The thought made a sinking feeling drop between my ribs as I tied another strip of silk and kicked off, letting the current take me again. She’d never told a soul where she’d found the midnight. What other secrets had she left here?

TWENTY-EIGHT

“Fable.”

I was still floating in the deep, infinite blue illuminated around me. The reef stretched out below, the ripple of sunlight dancing on the surface above.

“Fable.” My name was soft on West’s gravelly voice.

The length of him pressed against me, and I felt his fingers slide through mine. The blisters on my hands stung as he pressed my knuckles to his mouth.

“Time to wake up.”

I opened my eyes just enough to see a faint light spilling through the slats of the closed window shutters of the helmsman’s quarters. I rolled beneath the quilts to face West and set my head on the crook of his shoulder, fitting my hands beneath him. They were still a bit numb, even after a few hours of sleep in the warm cabin.

The smell of him filled the room and I pulled it in on a deep, relieved breath. He’d thawed, acting more like himself than he had since we were at Azimuth House. I didn’t know if it was being back at sea or if it was the long hours spent underwater in the quiet that had done it. I didn’t care.

“Sun will be up soon,” he said, pushing the hair back from my face.

The first day of the dive had been brutal, with shifting tides that slowed our progress over the reefs. And though we’d found cache after cache, none of them had been anything close to midnight. Worse, we didn’t have time to dredge what we did find. We’d have to leave all those stones where they were buried in the rock.

I curled up closer to him, not wanting to surrender to the rising sun. I took one of his hands and held it to the beam of light. His fingers were cut up and rubbed raw from the coral. “You never told me how you learned to dredge,” I whispered.

The first time I’d seen him put on a belt was when we dredged the Lark. It was unusual for a helmsman to have ever been a dredger because it was considered one of the lowest rungs on a crew.

“I learned when I was a kid.”

“But who taught you?”

He looked as if he was trying to decide how much of the story to tell me. “No one, really. I just started following the dredgers into the water on dives and watching them work. I figured it was better than staying on the ship and giving the helmsman a reason to notice me.”