Nocticadia

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, death by suicide, graphic violence, sexual violence, mental illness, gender discrimination, substance use, and sexual content.

Lilia researches her mother’s family on the island. Vanessa’s mother passed a few years prior, after which her home became abandoned. Lilia breaks into the property and finds a painting of a garden that Vanessa painted when Lilia was a child.

She realizes that when her grandmother died four years ago, Vanessa had gone on a short trip under the guise of finding a doctor to remove a benign tumor from Bee’s eye. Lilia wonders if Vanessa actually came home for the funeral and got infected with the Noctisoma during her trip.

During Devryck’s class, Lilia researches his father, frustrated at the lack of information about him online. Vanessa became pregnant and left the study before the six women died, yet Lilia wonders if Devryck’s father killed her. She considers how to get close to him to uncover information.

After class, Devryck apologizes to Lilia for his behavior at the library. She flirts with him, hoping that he’ll respond more amiably when she asks again about Andrea, who attacked Lippincott. She asks if Noctisoma have a latency phase that might explain a delayed onset of the infection, though she doesn’t mention her mother or the study.