Day forty-seven. No wind. The sea lay flat as poured lead, gray and still from horizon to horizon, and that was the first wrong thing.
Moss came up from below at the change of watch, 0400, and tasted it before he saw anything — a thin sourness at the back of his throat, like pennies left in vinegar. His body knew before his mind. He stopped on the third step of the companionway and held the rail and breathed shallow.
The air at deck level was wrong. Wrong in the way that meant people would die.
Captain Lin was at the helm. She stood in the half-dark with one hand on the wheel and her chin lifted toward the south, the way she always stood, reading the water with those sharp old eyes that missed nothing. She had the watch. She'd had it for two hours.
He saw her cough.
It was a small sound. A catch in her throat, nothing dramatic. She put a hand to her chest. Then she bent at the waist like someone had struck her in the stomach and her legs folded and she went down to the deck in a motion that was almost gentle, almost slow, and the wheel spun free.
"Lin!" Moss came up the last three steps in one stride. The sourness was thicker here — deck level, pooled in the stillness like water in a ditch. No wind to push it. No chop to break the surface and let it dissipate. The H₂S was just sitting there, venting from a dead ocean in the dead calm, and Lin had been standing in it for God knew how long.
He got his arms under her. She was lighter than he expected. The old fisher who had sailed deeper water than anyone alive, who had selected her crew with the cold precision of a woman who understood exactly who would live and who would die — she weighed nothing. He could feel her ribs through her shirt.
He carried her below. Down the companionway, into the cabin, onto the bunk. Her eyes were open but not seeing. Her mouth worked. Air came in and out in short, wet gasps that sounded like cloth tearing, and her hands opened and closed on nothing.
Three hundred parts per million. Three minutes. He knew the numbers. Everyone on the crossing knew the numbers. Three hundred ppm knocked you unconscious. Five hundred killed you outright. The calm mornings were the worst because the gas pooled at deck level with nowhere to go, and you breathed it before you smelled it because H₂S burned out the receptors in your nose. By the time you tasted pennies, you were already dying.
Lin's lips moved. No sound came out. Her pupils were blown wide and her skin had gone the color of old ash and Moss held her hand and watched her die.
It took four minutes. Her breathing hitched, then slowed, then stopped. Her hand tightened on his once — a squeeze that was reflex, not intention — and then it relaxed and she was gone. Her eyes stayed open. Moss closed them with his thumb and forefinger, the way you'd close a porthole cover, and sat with her in the dark of the cabin while the ship drifted without a hand on the wheel.
He sat for ninety seconds. He counted them. Ninety seconds of sitting with the dead because that was what she was owed and he could not give her more.
Then he went back up the companionway and took the helm.
Someone had to.
He ordered the crew to stay below until wind picked up. Jula, his best rigger, argued. Moss told her once. She went below. There was something in his voice that morning that made people do what he said without asking twice, and he did not examine what it was because examining it would have required acknowledging what had just happened, and he was not ready for that. He might never be ready for that.
The wind came at noon. A faint westerly, enough to clear the deck and push the gas off. Moss called the crew up. He told them Lin was dead. He said it flat, the way you'd report a change in weather. He told them he was taking command.
Nobody objected. There was nothing to object to. Command on the crossing was not a rank or a privilege. It was the job of the last person still standing, and Moss was standing.
Three ships remained. Lin's — his, now — the Redtide, and a converted fishing vessel called the Patience whose name had become a bitter joke somewhere around week four. The other nine ships were gone. Sunk, or capsized, or scattered so far off course that their lamp signals no longer reached across the water at night.
That evening, Moss climbed the mast with the signal lamp and flashed a message to the Redtide, whose lantern blinked a half-mile to the east.
ACHIKE COMMANDING. LIN DEAD. H2S.
The reply came slow. The Redtide's signaler was a woman named Deshi who had lost two fingers to a winch accident in week three and worked the shutter with her remaining hand.
UNDERSTOOD. SORRY. WHAT NOW.
HOLD COURSE. FOLLOW WAYPOINTS. STAY TOGETHER.
The Patience was farther out, barely visible, her lamp a faint pulse on the southern horizon. Moss signaled her too. The reply took twenty minutes because Patience's crew was down to eight and their signaler was also their cook and their medic and he was probably asleep.
Some of the crew wanted to turn back. Moss heard it in the way they talked at meals, the silences that opened up when he walked past. The cook, a broad man named Tomas who had signed on because the lifetime provisions would feed his daughters, said it outright on the second night.
"We've lost nine ships, Moss. Nine. Out of twelve. There's nothing south but more of this."
Moss spread the navigation chart on the galley table. The waypoints were marked in his own hand — coordinates extracted from Kael's signal data, positions that someone on the other end had encoded and transmitted north through fourteen thousand kilometers of dead air and dying ocean. The waypoints didn't follow a straight line. They jogged east and west, routing around something. Around the kill belts. Around the storm corridors. Around the places where the ocean was most determined to end you.
"Look," Moss said. He put his finger on the chart. "These aren't random. Every waypoint routes us around the worst water. Somebody mapped this. Somebody knows where the dangers are and marked a path through them."
Tomas stared at the chart. His jaw worked.
"Someone is guiding us," Moss said. "Someone wants us to arrive."
It was not a speech. Moss did not give speeches. It was a fact, laid out like a heading on a chart, and the crew could take it or leave it. They took it. Not with enthusiasm — enthusiasm had drowned somewhere around day twenty — but with the grim inertia of people who had come too far to turn back and knew it.
They held. Barely.
Day fifty-nine. The barometer — a crude mercury instrument bolted to the bulkhead — dropped so fast that Moss thought it was broken. He tapped the glass. The mercury stayed where it was.
He checked the waypoints. The next one was fifteen degrees east of their current heading, which made no sense unless you looked at the broader pattern and realized the waypoints were pushing them hard to port — away from something to the west. Moss altered course. He signaled the Redtide. The Patience was already too far south to reach by lamp.
The storm hit at nightfall.
Moss had sailed through storms. Coastal storms, equatorial squalls, the sudden violent weather that came off the landmass in spring. This was not that. This was the ocean deciding to stand up.
The first wave broke over the bow and swept two crates of supplies into the dark. The second wave heeled the ship forty degrees to starboard and held it there for three seconds while water poured through every gap in the decking. The third wave was eighteen meters — Moss knew because it rose above the top of the mainmast and the mainmast was seventeen meters and the wave kept going.
He lashed himself to the wheel. Jula lashed herself to the mast. The rest of the crew went below and braced against whatever they could find and held on while the ocean tried to turn the ship inside out.
The waypoint data had pushed them east. East, to the edge of the storm system rather than its center. Moss understood this in his body the way he understood current and tide — the people sending the waypoints had known this storm was coming and had routed him around its killing radius. They couldn't route him out entirely. But the edge was survivable. The center was not.
The storm lasted nine hours. In those nine hours, Moss did not leave the wheel. His arms locked. His shoulders seized. Saltwater filled his boots and his mouth and his eyes and he steered by feel because he could not see anything except black water and white foam and the occasional sick green glow of bioluminescence in the wave faces.
At dawn the wind dropped. The sea was still enormous — rolling swells that lifted the ship and set it down with a motion like slow breathing — but the killing violence was gone.
Moss looked east. The Redtide was not there.
He climbed the mast, ignoring the pain in his arms, and scanned the horizon in every direction. Gray water. Gray sky. No ship. No wreckage. No signal.
The Redtide had been west of him when the storm hit. West — toward the center. Where the waypoints had told Moss not to go, but where the Redtide might not have had time to adjust before the first waves came.
He signaled for an hour. No reply.
He signaled south for the Patience. No reply.
One ship. His ship. He was alone on the ocean.
The crew came up at dawn and looked at the empty water and nobody spoke. Moss counted heads. Twenty-three. Fifteen of his original crew plus eight survivors picked up from other ships along the way — pulled from the water or transferred from vessels too damaged to continue. Twenty-three people on one ship in the middle of fourteen thousand kilometers of toxic ocean with no rescue, no communication, no weather forecasting, and no guarantee that the waypoints led anywhere but a white line on a chart.
Moss set a heading south. There was nothing else to do.
Day seventy-four. The water changed.
Moss noticed it the way he noticed everything — in his hands, in his skin, in the way the ship moved. The swells were different. Shorter period, choppier, with a weight to them that hadn't been there before. He dipped a bucket over the side and hauled it up and looked at what he'd caught.
The water was dark. Not the gray-green murk of the Crossing, not the brownish sulfide haze that had stained everything for weeks. Dark blue. Almost black. And cold. He put his hand in the bucket and the cold hit his wrist like a slap.
He sniffed it. Salt. Clean salt. No sulfur.
The air was different too. He'd been breathing the faint rotten-egg background of H₂S for so long that he'd stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing the smell of your own ship. Now it was gone. The air tasted like metal and cold and nothing else.
He checked the thermometer bolted to the stern rail. The water temperature had dropped eight degrees in two days.
On day seventy-six he saw something he had never seen.
White shapes in the water. Small ones, at first — chunks the size of a man's fist, bobbing in the chop. He fished one out with a boat hook. It was ice. Frozen water, floating on the sea. He turned it over in his hands. It was dense and blue-white and it burned his fingers with cold and he stared at it because he had read about ice in books but had never touched it, had never seen water that was solid, had never understood that the ocean could become a thing you could hold.
Jula came up beside him. She looked at the ice in his hands.
"What is it?"
"Frozen water."
"I didn't know water did that."
"Neither did I."
More ice. Larger pieces. Slabs the size of the deck, then larger — flat white platforms that the ship had to navigate around, bumping against the hull with a deep grinding sound that made the crew flinch. The water between the ice was black and still and so clear that Moss could see down into it farther than he'd ever seen into any ocean — fifty meters, a hundred, into a blue darkness that had no sulfide haze, no bacterial scum, no death.
Clean water. He had forgotten what it looked like.
On day seventy-eight, Moss climbed the mast at dawn and looked south.
A white line. Low on the horizon, running east to west as far as he could see in both directions. It did not move. It was not cloud. It was not wave. It sat on the edge of the world like a scar, white against the gray sky, solid and real and there.
Land. Or ice that was land. The edge of something that was not ocean.
Moss looked at it. He gripped the mast and looked at the white line and he did not cheer because there was no cheering left in him. Seventy-eight days at sea. Eleven ships gone. A hundred and fifty-seven people dead or lost — he had kept the count, added each name to a list in Lin's logbook, the logbook that was his now because Lin was in the list. He carried the number in his chest like ballast. It sat low and heavy and it would never shift.
He climbed down. The crew looked at him.
"South," he said. "White line on the horizon. Doesn't move."
Tomas gripped the rail. "Land?"
"Ice. Maybe land under it. We'll know when we get there."
He took the helm and steered toward the white line and the waypoints guided him through the ice field, threading the ship between the frozen platforms with the precision of someone who had walked this path before and left markers for those who followed. The signal from the south was still pulsing. He could not hear it — he had no equipment for that, Kael had the equipment — but he knew it was there the way he knew current and tide. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11.
Someone on the other side of that white line was counting. Someone was waiting.
Moss steered south. One ship. Twenty-three crew. Seventy-four days on the ocean and the list of names in the logbook growing no shorter by being written down. He had dreamed of this shore for twelve years. A white line. A figure waiting. In the dream, he had always woken before the ship landed.
He was not dreaming now.