The first thing Ila noticed about the captain's cabin was that it was exactly the same.

Not in the details. The details had shifted, as details do. The bunk was wider now, with a quilted gray blanket instead of the old orange one. A shelf of battered paperbacks had appeared above the desk, held in place by a bungee cord. There was a mug with a chip in the rim, and a sweater drying over the back of a chair, and a small framed photograph screwed to the bulkhead that Ila did not let herself look at.

But the room still had the same shape. The same low ceiling, the same slanted porthole, the same brass handle on the wardrobe that stuck if you did not lift as you turned it. It still smelled of cedar and engine oil and strong tea. It still, when you stood in the center of it, felt like the inside of someone's breath.

Ila had been in this cabin perhaps a hundred times, when it had belonged to a different Rooke.

She stood just inside the door with her hand on the frame and thought: you are not supposed to be here.

It was not entirely true. She had been sent.

"Logbook," Tamsin had said, an hour ago, from the foot of the gangway, where she stood with a harbor inspector and a clipboard and an expression of tightly leashed patience. "My cabin. Top drawer of the desk. Black leather, with an elastic band. Don't touch anything else."

"Your cabin."

"Do you need a map?"

"I need a reason."

"The reason is that the inspector wants to see the tide record for the last quarter, and I'm in the middle of an argument about fenders." Tamsin did not look at her. "You've got two minutes. Go."

So here she was, with a hammering heart and a hand that wouldn't stop trembling, standing in a room she had sworn never to enter, looking for a black leather book.

She crossed to the desk. The top drawer slid out without protest. The logbook lay there on a nest of pencils and spare rubber bands, exactly as described, and she took it with the fingertips of one hand and held it against her chest like a shield.

It would have been easy to stop there.

It would have been easy to turn around and walk out, shut the door, and hand the book to the inspector with a calm smile. A clean, forgettable errand. She had done a thousand like it in her life.

But the room was humming.

* * * It began as a pressure in the ears, as though the air had thickened. Then a sound, so soft she wondered if she was inventing it, a low, vibrating note somewhere below hearing, like a fingertip drawn around the rim of a crystal glass. It rose and fell with a slow, living rhythm. It was coming from somewhere near her knees.

Ila looked down.

The desk had a second drawer, a deep one, bolted to the frame with an iron hasp and a small brass padlock. She had not noticed it on the way in. It was a plain thing, dark wood, scarred and unremarkable. But around the keyhole a faint light had begun to leak, a thin gold thread, curling up toward the ceiling like smoke from a candle.

She knew what was inside.

She did not move. She did not breathe. She stood with the logbook crushed against her ribs and the hum sinking into her bones, and she thought of a kitchen with a scrubbed pine table, a roll of old paper, a pair of big, warm, ink-stained hands unfurling it with all the ceremony of a priest.

You've got to be patient with her, girl, Cormac Rooke had said.

Her. As though the chart were a person. As though it could be insulted.

She had been twenty. She had come to Saltwick with a rucksack and a head full of dreams and a talent that made old fishermen cross themselves, and Cormac had taken one look at her, a thin dark child with the Pull burning in her like a lamp, and had said, "You'll want to eat something." And she had eaten. And he had talked. He had talked for three hours, in his big quiet voice, about tides and weather and the long slow arithmetic of the sea, and at the end of the evening he had unrolled the chart and let her look.

It had not shown her anything. Of course it hadn't. But she had felt, in that moment, with Tamsin's shoulder warm against her own and Cormac's smile glimmering in the lamplight, that she had been let into something enormous, something sacred. A family. A home.

Cormac would have let me look, she thought. He'd have shown me. He'd have understood.

He would have understood a great deal, if he had been alive. He had always understood what other people were too frightened to say. He would have taken one look at her face and known that something had been broken, and he would have put the kettle on, and he would have asked absolutely nothing.

And then he would have told her, gently, with great sorrow, that Old Harrow did not forgive.

The hum deepened. A thread of gold light slid across the floor and touched the toe of her boot.

"No," Ila whispered. "I'm not supposed to."

The light lifted. It curled around her ankle like a cat.

She had come to Saltwick for the chart. She had signed her name three times on a ruinous contract, and slept in a cupboard, and endured a hundred little cruelties from a woman she had once loved more than the sea. It was the whole reason she was here. And it was sitting a foot away, behind a brass padlock, and humming her name.

She knelt.

She did not remember deciding to. She simply found herself on her knees on the cold steel floor with the logbook set aside and her hand outstretched, fingers spread, hovering an inch from the padlock. The gold light flowed over her knuckles like water. It was warm. It was alive. It felt like standing in the sun after a long, dark winter, and a small, desperate, stupid part of her wanted to weep.

Just a touch, she thought. Just to see if it's real.

Her fingertip came down on the hasp.

* * * "Out."

The word cracked across the cabin like a whip.

Ila jerked her hand back as if burned. She spun, still on her knees, and the logbook skidded across the floor and fetched up against the bunk. Tamsin stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and the light behind her turned her into a dark outline.

She was breathing hard. She had run. A strand of auburn hair had fallen across her face, and her chest rose and fell, rose and fell, beneath the yellow oilskin. Her eyes were fixed on the second drawer, and the thin gold thread that still curled from the keyhole, and her face was a mask of absolute, cold fury.

"I said out."

"I was only getting the logbook."

"I can see what you were doing."

"Tamsin."

"On your feet. Now."

Ila scrambled up. Her knees were weak and her palms were wet. "I didn't open anything. I didn't touch the lock. It was humming, and I only."

"You only."

"I only wanted to look."

"You only wanted to look." Tamsin said it very quietly, with a flat, bitter softness, as if tasting each word. She crossed the cabin in three strides and planted herself between Ila and the desk, her back to the second drawer, her arms spread slightly at her sides like a woman guarding a doorway. "That's what you said last time."

"Last time?"

"At the Pennywhistle regatta. You said you only wanted to look at my father's compass. I found you in the wheelhouse at midnight with the case open and your hands on it."

"I was nineteen!"

"And now you're twenty-nine, and you're in my cabin, kneeling at my father's chart, with that look on your face."

"What look?"

"The one you get when you've already decided."

It struck home so exactly that Ila lost her breath.

"This is my father's chart," Tamsin said. "My father's. It's the last thing he left me. It's the only thing on this boat that's more than a tool. And you don't get to come in here and put your hands on it just because you've suddenly remembered you have a conscience."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?"

"I didn't come for the chart."

It was a lie. It was one of the worst she had ever told, and she knew by the glint in Tamsin's eye that it had been heard for exactly what it was.

"No lying on my deck," Tamsin said, almost gently. "Clause thirteen."

"This isn't your deck. It's your cabin."

"It's the same principle."

Ila's temper, which she had been holding down for days with both hands, snapped like a rope.

"Cormac would have let me look," she said.

It was out before she could stop it. It fell into the silence like a stone into a well, a small hard sound, and then a long, terrible hush.

Tamsin went white.

She did not flinch. She did not step back. She simply stood there with her hands at her sides and her eyes enormous in her pale face, and the light from the keyhole shivered gold across her cheekbone, and for one awful second Ila thought she might actually fall.

"Don't," Tamsin whispered. "Don't you dare."

"I didn't mean."

"Don't you dare say his name to me."

"Tamsin, I'm sorry."

"You weren't at the funeral."

It was a quiet statement. It was a fact, laid flat on the table, and it was the single most devastating thing anyone had ever said to her.

"I know," said Ila.

"Five years. He asked about you, you know. At the end. He asked if you'd come. I told him you were away." Tamsin's voice shook, once, and steadied. "I lied to a dying man because I didn't have the heart to tell him that the girl he'd called his third daughter had walked out on the whole family and never looked back."

"That isn't what happened."

"Then what happened?"

"I can't."

"You can't."

"I can't tell you," Ila said, and felt the old familiar pressure tighten around her throat, the invisible thumb on the windpipe, and hated it with her whole heart. "I want to. You don't know how badly. But I can't."

Tamsin stared at her.

Then she did something Ila did not expect. She laughed. It was a short ugly laugh without any joy in it at all, the laugh of a person who has finally been handed the last piece of a puzzle and found it is shaped like a coffin.

"Of course you can't," she said. "Of course you can't. You've never been able to tell me anything that mattered."

* * * Neither of them saw the drawer begin to shake.

It was a small movement at first, a faint rattle of the hasp, a tremor in the wood. But the gold light, which had been thin as a thread, widened with every heartbeat. It poured from the keyhole in a bright, trembling ribbon. It spilled over the lip of the desk, ran across the floor in a flood of liquid sunshine, and the hum in the air rose, and rose, and rose.

Tamsin spun.

"No," she said sharply. "No, not now."

The padlock was glowing. A white-hot line ran along the hasp, and the whole drawer shuddered like a living thing straining at a leash. Ila heard the iron creak. She felt the air thicken and press against her eardrums, and she smelled something sharp and clean, like ozone and rain.

"What is it doing?" she said.

"I don't know!"

"Can you stop it?"

"It's never done this before!"

"Then try!"

Tamsin lunged. She flung herself at the desk and slapped both palms flat on the lid of the drawer, pressing down with all her weight, as if she could hold the thing shut by sheer will. Her knuckles whitened. The gold light blazed between her fingers.

It wasn't enough. Ila could see that. The drawer was heaving under her hands like a trapped animal, and the padlock had begun to crack, tiny fractures spreading across the brass in a delicate web of light. Another few seconds and it would burst.

She did not think. She had done a great deal of thinking in the past seven years, and it had gotten her nowhere. She simply dropped to her knees beside Tamsin, reached out with both hands, and laid them on the edge of the desk, one beside the other, next to Tamsin's.

Their fingers touched.

It was a small contact. Pinkie against pinkie, a brush of skin on skin. But the instant it occurred, the whole room went white.

* * * Ila had no words for what happened next.

It was not a flash. It was not an explosion. It was more like a great bell being struck very softly, a single deep note that rolled out of the drawer and through the walls and down through the bones of the boat. The light did not blind her. It wrapped her. It poured across her skin like warm honey, and every tiny hair on her arms stood up, and the air seemed to fill with gold dust, a swirling glittering galaxy of drifting motes.

She heard Tamsin gasp.

She saw her face, inches away, lit from beneath by that molten glow, her mouth open, her eyes wide, her whole expression stripped of every guard she had ever built. She looked nineteen. She looked as though she had just been told something extraordinary, and had not yet decided whether to believe it.

And for one long, impossible moment, Ila felt it. A thread. A fine bright line of connection, running from her breastbone to Tamsin's, humming like a plucked string. It was not the Pull. It was nothing she had ever felt before. It was gentler and stranger and infinitely more dangerous, and it had no direction at all except toward the woman at her side.

"Tam," she breathed.

Then the gold light drew in on itself, like a breath being drawn, and snapped out.

* * * Neither of them spoke.

The cabin was dim and ordinary again. The porthole let in a thin gray wash of daylight. The drawer stood quiet. The padlock, whole and unscarred, glinted dully in the light, as though nothing at all had happened.

Their hands were still touching.

Ila realized it at the same instant Tamsin did. She felt her go rigid. She felt, rather than saw, the sharp indrawn breath, and then they both snatched their hands back as though from a stove, and scrambled to their feet in opposite directions. Tamsin retreated to the bunk. Ila backed against the wardrobe. A yard and a half of floor lay between them, and it seemed to Ila as wide as an ocean.

"That didn't happen," Tamsin said.

"Tamsin."

"Whatever you think you saw. It's old wood. It's static electricity. There was a surge in the generator." Her voice was high and fast and brittle. She had not looked at Ila once. "It's nothing."

"It's not nothing."

"It's nothing."

"You felt it."

"I felt a draft."

"You," began Ila.

"Don't." The word came out cracked. Tamsin dragged a hand across her face. Her fingers were shaking so badly that she had to press them against her thigh to hold them still. "Please. Just. Don't."

Ila closed her mouth.

She looked at the woman in front of her, this pale, trembling, furious, magnificent woman, with her braid half unraveled and her eyes bright with something that looked uncomfortably like fear, and she thought: she's as frightened as I am.

It was a revelation. It did not make her feel better.

Tamsin bent, with a movement of tremendous deliberation, and picked up the logbook from the floor. She dusted it off on her sleeve. She held it out at arm's length, like a person offering a bone to a strange dog.

"The inspector's waiting," she said. "Take this. Give it to him. And then I would appreciate it, very much, if you'd go and find something to do on the other side of the boat."

Ila took the book.

"We'll talk about this," she said.

"We won't."

"Tamsin."

"I'm going to lock that drawer," Tamsin said. "And you're not going to come within ten feet of it. And that's the end of it."

She turned her back.

She had always had a very eloquent back. Ila had learned to read it at fifteen, in a hundred small quarrels. The set of the shoulders. The stiff line of the spine. She read it now, and what it said, in quiet, final, unmistakable capitals, was: I can't afford to look at you.

Ila walked out.

* * * Night fell slowly over the harbor.

She lay in her bunk with the lights off and the blanket pulled over her head and listened to the small noises of the boat. The slow knock of the hull against the pilings. The creak of the mooring lines. Odo, somewhere forward, snoring like a distant tractor.

On the other side of the wall, Tamsin was awake.

She knew it by the silence. Not the heavy, even silence of sleep. The held, careful, listening silence of a person lying on her back with her eyes open, not moving, not daring to. It had been going on for hours. Ila knew, because she was doing exactly the same thing, a mirror image in a narrow bunk, three feet and one thin sheet of steel apart.

She could feel it. That was the worst of it. She could feel her, as clearly as if the wall were glass.

She pressed her palm against the cold steel and closed her eyes.

It was not the Pull. She was certain of that. The Pull had been a compass, a clear and certain direction, a needle pointing north. This was something else. It was a faint, steady warmth in the center of her chest, a slow golden pulse, a bell tolling softly under the surface of the sea. And it pointed, with unwavering precision, at the opposite side of the wall.

Do not, she told herself. Do not.

At two in the morning, when the harbor had gone completely still, she saw the light.

It came from beneath the cabin door, a faint, flickering glow, no brighter than a firefly, creeping along the bottom of the frame and spilling a thin golden line across the passage floor. It pulsed softly. Brightening, dimming. Brightening, dimming. Like a heart. Like breath.

Ila lay motionless, watching it, her pulse loud in her ears.

Then, very quietly, on the other side of the wall, she heard Tamsin say something. A whisper, barely audible, a word that might have been spoken to the dark, or to the ceiling, or to a roll of old paper in a locked drawer.

"It's waking up."

Ila shut her eyes.

Whatever was coming, she thought, whatever was rising from the deep, whatever debt was due, it had already begun. And she had a terrible, quiet, bone-deep feeling that when it finally reached the surface, there would be no one left on this boat who could pretend not to see.