Time passes. Slowly, she realizes … the threads are thinning. Growing more shallow. Bits and pieces of rock are emerging into view. It reminds her of a story one of the lord’s chatelains told about how the ocean has tides.

What if the White Sea has tides, too?

She shakes Ao awake. “Up! Up! We can get across if we go right now. The tide is going out.”

Ao has slept long enough to muster a final burst of determination. They sling their empty packs over their backs.

“Hold on to my hand,” says El.

They run across the barren ground, feet slapping as they skip atop rocks and clamber over heaps of fallen brick. They reach the great turtle-like rock. It’s a longer distance than it seemed. They’re both panting, struggling, as they drag themselves up the big granite outcropping. Only when they reach the top, where the road builders long ago hammered iron stakes into the rock to anchor the middle section of their bridge, do they discover the horrible truth.

The rock is an island, or was once an island, in the middle of an astoundingly wide river or perhaps a strait. The beacon light looms closer. For the first time, as the predawn light brings color back to the world, they can see land—actual land—rising above the White Sea. A tower, like a spear, stands against the sky. The road leads right there.

Or it would, if the bridge on this side wasn’t also collapsed.

That isn’t even the worst of it. The “tide” hasn’t gone out on this side. There is no obvious path across, no places where “dry land” emerges, no heaps of bricks and collapsed piers to create stepping stones. Just the slow slip and slide of deadly mist, the dense, impassable fog.

Ao stares as if she can’t believe life could be so cruel, when they have tried so hard. This time, she doesn’t even have the energy to cry. She slumps to the ground, defeated.

El never weeps. She’s not even angry, precisely. Anger has left her body, and something else is writhing in her heart. A memory assails her: the broken pot in the woods. Spore can move at an astonishing speed, so why has it never swiftly and ruthlessly attached itself to her? Pure luck? Or something she doesn’t understand?

“It’s shallow. I swear the mist is no more than ankle deep, you can see the ground,” she says.

“So what?” Ao shoots back.

“You get on my back. I’ll wade across.”

“But it will kill you. And then it’ll kill me.”