The call came at four fifty-one in the morning, which Ila would later think of as the universe's way of saying hello.

She was already awake. She had been awake since three, lying rigid on her narrow bunk with her eyes on the steel ceiling and the blanket pulled to her chin, listening to the thin wall beside her head. On the other side of it Tamsin had been restless too, turning over, shifting, a long sigh now and then like a door swinging on a rusted hinge. Ila had counted each sound the way she counted days, as a ledger of small humiliations.

Then the radio in the passage crackled, and a woman's voice from the Tidewatch office said, "Marrow Lark, Marrow Lark, this is Saltwick Control. We have an Open Tide window opening at oh-five-forty and a distress call from a charter vessel in the outer Drift. Please confirm."

Ila was on her feet before she realized she had moved.

Her door banged open at the same moment as Tamsin's, and they collided in the narrow passage, shoulder to shoulder, in the sort of tangle that would have been funny with anyone else. Ila had a hand on the wall and a boot half on. Tamsin wore a gray sweater and a pair of old pajama trousers with a pattern of faded anchors and her braid coming undone, and her face was entirely, intimidatingly awake.

"Boots," Tamsin said.

"I'm wearing them."

"One boot. Both boots. Move."

They moved.

By five twenty the Marrow Lark was clear of the breakwater, riding the first long swells of the open water with her bow thrusting steadily toward a horizon that was beginning to turn the color of weak tea. Odo was in the engine room, shouting something affectionate and profane at the diesel. Juno was on the bow, wrapped in a bright orange float coat three sizes too big, practicing his coiling knots with the grim concentration of a boy who knew he would be tested.

Ila stood at the wheel.

"Open Tide in twelve minutes," Tamsin said from the chair behind her. "Give me the table."

"Window starts at oh-five-forty and holds for two hours and eleven minutes. Peak at oh-six-forty-eight. The first island should surface to the north-northeast, based on the surge data." Ila read it off a laminated card she had drawn up herself the night before, because the tide app was prone to failing without warning in the Drift. "Island type is unknown. I'd guess something from the Hushwater line."

"You'd guess."

"I'm hedging."

"Don't. Guess better." There was no unkindness in it. There was only the flat, practical pressure of a person who had been doing this since she was twelve. "Everything inside the Drift is a guess until you've got your boots on it. If you wait for certainty, you drown."

Ila swallowed.

"North-northeast," she said. "Eight knots."

"Then go."

She went.

* * * The first thing that happened, in the minutes before the Open Tide, was that every electronic device on the boat quietly stopped working.

It did not happen all at once. It happened the way sleep happens, in slow soft stages. The tablet flickered, then blurred, then showed a wash of pale blue static. The GPS unit blinked its little satellite symbol once, twice, and went dark. The radio, which had been murmuring Tidewatch updates, dwindled to a hush and then to silence, and the compass, the old brass-cased marine compass that Cormac had mounted on the console when Tamsin was a baby, began to swing lazily in a wide circle, like a dancer who has forgotten the tune.

"There," Tamsin said, very softly.

It was not alarm. It was recognition, almost reverence. Ila had forgotten that part, the reverence. The way the whole boat seemed to hold its breath as the world slipped quietly sideways.

She had a dry mouth and a pounding pulse and a wheel under her palms that she could not trust to tell her where she was. All she had was a laminated card, a stopwatch, and the twenty-six numbers she had memorized over the last two days with a ferocity that bordered on prayer.

Seven years ago, she would have closed her eyes.

She would have let the sea tell her, in that wordless pull below her breastbone, a magnet drawing her toward every island and reef and sandbar within twenty miles. It had been like having a second set of lungs. Like carrying a map inside her ribs that updated itself with every breath.

She opened her eyes wider instead, fixed them on the stopwatch, and counted.

"Two minutes," she said. "Course unchanged. Speed eight and a half."

"Good."

"One minute."

"Good."

"Thirty seconds." Her voice cracked on the last word. She could feel Tamsin's attention on the back of her neck like the warmth of a lamp. "Fifteen. Ten. Five."

The sea changed.

There was no other way to describe it. For a moment the horizon stayed flat, silvery, perfectly ordinary. Then a long slow shudder ran through the water, as though something very large beneath the surface had turned over in its sleep, and the whole smooth skin of the ocean began to lift.

Ila had seen the Drift rise a hundred times as a girl. She had never once, in all her years, grown used to it.

First came the light, a pale green glow spreading from nowhere, like phosphorescence rising from the deep. Then the water bulged and parted, and out of it, dripping, glittering, impossibly, serenely alive, came trees.

They rose first in rows. Dark, twisted trunks as thick as barrels, laced with kelp and garlanded with strings of pale sea foam, they surged out of the swell with a sound like a thousand people exhaling at once. Their roots trailed behind them in long black ropes, braided through mats of floating peat, and the whole orchard rode the waves as calmly as a barge. Between the branches hung fruit. Pearly, silvery, translucent fruit, round as lanterns and the size of fists, each one glowing faintly from within like a lit window in a distant house.

"Brine Orchard," Tamsin murmured.

Ila's fingers had gone numb on the wheel. "Apples."

"Don't call them apples. They don't like it." It was said so seriously that for a moment Ila thought she meant it, and then she saw the corner of Tamsin's mouth twitch. "Not that they can hear you. Probably."

It was the faintest crack in the armor, and it passed so quickly that Ila almost missed it.

* * * The charter boat was called the Dolly May, and she lay on her side in a tangle of kelp and peat about two hundred yards inside the orchard's edge, her bow wedged between two floating trunks and her hull groaning every time the swell lifted her.

There were six people aboard. Ila could count them from the Lark's deck as the tug nosed alongside: a stout man with a gray beard, three women in matching tourist windbreakers, a boy of perhaps ten clutching a camera, and a skinny deckhand with a coil of line over one shoulder who looked like he was about to cry. They stood in a huddle on the tilted deck with the white faces of people who had been told, in so many words, not to leave the boat.

"Hello, Dolly May," Tamsin called, through the loud-hailer. Her voice was brisk, cheerful, and totally unhurried. "Marrow Lark here, come to give you a tow. Is everyone all right?"

"We're fine," the gray-bearded man shouted back, quavering. "The engine quit and the boy says the compass is broken."

"The compass is always broken in here. It's a feature." She said it with such serene calm that the passengers visibly relaxed. "Stay where you are. Don't touch anything. Especially, I'm serious about this, don't touch the fruit."

"Are those pears?" said one of the women.

"No, ma'am."

"They're so pretty. They look like little lamps."

"They're memories," Tamsin said. "That's why you don't touch them. Juno, bow line. Odo, give me hook and shackle. Ila, bring us in alongside, port side to, bow into the swell."

Ila put the helm over.

It was, in fairness, a beautiful piece of work. She would allow herself that much. A tug of the Lark's weight did not slide gracefully into a pocket of tangled trunks, and she had no feel for the water, no ghostly sense of where the currents ran or how the wind curled around the peat banks. She had a stopwatch and a table and her own bare, trembling skill. She used every ounce of it. She came in slow, crabwise, with the bow angled twenty degrees off the swell, and she felt the Lark settle against the Dolly May's rail with a soft, grinding kiss of rubber and steel.

"Nicely done," Tamsin said.

Ila did not turn around. She could not have said anything if she had. Something hot and stupid was gathering behind her eyes at the word nicely, and she concentrated very hard on not showing it.

The rescue itself took twenty minutes.

The passengers came across in a line, handed from deck to deck by Juno and Odo, each one clutching a life jacket and a handful of nervous gratitude. The boy with the camera, a serious child with a gap in his front teeth, stopped midway across the gangplank and whispered to Ila, "Is it true there's a ghost orchard under the sea?"

"It's not a ghost," she told him. "It's just a very old tree."

"Mum says it eats things."

"Your mum is a sensible woman."

"Do you ever see it?"

"I used to," Ila said, and surprised herself with the truth of it.

The boy nodded as though this were very reasonable, and the camera strap swung against his chest, and then Juno lifted him over the rail and the moment was gone.

* * * It might have ended there.

It should have ended there, in Ila's private catalog of near-disasters. The boat stable, the passengers aboard, the tide still comfortably wide. She stood at the wheel with her hands finally beginning to unclench, and she let herself breathe, a long ragged breath that tasted of salt and cold.

Then Juno, on the foredeck, said, "Captain, there's a really big one on the tree next to us," in the dreamy voice of a boy who was no longer entirely paying attention to the thing he was saying.

Ila looked.

It was an apple the size of a grapefruit. It hung from a low bough not twelve feet from the Lark's starboard rail, and it was shining. Not the soft pearl of the others. This one burned a deep gold, a color like the inside of a sunrise, and a slow pulse seemed to travel through it, brightening and dimming, brightening and dimming, like the beating of a heart.

Juno was leaning over the rail.

"Juno," Tamsin said. Not loud. She did not need to be.

"I'm just looking."

"You are leaning."

"It's very pretty."

"Everything in the Drift is very pretty. That is how it gets you." She was already moving, crossing the deck with long strides, one hand out. "Come away from the rail."

"I only want to," Juno said, and stretched out his arm.

The apple fell.

Ila would never know whether it dropped because Juno touched the branch or because it had, in some way, been listening. It came loose from its bough with a soft, wet snap, and instead of splashing into the water it arced across the gap between the trees and the boat in a slow, glowing curve, trailing light like a comet, and landed squarely against Tamsin's shoulder.

It burst.

It did not splatter. It dissolved. A bloom of golden mist exploded out of it and wrapped around Tamsin's head like a cloud of fireflies, and Ila saw her go rigid, her hand still half raised, her mouth open on a word she never finished.

Her eyes went glassy.

For a moment that seemed to stretch forever, Tamsin Rooke stood in the middle of the deck with the gold light twined around her, as still as a statue, as pale as bone. Her lips moved soundlessly. Her fingers curled slowly shut, and Ila, watching, felt the floor of the world drop away.

She knew that look.

She knew it from somewhere very far back, from a seven-year-old night and a cold beach and a face lit by a single swinging lantern. She knew the exact moment when it crossed Tamsin's expression, a brief flicker of confusion, of dawning hurt, of a person looking at someone's retreating back.

Oh no, Ila thought. Oh, please, no.

"Captain?" Odo said. "Tamsin?"

Tamsin's breath came out in a shudder. The gold light thinned, drifted, vanished into the morning, and she swayed, put a hand to the rail, and shut her eyes tight.

"I'm all right," she said, and her voice was perfectly steady and perfectly wrong. "It was a memory. That's all. Everyone's all right."

But she did not look at Ila.

She looked, very carefully, at the horizon. At the water. At her own boots. She looked at everything on the boat except the one person who had been watching her from the wheelhouse with her heart stopped in her chest, and that, more than any words, told Ila what she had seen.

It was the beach.

It was the beach, and the sound of Ila's own voice, saying one word to something in the dark that Tamsin had never been meant to hear.

* * * The hardest part of the next hour was that nobody said anything.

Tamsin went back to work. That was how she dealt with shock, Ila remembered, with a grimly efficient ferocity, coiling lines and checking shackles and snapping orders at Odo in a clipped voice that brooked no questions. The passengers were seated in the galley with blankets and hot tea. The Dolly May was secured behind the Lark with a towline and a tangle of buoys, and the engine room began to hum with the steady rhythm of a vessel preparing to depart.

Ila stood at the wheel with her hands on the spokes and watched Tamsin's back through the glass.

Every line of her was held too straight. The shoulders too square, the braid too tightly bound, the hands moving with a tight, controlled precision that Ila had seen only once before, in a kitchen seven years ago, when Tamsin had been trying very hard not to throw a plate.

"She saw something," Odo said quietly.

He had come up behind Ila in the wheelhouse, a bulky, silent presence, and he was looking not at her but out at the deck, at the ramrod stiffness of the captain's back.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Don't you." He did not say it unkindly. "The orchard does that. Gives you back what you've buried. I once got a mouthful of my own wedding day, sixty years after I'd stopped thinking of it." He scratched his beard. "It rattles the best of us."

"She's fine."

"She's not, and neither are you."

Ila said nothing. She heard her own pulse in her ears, and the creak of the old wooden wheelhouse, and the long slow sigh of the orchard moving past the porthole.

"I won't ask," Odo said. "I've never been a man for questions. But I'll say this. Whatever that girl saw, she's carried it a good long time, and it's heavier than you'd think. If you've any hand in it, and I'm not saying you do, you might think about putting it down before it falls on someone."

She wanted to tell him. The need rose in her throat, a hot, aching pressure, and she could feel the words lining up on her tongue, the whole terrible story of the beach and the bargain and the thing that had spoken out of the dark.

And then her throat tightened.

It was a small thing at first. A faint constriction, like the pressure of a thumb on her windpipe. She coughed, startled, and felt it close another notch, and she knew with absolute, frightening certainty exactly what it was.

Not yet, she thought, with a flash of pure animal panic. I haven't even said it.

The pressure eased. She drew breath, shaky and thin. Odo watched her, one grizzled eyebrow raised.

"Are you well, lass?"

"Fine." She rubbed her throat. "Salt air."

He did not believe her. It was written all over his face. But he nodded and clapped a heavy hand briefly on her shoulder, and went back down to his engines.

* * * The trouble began when the tide started to turn.

It started with a sound, a long low groan from somewhere deep in the orchard, like a huge door swinging shut. Ila felt it through the soles of her boots before she heard it, and she looked up to see the first row of trees beginning to tilt, their roots lifting out of the swell, their silver fruit swaying on their branches like a thousand tiny lamps.

"Tide's turning early," Tamsin called from the deck. She had come back to the wheelhouse door, and her voice was crisp and clean and without any trace of emotion. "How long?"

Ila checked the stopwatch. Her hands, she was pleased to note, were only slightly unsteady.

"Forty minutes," she said. "Maybe thirty-five. The surge is faster than the table says."

"Then we've no time. Juno, prepare to cast off." She turned. "Where's Juno?"

Nobody answered.

Ila looked at the foredeck. The deck was empty. A neat coil of orange rope lay on the planks where it had been dropped. On the rail, sitting in a small damp puddle, lay a half-eaten apple, its silver skin broken, its pale flesh glimmering in the gray light like a bruised moon.

A bite had been taken from it. A bite the size of a boy's mouth.

"Juno?" Tamsin said, sharply. Then, louder, in a voice that Ila had not heard in seven years, a voice with a crack straight through the middle of it, "Juno!"

Far away, deep inside the swaying rows of silver, something laughed.

It was a young, delighted, entirely unconcerned laugh. It trailed away between the trees like smoke.

Ila turned. She and Tamsin were standing a yard apart, in the doorway of the wheelhouse, with the wind lifting their hair and the gold light of the orchard moving across their faces. And for the first time since the apple had burst, Tamsin looked straight at her.

There was nothing guarded in it now. Nothing cold. Only a bright, naked, bottomless terror, the look of a woman whose child has wandered off in the dark.

"Forty minutes," Tamsin said, hoarse. "He's got forty minutes before the island goes under."

"Then we'd better start looking," said Ila.

She did not have the Pull. She did not have a compass or a map or a single useful instinct. She had a stopwatch, a laminated card, a captain she had hurt more than she could ever repair, and a boy somewhere out in the glittering silver dark, laughing at the sea.

It would have to be enough.