Ila Sorrel had learned to steer a ferry the way some people learn to lie convincingly: by committing to the performance so completely that nobody thought to check the facts.

The Saltwick Harbor morning ferry, a squat white vessel named the Gannet's Promise, pushed out of berth four at six forty-five exactly, which was the first piece of theater. Ila stood at the wheel with her feet planted and her chin lifted, the posture of a woman who could feel the harbor's currents through the soles of her boots. In truth she could feel nothing but the vibration of a diesel engine and the faint nausea of seven years of pretending. The real work was happening on a small tablet bolted to the console, where a tide app glowed with blue arrows, and on the old paper chart pinned beneath the glass, where she had penciled her own private markings in a code only she could read.

"Smooth as ever, Captain Sorrel," said a passenger in a rain jacket, holding a paper cup of coffee that steamed in the cold.

"The harbor's in a good mood," Ila said, and smiled the smile she kept for passengers, the one that never reached her eyes and never needed to.

The harbor was in a good mood. That was the whole trick of the shallow route. The Saltwick ferry ran a loop around the inner breakwater and out to the three tame islands in the bay, places with names like Gull Rest and Pennywhistle, places that had never once misbehaved. On a morning like this the sea lay flat and pearly under a sky the color of an oyster shell, and a child could have driven the route with a stick and a good attitude. Ila had driven it for seven years and she had never once taken the Gannet's Promise beyond the breakwater at an Open Tide, and nobody in town had ever asked why.

They assumed it was a choice. A sensible one, even. Ferry pilots with a lick of the Pull were supposed to be the daredevils of the harbor, the ones who could look at a wall of fog and point the bow at a hidden island by instinct alone, and those pilots tended to die young or retire rich. Ila had been famous for it once. Ila Sorrel, the girl who could close her eyes in the middle of the Drift and tell you where the shore was. Now she was the woman who ran the safe loop and kept her licence clean, and people said, kindly, that she had settled down.

She turned the wheel a degree and a half, because the tablet told her to, and kept her hand light, because that was what a woman with the Pull would do.

On her thumb, the brass compass ring turned over once, then again. She did not remember starting to twist it. She never did.

"Did you hear?" The deckhand, a nineteen-year-old named Pim who talked the way other people breathed, leaned in the wheelhouse door with a mop in his hand and gossip in his eyes. "They're saying Old Harrow's coming up this season."

Ila's hand did not move on the wheel. It took a measure of will.

"They say that every year," she said.

"Not like this. Dockmaster Ferrant had a call from the Tidewatch office at five this morning. The numbers are stacking, the surge tables are doing something weird, and the old fishermen are all saying the same thing. Big water, early. The big island, the real one. Fifty years since anyone saw it." Pim lowered his voice with great drama. "My gran says it takes a debt every time it rises."

"Your gran also says the gulls are spies."

"She's not wrong about the gulls."

Ila let him have the laugh he was fishing for, and he went back to his mop satisfied. When he was gone she stood very still with the wheel under her palms and the cold coming up through the floor, and she did the arithmetic she had been doing every morning for a year without letting herself notice that she was doing it.

Eighty-eight days.

It was a ridiculous number to carry in her chest. It had no weight and no color. It was only the difference between the date on the tablet and a date she had memorized on a night seven years ago, standing on a shingle beach with salt water in her mouth, and it kept shrinking by one every sunrise like a candle burning down in a room she could not leave.

She had thought she had more time. She had thought, in the cowardly way people think about deadlines that begin as numbers on a contract, that something would change before the end. That she would find a way around it. That she would find her nerve.

Instead she had found a rumor about a very old island and a pilot's logbook full of lies, and now the tide itself had decided to arrive early.

* * * By the time the Gannet's Promise returned to berth four, the harbor was awake and talking about nothing else.

Saltwick Harbor had a way of gathering itself around news. The fish market, the chandlery, the little cafe called Brine and Bean, the long timber dock with its row of bollards painted in fading colors, all of it leaned together like gossiping neighbors over a fence. There were four thousand people living within sight of the water and every single one of them had a theory about Old Harrow. A man outside the chandlery was selling laminated Open Tide charts at triple price. A woman at the fish stall swore her grandmother had seen the island in her youth and that it had been made entirely of bells.

Ila passed it all with her canvas bag over her shoulder and her face arranged into polite blankness, and she told herself she was going to the ferry office to log her hours.

She was not going to the ferry office.

She knew it somewhere around the third bollard, where her feet slowed down on their own. She knew it as the dock curved toward the long, ugly stretch of berths on the south side, the working berths, the ones tourists never photographed. She knew it when she smelled diesel and rope and wet tar, and when she heard a voice she had not listened to in seven years, rough and dry and giving orders in the plain, clipped syllables of a woman who had no patience for being misunderstood.

"No, Juno, the other line. The one that isn't frayed. Look at it. Does it look like it wants to live?"

Ila stopped walking.

At berth nineteen, nose to the weathered pilings, sat a boat she had known the way you know the face of a house you once lived in. The Marrow Lark. Sixty feet of stubborn blue-hulled salvage tug, built heavy and ugly and honest, with a high bridge and a crane arm folded against her back like a heron's wing. Her paint had gone chalky. Her rails were scarred. A line of mismatched buoys hung along her side, faded orange and bone white, and on her stern in careful hand-painted letters was her name, and beneath it in smaller script her home port, which was a lie, because the Lark belonged to no port and had never wanted to.

On her deck, in the thin early light, a woman was coiling rope.

Ila had rehearsed this. She would be honest about that, afterward. She had rehearsed it in the shower and on the ferry and in the long dull hours at the wheel, a hundred versions of the same short scene, some of them dignified, some of them embarrassing, one of them, at three in the morning, quite violent. In every version she had a steady voice. In every version she knew what to say.

Tamsin Rooke straightened up from the coil and wiped her palms on her trousers, and every version evaporated.

She was taller than Ila remembered, or maybe she simply held herself taller now, with her shoulders squared and her weight set solid on the deck. The auburn braid that fell down her back had been a loose and careless thing when they were young, forever escaping its tie, and now it was plaited tight and severe, a rope of dark copper. Freckles across her nose and cheekbones, more of them than before, as if seven years of weather had added to the count. A faded yellow oilskin jacket over a navy sweater with the cuffs pushed to the elbow. A scar along the left forearm that Ila did not recognize, thin and white, and the sight of it went through her like a fishhook.

Seven years of life she had not been there for. Seven years of small injuries Ila had not been told about.

Tamsin looked up.

It was a very short moment. Ila would turn it over in her mind for days and never find a way to make it longer or shorter. Gray-green eyes, steady as a level. A face that did not change at all, which was somehow worse than if it had. No flinch. No flash of anger. No softness. Just a pause, a long breath, and then a nod, small and precise, the kind of nod a ship's master gives a vessel she has recognized across the water and does not intend to hail.

"Sorrel," Tamsin said.

Her voice carried easily across the gap of the dock. It was lower than Ila remembered. It had lost its laughter somewhere along the way.

"Rooke," Ila said, and was impressed that her mouth had managed it.

That was it. That was the whole of their first conversation in seven years. Tamsin turned her head and said something sharp to the young deckhand beside her, a lanky kid with a mop of sandy hair who had frozen in the act of looking from one of them to the other with enormous interest, and the kid scrambled for the correct rope. Ila stood on the dock with her bag and her wrecked composure and the distinct, humiliating sense that she had just been dismissed.

Which was fair. Which was, if she was being honest, more than fair.

She should have turned around then. She should have gone to the ferry office and logged her hours and gone home to her small clean apartment, and eighty-eight days later, or fewer, she should have driven her own ruin out into the Drift on her own terms.

But a mile of grief sat between her and any other plan, and the only vessel in Saltwick Harbor that could take her where she needed to go was sitting at berth nineteen with her name on the stern.

* * * It was not as simple as walking up and asking.

Ila understood the problem very clearly, because she had spent a year studying it. The Drift Isles did not rise for ferries. The tame islands in the bay, Gull Rest and Pennywhistle and the rest, were gentle, permanent rocks that happened to be inhabited, and any child with a boating license could visit them. The Drift was different. The Drift was what the old fishermen called the sea beyond the breakwater when the Open Tide came, the narrow window of hours when the water pulled back from its own edges and the phantom islands surfaced, dripping and impossible, to be visited and plundered and sometimes feared. To enter it, a vessel needed a salvage permit, a licensed captain, an insured hull, and a pilot with an endorsement for deep water.

Ila had the endorsement. It was the one thing in her name that still carried weight.

She did not have a vessel. She did not have a captain. And she did not have the single thing she needed most, which was the chart.

She had seen it exactly once, at twenty years old, in a kitchen that smelled of coffee and pipe smoke, when Cormac Rooke had laid a roll of old parchment across a scrubbed table and told two girls to be very careful where they put their elbows. It had been blank when he unrolled it. Pale, cracked, ordinary. And then Cormac had smiled his slow, pleased smile, and said, "Give it time," and the girls had leaned in with their heads almost touching, and Ila had felt Tamsin's breath against her cheek and had not looked at the map at all.

Nothing had appeared. Of course nothing had. Cormac laughed and said it never showed itself to anyone who watched too hard.

Seven years later, Ila had learned from a tipsy retired tidewatcher in a bar that Cormac Rooke's chart was the only record in the world that marked the path to the island she needed. And that the path ran only one direction, and that only the chart's keeper could read it.

Cormac was dead now. Five years, she had heard, swallowed by the sea he loved. She had not gone to the funeral. She had stood on the headland above the cemetery in a borrowed coat and watched the mourners from half a mile away, and she had not gone down.

So the keeper was his daughter. And the daughter, as of this morning, owned a salvage tug with a chronic shortage of luck.

Ila had learned that part by asking, with great care, around the edges of the harbor. Tamsin's pilot had broken a wrist in a dock accident three weeks ago. The insurers would not clear the Marrow Lark for the coming season without a licensed pilot aboard. Venn Ferries, the big modern outfit run by a woman named Corra Venn, had made the Rooke family an offer for the chart and the tug together, a tidy purchase, an honorable retirement. And Tamsin, by every account, had sent the offer back unopened with a message so short it had become local legend.

All of which meant that the only woman in Saltwick who needed a pilot more than Ila needed a boat was Tamsin Rooke.

There was a word for that kind of situation, Ila thought as she stood with her bag at the foot of berth nineteen. The word was leverage. And the person holding it was not her.

"Can I help you?"

The sandy-haired kid had appeared at the rail with a coil of rope over one shoulder and an expression of heroic innocence. He was perhaps twenty, all wrists and elbows and curiosity. A name was stitched onto his jacket pocket in red thread. Juno.

"I'd like to speak with your captain," Ila said.

"Oh." Juno glanced over his shoulder toward the wheelhouse, where a figure in a yellow jacket was very deliberately not looking in their direction. "She's busy. She's doing a thing. A very important thing with a clipboard."

"I can wait."

"I'm Juno, by the way. Juno Pike. Are you the Ila? The ferry Ila? The one who used to be, um." He stopped, either sensing danger or running out of grammar. "Never mind."

"The one who used to be what?"

"Nothing. Famous. A bit." Juno's ears had gone pink. "Odo said I shouldn't say anything."

"Odo is a wise man," Ila said gravely, and Juno looked so relieved at being forgiven that she felt, for the first time that morning, a flicker of something warm. It startled her. It also passed, which was good.

From somewhere behind the wheelhouse, a voice like gravel rolling down a hill said, "Juno, if you're fraternizing, do it with a rope in your hands."

Tamsin came down the short gangway before Juno could answer. She did not hurry. She moved the way she had always moved on a deck, loose and balanced, as if the boat were an extension of her own spine, and she stopped three feet from Ila with the wooden planks creaking under her boots and her arms crossed over the faded yellow oilskin.

Up close, she smelled like salt and engine grease and cold, clean air. Ila noticed that. She noticed that she was noticing. She told herself to stop.

"Whatever it is," Tamsin said, "make it quick. We've got a tide."

"I heard you're short a pilot."

Something flickered across Tamsin's face. It was gone too fast to read.

"You heard wrong."

"I heard your pilot broke her wrist three weeks ago and your insurers won't clear the Lark without a replacement. I heard Venn Ferries offered to take the boat off your hands." Ila kept her voice level. "I heard what you said back."

"Did you." Tamsin's jaw shifted. "Harbor gossip travels at the speed of light and with about as much accuracy."

"Is it wrong?"

For a long moment Tamsin did not answer. Down the dock, a gull screamed, and somewhere a halyard clattered against a mast. Juno, who had retreated exactly two steps, pretended to inspect a cleat with the focus of a surgeon.

"No," Tamsin said at last. "It isn't wrong."

"Then I can help."

"You can help." Tamsin laughed, one short hard breath with no humor in it at all. "Ila Sorrel, who runs the safest ferry loop on the coast and hasn't touched an Open Tide in seven years. Who was the best pilot in the harbor and chose to become a bus driver. You'd like to crew with me."

The words landed like stones. Ila took each one.

"I have the endorsement," she said. "It's current. I can sign off on your insurance and I can take the wheel in deep water, and I'm not asking you to like it."

"Good. Because I don't."

"Then we understand each other."

"We understand nothing." Tamsin took a step closer, and for a moment Ila thought she might say the thing, the real thing, the thing that had been sitting between them on the dock like a third person since the moment they had both stopped moving. But Tamsin only looked at her, up and down, a slow, assessing look that had nothing of warmth in it and somehow still made Ila's skin prickle.

"Let me be clear," Tamsin said, very quietly. "I'm not hiring you. I'm renting your license. You'll sign the papers my insurer wants and you'll stand where I put you and you'll do what the numbers say. You won't talk about the past on my boat. You won't talk about it at all."

"Fine."

"You'll keep your mouth shut about what's in my cabin."

"I don't know what's in your cabin."

"Good." Tamsin's gaze dropped, briefly, to Ila's hand, where the brass compass ring turned between thumb and forefinger. It stopped there. Ila felt it the way you feel a draft, a small cold weight of attention, and she forced her fingers to still.

Tamsin's eyes came up again, flat and unreadable. If she recognized the ring, her mother's ring, the ring Ila had worn the night they met, nothing in her face said so.

"I'll have the contract drawn up by noon," she said. "Be at the wheelhouse at six. If you're late, I'll find someone else."

"I won't be late."

"You used to be good at that," Tamsin said. "Being on time."

It was a beautifully aimed knife. It went in sideways, between the ribs. Ila felt the whole weight of a single evening seven years old, of a tide table and a promise and a boat that had not come back, and she kept her expression exactly where it was.

"I'll be there," she said.

"Then we're done."

Tamsin turned and walked back up the gangway without another word. Juno, still crouched at the cleat, looked up at Ila with an expression of pure, awed alarm, as though he had just watched two cats square off in a bakery.

"That went well," he whispered.

"Did it?"

"She didn't throw you in the harbor." Juno brightened. "I'd say that's a ninety percent success rate."

* * * The papers were signed in the Marrow Lark's cramped galley an hour before noon, over a table scarred by decades of knives and coffee rings. An older man with a salt-and-pepper beard, a grease-stained cap, and eyes like two bright blue marbles witnessed it from the corner. Odo Fenwick, the engineer. He had been old when Ila was young, and he had not gotten any younger, and he nodded to her once, slowly, as though acknowledging a long-delayed arrival.

"Good to see you, girl," he said, and nothing more.

It was kindness, Ila thought, and it nearly undid her.

Tamsin did not look at her while she signed. The contract was short, the lines blunt, the signature page marked in a tidy hand with little pencil crosses. Ila wrote her name three times, Ila Marguerite Sorrel, in the neat looping script she had used for every logbook entry of her adult life, and with each signature she felt the trap close another notch. It was not a bad contract. It was a fair one. That was the trouble. It bound her to the Marrow Lark for the length of the season, three months of salvage runs and rescue calls and long hours in the cramped wheelhouse of a boat that smelled of everything she had ever lost.

Eighty-eight days. She had asked for ninety, practically. The universe had a sense of humor.

"Season ends at the equinox," Tamsin said, sliding the final page across the table. "After that, you can go back to the bay and your tame islands. Until then, you're crew."

"Understood."

"Good."

There was a pause. Odo coughed into his fist. Somewhere above their heads, Juno's boots drummed across the deck like a nervous drummer, and the whole boat seemed to be listening.

"There's a room," Tamsin said finally, not quite looking at her. "Off the starboard passage. It's small."

"I don't need a room. I have an apartment."

"You'll need a room." Tamsin's tone brooked no argument. "Open Tides don't care about commuting. If we get a call at three in the morning, you're on the boat in five minutes or not at all."

It was sensible. It was entirely sensible, and the sensible thing struck Ila in the gut like a cold hand, because it meant a bunk beside Tamsin's bunk, a wall between them thin enough to hear breathing through. She had not thought of that. She had thought of the chart and the deadline and the island, and she had not thought, not once, about the thin wooden walls of a salvage tug.

"All right," she said.

If Tamsin noticed her hesitation, she did not remark on it.

* * * That evening, Ila went home and did not sleep.

Her apartment sat on the second floor of a narrow gray building two streets from the water, a small clean place with one window and a view of someone else's chimney. The walls were bare. The furniture, such as it was, had been chosen for being unmemorable. She had lived here for six years and had somehow never hung a single picture, as though some animal part of her had refused to settle, had kept a bag half-packed in the back of her mind and a coat by the door.

She sat on the edge of the bed with the lamp off and the window open and listened to the harbor settle into its night sounds. The slow knock of hulls. A distant foghorn, groaning like a patient cow. Under it all, the long breath of the sea, which had been talking to her for seven years in a language she had once understood and no longer could.

She opened her bag and took out a small calendar, the kind that came free with a ship's chandler's order, its pages soft with handling. She had marked it every night for a year. Each date had a neat black line through it, and the lines marched across the pages like prison scratches, and at the bottom of the current month, circled twice in red ink, was a date she could have recited in her sleep.

She picked up a pencil. She crossed off today.

Eighty-seven.

"You can do this," she said aloud, to nobody, to the chimney. "Three months. Work. Don't feel anything."

It sounded absurd. It sounded like instructions for a different kind of person. And she thought, with a bitterness that surprised her, of Tamsin's face on the deck this morning, so closed, so composed, so perfectly unreadable. She had known that face with its guard down. She had known it laughing, furious, asleep. She had known the exact weight of Tamsin's chin on her shoulder in the dark and the exact sound of her voice when she said a name in her sleep.

That person was gone. Ila had killed her herself, on a beach, with her own mouth, and every day since had been a slow funeral for something she had no right to mourn.

It does not matter, she told herself. You are not here to be forgiven. You are here to fix it.

She repeated this until it sounded true.

At eleven-thirty, restless and furious with her own restlessness, she put on her jacket and walked down to the water.

The dock at night was another country. The mercury lamps threw pale islands of light onto the planks, and between them lay long stretches of dark where water lapped and ropes creaked and nothing was quite what it seemed. A drunk fisherman sang something sad and slightly out of key at the far end of the pier. Ila went the other way, down the south dock, with her hands in her pockets and her shoulders tucked, and she told herself she was only going to look at the tide.

She was not going to look at the Lark.

She looked at the Lark.

The tug sat dark at berth nineteen except for a single pool of amber light spilling from a porthole near the stern. And on the aft deck, leaning on the rail with her back to the harbor and her yellow jacket draped over one shoulder, stood Tamsin Rooke.

Ila stopped in the shadow of a stack of crab pots, where she could see without being seen. It was a cowardly thing to do. She did it anyway.

Tamsin was not doing anything. She was only standing, with her braid come half loose over her shoulder and her face turned toward the black water, and she held something loosely in her hands: a roll of paper, cracked and pale, the color of old tea. She was running her thumb along its edge in a slow, absent motion, the way you touch a thing you have touched a thousand times in the dark.

Ila's throat closed.

She had not expected to see it. She had known it existed, she had come for it, she had signed her name three times for it. But she had not expected the hollow lurch in her chest at the sight of it in Tamsin's hands, at the way Tamsin held it, as though it were a letter from someone she was afraid to finish reading. Her eyes burned. She blinked, and the lamplight blurred and doubled, and she realized with a distant, horrified clarity that she was about to cry on a public dock, hiding behind crab pots, over a piece of paper.

On the aft deck, Tamsin tilted her head.

Not toward Ila. Toward the roll in her hands. As if it had said something.

And across the pale paper, in the lamplight, Ila saw it: a single thread of ink, fine as hair, gold at the center and teal along the edges, blooming across the blank parchment like a line of frost across glass. It twisted once. It paused. And then, with a slow, deliberate curl, it pointed straight at the shadows where she stood.

Tamsin looked up.

Ila did not breathe. She did not move. She stood very still behind the crab pots with her heart going like a trapped bird, and across forty feet of dark water and rotting planking, a woman she had once loved more than anything in the world stared into the dark with an expression Ila could not read.

Then Tamsin rolled the paper up tight, slipped it into her jacket, and went below without a backward glance.

The porthole light went out.

Ila stayed where she was for a very long time, her pulse in her ears and the cold salt wind drying the wet from her face.

Eighty-seven days, she thought. And the chart had already started to move.