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The stranger's voice was as flat as the black horizon. For a moment Sylvi regarded his shadowed features, searching for meaning behind his elusive words, his emotionless tone. Perhaps she should be frightened of him. What did he have to hide? What brought him to approach a stranger in the middle of the night, one whose youth he made a point of tasting on his tongue? "Young one," he called her. Was she prey to him? Sylvi shivered again, and searched inside her gut for any tell-tale twist, any rumble of unease. There was nothing. She felt nothing at all except a strange detachment from the situation.
What, after all, did she have left to lose?
"Shall I call you 'old one', then?" she finally said. Her tone and bearing were as vacant as his own, with no twitch, no hint of her inner world except a deep glimmer in her eye that mirrored the black glass of the sea beyond. A slight breeze rose, then, stirring her sodden forelock. She gently blew water droplets from her nostrils. Her gaze strayed for a moment, taking him in, searching for something — she was not certain what — something like an answer to a question half-formed in her mind, and searching for it in his bearing, in the starkness of his coloring, in the advantage in years and inches he had on her. But her appraisal was over in half a heartbeat, and her eyes locked on his once more with a quiet firmness.