The Lower Bay was a treacherous maze of sunken masts and scaffolds and radar antennas, jutting up from the water like a barnacled metal forest. Their pilot was the best they could find on the island, and he navigated through it with white-knuckled intensity. Their yacht was not the most maneuverable thing, and the controls were old and stiff. Marcus crossed the narrow boat—a braver act than he liked to admit—and gripped the far railing next to Woolf, who was looking at the ruins of the wrecked ships as they glided by.

“Please tell me these aren’t what’s left of your previous missions,” said Marcus.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Woolf, “but these missions failed twelve years ago. This is the last great NADI fleet, sailing north to attack the Partial stronghold in New York—quite possibly the one we’re headed to now in White Plains. It was sunk by Partial aircraft before it could enter the narrows.”

“And they’re still here?” asked Marcus, looking around at the wreckage. “Some of these ships are sticking so far out of the water I don’t know if we can count them as sunk, just grounded.”

“The bay through here was only about forty feet deep,” said Woolf, “more in the center where they dredged it as a shipping lane, probably much less now that it’s collected more than a decade’s worth of silt. The bigger ships are out there,” he said, pointing to the southeast, “on an ocean shelf just south of Long Island. All the bigger ships that couldn’t make it in this far.”

“Why were any of the ships trying to get in this far?” asked Marcus. “Even if they weren’t attacking a narrow river, a fleet this size would be overkill.”

“I imagine overkill was exactly what they were going for,” said Woolf, watching as another metal monstrosity floated gently past. They twisted up from the ocean floor like giant metal tentacles, the last, frozen remnants of a rusted kraken. “I know my unit was.”

They left the worst of it when they passed south of Staten Island, crossing from the Lower Bay to the Raritan Bay, but even here there were shipwrecks and hazards. Their pilot watched the northern shore with a practiced eye, taking them into a small inlet that narrowed quickly to a kind of swampy marsh.

“Why are we stopping?” asked Woolf.

“This is it,” said the pilot. “This is the Arthur Kill.”

“This is the canal?” It looked more like a creek through a winding park than the deep shipping lane they’d seen on the map. “Are you sure?”