Swimming in the waters around the island always bore a certain amount of risk, but Jordan did it anyway sometimes. The crash of waves rolling in called to him, and the slow rocking lift and fall of the water out beyond the breakers soothed him. The water didn't have the icy chill driven down the West Coast from the Arctic by the currents, but that just meant he didn't need a wetsuit. He might not anyway, these days. He wasn't as fragile as he'd been when he'd swum in the cold waters of the Pacific.

The break between the first twenty years of his life and the last three felt like the dropoff out past the continental shelf sometimes, sharp and deep, worlds so different that though they remained part of the same whole, they were almost incompatible. An ordinary life, determinedly ordinary, though it had never really been ordinary at all. A sudden weight of responsibility and sorrow, a life turned inwards early, and he'd adjusted everything about himself to meet the demands of a world turned abruptly upside down.

"He's been telling the other kids these horror stories about the equipment room, and half of them are avoiding going in there now. He's got a vivid imagination, ma'am, and I'd venture to guess that grief has something to do with these tales he's telling. Have you considered counseling?"

Don't talk about it, don't be disruptive, don't make it worse. Don't get him sent to counseling. Don't get yourself sent to counseling. Don't let anyone think anything is out of the ordinary. Mom's been tired, don't give her anything else to worry about.

If they don't believe the truth, what's the point in telling them anything?

Jordan turned over, took a breath, and dove, kicking down under the water. The New Year's dream had shown him something else, a different self, a version of him who hadn't needed to turn inwards to protect himself. The details were vague, a dream mostly forgotten. But that other self had lived on the island since he was fourteen, had known he wasn't crazy, known there was a place for him. He'd been comfortable in himself, secure in the solid sense of his own skills and his own worth.

As a Hunter, you had to provide your own definition of the soul, the self, the core, or the things that happened to you would slowly erode your sanity. He knew three other selves now; one was a criminal, one a demon, one still a Hunter. Those were the "real" others, the ones whose lives and memories had been shared and matched with other people. That was his point of reference, his measurement of the reality of his memories, the line he drew between another self and a hallucination. Without that distinction, it became dangerously easy to doubt his own perceptions, to fear that maybe he was still caught helplessly in some dream, unaware of his own slow starvation.

This world was real, as far as he could tell. It was, at least, the world in which he continued to wake up from other states, and until proven otherwise, he would treat it as his home reality, in which his central self lived.

But why was this the world in which he was least certain of himself? Why had he come so close to falling apart when his identities had come into conflict? Two shapes to make himself into, two points of view which, if they didn't oppose, certainly weren't a good match. He had made and remade himself over and over, shifting from one self to another whenever someone needed something from him, and when he had felt as though he wasn't needed, there had been nothing left, nothing underneath.

His hand brushed sand under the water. Was that true? Was there nothing underneath the roles he had poured himself into? It couldn't be. If there were nothing of himself in the person he knew himself to be, there would be little or no resemblance to the other versions whose lives he'd inhabited, however briefly.

Ferros had remained silent while Jordan turned the question over in his mind. The dragon stirred now, setting aside his discomfort at being submerged in water. You are you, the weapon said. If you were not you, I would not have chosen you.

Why didn't I ask you before?

You don't think a lot about yourself, Ferros observed. Not in this way. You think about how to build a mask, but you do not think much about the face. But if there is no face, there is no mask.

Jordan broke the surface and drew in a deep breath, treading water. He hadn't thought of it that way. A mask fits better if it's shaped to fit what's underneath. He looked back across the water towards the beach, a small and thoughtful frown gathering between his eyebrows. He hadn't observed and analyzed himself in the same careful way he paid attention to others. Maybe it was about time to start.

He didn't have to discard the way he worked, nor did he have to shape himself to an externally imposed standard. Obvious conclusions, painfully and embarrassingly obvious, but never before consciously examined. He wasn't any of those other selves, but perhaps he could take their self-knowledge as a model on which to build his own, mapping unseen shapes with careful exploration, navigating by sonar in dark water.