The Ferryman's Signal

Etta Kline kept her hands in the engine as if they were keeping the world together. The Morrow breathed around her: a low, wet shudder of diesel and tide, canvas hissing where it had been patched so many times the stitches looked like runes. Salt crusted the edges of the hatch and powdered the soles of her boots; when she rubbed it off, the skin beneath smelled faintly of copper and old bread. Above, the copper throb of the radio stack sang only a thin static, an appetite of noise without a voice. Etta listened because listening had been what kept her father alive for a year after the first lights went out — listening and turning knobs.

Her fingers moved under wires scarred with solder burns and under a plate where a brass label had once read "resonator."

— You hear anything? Rin's voice was small as a gull, and the child's shadow made quick little shapes on the bulkhead. She had wrapped a scarf around her head the way people wore armor now and balanced a metal pail that threatened to pour itself back into the sea.

— Just that same old hunger, Etta said, but she tried to make her voice steady. She checked a terminal; a filament winked and went black. The purifier in the hold had coughed twice and gone silent an hour ago. Two hundred people in Haven-lot built their days around the thing that turned brackish water into something you could drink without thinking of salt sores. When it died, their plans went thin as a scrap.

The Morrow rocked when a flake of rust fell and spattered onto the deck. Etta jammed a panel back in place. Her hands were steady but inside a drumbeat of worry began to build — a thought with teeth: what if the part wasn't here? She had scavenged most of the barge herself. The transporter gears and the wind-lash that made the sails breathe; she knew every spare bolt by the nicks in its head.

— Tomas says the shore scanners found a pulse near the Old Harbor, Rin added. She tried to make the words not matter, but they slid like pebbles now that the purifier had failed.

Etta's mouth tasted of oil and brine. Old Harbor meant the Beacon: a ruin of a lighthouse and a glassed tower east of the drowned market. Nobody from Haven-lot went there much. It showed up on maps as a spit of stubborn light that refused to die. In stories, the Beacon kept its heart. In truth, it was a place where people with teeth and guns sold salvage for favors.

She tightened a wire and felt it give a small, hopeful chirp. A single bulb on the panel blinked. The purifier coughed in the hold as if waking. Etta let out a breath that was almost a laugh and then almost a sob. She should have been happy. That twitch of life wouldn't last long without the spindle that modulated salinity — the oscillator piece that wore a cracked moon of glass and the thread of filaments inside, the part her father had called a lumen core.

The Morrow groaned and the sea took one of its usual long pulls at the hull. Outside, gulls carved the air like paper knives. Somewhere downriver, a bell clanged once and then drowned in distance. Etta swallowed and heard Tomas' footsteps on the deck, heavy, measured.

— We can hold out for a while, he said quietly, but his hands traced the same paths they had traced for forty years, fingers on rope and frayed charts. "Not forever."

Rin set the pail down and dust motes swam in the slant of light through the hatch. There was no accusation in her eyes, only expectation.

Etta thought of the ledger by the galley, of the small carved token her father had left under the floorboard. She thought of the nights when he still hummed to the radio. She pushed up her sleeves and smiled too hard.

— I'll go, she said. The words sounded like a coin dropped into a deep well. It was the only thing you could say when a thing had to be found and no one else was offered.

Tomas's hands stilled, and for a second the old man looked like a child learning to make a boat out of leaves again. Haven-lot watched them all, and for the briefest moment the settlement's breathing matched hers. Outside the Morrow, the sea kept eating the shoreline, slow and indifferent.