A Starving Orphan Stole a Fish, and the Dead Lighthouse Answered Her

Nessa had the fish under her coat before the fishmonger turned around.

What the plan didn't include was the tuning fork in her shirt pocket going hot enough to blister her skin - or the Wick, dark for fifteen years, throwing one gold flare across the whole harbor at low tide.

"What did you do, girl?" the dockworker beside her whispered. Then a garrison whistle cut the market in half.

She ran. Wet cobblestones, crab traps, bare feet. She didn't make it far. A patrol hauled her up the bluff to Commander Elias Rusk, the man who runs the regent's garrison and is hated on every dock in Kellbridge.

Rusk looked at the fork hanging from her neck. His hand shook. Then he did the thing that could get him hanged - he cut her loose and told her to be past the city walls by dawn.

Nessa didn't go. From the bluff, low tide had laid the drowned lower district bare: rooflines, a street, a small house with a red door. She remembered that door from a freezing room when she was six. Her mother's house. Fifteen years underwater, and somebody put it there on purpose.

So she's heading to the union hall instead, where the dock crew has waited fifteen years for the Wick to answer. Behind her, the regent's men are already working the fish market, asking who the barefoot girl was.