Chapter 7: Sable Names the Leviathan

The morning came in low and grey, the kind of light that flattened everything to the same exhausted color, and Calder was on the dock before anyone else in the settlement had stirred, doing what he always did when he couldn't file a report and couldn't leave and couldn't think straight: he was checking the skiff's equipment with methodical, unnecessary thoroughness.

The port thruster. Again. The coupling that had been rattling since the outer delta — still rattling, still not quite failing, still not quite fixable without a part he didn't have. He tightened the housing bolt a quarter turn and felt it catch on nothing and knew it would be the same tomorrow. He tightened it anyway.

He heard her before he saw her. Not her footsteps — the girl moved on dock planking the way the tide moved, without announcing itself — but the particular quality of silence that preceded her. His grafts registered it first, that upward shift in the baseline hum, the same register they'd been climbing toward since he crossed into the outer delta. He kept his back to her and replaced the thruster housing panel.