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Marrow kept its dead in the harbour, people said, and its living on the wall above it, watching. Idris had grown up on that wall, first in her mother’s arms and then in her father’s shadow, and she had never once seen the tide go out this far.

The old men who mended nets by the customs house had stopped mending them. They stood instead with their hands in their pockets, looking at the flats where the water should have been, at the black ribs of a wreck none of them could name.

Her father had sailed the Nine Currents twice, and come back twice, which was more than anyone else in three generations could claim. He had promised her a third crossing would be no different. He had promised her a great many things.

She found herself at the harbour master’s door before she had decided to knock. Through the glass she could see the log book open on the desk, and beside it, unmoving, the brass hand of the tide clock.