The boat hadn’t stopped.
Wind filled its sail. The hull drove forward. Yet from the lighthouse window, the distance never seemed to shrink. Nume’s boat looked like an insect running in place.
The lane was coming loose.
Sera gripped the window frame.
“Can’t we make the light stronger?”
Instead of answering, Varen showed her the underside of the lightstone. A third of its once-clear surface had clouded. A stronger beam would only use it up faster, he said.
“Someone has to watch from the other end. Light holds the lane. Eyes fix its position.”
Maru’s reflector had gone dark. The rule that required two places to observe the same thing was letting go of the boat.
Sera put a finger on the chart.
Lighthouse to Salt Steps.
Salt Steps to Maru Island.
She followed the boat’s path from point to point. Her own observation post was underwater now. The expensive stand was still there too.
She remembered the moment she had let it go.
From the ledge, she had watched the bell tower’s roof. But the roof wasn’t the only thing that stopped shifting when the bell rang. The white wall of the storehouse below it had stopped too, just above the shoreline.
“Their reflector might have moved lower.”
Varen looked at her.
“We don’t know whether the reflector broke or the person collapsed,” she said. “If the roof fell, they might have taken it down.”
“The coastal cliff blocks that view from here.”
“Then we need to look from lower down.”
He looked below the tower window. The Salt Steps were gone. Water struck them in white foam. They couldn’t go back there.
Tio came up the stairs, shaking water from his hair.
“The boat’s doing something wrong. The captain’s ringing the bell, but all that comes back is the echo.”
“Is there a window near the water beside the pier?” Sera asked him. “Facing Maru?”
“Old boathouse. Half the wall’s gone.”
Varen turned.
“Waves come into that place.”
“It still has a roof. I replaced the support.”
Tio looked as if he wasn’t sure why he kept adding things that would get him scolded.
Sera held out a hand to him.
“Show me the way.”
Varen called her name. She expected him to tell her to stop. Instead, he handed her the little reflector he had used to answer the bell tower.
“Signal the boat with this. Establish the way home first. Don’t go promising a way to the island.”
The reflector was only a little larger than her palm. It felt heavy.
He closed the box containing the last reserve lightstone.
“Use another stone now and the lighthouse goes dark tonight. We do what we can with this one.”
Sera decided not to run.
Her knee still hurt, and her wet shoes slipped on the stairs. She kept a hand on the rail and took one step at a time. Her mind had already reached the place below the pier. Her feet stayed where her body was.
Tio lit the way ahead.
The old boathouse clung to the rocks east of the pier. Small boats had once been hauled up inside. Through the missing half of its wall, she could see straight out to sea. Only one of the roof supports was new wood.
Waves covered the floor, then drained away.
“Where do we tie on?” she asked.
“There.”
Tio pointed to the new timber, its base sunk deep into the rock. They tied separate ropes around their waists, short enough to keep them from falling out of the shelter.
Sera crouched with the reflector.
Maru’s shore came into view. Fog hid the bell tower’s top, but the storehouse’s white wall still showed. A little light wavered in front of it.
She caught her breath.
“There.”
Tio knelt beside her.
“It really is.”
She sent sunlight from her reflector. The low sun dazzled off the water beside the storehouse. When she changed the angle slightly, the distant glimmer vanished.
She turned it back.
Once. A pause. Twice.
The other light answered in the same rhythm.
She shouted. No words, only a sound. Her lungs opened as though she had surfaced after too long underwater.
Tio raised a signal board toward the lighthouse.
Varen’s beam moved slowly downward. Turn it too far at once and the existing lane would break. Sera kept receiving Maru’s signal while the light shifted.
But she had no observing stand to read the bearing.
The instrument she had abandoned underwater wasn’t coming back now.
She took out the ruler she had used at the lighthouse. It wasn’t enough for a standard observation, but by lining up the marks at either end before her eyes, she could estimate a broad bearing.
First she tried to establish a level.
The floor shuddered. Each wash of water changed the vibration under her feet. Holding the ruler by hand only enlarged the error. She couldn’t draw a fine line from this.
Tio studied the reflector’s support.
“Shall I fix it?”
“Won’t cutting wood take too long?”
“Cutting would.” He lifted his hammer. “Splitting’s quick.”
He drove two dry wedges between the timber and the support. Three blows, and the base stood firm. Sera rested the ruler on it.
The scale still shifted, but her trembling hands no longer made it worse.
The bell sounded.
She read the value as the note sank to its deepest resonance, then called it to Tio. He raised the large number board for Varen.
Next bell.
Next reading.
They were close.
Varen flashed acknowledgment. The silver band on the water bent toward the low boathouse. The end of the old lane moved, little by little, until it lay alongside the boat.
At last Nume began to make visible headway.
Sera clenched both hands. The boat wasn’t home yet. Reaching it with a lane did not bring it back for them.
People appeared on Maru’s shore. Small moving points. One helped another along. Sera started to count and stopped. She couldn’t look away from the reflector now.
Nume brought the boat close to shore.
One person held a shining panel aloft. After a while, they changed arms. From that single movement, Sera understood that someone over there was holding on too.
No one made a lane alone.
A wave pushed into the shelter. Tio pulled on Sera’s waist rope. They pressed toward the wall. Water struck their knees and washed over the reflector’s lower edge.
The beam went awry.
Sera gritted her teeth and turned the panel back.
The person across the water answered.
The same rhythm.
Nume’s boat turned for home.
Then the hull heeled sharply left. The current. The circling shadow Sera had seen from the Salt Steps was catching beneath it.
She made a triangle with her empty hand. Too far away for anyone to see.
Tio reversed the signal board. A red triangle covered the back, drawn by Sera before they left.
He held it high.
Nume let a sail rope go. Half the sail loosened, slowing the boat’s roll. Something went overboard. A water barrel.
The captain was giving up weight.
Sera remembered her own hand releasing the stand.
The boat cleared the edge of the circling water. The way back widened a little.
The sun sank. Less light reached the reflector. Sera put Tio in charge of the bell signal; when the sunlight failed, they and the observer on Maru needed a shared cue for ending their observations.
Rust dulled the first strike. Tio changed the angle of his hammer. Sera kept hold of the reflector and braced her back against the support. Together their weight steadied it against the waves.
This time the note rang clear.
With the little iron hammer from his belt, Tio struck the bell on the post.
Once. A pause. Twice.
Maru’s larger bell returned the rhythm.
People remained on the shore. Beside the person holding the panel, Sera could make out two small figures. Nume didn’t turn back again. The boat was already full.
Sera didn’t say she could make the passage wider.
Throw a promise she couldn’t keep across this sea, and the people already aboard might never get home either.
By the time the boat reached the pier, the lightstone was almost white.
Sera and Tio left the shelter and reached for the mooring rope. Nume’s throw fell across the water. Together they hauled. Beside the hull, the sea smoothed like glass, then abruptly became ordinary waves again.
The lane released.
The crossing was over. They still had to get everyone safely off the boat.
One passenger clung to the rail, unable to step ashore: a white-haired woman staring into the gap between hull and pier, her foot trembling. Sera offered a hand, then drew it back. Her own legs were giving way.
Tio brought a plank. Nume held the end aboard while the boy secured the end on the pier. Once the gap was covered, the woman walked slowly across.
From a bundle against her chest, she took a pair of little shoes. Her grandson’s, she said. He was still on the island.
“He’ll need these for the next boat.”
She asked no one for a promise. She only brushed dirt from the shoes with her hand. Watching that hand, Sera looked down at her own knee. Hurting now and being unable to walk tomorrow were different things.
She sat down hard.
Nume draped a wet blanket around her shoulders.
“I told you to get yourself back first.”
“I did.”
“Which is why you’re here to say so.”
The captain said nothing more. Along the pier, people were counting those left behind before they counted those who had escaped.
Eleven had come back.
Nine remained on Maru Island.
The person holding the reflector was the bell keeper, Or. He had put the residents aboard first and stayed by the bell himself. They learned that the roof had collapsed, forcing him to move the emergency panel down to the storehouse.
Sera had been half right.
Half right had brought one boat home today. It didn’t mean she would be right tomorrow.
She left red marks on the wet chart: the range measured without proper instruments, the current, the number of residents still there. Seawater blurred one figure. She didn’t replace the sheet. She wrote the figure again beside it.
By the time Varen came down, the sun had reached the edge of the sea.
“One stone spent,” he said. “One left. Tomorrow we decide where to use it.”
Sera looked toward Maru. A small light had appeared in the distance. The reflector might be useless after sunset, but the people were still there.
“We have to go back.”
Varen nodded.
“Then sleep tonight.”
She began to stand, then stopped.
There was light below the pier.
She thought it was the lighthouse’s reflection. But Roan’s beam was already out, and the last sunlight lay in the opposite direction.
A circle of light was rising from underwater.
At first it was small enough to seem held inside a saltwing. Then it grew. Deep beneath the surface, seven beams slowly spread.
Nume caught Sera’s shoulder.
“Back.”
She stepped away without looking away.
Between the beams, the top of a stone tower appeared.
Varen dropped his walking stick.
“That should be on land.”
Beneath the surface, the tower rang its bell.
Silver circles spread across the water in place of sound.
Sera looked at the erased lighthouse symbol on the edge of her chart. The seventh lighthouse. Three months earlier, she had been taught, it had fallen with the cliff and sunk into the sea.
Its light was drawing a way toward Maru Island.