Chapter 4: Sable in the Water

The settlement didn't announce itself.

He came through the last mangrove channel at half-tide and found it simply there — a cluster of platforms and walkways built across what had once been a small coastal town, the old rooftops still visible beneath the water as dark geometric shapes, street grids made ghostly and patient by three centuries of submersion. The Tideworn had built upward from those bones without erasing them. Their platforms ran between the projecting second-floor facades of drowned buildings, connected by rope bridges and salvaged aluminum walkways, and from the water the whole structure had the appearance of something that had grown there rather than been constructed — an organic inevitability, the way a strangler fig looks like it was always part of the tree it's killing.

He cut the engine thirty meters out and let the skiff drift, taking it in.