rise to my challenge, but he stays silent.

“I can’t take it back once I tell you, Ad,” he whispers finally.

“I know that, but I need to hear the truth from you.” My voice is a plea, cracking from the pressure of my warring emotions. “Right now I’m betting my imagination is making things worse than they are.”

“I doubt it.” Erik scratches the top of his head and pushes out of the pool so he’s sitting next to me. Our feet dangle under the surface of the water, dangerously close to each other.

“I left Saxun to pursue a career with the Guild,” Erik begins, and I nod to show him I’m listening, that I care about whatever part of his story he’s willing to share—as long as there are answers at the end of it.

“I wasn’t cut out for fishing.”

“The pretty ones never are,” I joke, trying to lighten the mood. Erik gives me a small smile but his face stays serious. “What I’ve never understood is how. How did you get the Guild’s attention?”

“I gambled,” he said. “They brought a friend of mine into service, which is pretty rare, and when they came to Saxun, I approached a Guild official and told him I had something they wanted.”