My brother’s eyes are the easiest words to read, and the truest.

“Tell me about the sea,” he says. His eyes are amber pools, calm, unruffled.

We are sitting in his favorite gallery, the one that abuts the sea. From here, we can’t see the blue expanse, but we hear the waves lapping against the rock wall.

I smile. “The sea is a sky full of water.”

His eyes lighten into yellow, like butter, soft, melting. “Tell me about the sky.”

“Vast. Immense. Endless,” I chant.

“Massive. Enormous. Gigantic,” he intones.

I invented that game, moons ago. Whenever he asks a question I can’t answer, I unleash a litany of adjectives. He responds with a string of synonyms.

It is my way of keeping him out of that other labyrinth, the worse one.

Some days it works. Not today.

“I hear the sea,” he says. His voice is empty. “When the sea croons it reminds me of you, Ari. Then I sit, close my eyes, and listen until sleep comes. Other times the sea roars, a monster to terrify every other monster. I flee then, from gallery to gallery.”

Grief stills my tongue. I take his hand. His fingers are like our mother’s, slim, long, deceptive, human.

His eyes waver between earth and amber. “How can the same sea be so terrifying and so tender?”

I know the answer. Like our parents; so loving to me, so monstrous to him. But I can never say it.

“Tell me a story,” I say instead.

Inventing stories diverts him. They are set not in palaces or cities, but in plains and deserts, unbounded spaces where a bull-man can be free because he will not be judged. They are places of light, but dark things lurk just beyond the horizon, misshapen trees with branches like tortured limbs, distorted hills from which rocks jut out as sharp as fangs.

The stories make him happy, almost.

Not today.

He shakes his head. “You should go. It is late. There is no time.”

There’s time. But he wants me gone.

What does he do after I leave and he is alone? Does he wander through the physical labyrinth? Or does he vanish into the invisible one, the one inside him?

Is that when he roars louder than the sea at its angriest, bellows that pierce the marble walls of the palace that spurned him and echo across the city that fears him?

He never stops telling me it wasn’t my fault. But guilt assails me every time I see the sun and the moon, every time I feel the wind and the rain, every time our parents embrace me, every time my normal human face stares at me from the mirror.

We walk slowly, hand in hand. He knows the galleries, every inch, every stone, every crevice. He never gets lost in this labyrinth.

The other maze is different. It can never be known fully; it grows and changes. I fear that someday he will lose his way there, that he will be lost to himself, lost to me.

We embrace at the door. He breaks free first.

I tap on the door. It opens. I step out.

His voice follows me. “Take care, Ari.”

I wailed the day they took him away, my brother.

Or so my nurse told me, as she lay dying.

Necha and I were alone, in her room. It had been her refuge, since she was abducted from her faraway home, brought to this island, and sold to my father. That room became her universe when oncos, the crablike growth that begins as a dot and spreads into every nook and cranny of a body, consumed her.

She had nothing from her home except memories. I could never hear enough of her tales of a land that was a sea of trees, a place of dancing, music, and flowers, where the unnatural was not condemned but worshipped.

Now she lay, eyes closed, waiting for death, for release.

The windows were shut against the noonday heat. The smells of human detritus clogged the airless air. I sat by her pallet and held her hand.