Claustrophobic terror washed through Vera’s beating heart. “I can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t bear any more.”

“I’m not scared,” Karen told her. “I used to be very scared every time I came down here. But emotion is a neural state. A neural state can’t touch you. I’m never afraid like I used to be. Sometimes I have fear­thoughts, but my fear-thoughts are not me.”

“I’ll scream!”

Karen’s voice was full of limpid sympathy. “You can scream, then. Do it. I’m here for you.”

* * *

SEEN FROM THE AIRY HILLTOP, Mljet was a tattered flag, all bays, peninsulas, and scattered islets. The island’s scalloped shores held stains in their nooks and corners: the algae blooms.

The rising Adriatic, carrying salt, had killed a dry brown skirt-fringe of the island’s trees.

The island’s blanket of pines and oaks was torn by clear-cut logging, scarred black with forest fires.

And if the golden shore of this beautiful place had suffered, the is­land’s interior was worse. Mljet’s angry creeks had collapsed the island’s bridges as if they’d been kneecapped with pistols. Up in the rocky hills, small, abandoned villages silently flaked their paint.

Year by year, leaning walls and rust-red roofs were torn apart by tow­ering houseplants gone feral. The island’s rotting vineyards were alive with buzzing flies and beetles, clouded with crows.

A host of flowers had always adorned this sunny place. There were far more flowers in these years of the climate crisis. Harsh, neck-high thick­ets of rotting flowers, feeding scary, billowing clouds of angry bees.

Such was her home. From the peak of the island, where she stood, throat raw, flesh trembling, mind in a whirl, she could see that the is­land was transforming. She could hear that, smell it, taste it in the wind. She was changing it.

Brilliancy, speed, lightness, and glory.