Tamsin ran.

She did not decide to. Her legs simply carried her across the deck and over the rail and down onto the nearest floating trunk, a thick wet slab of bark that rolled alarmingly under her boots, and she was three jumps across the swell before the thought arrived in her head that she had left the wheelhouse without giving orders.

"Odo!" she shouted, over her shoulder. "Hold the Lark! Keep the engine warm! If the tide turns before I'm back, take her out!"

"Captain, you can't go in alone!"

"I'm not alone."

It was out of her mouth before she had checked it, and it was only when she heard the answering thump of boots on bark behind her that she understood what she had said.

Ila had followed her.

She came down off the rail in a single practiced leap, landing in a crouch with one hand braced on the slick trunk, her dark hair whipping loose from its knot. Her jaw was set. Her eyes, the color of a river under cloud, were fixed on the glittering rows of trees ahead, and she did not so much as glance at Tamsin.

"Which way?" Ila said.

"Why are you here?"

"Which way, Rooke?"

It was not the time to argue, and they both knew it. Tamsin pointed with her chin toward the thick of the orchard, where the silver light pooled like milk in the gaps between the branches. "The laugh came from the north side. He'll have gone deeper. They always go deeper."

"Then we go deeper."

"I go first. You stay in sight."

"I'm not a child."

"You're not a navigator either," Tamsin said, and watched the words land.

She had not meant them to cut that way. She had meant them to sound like a practical observation. But Ila's face went white and still, and for a moment Tamsin saw her flinch, a small, involuntary tightening around the mouth, like someone who has been struck on an old bruise.

Then Ila lifted her chin.

"Then lead," she said quietly.

They went in.

* * * The orchard was not like any forest Tamsin had ever walked through, and she had walked through most of the strange ones.

The ground, if it could be called ground, was a living carpet of peat and kelp that rippled beneath their boots in slow, breathing waves. Everywhere she stepped it gave a little, like a mattress, then pushed back. The trunks rose on either side like dark cathedral pillars, twisted and glistening, their roots trailing into the black water below. And everywhere above, in the thick silver canopy, hung the apples, hundreds upon hundreds of them, shining softly, each one a small cold lantern in a world gone silent.

It would have been beautiful if it had not been so wrong.

"Don't look at them," Tamsin said, over her shoulder. "Keep your eyes on the ground."

"They're pulling at me."

"I know. Don't look."

"I can hear them." Ila's voice was strained. "It's like whispering. It's like a thousand people in the next room, all talking at once."

"That's the memories. Everything anyone ever left behind in the Drift, it keeps. It tries to give it back."

"Is that what you saw? Before?"

It was a mistake, and Tamsin knew it was a mistake the instant she heard the question. She felt something in her chest lock down like a cleat taking a line.

"No," she said.

"Tamsin."

"It was nothing. A flash. A gust of old air." She kept walking. "We're looking for a boy."

Behind her, Ila fell silent. It was not the silence of agreement. It was the silence of a person deciding to wait.

Tamsin ground her teeth and kept moving. Between the trees ahead, the gold light was thickening. She could taste it on the air, a sweetness like warm honey, and under it, faintly, something that was almost music.

What had she seen?

She did not want to think about it. She had not wanted to think about it for the last forty-five minutes, which had been a notable feat of discipline, even for her. But the memory lay in her skull like a stone in a shoe, and every step she took pressed it into a slightly different place.

A beach. A cold gray beach under a dark sky, and the sound of the sea at her back. A lantern swinging. And in front of her, a long way off, the narrow, retreating line of someone's shoulders, going away from her down the shingle, slow and straight and not looking back.

She had known the shoulders. She had known them the way she knew her own hands.

And a voice. Soft, level, perfectly clear, speaking to something Tamsin could not see. It had said one word. It had said it calmly, like someone accepting an invitation.

Yes.

That was all. That was the entire memory. A woman walking away, and a single word spoken into the dark, and then the apple had burst and Tamsin had been standing on the deck with a bad taste in her mouth and Odo calling her name.

It was the last three hours of that night.

She had never remembered them. For seven years she had lived with a blank where those hours should have been, a smooth gray gap in her memory, like a missing stair in a flight of steps she had to climb every day. She remembered the beach before. She remembered the cold water, the dark, the way the island had gripped her ankles like a living hand. And she remembered waking, long afterward, on the shingle in the early light, with her feet frozen and her toes already turning black and nobody coming.

Nobody.

Between those two memories lay a gap exactly three hours wide, and in that gap Ila had gone away.

And now the orchard had given her a single thread of it.

Yes. As if it had been an easy thing. As if she had been asked a question and had found the answer already waiting.

Tamsin swallowed. Her throat felt as dry as paper.

You left, she thought. You chose to leave, and you said yes to something, and you never looked back. That was what you did. That's all it ever was.

She had known it. She had always known it. But it was one thing to know, and quite another to see, and she found that the knowing had a sharper edge now, a freshly honed, glittering edge, and she was bleeding on it with every step.

* * * They found Juno at the bottom of a small hollow, sitting cross-legged under a tree.

He looked like a boy at a bonfire. The silver light fell on him in soft ripples, and there were tears running down his face, big slow ones, which he did not seem to notice. In his lap he held the core of the apple he had eaten, a thin pale ring of flesh with the seeds still in it. His eyes were huge and unfocused, and he was smiling.

"Juno," Tamsin said.

He did not respond.

She crouched in front of him. Slowly, gently, the way you approach a startled animal, she laid a hand on his arm. His skin was freezing. "Juno. It's the captain. Can you hear me?"

"I was at the kitchen table," Juno said dreamily. "Mum was making pancakes."

"I know. It's all right."

"She had her yellow apron on. The one with the strawberry. She used to hum." His smile trembled. "She doesn't hum now. She doesn't do much, now. And I'd forgotten that she ever did, and I was just. I was just sitting there, and the sun came in, and it smelled like butter."

His voice broke on the last word.

Tamsin felt her heart turn over, slowly, painfully, like a heavy wheel. She had known Juno for two years. She knew he had a mother in a care home on the north shore and a younger sister at school. She knew he sent half of his wages home and ate cheese sandwiches for lunch six days a week. She had not known that he carried this.

"Hey," she said. Her voice came out rougher than she wanted. "Hey. Come back to me, Pike."

"Don't be angry."

"I'm not angry."

"I shouldn't have eaten it."

"No." She cupped his cold face in her palms and tilted it up, gently. "But I'm not angry. It's the orchard. It does that. It finds the thing you've lost and holds it out to you, and it's so hard not to take it. It's hard for everyone."

"Is it?"

"It's hard for me," Tamsin said, and it was out before she knew she would say it.

She felt, rather than saw, Ila go still behind her.

Juno blinked. Slowly, the glaze began to drain from his eyes, and the tears, which had been running so quietly, burst out in a hiccuping rush. He folded forward into her arms like a collapsed tent, and Tamsin held him with one hand on the back of his head, the way she had held her father once, on the worst day of her life.

"There," she murmured. "There. Get it out. It's all right."

Above them, the silver apples swayed. Somewhere very far away, the sea gave a low, groaning sigh, and Tamsin felt the orchard shift under her knees.

"Tamsin," Ila said, urgently.

"I know."

"We've got maybe fifteen minutes."

"I know." She hauled Juno to his feet and slung his arm around her shoulders, a gangly, shaking weight. "Can you walk?"

"I think so."

"Good lad. Let's go."

* * * Getting out was worse than getting in.

By the time they were halfway back through the orchard, the whole island had begun to move. The trees swayed. The peat heaved. The ground rolled under their boots in long slow swells, and the silver light was draining out of the branches, one apple at a time, leaving the canopy dark and bare. Water was welling up through the mats of kelp, black and cold. It rose around their ankles in thin sheets, hissing, and every few seconds the whole orchard gave a deep shuddering groan, like a ship about to break.

"Left!" Tamsin called.

"I can't see it," Ila called back.

"The break in the trees. Past the leaning one."

"I can't see it!"

She could hear the strain in Ila's voice, the rising edge of something that wasn't quite panic but was a close cousin. And Tamsin looked back, over Juno's bowed head, and saw her standing in the half-dark between two trunks, turning in a slow circle with her arms held out from her sides.

She was searching.

It was a small gesture, and Tamsin had not seen it in seven years. A tilt of the head. A slow, listening stillness, the lids half closing, the face lifting toward something none of them could hear. It was how Ila had always looked when she reached for the Pull, her whole body tuning itself like a fiddle string to the sea.

And nothing happened.

Tamsin watched it not happen. She watched Ila's face crumple, just for a heartbeat, a flash of pure naked loss, as the instinct reached out and found a wall where there had been a door. Ila swayed. She put out a hand toward the nearest trunk, and her fingers were trembling.

She doesn't have it, Tamsin thought, with sudden, terrible clarity. She really doesn't have it anymore.

All the evidence had been there, of course. The tablet, the stopwatch, the laminated cards. But she had told herself it was a choice, or a habit, or a clever cover for some private advantage. She had not let herself believe it was a loss. Because if it was a loss, then something had taken it, and if something had taken it, then something had been paid.

"Ila," she said.

Ila turned. Her eyes were bright and wide and furious with themselves. "I'm fine. I'm just."

"You can't feel it."

"No."

"Not at all."

"No," Ila said. "Not at all. Are you happy now? Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"Of course it isn't."

"Then why did you."

A great shuddering crack rent the air. The tree beside them lurched, shed a cascade of silver fruit, and a long dark ribbon of water surged up through the roots and across the path. Ila stumbled back, her boot skidded on the wet peat, and her foot went out from under her.

She fell sideways into a gap between two trunks.

Tamsin saw it happen as though it were in slow motion. She saw the dark water open under Ila like a mouth. She saw Ila's hand flash out, grasping at the air, and heard her draw one sharp breath. And Tamsin dropped Juno's arm and lunged without thinking, and her hand closed on the collar of Ila's jacket as the water took her to the chest.

The sea, Tamsin thought distantly, was very cold.

She braced her boots against a root, hauled with every muscle in her back, and the water let go of Ila with a reluctant sucking sound. Ila came up out of it gasping, soaked to the neck, her hair plastered to her face, and she hit Tamsin's chest with enough force to knock them both onto the peat.

They lay there, tangled, for a long breathless instant.

Ila's weight lay across her ribs. Her breath came hot and fast against Tamsin's collarbone. Her hand was clenched in the front of Tamsin's jacket, white-knuckled, and her whole body shook with a fine, relentless tremor that Tamsin could feel straight through two layers of wet wool.

She was so close. She was so close that Tamsin could see every drop of water in her lashes. The tiny freckle at the corner of her left eye. The scar through her eyebrow that Tamsin had given her at fifteen, with a badly aimed fishing hook, and that Ila had always claimed made her look dangerous.

Neither of them moved.

"You've got me," Ila whispered. It might have been a question. It might have been something else.

"I've got you," Tamsin said.

It was the stupidest thing she could have said, and she knew it, and she said it anyway. Because the words were true and because her hand was still tight in the collar of Ila's jacket and because, for one terrible weightless heartbeat, she did not want to let go.

Then the orchard screamed, a wild groaning howl that shook the whole island, and the spell broke.

* * * They came out of the trees onto the Lark's deck in a single stumbling rush, Juno hanging between them, the three of them soaked and shaking. Odo was waiting at the rail with a boathook in his hand and murder in his eyes. He took one look at them and bellowed "Cast off!" and the tug's engine roared, and with a long shuddering wrench the Marrow Lark tore free of the dying orchard and fled out into open water.

They had barely cleared the outer rows when the island sank.

It went all at once, as it always did. The silver trees folded inward like a closing hand. A great wave rolled outward, black and glassy, and in a heartbeat the whole shimmering orchard had slid under the surface, leaving nothing behind but a slow-spreading circle of pale foam and a scattering of pearl-colored apples bobbing in the swell like drowned stars.

The sky was ordinary again. The compass settled. In the wheelhouse, the radio crackled to life.

Tamsin sat on the deck with her back against the bulkhead and her hands shaking in her lap.

Juno lay beside her under a heap of blankets, white-faced but alive, with a mug of Odo's terrible tea clasped in both hands. The passengers had all been moved to the galley. The Dolly May bobbed placidly behind the tug on her towline. Nothing had been lost.

Ila had gone to the stern, and she stood there alone, at the rail, with her hands on the cold steel and her back to everybody.

Tamsin watched her for a long time.

Her jacket was still dripping. Her hair hung in dark wet ropes against her neck, and she had not changed or dried or even wrapped herself in a blanket. She simply stood, staring at the spreading foam where the orchard had been, and from time to time a tremor ran across her shoulders.

She should leave her alone. That was the sensible thing. That was what the Terms of Passage would have recommended, had they been drafted by a saner woman.

Instead, Tamsin got up, went below, took a dry sweater out of her own locker, and carried it to the stern.

"Here," she said, and held it out.

Ila turned. Her face was blotched and raw. She looked at the sweater as though Tamsin had offered her a live eel.

"I'm fine."

"You're soaked."

"I said I'm fine."

"You're blue," Tamsin said. "Put it on. Don't make me explain hypothermia to a woman with a deep-water endorsement."

For a moment she thought Ila would refuse. Her mouth firmed. Her chin lifted. And then, with an awkward, stiff little movement, she took the sweater, and she stripped off the wet jacket, and Tamsin turned her back with great decorum while she changed.

Don't look, she told herself. Don't think.

"Done," Ila said, after a minute, in a small voice.

Tamsin turned.

The sweater was navy, a heavy wool knit with a high neck, and it fell on Ila like a blanket. The sleeves swallowed her hands. The hem hung to her thighs. She stood there in it with her damp hair curling at the collar and her eyes wide and wary, and Tamsin felt something go through her like a slow warm tide, so sudden and so unwelcome that she nearly stepped backward.

It was her sweater. It was her smell. Salt and wool and diesel. And it was wrapped around the one person in the world she had sworn never to wrap anything around again.

"Thank you," Ila said.

"Don't mention it."

"I mean it."

"I said don't mention it." Tamsin heard the snap in her own voice and softened it, a fraction. "Don't make me regret the license, Sorrel. That's all I ask."

Something flickered across Ila's face. It might have been hurt. It might have been relief. She nodded slowly, and said, "I won't," and Tamsin turned and walked away before she could do anything foolish.

* * * She did not go to her cabin until the Lark was tied up at berth nineteen and the passengers had been handed over to a cluster of relieved relatives and the harbormaster's staff. She did not go until the sun was high and the wind had dropped and Odo had made her eat a sandwich, which she had done without tasting it.

She went down the passage in the afternoon light with her shoulders aching and her hair stiff with salt, and she opened the gray door with its hand-lettered sign, and she stopped on the threshold.

The leather tube lay on the desk, exactly where she had left it. It had not moved. But the end of the tube was open, the cap unscrewed, and from inside it a pale glimmer was spilling out across the desk, soft as breath on a cold window.

She crossed the cabin in three strides and drew the chart out.

It unrolled across her hands like a living thing.

Where there had been blank paper that morning, there was now a drawing. A small one, in the upper left corner, no larger than her palm. A neat cluster of tiny trees in silver ink, each with its own tiny glowing fruit. Around them ran a delicate ring of rippling lines, and beneath them, in a hand she had known all her life, in her father's looping, slanted script, was a single line of writing.

Pay what you owe.

Tamsin stared at it.

Her ears were ringing. Her father's handwriting. Her father's voice, rough and warm, saying it at the dinner table, saying it at the end of every deal, every favor, every loan. The Rooke family motto, he used to joke. Only now there was no joke in the words, and the ink was damp, as if he had written it a moment ago.

She put her finger on the last letter. It smeared slightly, gold and teal across her skin.

And at the edge of the paper, past the little cluster of trees, a second line of ink began to creep. It drew itself out slowly, patiently, a thin dark thread curving away across the empty parchment, heading toward the lower right corner as though it had somewhere to go. It stopped, trembling, a few inches short of the edge. A tiny, hesitant arrowhead formed at its tip.

The arrow pointed toward the cabin door.

Toward the passage. Toward the narrow room at the end of it, where a woman in a borrowed navy sweater was sitting on her bunk with her face in her hands.

Tamsin let out a long, shaking breath.

She rolled the chart up, her hands careful and fast. She locked it back in its tube. She slid the tube into the drawer beneath her desk, and turned the key, and put the key in her pocket, and sat down on the edge of her bunk with her heart pounding like a fist against a door.

Pay what you owe.

Whatever Ila had come back to Saltwick to pay, Tamsin thought, with the cold certainty of a woman who had spent seven years learning to read the sea, it was going to cost them both more than either of them could afford.

And whatever it was, she was not going to let the paper tell her first.

She would find out for herself. And when she did, she would not be gentle.