She rolled onto her stomach, and after a panicked moment saw Teo and Izza. During her retrospection they had pulled ahead, and she’d drifted west. She adjusted course to follow.

Night swimming resembled daytime swimming as little as an ocean resembled a pool. Daytime, you knew where you were, relative to where you had been. After sunset, the coast was a confusion of light, and only texture separated the dark above from the dark below.

They drew even with the docks and factories of East Claw, and pressed south. Kavekana receded. Ahead, Kai saw only the skyspires miles distant. Surely Teo didn’t plan to swim all the way there. Long before they reached the spires, they’d pass the harbor wards, and then nothing would stand between them and the ocean’s hunger.

“Familiarity breeds contempt” was a saying Kai’d heard at school. The saying did not apply to Archipelagic ocean. In waters beset by star kraken, sentient storms, and sunken cities where alien monsters lived, familiarity bred terror and, failing that, death.

When Kai next looked for Teo, she was gone.

A second before, the woman had been swimming steadily ahead of them. The next, she vanished.

Kai knew better than to panic. Aching, she still wasted strength treading high in the water for a better view. She saw nothing: only Izza pressing doggedly forward. She called the girl’s name, softly: sound carried over the open ocean, and she did not know who else might be listening.

Izza turned toward Kai. Her eyes widened—and she too disappeared.

Kai swam alone, far from shore.

“Izza!” She made for the spot where the girl had sunk. She heard her father’s voice chant the litany of beasts that preyed on unwary sailors, and the remedy for each. Kraken be craven, shark-teeth blunt, gallowglass sail clear, scissorfish hunt. Even as a kid she’d thought the rhyme’s suggestions impractical. Oh, yes, when the shark comes for me, I’ll blunt its teeth.

She did not, until that moment, realize the rhyme’s purpose: not to advise, but to fill the mind in the face of danger. Chants might not deter sea monsters, but they were marginally better than the alternative litanies Kai would have composed of all the ways she was about to die.

She thought she had reached the spot where Izza sank; she saw nothing, felt no leviathan underwater. She drew a deep breath, and dove.

She opened her eyes. Water lay beneath, only water, down to the mirror coral–crusted sea floor a hundred feet below. No Izza. No Teo. No sharks or gallowglasses. The water carried sound: clicks of tiny shrimp, ship wakes and propellers, and beneath all that, far away, so deep she heard it more in her blood than in her ears, music. Long notes rose and fell, glissando and trill. Praise song.

Salt water burned her eyes. She sought, and did not find.