Errol flashed and his family lit up the water, illuminating a safe path. The clipper veered, Matthias at the helm, narrowly missing the figurehead, a wooden dolphin with half its nose missing. Sera thought she saw a body floating in the water surrounding the wreck, but she couldn’t bring herself to look too closely and then the fog swallowed it up.

They passed several more wreckages, ships with gaping holes in their hulls, tattered sails hanging from their splintered masts. They were ghost ships, shrouded in grayish white, silent forevermore. Some had shredded Kaolin flags draped over their prows, others the green-and-silver flag of Pelago. The fog did not care for country or allegiance.

“There is a presence here,” Vada said. “It does not want us.”

Sera had sensed it too, but not the same way Vada did.

“It’s the tether,” she said. “It is protecting itself from your kind. But it . . . it calls to me. It sings.”

She could hear it faintly, could feel it resonating in her chest like a violin string. It kept her going, kept her hopeful as a silence so unnervingly complete fell around them. Even the water lapping at the ship had ceased to make any noise. Agnes had her hands pressed against her ears as if the silence was somehow too loud, and Leo was pale and drawn, gripping the rail so tight his knuckles looked about to split through his skin.

“It feels like this will be forever,” Eneas said dully. “Silence and fog and nothing else and no one left to remember.”

Sera clutched Leela’s pendant tight, praying for the fog to end.

“Look!” Agnes cried suddenly, and though her voice was muted, there was a spark of life in it.

In the distance there was a crack in the mist—a thin strip of silver that was widening as they approached. Like the first breath after being underwater for too long, the fog parted and the ship sailed into a circle of bright blue sky, so stunningly clear it made tears well up in Sera’s eyes.

Oh, thank you, Mother Sun, she prayed. The change in her companions was noticeable—Leo’s shoulders relaxed, Agnes stood to get a better view, Eneas and Vada exchanged tentative smiles.

“Braxos, Sera Lighthaven!” Errol cried from the water.

“Braxos,” his family echoed around him.