Sera picked up Varen’s walking stick first.
Light spread beneath the water. The keeper did not go closer to the pier’s edge to see it. Taking the stick, he told everyone to retreat onto dry ground.
Nume checked the mooring lines. Light that resembled a lane touched the hull and scattered. The boat still rocked on ordinary waves beside the pier.
“We don’t follow a light just because it’s there,” Sera said.
Nume turned.
“Are you telling me, or your feet?”
Sera looked at her boots. They were already pointing toward the edge. She stepped back again.
The seven beams stretched out briefly, then shortened one by one. The one toward Maru Island wavered as though its end had been cut off. A silver line on the sea was not the same thing as a way home.
Varen did not name the tower. In daylight, they would check whether its bearing matched the seventh lighthouse, reported sunk three months earlier. Recognizing something in surprise and being able to explain it were different things too.
A child cried farther up the pier.
The eleven rescued residents were climbing toward the empty room above the old boathouse, wrapped in blankets. The woman with her grandson’s shoes paused for breath before the last steps. Before the mystery underwater, there were people who needed somewhere to go.
Nume handed Sera a water container.
“The sea will still be wet tomorrow. Their cups are empty now.”
The handle pressed into her palm. Her knee hurt from the first stair. She climbed one at a time without running.
Dry sacks covered the floor. Tio was boarding a crack in the wall against the wind. His shaking hand dropped a nail twice. Sera offered to take the hammer, but he shook his head.
“I can do this. Hold the nail up for me. With the tongs, not your fingers.”
They closed the final gap and sat together. He began to talk about tomorrow’s work before today’s, then yawned hugely.
Sera shared out the water. There were too few cups; bowls were washed and passed around. Everyone had heard the bell and seen the light, but they had lived through slightly different crossings. One remembered Or’s hand holding the reflector. Another remembered the water marks on the storehouse door.
She wrote the names of the people who had returned alive. Eleven as a number became eleven lines of names. She added what names she could of the nine remaining, leaving unfamiliar spellings incomplete.
“Are we certain it’s nine?”
The white-haired woman opened a hand. Or, the bell keeper. Two people who could not walk easily. Family members helping them. Folding her fingers, she explained who had been in which building.
Nine was not a vague rescue target. She knew how three of them ate their bread: who soaked it in water, who needed someone to remove the crust.
“What food do they have?”
“Dry grain at the upper bakery. Water in the rain jars behind the bell tower. We tied the lids before the seawater reached them.”
“How long will it last?”
The woman did not answer immediately. Supplies for twenty people before departure were different from supplies for the nine remaining. Sera entered no definite date. Only three lines: food last seen, drinking-water location, local verification needed.
Nume came up from below. The discarded water barrel was lost, and a plank on one side of the boat needed more securing. No one suggested departing again immediately.
Sera knew that was right and still looked through the window toward Maru. One small light floated there. Beside it, nine people would be more tired than she was.
Varen set down his empty cup.
“Write that we aren’t going tonight first. When we go comes after observation.”
It did not sound like giving up. It was harder than falling asleep after leaving behind an uncertain promise.
Tio changed into dry clothes and lay down. Sera removed her wet boots. A little pebble lay inside one, perhaps picked up when she struck her knee on the Salt Steps. A poor substitute for the observing stand she had lost.
She placed it on the corner of her paper to keep the number nine from turning over in the wind.
They agreed on only a short observation before sleep. Sera and Varen positioned themselves at the dry railing above the pier. One recorded the light’s bearing below; the other, the height of water against the stone. Watching the same sea did not make them two observations for establishing a lane. They had not yet agreed on a shared target and time.
The underwater light sharpened when the waves settled. A swell made it seem longer; retreating water split it into pieces. The original seven lines became six, then divided as though there were eight.
Sera began erasing the count, then stopped. Beside eight, she added: appears split at surface. Varen did not look at the number and supply the correct answer.
“You’re writing what you observed.”
That sentence gave her another task she could do tonight.
Nume returned from the boat and tied dry cord to a long pole. Before anyone suggested diving for the lightstones, they should mark the dangerous depths. Varen established a boundary below the pier that no one was to approach.
“We don’t even know if a recovered stone would work,” Nume said.
Sera nodded. Seeing a sunken lighthouse did not restore a lost resource.
A saltwing rolled beneath the railing. What had been white wings in daylight looked like thin glass under the blue light. For a moment she thought the light moved along its back. It folded its wings, and the light remained on the stone below.
She gave movement and reflection separate lines in her notes. In darkness, the difference could lead someone’s feet into the water. Nume removed a white cloth from the stern; at a distance, it might resemble Maru’s reflector.
Finding the two rocks obscured by the light was difficult too. One appeared with the tide. The second showed a black tip only when a wave flattened. While waiting, Sera sat with her knee straight. If pain made her lower her eyes while standing, her readings changed with them.
Varen brought a low wooden box. When she said it was heavy, he told her he was starting her with the lighthouse’s lightest work. She smiled. Seated, she found the ends of the beams overlapping differently beyond the rail.
She added eye height and position. Looking from the same window did not guarantee the same observation. Her paper was filling with more cautions than numbers. She had come to Roan after being pushed out of a world of perfect charts. The real sea was gradually taking shape between these imperfect sentences.
A bell rang once far in the darkness. She noted when she heard it. Beside Varen’s time, the difference was less than half a turn of the hourglass. They kept the discrepancy as the first thing to check tomorrow.
The Maru light disappeared and returned at regular intervals. She rose. Someone seemed to be moving a board in front of it, in a pattern like the brief acknowledgment from the bell signal table.
Varen covered his low lamp twice. The same rhythm returned. It conveyed no sentence. It confirmed a living observation point.
“At sunrise, check conditions first,” Sera wrote. Water jars. Dry shelter. Head count. She could not send the questions as words across the sea. They needed conditions for a second boat to reach the island.
Varen asked where to use the remaining reserve stone. She nearly answered Maru at once, then stopped. If the bearing home was wrong, they might never even be able to add the crew’s names beside the eleven who had returned.
“We need to verify a short round trip first. I only marked a broad range for the current. We have to recheck where the boat heeled.”
“Use even part of the stone and we may lose three days.”
“We can’t put nine people aboard using today’s map unchanged.”
Her throat tightened. She had thought that discovering her mistake would let the boat leave at once. Sometimes it meant they had to wait.
Nume traced the direction the water had pushed the stern on the return. Sera compared it with her chart. The red current mark lay to the right of the lane. The place the captain had actually avoided was farther inside.
A dangerous blank.
She drew the notes toward her chest. Remembering the people rescued today must not become a reason to conceal a faulty map. Nor could she send the boat out at midnight to prove it wrong.
They agreed on only a short section to check next day. Nume would decide whether to sail. They would proceed only when observers on Roan and Maru could watch the same boat. No agreement between observation points, no use of the stone. Supply capacity and passenger capacity would be calculated separately.
Sera remembered the little shoes. She feared how the woman would see a boat returning without passengers. Nume touched her notes.
“An empty boat coming back leaves us a boat. If it doesn’t come back, there isn’t a next boat.”
Sera did not write the saying down. She wrote that losing this boat would leave no way to reach Maru again. It was a cost a cartographer had to record even when she did not want to read it.
At the final observation, the underwater light suddenly shortened. Water against the coastal stone fell too. There seemed to be a connection between light and tide, but she did not write cause. One night would not explain a sea.
Varen turned his stiff leg to stand. When she offered support, he asked her to set the tip of his stick on dry ground. That was the help he needed.
In her room, Sera laid dry cloth over her knee. Her windgrass drooped by the window. Before watering it, she checked that the water was free of salt. Filling other people’s cups had made her forget her own plant.
Two dry grains of sand clung to the saucer. She brushed them free and set them a little apart. Two observation points. Watching the space between them, she grew sleepy.
Nume knocked at dawn.
Sera’s first thought was of the number remaining. Nine. She hoped sleep had neither increased nor diminished it.
The captain wore dry clothes and carried a piece of rope bent in a different curve from yesterday’s map. It marked the boat’s path home.
“The wind’s changed. Turn along your map today, and we go straight into the current.”
Sera looked up, one boot still in her hand. She had to begin with the way home.