The offices of Venn Ferries occupied the top two floors of a converted grain warehouse on Quay Street, and they were everything the Marrow Lark was not.

Ila had walked past the building a thousand times without going in. It was a handsome thing, honey-colored brick, tall arched windows, a copper roof gone green with weather, and over the entrance, in clean brass letters six inches high, hung the company name. On the ground floor sat a glass-fronted ticket hall with a bank of gleaming kiosks and a bright digital departures board. On the second, a staff room. On the third, behind a pair of frosted doors, a corridor of pale oak and soft carpet that smelled of lemon polish and good coffee.

It had taken exactly one night for Ila to change her mind about refusing the invitation.

"It's only a conversation," Corra had said, last evening on the quay, with her warm, reasonable smile. "A cup of tea. Nothing binding. You can leave the moment you're bored."

"I don't see what we'd have to talk about."

"You're an intelligent woman, Captain Sorrel. I think you do."

It had been the particular gentleness of it that did the damage. Not the threat. There had been no threat. Only a pleasant, patient, courteous, utterly unmistakable awareness that Corra Venn knew more than she was saying, and was prepared to wait. Ila had lain awake until three, arguing with the ceiling. And then, at ten the next morning, with her heart in her mouth and her best clean shirt buttoned to the collar, she had walked up three flights of stairs and knocked on a frosted door.

She was a coward. She knew it. But she was a coward who needed to know what the enemy held.

"Come in," called a voice.

* * * The office was enormous.

It ran the whole width of the building, a long airy room with a polished oak floor and tall windows that looked out over the harbor. Everything in it was in its place. A broad desk of pale wood, uncluttered, bare except for a laptop and a small brass lamp. A leather sofa. A wall of framed photographs, each of a Venn vessel under way, taken at dawn in fine light. And along the far side, an astonishing array of charts, pinned to cork boards and spread across a long table, so numerous and so beautifully inked that Ila stared at them in involuntary admiration.

"Do come in," said Corra Venn. "Sit anywhere."

She stood at a small sideboard with her back to the room, pouring tea. She had shed the camel coat. In its place she wore a slim charcoal sweater and tailored trousers, and a simple silver chain at her throat, and she looked less like a magnate than an elegant, slightly weary schoolmistress. She turned, and held out a cup and saucer, and the china rang softly in the quiet.

"Milk? Sugar?"

"Neither. Thank you."

"A woman of principle." Corra smiled, and set the cup down on the desk before her, and took the chair opposite. She crossed her legs and settled back with the easy ownership of a person on her own ground. "I'm glad you came. I wasn't sure you would."

"I wasn't sure either."

"Honesty. Good. We'll get on."

"Why am I here, Ms. Venn?"

"Corra."

"Why am I here?"

"Very well." Corra folded her hands in her lap. "Captain Sorrel, I run the largest salvage and passage fleet on this coast. I have eleven vessels. I employ ninety-three people. I have spent six years building a business that does not break rules, does not sink ships, and does not make mistakes, and I am about to attempt the most difficult and profitable operation in the history of this harbor." She paused. "I need a pilot."

"You have pilots."

"I have competent pilots. I have good pilots. I have no one who can do what you used to do."

There it was.

Ila did not flinch. She held herself perfectly still, with her hands wrapped round the arms of the chair and her gaze steady on Corra's face, and said nothing at all.

"I'm offering you a position," Corra said. "Lead pilot. Full command of the Venn Surveyor, my flagship, for the Old Harrow window. Your own crew. Triple the Rooke rate, plus a share of any salvage."

"That's very generous."

"I'm a generous woman."

"You're a tactical one."

"That too." The corner of her mouth twitched. "It would be a wonderful opportunity for you. A way out of that cramped little tug, away from all those, shall we say, difficult associations."

"I have a contract."

"Which you could break."

"I don't break contracts."

"No." Corra's voice was very soft. "No, you don't, do you? Not once you've signed." She tilted her head. "That's what interests me. Your whole career, you've been so very scrupulous. Your logbooks are spotless. Your license has never so much as a parking ticket. You keep yourself very tightly wound, Captain. I've always wondered what it would take to make you come undone."

Ila's heart beat once, hard, against her ribs.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Don't you?"

"No."

"Let me be plain." Corra leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "I've watched you steer for seven years. I've watched you run the Gannet's Promise past the same three islands at the same four times a day, hugging the shallows like a nervous swimmer, never once stretching her legs beyond the breakwater. I've studied your logs. I've reviewed your weather decisions. I've seen you turn down offers, at the Open Tide, that would have made you rich. And I've watched you at the wheel, Captain, from the quay, with my own eyes, and I will tell you what I saw."

"Please don't."

"You don't look up."

Ila said nothing.

"A pilot with the Pull looks at the horizon," said Corra gently. "She looks beyond it. She looks like a woman listening to music nobody else can hear. You never do that. You look at your instruments. You look at your hands. You look like a person walking across a frozen lake in the dark." Her eyes were steady and compassionate and utterly unshakable. "I'm not going to tell anyone. I want you to understand that. I have no wish to ruin you. But I won't pretend I haven't seen."

The room was very quiet.

Outside the tall windows, a ferry sounded its horn, a long, low, melancholy note that rolled across the water and died away. A gull cried. A clock somewhere ticked.

Ila heard none of it. She was sitting in a pale oak chair in a pale oak office, with a cup of cooling tea at her elbow and the whole architecture of seven years of careful lying crumbling around her ears. She felt very calm. It was like standing in the eye of a storm, a hollow, ringing, glassy calm, while all around her the walls came down.

She thought: she's the first person who has ever said it out loud.

She thought, with a faint, wild, absurd laugh rising in her throat: and she was kind about it.

"How long have you known?" she said.

"Six years. Perhaps a little more."

"And you never."

"Never. I'd be a poor businesswoman if I spent a secret before it was worth anything." Corra spread her hands, a gesture both rueful and honest. "I'm not proud of that. But I'm not ashamed either. It is what it is."

"What do you want?"

"A pilot."

"No. What do you really want?"

For a moment, Corra Venn looked at her. Something shifted in her face, some veil lifting, and for the first time Ila saw not the magnate but the woman. A woman of thirty-four, with a good coat and a hard-won position and a faint line of fatigue around her eyes. A woman who wanted something very badly, and was not quite sure she was allowed to say so.

"The chart," she said.

* * * Ila had not been surprised. It would have been foolish to be. She had known, from the first moment in the cafe, from the first flick of that clever dark gaze, that this was where it would end.

"You want Tamsin's chart."

"I want what it knows." Corra rose, restless, and went to the window, and stood with her arms folded, looking out over the water. "I'm not a thief, Captain Sorrel. I'd prefer you didn't think of me as one. I made Tam an offer a year ago. A fair one. I would have bought the boat and the chart at twice their market value and given her a seat on my board. She turned me down without opening the envelope."

"She's loyal."

"She's stubborn." But there was no malice in it. It was said with a rueful, tender exasperation, the tone of someone describing a much-loved flaw. "Always was. It's one of the reasons I."

She stopped.

Ila waited.

"One of the reasons it didn't work," Corra finished, quietly.

There it was, the whole history, folded into a single sentence. Ila had wondered, in the long nights since the cafe, what exactly it had been. Whether it had been a brief thing or a lasting one. Whether Corra had wounded Tamsin, or been wounded. And she saw now, in the line of that straight back, in the careful stillness of the hands, that it had been something real. Something with weight, and warmth, and a long slow ending. Something that had mattered.

She was surprised to find that it did not hurt as much as she had feared.

It hurt. But it hurt cleanly, the way a cut hurts, and she could bear it.

"You want me to get it for you," Ila said.

"I want you to consider it."

"Steal it."

"Borrow it." Corra turned. "Copy it. A few hours of access is all I need. A photograph. A tracing. You'd never have to touch the original, and Tam would never know."

"She'd know."

"Would she?"

"She'd know in a minute. She can feel that chart across a room."

"Then let her. What would she do? Throw you off the boat? You'd be on mine by nightfall, with a glass of wine and a contract in your hand." Corra's mouth quirked. "The question is not whether she'd find out. It's whether, when she did, you'd be glad you'd already left."

It was an astonishingly well-aimed arrow. Ila felt it slide neatly between the third and fourth ribs and lodge there.

"And if I say no?" she asked.

"Then I think you'll find that your secrets become somewhat harder to keep."

"That's blackmail."

"It's a negotiation."

"It's a threat."

"Captain." Corra's smile was sad, and entirely sincere. "I don't make threats. I'm telling you what will happen. Eventually, everyone will see what I've seen. It's only a matter of time. I'm offering you a chance to leave before they do."

* * * Ila stood.

She did it slowly, with care, setting her cup back on its saucer and pushing in her chair. Her legs were remarkably steady. She smoothed her shirt. She looked across the oak floor at the tall, straight, elegant woman by the window, and she thought of everything Corra had said.

Triple the rate. A flagship. A crew of her own.

A way out.

It would have been so easy. She could have taken it. She could have told Tamsin, on a gray afternoon, that she had a better offer, and walked out of the Lark with her bag on her shoulder and her chin held high. She could have sat in a pale oak office and drunk tea and never once felt the cold ring of a tin promise in the water. She could have run the Venn Surveyor into the Old Harrow window with a hundred silent hands behind her. And when the deadline came, and the island rose, and the bargain fell due, she would have faced it alone, as she had always intended.

It would have been very clean.

"I can't," she said.

"Can't."

"I won't take the chart. And I won't leave the Lark." She drew a breath. "I'm sorry. I know that isn't what you wanted."

"It's not what I wanted," Corra said evenly. "But I admit it isn't what I expected, either."

"What did you expect?"

"That you'd run."

"I've done that."

"Yes," Corra said. "I rather think you have."

It was said without cruelty. It was said, almost, with respect. Ila looked at her for a long moment and saw a calm, clever, lonely woman at the end of a long career, who had spent a decade making sure that nobody could ever hurt her, and who was now looking at someone who had decided, against all sense, to be hurt anyway.

"I'm not your enemy, you know," said Corra. "I'm just the one with the contract."

"I know."

"I'm only trying to win."

"I know."

"If I were you, I would be very careful."

"Of what?"

"Of the girl," Corra said. She said it lightly, almost carelessly, but her eyes were suddenly dark. "She's not as hard as she pretends. She never was. And whatever you've done to her, whatever you're hiding, she's going to find out. And she'll forgive you or she won't. But if she doesn't, she'll never forgive herself for having let you in."

Ila's throat tightened.

"I know," she whispered.

"Do you?"

"Yes."

"Then you're braver than I am," said Corra Venn, and turned back to the window.

* * * She went down the stairs very fast.

The frosted doors swung shut behind her. The pale corridor, the lemon polish, the faint hum of the ticket hall all fell away like waves. She hit the ground floor at a half-run and burst out through the brass-and-glass doors onto Quay Street, and the cold gray air struck her in the face like a slap.

She stood on the pavement with her hands shaking.

It was early afternoon. The street was crowded with shoppers and stevedores and children on their way home from school. A bus rumbled by. A delivery boy wheeled a crate of cod across the road with a long unmusical whistle. Everything seemed utterly ordinary, as though the world had not just shifted one notch on its axis, and she thought: how do they not see it?

She thought: I told her no.

She thought: I'm an idiot.

She thought, with a sudden fierce ache, of a gray-green gaze steady as a level, and a voice saying Sit down, and a pair of rough warm hands holding her on a pier. I've got you. It's all right. She thought of how she had answered. Don't confuse concern with a contract.

She should go back. She should walk straight down to berth nineteen and find Tamsin, on whatever deck or in whatever corner, and say the thing she had not been able to say. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was frightened, and I did the cruelest thing I could think of, because it was the only way I knew to keep you safe.

She could not say the rest. But she could say that.

She turned toward the water, and began to walk, and rounded the corner of the old fish market, and stopped dead.

* * * A tall figure in a faded yellow oilskin stood at the end of the street.

She was leaning against a lamppost with her arms crossed and her braid blowing sideways, and she was looking directly at the frosted-glass doorway of Venn Ferries. Her face was perfectly, utterly still. Her gaze was fixed on Ila, across forty yards of crowded pavement, with a flat gray intensity that Ila felt in the pit of her stomach.

It was Tamsin.

For a moment, neither of them moved. A bus rolled between them, and passed, and the long clear line of sight reopened. Ila saw her swallow. She saw her lift one hand, slowly, as if to wave, or as if to say something, and then let it fall.

She had seen. She must have. She had been standing there watching the door. She had seen Ila come out of the Venn building, flushed and shaken, with the look of a woman who had just made a terrible decision, and she had drawn the only possible conclusion.

"No," Ila said, aloud. "Wait."

She started toward her. She had gone three steps when Tamsin straightened up from the lamppost, put her hands in her pockets, and began to walk.

She did not walk away. She walked toward Ila. She came down the pavement with an unhurried tread, her boots ringing on the stone, her shoulders squared, her face closed. And when she reached her, she stopped at precisely the length of a polite handshake, and looked at her with a clear, cool, entirely neutral expression.

"You're late for the tide," she said.

"I'm not. It isn't until."

"You're late."

"Tamsin, I wasn't."

"We have a Friday run at oh-five-forty," Tamsin said. "I need you on board by eighteen hundred for the pre-check. I expect you'll want to prepare."

"It isn't what you think."

"I don't think anything."

"Please."

"I've been a captain for nine years," said Tamsin Rooke, in a perfectly level voice. "I've learned that it's best not to think about things that aren't my business. A pilot has the right to explore her options. It's in the contract."

"That's not."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine."

"It's fine," Tamsin said again, and for an instant, a hairline fracture, a flicker of something raw and bitter flashed across her face, and was gone. "Truly. Do what you must. I'll have Odo find a replacement by Friday, if it comes to that. But I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me before the tide, and not after."

"I'm not leaving."

"Good."

"I'm not."

"Good," she said again, and nodded, once, a short, formal, impersonal nod, and turned and walked away.

Ila stood on the pavement with her mouth open and her heart in pieces.

She thought of calling after her. She thought of running. She thought of a hundred things she might say, and every one of them was a lie or a confession or both, and the clause was waiting, a cold hand at her throat, patient as a tide. In the end she only stood there, with the wind in her hair and the hum of the street in her ears, and watched the yellow jacket recede down Quay Street until a crowd swallowed it.

If I tell her, she thought, she'll understand.

If I tell her, I'll lose her for good.

If I don't tell her, I'll lose her anyway.

She did not know which was worse. She did not think there was an answer. And somewhere beneath the pavement, deep under the foundations of the town, she felt the great slow pulse of the tide, drawing back and back, gathering itself, waiting.

Seventy-six days.