Caleb looks thoughtful, then shakes his head. "The only time I can ever 'discard' an emotion is when I'm far enough away from the source, or if I fall asleep. Sleeping's sort of my reset button. Them, or me, I mean."

He thinks about how, back home, he'd felt the threads of emotion from his family dissolve when they fell asleep. Caleb had always been the last one down because of that. But with Adam, the ocean often pulled him down enough that he fell asleep on his own, and he'd wake up feeling a little more like himself.

But he'd never intentionally tried to sever one of those threads. He'd rejected negative emotions before, but he'd still felt them, still been aware of them. That's not the same thing as taking it and discarding it.