by Jake Halpern
“You don’t—but she does,” said Crown, gesturing toward Wren. “I wouldn’t leave her high and dry—especially not with a sunstone on the line.”
Crown turned to Alec. “I’m assuming you know how to handle a small boat in rough seas?”
“Of course he does,” snapped Wren. “He brought the furriers to Edgeland, didn’t he? Now take us to our boat.”
The boat wasn’t worth a sunstone. It wasn’t worth a wooden amulet.
They found it tied next to the schooner. It was old and cracked, with a worrisome pool of water at the bottom—but it floated, and they wouldn’t be in it for long. They climbed in and shoved away from the pier.
Alec started rowing. “What now?” he asked Wren, who was sitting in the bow.
“It’s a straight shot to Needle Island,” said Wren. “Keep rowing and I’ll tell you if you need to turn.” The boat struggled in the waves, and the water at the bottom seemed to be rising already.
“You do realize—I have no idea what I’m doing,” said Alec as he pulled on the skiff’s oars. “Last time I was in a boat, it capsized and went over the Drain.” Their boat was almost an exact replica of the one that he’d used to intercept the furriers—an irony that almost made him laugh.
“That doesn’t matter now,” said Wren. “You just need to row.” She scanned the ocean with a brass monoscope that Crown had given her. She was mildly surprised to discover that it worked.
Alec kept pulling. “Are we going the right way?” They were only two hundred feet from shore, but already he could feel the current pulling them toward the Drain.
“There they are,” said Wren, ignoring Alec’s question.
“Where?” asked Alec, with mounting frustration. He glanced around hastily, but could see little. Alec caught fleeting, blurry glimpses of the Edgeland skyline.
“They’re moving fast,” said Wren, still looking through the monoscope. She turned back to Alec. The roar of the Drain was getting louder, and she had to yell to be heard: “Bring us a little more to starboard.”
Alec glanced over his shoulder, trying to get his bearings. Finally, he saw the Needle Island lighthouse, a squat structure made of salt-stained gray brick.
The current grew stronger. Alec stared at his knuckles, which were going white from gripping the oars so tightly. Blisters were already forming on the underside of his hands.
Whitecaps crashed around them, and waves spilled over the gunwales. The roar of the Drain grew louder. Wren took up the spare oar and paddled. Alec braced himself, wedging his sandals into the crevices where the ribs of the boat joined the hull.
Alec pulled on the oars with a grim monotony. His entire body ached and his chest heaved with exertion. This was much harder than rowing out to meet the furriers. The water was choppier, and he was trying to row faster. In fact, it was probably the hardest he’d ever pushed his body.
It took only a few minutes more to reach Needle Island. The waves whipped the boat so intensely against the rocks that the hull cracked and water rushed inside. Wren threw her spare oar onto the pebble-strewn shore. Alec was exhausted. At first, he just lifted his head and stared dully at the waves crashing around him. Wren lunged forward, grabbing him under the arms and yanking him out of the boat. She succeeded in pulling Alec ashore, but—in so doing—her wig fell into the water and was quickly whisked away, along with the remains of their skiff.
Alec barely noticed any of this. He was hunched over on the shore, panting violently and swallowing down a bitter metallic taste in his mouth.
“Alec,” said Wren, tugging gently on his shoulder. “We have to go.” He nodded.
Wren was clutching the spare oar in one hand and the monoscope in the other. Her eyes were brimming with excitement. She’s actually enjoying this. Unbelievable.
“I need an oar, too,” he said.
Wren pointed out to sea. “Everything’s gone. This’ll be enough.” She stuck out her hand. Alec grabbed it and stood.
Together, they scurried across Needle Island, past the little gray lighthouse and to the island’s far end, where a staircase connected it to the Ramparts. Wren and Alec raced up.
When they emerged onto the path atop the Ramparts, Alec was surprised to see so much water. The path was covered with puddles. He panicked. Has the Drain flooded? According to the history books, the Drain did flood every few centuries. It last happened about five hundred years ago. The stories of it overflowing used to give him nightmares. But then he realized he was being ridiculous. There may have been more mist and water than usual, but there was nothing actually coming out of the Drain. He had to calm down.
Wren stood next to Alec. She was scanning the seas with the monoscope.
She could see that the current was herding Isidro’s scow and three others toward a nearby vent. The other scows were farther away, strung out like ragged lamps along a string.
Wren began to run down the Ramparts’ path. A crowd of people in Shadow mourning robes were up ahead. It was almost dusk, so it wasn’t all that strange to see Shadows, but why such a crowd? There were at least fifty people, maybe more. Faintly, above the roar of the waterfalls, Wren heard them chanting: “Friderik! Friderik! Friderik!”
Wren cursed bitterly—the way only a grayling could curse. These were Fat Freddy’s devotees—mourning his death. They might have already pushed his body into the Drain.
She was furious at herself. She should have realized Freddy’s followers might still be on the Ramparts. And she didn’t even have a wig to disguise herself. But it was too late to worry about that now. Wren returned her focus to the sea, saw the furrier scows approaching, and tried to guess which vent they would enter. After a few moments, she spotted the likeliest one. It wasn’t far from where the Shadows were, but thankfully, it wasn’t right beneath where they were standing. A small stroke of luck.
Wren walked quickly toward the vent, head down. Alec followed several paces behind. By the time they reached the right place, Isidro’s boat was approaching a chute of rapids leading to the vent. Not much time now. Wren peered over the edge of the railing and quickly found the ladder, a series of serpent-shaped metal rungs bolted to the outer wall of the Ramparts. They were so encrusted with sea salt that they were almost perfectly camouflaged.
Roughly thirty feet below, a lip of rock formed a walkway on the vent’s perimeter, a mere five feet above the water line. Clutching the spare oar in her left hand, Wren nodded to Alec and slipped over the railing.
She began to climb down. It was a treacherous descent, especially because holding the oar meant she had only one free hand. She leaned in toward the stone wall of the Ramparts to keep herself from falling.
Alec watched her for a minute. At one point, he turned his focus away from Wren and out toward the Drain. What he saw turned his stomach. It was a vast chasm of mist, clouds, and swirling wind, accompanied by a roar that sounded like a million angry whispers. It was one thing to read about the Drain; it was another to be staring down into it.
I can’t do this, Alec thought. He couldn’t imagine climbing over the railing and starting down the ladder. He wanted to call out to Wren to turn back. By this point, she was about ten feet below where he stood.
Someone shouted. Alec looked up. One of the Shadows had left the group of mourners to walk toward them. He was a slightly built man. The others stopped chanting and turned to watch.
As the man approached, he looked curiously at Alec, who was ignoring him, pretending to be an ordinary Shadow tourist. As he neared Alec, he peered over the railing and saw Wren.
The man began to shout in a mad, frenzied voice. “That was the killer,” he shouted. “THAT WAS HER!”
He approached Alec, his eyes bulging. “Stop!” he shouted again, much closer now. “Dirty graylings!”
Alec recognized the man. It was Dorman, Freddy’s most notorious follower. Whenever there was a fight on Edgeland between Suns and Shadows, it was a good bet that Dorman was involved.
This is bad.
Clang.
The rungs of the ladder vibrated.
Alec looked up and gasped. Amazingly, Dorman was climbing down after them.
“I’m not a grayling!” shouted Alec.
“Alec!” shouted Wren. “What’s happening?”
Alec tried to move down the treacherous rungs faster. He’d almost reached Wren when he caught a glimpse of movement overhead.
Dorman had slipped, and was dangling with one hand. His screams were swallowed by the roar of the falls.
Then he lost his grip and plummeted down past Alec and Wren like a dart, his silver robe fluttering around his flailing arms. A half second later, he vanished into the Drain.
Alec stared at the spot where Dorman vanished, his mind and body frozen in shock. Then he saw Wren move from the ladder into the vent, where Isidro’s scow would soon appear.
Alec closed his eyes and shuddered. He hugged the ladder. Don’t think about falling. Keep moving. He forced himself to continue down until he reached the walkway. There was no sign of Wren. He followed the walkway around a bend and into the vent. Here the rumble of the falls was replaced with the echo of water rushing through the narrow passage. Wren was just up ahead, thirty feet down the walkway, oar at the ready.
Alec joined her just as Isidro’s scow appeared. Wren crouched and pivoted toward the oncoming boat, gripping the oar as fiercely as a hunter about to strike. The boat surged forward. Wren rammed the oar savagely into the hull, forcing it to spin so it was perpendicular to the current.
Waves hammered the boat’s side, jamming it into place. The boat blocked the vent perfectly, like a bone stuck in someone’s throat. Whitecaps crashed over its gunwales, filling it with water.
“COME ON!” screamed Wren. She leapt off the walkway and onto the boat.
Alec hesitated, then broke into a run and sprang off the walkway—yelling wildly as he leapt over the bow and crashed into one of its built-in wooden benches. Alec clamored to his feet and shook out his arms.
Nothing broken.
There were several loud thumps. Two furrier scows had piled behind the boat, which had started to tremble. Alec clutched the gunwales and made his way toward the stern, past the first block of ice. Alec glanced at it briefly. It was the one containing Isidro’s daughter and grandson.
Alec crawled up alongside Wren. To his great surprise, Alec saw that this block of ice contained the man who Isidro had killed. The ice had begun to melt, and the man’s right hand—cold, wet, and white—was sticking out, along with his diamond bracelet, which sparkled in the water vapor.
For a second, Alec considered taking the bracelet—Wren might need it. But he could hear Sami Aron’s voice in his head, even louder: We do not steal from the dead.
Alec continued on, following Wren up the boat. There was the bench built into the hull, laden with three iron chests. At last! Wren was on one side of a chest, struggling to drag it forward. Alec clambered over to help her, and the two inched their way to the stern. They were close, and the other walkway—on the opposite side of the vent—was just five feet above them.
It was their way out.
The boat was shuddering violently now. Behind them, the current pushed one of the other scows up in the air and over Isidro’s boat. Wren shouted, but her words were inaudible. Together they lifted the heavy chest. Alec maneuvered around a tangle of ropes at his feet and stumbled, losing his grip on the handle. Wren yelled and strained to hold her end. Alec popped back up and grabbed the handle he’d dropped. At that exact moment, the surging current and the weight of the other scows broke the hull.
An explosive cracking sound echoed in the vent as the front third of Isidro’s boat snapped off. Both parts spun away from each other, caught by the torrent of water rushing toward the Drain. Alec and Wren screamed.
The water catapulted the broken scow out of the vent and over the precipice—sending Alec, Wren, the dead furriers, and a great many sunstones into the misty, endless vapors of the Drain.
When Wren finally regained her senses, she opened her mouth to breathe. But instead of air, salt water snaked down her throat. She kicked and flailed, then felt herself being drawn upward until, at last, she broke the surface of the water. Wren gagged, and water spewed from her mouth.
Then she opened her eyes.
She was floating near the base of a massive waterfall fringed by sheer cliffs. Geysers of spray shot in every direction. She craned her neck up, trying to see the sky, but couldn’t. Seconds later, the current whisked her away from the waterfall and toward a haze of fog and clouds.
A thought bubbled up into her consciousness. I’m at the bottom of the Drain. Then another. Am I alive? Wren grabbed her forearm and twisted the skin savagely. The jolt of pain that ran up her arm brought a wave of relief.
“Alec?” she called.
Her voice sounded weak and scratchy. She took a breath and tried again.
“Alec!”
There was no answer.
The current carried her quickly away. The cliffs, the waterfalls, and the great plumes of spray all receded into the fog. Now the only signs of land were great slabs of black stone whose tops jutted from the water like the heads of sleeping whales.
“Hello?” she called softly.
She saw a body floating nearby, within arm’s reach. It was a young man, face up, with stringy brown hair covering his face like strands of seaweed. His eyes were vacant and lifeless. Wren squirmed away.
Not Alec.
Soon Wren saw other bodies—dozens of them—floating like timber, all drawn along by the current. She drifted past an enormous boulder surrounded by a small pebble beach. It was bigger than the other rocks she had seen—practically an island.
“ALEC!” she yelled.
She scanned the water but saw only limp corpses bobbing in the chop.
“ALEC!!!” she yelled again, louder. “If you can hear me, swim to the island!”
Seconds later, a child’s voice called back to her.
“Shut your mouth! They’re huntin’ for breathers like you.”
The sound of another voice was startling. Wren sank down in the water so that only the top half of her head was showing. She looked around for the child, but the mist made it impossible to see more than twenty or thirty feet in any direction.
“Hey!” called Wren. “Who are you?”
Silence—nothing but the fading roar of the Drain.
Then came the sound of the child’s voice again. “Play dead until th’ others wake up. If you don’t get caught, we’ll find you. Trust me.”
Wren tried to swim toward the voice, but the harder she pulled through the water, the more the current tugged her away. She watched helplessly as the island melded into the mist.
Wren’s mind whirred: Going over the Drain meant she must be deep underground. But if this was a cavern, where was the ceiling? Above her was an unbroken cloud, neither bright nor dark. Another thought formed in her mind. Is this purgatory?
Just then, something splashed behind her.
Wren jerked her head around, but the mist was so thick that she could barely see a thing. There was another splash. Maybe it was Alec. Or that kid who’d told her to be quiet.
Then a figure emerged. It was a man, holding on to a long wooden plank with one arm and paddling with the other. He had a hawkish nose and a razor-thin beard.
Dorman.
But how?
They locked eyes.
Dorman stopped paddling.
“YOU!” yelled Dorman, his eyes bulging and his face red. He splashed toward Wren. He was still clutching the wooden plank fiercely, as if afraid to let go of it.
“DORMAN—wait!” shouted Wren.
The man seemed stunned to hear his own name, and stopped swimming
for a moment. He was three or four feet away now, within striking distance.
“Dorman,” she said again. “I know what you think I did—but you’re wrong.”
His face contorted in rage. “You grayling liar. I saw you standing over his bloody body!”
“Listen to me,” said Wren, her voice pleading and insistent. “I’m not just a grayling. I have a name. Wren. Wren Brell. And I swear, on the memory of my dead mother, I didn’t kill Friderik.”
“There was blood all over your robes!” he shouted. “Your shoes were covered with it.”
With his free hand, Dorman reached for Wren, grabbing her arm. She fought him, but he pulled her closer, and then—a second later—swung at her. Dorman’s blow glanced off the side of her head.
Wren dove deep into the water, swimming beneath the surface until she ran out of breath. When she popped back up, Dorman was ten feet away, slapping his arms frantically against the water. When he’d struck Wren, he’d lost his grip on the wooden plank, and now it was nowhere to be seen.
Suddenly, a skinny boy with hair braided close to the scalp appeared behind Dorman.
Alec.
Dorman didn’t see him; he was too panicked, flailing his arms and legs, desperately trying to stay afloat. The water rose past his chin. He screamed.
“Take my arm!” Alec yelled.
Dorman spun around so he was facing Alec, but he swallowed more water and began to gag. He thrashed for a moment longer, then his entire head disappeared below the surface. Alec dove toward Dorman and grabbed his arm, trying to pull him up. But Dorman was heavier than he appeared. He began to sink, dragging Alec down with him. Alec held on for a few seconds, until his eardrums were about to burst from the pressure. He yanked as hard as he could, but Dorman kept sinking. When he couldn’t hold his breath any longer, Alec released his grip and surfaced. Wren peered underwater to see if she could catch a glimpse of him.
But he was gone.
“I tried to save him,” Alec sputtered.
“I know,” said Wren. As she caught her breath, Wren tried to process it all. First Fat Freddy, now Dorman. Who next?