A maze of towers and soaring smokestacks, built of old red brick and studded with windows that gaped like empty eye sockets, loomed over the southern edge of Harmine’s sprawl. Walls disgorged huge arrays of pipes and vents, from which spilled steam and soot, smoke and sludge,as if from disemboweled guts.

Mila stared in fascinated disgust, wrinkling her nose as she followed Clarissa along a canal that oozed with a trickle of stinking oily effluent, bound for the river.

The other girl walked ahead, her translucent wards shimmering in the air, the faint ozone wrinkle of sorcery trailing behind her.

The enormous beehive silhouette of the Harmine Foundry dipped in and out of sight, getting slowly closer as they wended their silent way around the hollow-eyed buildings. There was no one else around.

An osprey flew overhead and Mila watched it flap lazily to a high structure of vaulted ironwork, and drop a fish into a hashwork of sticks that she took to be its nest. All the fish in the river must have grown up absorbing these toxins, she thought. Even if this particular fish had spawned upstream, and then swum down, there was no way to avoid contamination from such pollution. The hatchlings in the nest would consume it, and the waste products of Imperiat industry would seep into their hollow bones.

Maybe all nourishment is poison, she thought bitterly. Her heart trudged like a lonesome, heavily-laden, cantakerous goat through shifting sand.

The walk here from the Archives had been awkwardly silent. Any conversation between her and Clarissa soon faltered and dried up. There was a pall hanging over her mind. She couldn’t help but replay her conflict with Roxa in the cistern, over and over and over.

You’re the one that understands sharks.

Roxa, scowling.

Roxa, turning away, not meeting her eyes.

Mila shook her head, trying to dislodge the memory. She shivered, feeling a sudden chill, and huddled deeper into her woolen sweater.

You’re the one that understands sharks.

~ ~ ~

Under the glow of the full-belly moon, the sea whispers and laughs against the wet sand slope. Mila tags along at the back of a knot of other tea girls as they make their way across the wide beach. It is the lowest tide in weeks. Mila is a gangly thirteen, trembling with nerves.

To one side of them looms a cliff face gaping with dark mouths. The tea girls make for the entrance of the largest cave, where a sizeable crowd of twisting, heaving dancers spills out onto the beach. From inside, Mila can already hear the liquid storm of bellmusic.

As the knot of tea girls she has been following mingles with the crowd and melts into it, she senses that they too are dropping into the throbbing, gooey bass of the spirit current.

Even from up here in the tangible world, she can tell that whoever is mixing the bells tonight is good. The sound is dense, artfully layered, strobing and spamming at hyper-speed.

Mila, heart bursting with longing, pictures them all nested somewhere deep in the Tide, buoyed by an animate reef of brilliant moonlight spirits who are resurrecting through a pulsating pocket of flowing space-time to hear their melodies.

She takes a deep breath, and feels for the edge, the threshold of the dark other-water. Perhaps this time she can do it. Perhaps she won’t be noticed in such a throng of spirits. Perhaps, with all these other girls alongside her—

“What are you doing here, shark-eyes?”

She flinches and whirls, shame bubbling caustic in the pit of her stomach.

Hezeba, a taller girl with hair that is gleams reddish even in the pale light of the moon, stands behind her, hands planted on cocked hips.

“Well? I hope you’re not here to follow us in, and bring a swarm of Eaters down on all of our heads. I know you can’t be here to do that.”

“N-no,” mumbles Mila, face heating.

“Good.” Hezeba wrinkled her nose. “Don’t bring your rassa stink around anymore.Your presence here makes us all unsafe, got it? We’re here to build a sisterhood, not to be fed on by ghouls.”

Throat too tight to muster a response, vision stinging with tears, Mila takes a step back and her heel catches. She stumbles—

~ ~ ~

Mila sunk down at the edge of the walkway, under the iron handrail. Her legs dangling over the edge, she stared blankly into the canal of hardened ashcrete below. The overlapping rimes of some white chemical crust caked the sides. Just so, her tears have carved channels down her cheeks, left salt to dry and stiffen her face.

This poisoned land mirrors your rassa-poisoned body, does it not?

The chorus of intrusive thoughts poured slick and fast through her mind.

Such a place befits you more than anywhere else.

Perhaps you do truly belong here, and not back in Opali.

You deserve to wind up alone,

to die alone,

to be consumed just like your father’s rotted soul.

This is bad, she thought numbly. I should not be letting this happen.

But she felt frozen, helpless, overwhelmed, unable to stop. Distantly, she noticed she was shivering hard, all the warmth draining out of her.

Clarissa had wandered some distance away from her, down the walkway. She was absorbed in her own gloom, paying no mind.

Mila was alone.

~ ~ ~

She stumbles against a small, firm body that does not give way but catches and steadies her to standing.

“Can you shut the fuck up, Hezeba?” flames a voice by Mila’s ear. “Everyone’s wondering where that rancid dissonance is coming from.”

“Don’t be a fool, Zuri,” Hezeba sputters. “It’s obviously her!”

“Stop embarrassing yourself,” says Zuri sharply. “Even from down in the current, I could tell you were spewing some self-appointed overseer nonsense. The way you were carrying on, it’s a wonder the Eaters aren’t already here.”

Mila’s insides are caving in with relief.

“She’s rassa!” sputters Hezeba. “I’m not! It’s disgusting and manipulative to blame me for what her presence has caused!”

Zuri throws her hands up. “You self-righteous prig of a—you’re such an idiot!”

She pulls Mila away down the beach. “Come on, pay no mind to that nonsense. Gulls like her will squawk us all mad.” A curious, open look. “What’s your name? I’m Zuri.”

~ ~ ~

Zuri’s concerned face flashed through her mind’s eye, and Mila latched on and clung to the memory with all her willpower. As she did, the heavy grip of her paralysis began to dissolve.

Something is wrong, Mila thought with sudden clarity. She grabbed the iron railing with chilled hands and heaved herself upright. For a moment, she reverberated with vertigo, the drop into the canal yawning below.

Jump, hissed a voice in her head that was not hers.

“Clarissa!” She called.

The other girl turned and gave her a look of bewildered alarm.

Mila’s hands fumbled desperately for the bell in its harness, strapped under her shirt. She felt so, so cold already—there wasn’t much time. Hastily, she widened her stance, dropped her center of gravity.

“Whatever you do,” she gasped, “Don’t follow me in.”

Clarissa frowned in confusion. Of course, Mila thought fuzzily. Clarissa was a sorcerer—she didn’t know about bellmagic, didn’t know that Mila could even navigate the same spirit current that she could.

Jump, suggested the Eater’s voice wormily.

“Shut up,” Mila muttered, and dropped into the sleek current of the Tide, her bell coming alive in her hand.

As she crossed into the dark waters of the spirit dimension, the chiming of the bell blossomed into a spreading sphere of argent fire, rippling out from her in every direction, illuminating the scene that greeted her.

They were surrounded.

The revenants had stolen up undetected. They hung suspended in the current around Mila and Clarissa, a swarm of eel-like forms with segmented carapaces and leech mouths, stealthily siphoning from their spirits.

Bellmagic rolled out from her hand in a thick, frothy fountain. The sound was uncarved, unsculpted, raw and inelegant, but that hardly mattered right now. Mila swirled it up and threw it at the revenants with the blind force of panic and, to her relief, it worked.

The silver sonic storm broke over the Eaters in a lashing wave that built and steepened, tumbling them before it. Scorched and disrupted from their feeding, they fell back before the onslaught, writhing and hissing with outrage.

Immediately, the pall of damp stupor broke and Mila found that she could think again. Clarissa’s eyes went wide as saucers, and her wards flared as she, too, crossed into the unseen dimension.

“What the fuck?” Clarissa yelled, though at who or what, Mila wasn’t sure, and extending her hand, she punched a bolt of dark lightning through one of the incorporeal hunters, drawing a screech of pain. She went back to back with Mila, glancing around wildly, her sorcerous wards shifting to enclose them both.

The swarm of Eaters was fanning out around them, snapping and lunging like wolves, though they flinched back from the wavy pulses of silver that still poured from Mila’s bell.

“Clarissa, listen, you need to get out of here,” Mila said tightly.

She scooped an armful of silver ripples and began to gather and spin them around her in preparation. How to explain what she was about to attempt? She’d never dared to try this before, let alone on such a scale and in such need. Would it even work? If it did, Mila suspected the results would not go well for the sorcerer. If it didn’t—well, best not to dwell on that.

The Ursilian girl thrust out her hand and a throbbing ruby needle of energy skewered another revenant, causing it to bellow in pain and thrash away. She looked over her shoulder incredulously. “What? I’m your only chance!”

One of the Eaters flashed forward and glanced off of Clarissa’s wards, causing them to spark.

“I’m serious,” Mila gritted, as she swirled the sphere of bellsound around her. Her free hand dipped in and out of it, carving away slivers of sound, refining the rippling cloud into a coherent song. “Just trust me!”

“What are you talking about?” Clarissa growled, and blasted away another revenant, but there were half a dozen battering at her wards now. For some reason, they seemed more focused on the sorcerer than on Mila. How long could those wards keep them at bay?

The bubble of melody spinning around Mila was hastily worked, but she judged it whole enough. Biting her lip, Mila rang her bell again in a hasty sealing pattern, and released her spell down the current, to find its intended recipients.

Hopefully it would reach them in time.

Clarissa swore, and Mila looked down and felt her insides plummet.

Charging up from directly below them was a much larger Eater, a many-legged revenant the size of a carriage with a muscular stinger and clacking jaws. As it closed the distance between them it unleashed a blood-chilling shriek laden with menace.

Clarissa clenched her fists and spoke a word that made Mila’s ears ache. Her wards exploded outwards, scattering the swarm that harried them. Her hands blurred, then a shaft-like anchor dropped from her feet like a plumb line into the depths below.

Just as the larger Eater reached them, she clapped her palms together and a golden lattice snapped shut around them both like a flower closing.There was burst of blinding light, and a grinding crackle as Clarissa’s newly anchored wards took a swiping blow from the massive stinger, flexed, and held.

Snarling, the revenant redoubled it’s efforts to punch through, and Clarissa’s wards shuddered again and again under the pummeling assault. The tiny Ursilian girl bore down, tight-lipped and white-knuckled, and Mila felt a wave of admiration sweep aside her frustration at the girl’s stubbornness.

The bell in her hand was still vibrating sweetly. She stilled the clapper, refocused, then swung it again, scooping up the resulting flurry of silver ripples and channeling them into along, forked tongue. Mila flicked her wrist and the streamer of bellmagic leaped out and lashed the Eater, burning a bright scar in its scuzzy cloud and causing it to flinch back and roar in pain.

She gritted her teeth. Perhaps a more skilled bellwitch could best an Eater this large and determined on her own, but she was under no illusions about her novice abilities. The most she could hope for was to hold it at bay long enough for help to arrive, following her call. If it came at all.

She had no time to doubt herself. Mila felt the Eater’s attention fasten onto her, and then it was skittering forward in a blur of armored legs and gnashing fangs. She took her stance, bell hand cocked and raised.

And then—

There was an almighty blast of soundless reverb as a molten starfire spirit as large as a three-masted frigate plunged into the current beside them, wings held close to its shimmering body. Mila’s heart soared in her throat as its massive red eye caught her gaze.

~ ~ ~

That neighborhood auntie from her childhood, rocking in her chair, her mouth a twist of disdain.

Pazo at her loom, engrossed in her weaving.

Mila, hesitant in the doorway, throat tightening as she asks whether it is true, as the other children have officiously told her, that rassa children are full of the hate and anger and callousness that made them. If it is true that her real ancestors are the Eaters—the ghosts and ghouls and hungry predators of the spirit world, whose siren songs will pull her down to join them, if she strays there.

~ ~ ~

She stared back, awestruck, at the spirit grebe. It was a diving bird she had often seen bobbing in Opali harbor.

Silence rolled through her like a hurricane, carrying unlanguaged meaning.

~ ~ ~

Pazo puts down her weaving, beckons her closer, pulls Mila onto her lap. “You, child, are full of my love, and the love of allllll my fore-mothers. And also the blessing of our anger, which follows on its heels.”

All distance is erased, all time.

The web rushes past her, through her, she is part of it.

Pazo, at her elbow, steadying her arm.

Lindsay, his mouth going firm, as it did when she impressed him.

Simone, stepping from one peak of silver swelling bellmusic to the next, turning and beckoning her to follow.

In the visible world she shudders and sags against the iron railing, tears leaking down her cheeks, as the knowing fills her breast like warm honey.

This realm, too, is hers to tread.

That great red eye watches her, unblinking.

She is not alone, here.

~ ~ ~

The huge knife-like beak snapped down on the oncoming Eater and tore it in half like wet paper.

The reverberations of the grebe spirit’s entry rolled out like a wave of concussive force, an expanding bubble of burning starlight. The ripples of bellmagic around Mila simply refracted it, but the remaining Eaters were caught in the explosion and tumbled deep into the depths below.

Clarissa’s wards and anchor held for a heartbeat and then shredded and dissolved under the rush of undiluted spirit magic. She shrieked in pain, writhing, and then, to Mila’s relief, she popped out of the River.

Mila spared one searching glance down into the currents below for signs of any remaining revenants, then she turned and sped to the surface. As she crossed the threshold into the visible world, she looked back and mouthed her thanks, silently.

The spirit grebe flickered out of existence.

Clarissa lay flat on her back in the world above, gasping in shock.

“What,” she croaked. “Was that.”

“Easy,” murmured Mila, crouching by her head. “I’m here. Are you hurt?”

The blond girl swallowed. “My—my tongue feels burned. And my…throat.” She tried to push herself upright and fell back, wincing. “My hands, too?”

Mila helped her up, glancing around at the empty sockets of the watching windows above. “We shouldn’t stay here, Clarissa. Your friends, the ones we're going to see, are they close by?”

A terrible foreboding was stealing over her. Perhaps she should have stayed down there, to finish off the rest of the revenants. They might be regrouping, even now, and whoever had sent them—she felt a chilling certainty that someone had—was sure to follow. If that someone was Penelope Caul, this area might soon be swarming with killers.

“My, um, friends. Yes,” Clarissa said hoarsely, swaying, her arm thrown over Mila’s shoulders. “Mila. How did you—with the bell?” Her pupils were dilating rapidly, and unevenly. “Can you…show me?”

“Let’s find your friends,” said Mila firmly. She glanced around. “Someone might be dowsing us, Clarissa. Remember? And the way those Eaters were all over you, like hunting dogs…”

Clarissa shook her head and winced. “Right. Let’s go. We’re close to the, uh, thing.” She pointed the way.

They limped together along the canal until Clarissa indicated a doorway in one of the brickwork buildings. Once inside, they stumbled down some steps to a service corridor full of pipes that curved for a long way before twisting and branching several times. As they followed it, Clarissa muttered groggily to take this turn and then that turn, and Mila was just starting to wonder if they were lost when they came to rusty metal door.

“Thassit.” Clarissa’s words were starting to slur more and more.

It opened onto a small anteroom, at the far end of which was an identical metal door—an airlock?

A girl with the same islander complexion as Mila was leaning against it, weight casually teetering on the rear two legs of a chair, cleaning her fingernails with a wickedly long knife. A loaded crossbow rested at her feet. Her hair was bound in a single long braid.

Her eyes narrowed as they entered. Then, in one catlike leap, she was on her feet, pointing the knife at Mila. “Not one more step. Who the fuck are you?”

Then she frowned. “Clarissa? What’s wrong with you?”

“Hiii Monarda,” blurred Clarissa. “Thissis Mila.”