Chapter 1

The sea had stopped making a noise.

Nora Ellis stood in the kitchen with one hand under the cold tap, listening for the sound that usually reached the flat from the bottom of Quay Street. At night, once the traffic had gone, water dragged stones down the beach in long untidy breaths. She had complained about it the first week they lived here, before she grew used to falling asleep to it. Now its absence had got her out of bed.

The tap coughed against her fingers. Behind her the fridge went quiet, and the light over the cooker blinked twice and stayed on.

“Gus.”

He appeared in the doorway in his work trousers and no shirt, holding his phone a little away from his face as if it might bite.

“Are you seeing this?”

She was. The words hung in the air just in front of her eyes, clear and patient, as though someone had written on a window very close to her face. When she turned her head, they came with her.

“It’s apologising,” Gus said. “Why is it apologising? Nothing apologises unless it’s about to do something.”

Nora pushed the window up. Cold air came in smelling of mud and weed and the underside of a boat. Beyond the roofs, where the harbour lights should have lain in broken lines on black water, there was no water at all. The lights stood on their poles above a long grey slope of seabed. Beyond the slope, where nothing should have been, moonlight lay on roofs.

Hundreds of them. They climbed out of a hollow beyond the harbour wall in terraces too regular to be rock, pale and wet and close-set, with one tall arch at the near edge throwing its shadow across the mud.

She had surveyed buildings on that front for eleven years. She knew what a spring tide exposed: shingle, sand, mooring chains, a shopping trolley that had been there since 2019. There should have been nothing out there with a roof.

Gus’s phone rang in his hand. He looked at the screen and his whole face changed.

“Dan.” He put it on speaker. “Dan, where are you?”

“Slipway.” Danny’s voice came through wind and shouting. Gus’s younger brother had been on the lifeboat crew since he was eighteen and had never once sounded frightened on the phone. He sounded frightened now. “Pagers all went at once. Gus, the harbour’s gone, it’s just gone, there’s people out on the mud. Someone’s car went off the end of the quay when it dropped. We’re getting a line out to them. And there’s a city. There’s a fucking city out there.”

“Stay off the mud,” Gus said. “Danny. Listen to me. Stay on the slip.”

“There’s a woman stuck to her waist. We’re not leaving her.” A pause. Shouting behind him, and something else: a high, wet clicking, like a lot of small things being counted. “What is that? What—”

The line went dead.

Gus was already moving, pulling a jumper on inside out and going for his boots. Nora caught his arm.

“Ten minutes,” she said.

“He’s on the—”

“I know where he is. Ten minutes, and then we go, and we go with whatever this is offering instead of a torch and your bare hands.” She held on until he looked at her. “You can’t help him with a boathook, Gus. Look at it. Look at what’s out there.”

He looked. For a moment she thought he would pull free anyway. Then he sat down hard on a kitchen chair and put both hands flat on the table, the way he did when he was trying not to throw something.

“Ten,” he said. “Then I’m going whether it’s finished or not.”

The assessment did not care that they were in a hurry.

It asked Nora questions in the air, one after another, while the clock on the cooker went from 2:14 to 2:16. What did she notice about the crack in the ceiling above the boiler? What would she test before she trusted the shelf beside the window? It gave her a coin that wasn’t there and asked her to find which way it was weighted. She found it, felt foolish and then didn’t. Across the table Gus was doing something with his hands that looked like holding a rope against a pull. His jaw was set so hard she could see the muscle jump.

At 2:23 the offers came.

The first one was her job. The second sounded kind. The third sounded like the roofs.

She took the third, and something answered beneath her ribs: an effort she could almost make, as definite as the weight of her hand on the table, though she had no name for it yet. It felt like a hollow that wanted filling.

“Mine’s got a Collector option,” Gus said, reading off the air in front of him with his lips moving. “Harbour Hand, Common, which is fifteen years of trawler winches in two words. Breaker, Uncommon, which says ‘hit things until they stop’, I’m not making that up. Spellsword, Rare, with a Collector specialisation. ‘Magic through a blade. Keep what you find.’”

“Take the Rare.”

“I was always going to take the one that lets me keep things.” It was almost a joke. He chose. She saw it land in him, a straightening of the shoulders, a breath taken and held. “Channelled Edge. Runic Guard. Driving Step. Two empty slots for things I haven’t found.” He stood up so fast the chair went over. “Ten minutes.”

“Eleven,” she said, grabbing the torch.

Quay Street ran straight down to the harbour, and people were already in it: in dressing gowns, in coats over pyjamas, standing in their doorways reading the air. A car alarm was going somewhere. Mrs Ogden from downstairs was on the pavement in her slippers with her phone pressed to her ear.

“Raymond’s at the depot,” she said as they passed. “He’s on nights. He’s not answering—”

“Stay inside, Margaret,” Gus said without stopping.

The lifeboat station stood at the bottom of the street, where the slipway ran down into what had been the harbour. The big doors were open and the boat was gone from its cradle; the tractor that launched it stood at the top of the slip with its lights on and its engine running and nobody in it. Below the slipway the seabed sloped away under the moon, glistening, cut by channels of black water that ran out towards the hollow and the roofs. Torches moved on the mud. Somebody was screaming in a steady, exhausted way, as if they had been doing it for a while.

Gus ran into the station. Nora heard glass break. He came out with a red-handled fire axe from the emergency board, the little BREAK GLASS sign still hanging off the frame behind him. A label slid into the air beside it as he lifted it: Fire axe — Common · Rating 12.

“Spellsword,” he said. “Doesn’t say sword. Says blade.”

Then they were on the slipway, and she saw them.

At first she thought they were rocks moving: low grey shapes coming up out of the nearest channel, one after another, on too many joints. Then the first one reached the bottom of the slip and stood up into the torchlight. It was the size of a big dog and the colour of wet slate, armoured in overlapping plates, with a long head that ended in a mouth opening sideways. Its jaws were lined with hooked teeth. It made the clicking noise she had heard down the phone.

Out on the mud, forty metres away, four people in yellow crew jackets were hauling on a line. At the far end of the line a woman was sunk to her waist in the soft grey, both arms wrapped round the rope. And between the crew and the slipway, coming out of the channels in a loose wide crescent, were six or seven of the grey things.

“Danny!” Gus roared.

One of the yellow jackets turned. Nora saw his face in someone’s torch: Gus’s face younger and thinner and wild with effort.

“Gus! Get the—”

The nearest creature came up the slipway at them.

It moved faster than anything that size should, low and scrabbling on the wet concrete. Gus stepped into it with the axe already swinging, and his Guard came up without his seeming to think about it: a flare of pale light along the axe-head that caught the hooked jaws and threw them aside. The impact shoved him back a step. When he recovered and hit it, she saw the second skill land. Light ran down the axe and bit. The blade went into the plates behind its head with a sound like a spade into gravel. The creature screamed and twisted away, still alive.

Nora lifted her hand. The hollow under her ribs had a shape now, and she knew what to do with it the way she knew how to read a level. She aimed and paid, two long seconds of building pressure, and Spark left her fingers in a blue-white crack.

It hit the slipway rail a metre to the left of the creature and blew the paint off it.

“Shit,” she said.

“Again,” Gus said, through his teeth, Guarding a second bite.

She held her hand steadier and did it again. This time it went into the thing’s side. The plates there lit from inside like a split lamp, and it went down in a jerking heap and did not get up. A notice slid into the corner of her eye, quiet and polite.

“Down,” Gus said. “We’ve got to get down there.”

They went down onto the mud.

It sucked at her boots. It stank of rot and salt and something else, something electrical, like the air before a storm. Two more creatures came at them from the left. Gus took one with the axe, a long chopping stroke that sheared a foreleg, while she put a Bolt into the other’s head from three metres away and felt the heat of it on her own face. Somebody on the line was shouting for help. The woman in the mud had stopped screaming and was just holding on.

Then the crescent closed.

It happened in a few seconds. Three of the grey things went for the crew at once, not for the woman in the mud and not for Gus and Nora, but for the line itself: for the people holding it. One of the crew went down with one of the grey things’ jaws shut on his boot and was dragged, shouting, towards the channel. Danny let go of the rope and threw himself on the man’s shoulders. A second creature caught Danny by the back of his lifejacket and pulled.

“No,” Gus said. “No, no, no—”

He ran. Nora had never seen him run like that. He went across the mud in great floundering strides with the axe in one hand. She went after him with her lungs burning and her hand up, looking for a line she could shoot through that didn’t have Danny in it. There wasn’t one.

The creature had Danny almost to the water. Gus reached them as it went in. He dropped the axe, got both fists in the shoulder straps of Danny’s yellow jacket and hauled backwards. For a second it worked: Danny’s head came up out of the black water, gasping, his eyes finding his brother’s.

“Gus—”

The jacket’s buckle went with a snap Nora heard over everything. The inflation charge fired with a bang. The jacket burst open in Gus’s hands, fat and yellow and empty, and Danny slid out of it into the channel like something poured.

Gus went in after him.

Nora caught his belt. She didn’t decide to; her hand was there and closed on the leather and she threw her weight back. They both went down full length in the mud at the edge of the channel, his legs in the water and her arm wrenched to the shoulder. The water was moving. Something long and grey moved in it, going away fast towards the hollow and the roofs. Then there was nothing but the black surface rocking and settling and the cold coming up out of it.

She fired a Bolt into the water where it had been, because she had to do something. Spark lit the channel blue for half a second, all the way down. There was nothing there.

Gus was on his knees in the mud, holding the yellow lifejacket in both hands.

“Get up,” she said. “Gus. Gus, they’re coming back.”

They were. Two more of the grey things had turned from the line and were coming low across the mud towards them. Gus looked up at them, and she watched something go out of his face and something else come into it, cold and very simple.

He picked up the axe and got up.

What happened next she remembered only in pieces. Gus Guarding a bite that would have taken her arm, the Guard’s light stuttering as the hollow in him emptied. Her own Bolt going into an open mouth. The crew pulling the woman out of the mud at last with a sound like a boot coming free, then carrying her up the slip between them. One of the creatures dragging itself back to the channel with its legs gone. The rest of them simply leaving, pouring away across the seabed towards the city in a long grey tide, carrying what they had taken. Kev Bright, the man the grey things had had by the boot, went with them; Nora saw his helmet roll on its side at the edge of the channel and lie there.

Then it was quiet, apart from the tractor’s engine at the top of the slip and a man in a yellow jacket sitting in the mud, saying “Danny” over and over in a flat, uncomprehending voice.

And then, a moment later, to everyone, in the same patient type:

Gus laughed. It was a horrible sound. He stood on the slipway with the axe hanging from one hand and the empty lifejacket in the other, laughing at the air until Nora put her arms round him from behind and held on, and he stopped.

By eight in the morning the assembly hall on Chapel Hill smelled of instant coffee and wet coats. Everybody in it had read that notice, and nobody was saying the word “units” out loud.

Nora sat on the stage steps with a mug of tea she hadn’t drunk. At some point in the night she had applied the level without noticing. She had looked at the sheet once, because she had to, and then not again.

Beside her, Gus had the yellow lifejacket across his knees and was turning the snapped buckle over and over in his fingers. He had not slept. She had slept for an hour against his shoulder and woken with the shape of his collarbone in her cheek, and he had been sitting exactly like this.

“It’s a cheap buckle,” he said, not really to her. “They’re meant to go. That’s the point. If you’re caught on something underwater, it lets go so you don’t drown.” He turned it again. “It did what it was meant to do.”

She put her hand on his knee and left it there.

The hall was full. People had come up from the front all night with whatever they could carry. Imogen Pask, who managed the hall and had apparently decided at four in the morning that she now managed the town, had them in rows: families on the badminton court, the injured under the stage lights, the volunteer watch by the doors with a trestle table, a radio and a hand-drawn map. Nobody had told Imogen she was in charge.

“Eat that,” Imogen said, appearing in front of them with two rounds of toast on a paper plate. She stood there until Gus took one. Then she looked at the lifejacket and said, more quietly, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

“He’s not dead,” Gus said.

Imogen didn’t argue.

Margaret Ogden was sitting by the doors with her phone in her lap. Raymond had not come home from the depot. The depot was the bus garage on the front, three hundred metres from the slipway, and its yard had been empty at dawn, with the gates open and a hi-vis jacket lying on the tarmac. Margaret had been sitting there since six, watching every person who came in, and Nora had seen her look at their shoes first, every time, before she let herself look at their faces.

Rosamund Achterberg ran the watch. She was a ticket clerk at the ferry terminal with a voice that could have stopped a bus. She had spent the night on the promenade with a fire extinguisher and her daughter’s old school hockey stick, and she had a Watchkeeper class and a dressing on her forearm to show for it. She came over at nine with a sheet of paper.

“My scouts got to the arch,” she said. “The big one out on the mud. There’s a plaque. Nobody could read it till they stood right in front of it, and then everybody could.” She held out the paper. “Thought you’d want it. You two went out on the mud last night. Not many did.”

Nora took it. The handwriting was careful capitals.

Underneath, someone had written DOES NOT SAY HOW.

“Protection,” Gus said. He was looking at it over her shoulder, very still.

“I sent them to look for shelter,” Rosamund said. “They found that instead. Nobody’s tested it. It might mean against those things. It might mean something else. It’s a sign on a door. I’ve worked at a ferry terminal for twenty years, I know what signs on doors are worth.”

“Local,” Nora said. “Installation. It’s part of the building. It’s not something you pick up and carry home.”

“Then somebody’s going to try to own the building,” Rosamund said. “I’ve asked the watch for volunteers to go back out there before they do. Nobody’s put a hand up yet.” She looked at the doors.

They opened at a quarter past ten.

Six people came in. They wore black fleeces with PORT SECURITY across the back, and four of them carried long clear riot shields. The extendable batons on their belts had never been meant for this. One of them, a big quiet man in his forties with a policeman’s way of standing, had a shotgun broken over his arm. The hall went silent row by row as they passed.

The man in front was in his fifties, grey, lean and very calm. He had the kind of face that is good at bad news. He stopped in the middle of the floor and waited, without impatience, until he had everyone’s attention, and then for a little longer.

“Good morning,” he said. “My name is Alistair Voss. Until yesterday I ran emergency security at the port. Some of you know me. For the rest of you, here is what I can tell you.”

He told them. The ferry terminal had generators, a kitchen and a fence, and his people had held it all night. They had killed nineteen of the grey animals between them; he said the number without pride, as information. He had food for a week, and more if they were careful. The town council had not been seen since midnight. The police had three bridges and a hospital to deal with. Nobody was coming.

“The installation on the seabed offers protection,” he said. “You have all read the notice. I intend to secure it. I am putting together an expedition, and I will take any able volunteer with a useful class. Anyone who comes under the terminal’s protection will be registered, fed and defended. Anyone who wants to stay here may do so.” He let that sit. “I would not.”

“What about the ones they took?” someone called from the badminton court.

Voss turned towards the voice. “If they are alive, the installation is the best way to protect everyone else from the same thing. If they are not, the same is true.” His face did not change. “I’m sorry. Those are the priorities.”

Gus stood up.

Nora felt it before she saw it, the way the step under her shifted. He walked down the hall with the lifejacket still in his hand, and the man with the shotgun watched him come and moved half a step to the side, not raising it.

“My brother’s out there,” Gus said. “Danny Hale. Lifeboat crew. They took him off the slip at half two this morning. I had hold of him.”

Voss looked at him with what might have been sympathy. Then his eyes went past Gus’s face to something in the air beside it, and Nora understood that he was reading him. She had not known you could.

“Spellsword,” Voss said. “Rare. Collector.” His gaze came back. “I’m sorry about your brother, Mr Hale. I could use you. Six tomorrow morning at the terminal slip. We go down at first light.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Gus said, quite pleasantly.

There was a laugh somewhere at the back of the hall, quickly stifled. Voss did not smile, and he did not get angry. He nodded as though Gus had confirmed something he had already written down.

“Six,” he said to the room. “Anyone who wants to be useful.” He turned for the door.

“He’s sleeping in my office,” Rosamund said, watching him go. “Twenty years I had that office. There’s a cactus on the windowsill called Gerald, and my daughter’s number is in the address book in the top drawer. I’ve asked twice for someone to bring it up.”

“How did he do that?” Nora said, when Gus had come back and sat down beside her, shaking very slightly. “Read your class.”

“Marshal,” said Rosamund, who had not moved from her place by the steps. “That’s his class. One of the scouts heard his lot talking. He can read people: class, rarity, the lot. The rest of us get the ranking.” She jerked her chin at the air. “Ask for it. It’s public.”

Nora asked for it, and the interface answered at once, as if it had been waiting to be asked.

“Third,” Rosamund said, without satisfaction. “Hockey stick.” She frowned at the list. “Rook. Never met him. One of my scouts has.”

“Level four,” Gus said. “He was out all night killing things while we were—” He stopped.

“While we were on the mud getting your brother’s crewmates back,” Nora said. “Which we did. Two of them, and the woman in the mud.” She looked at the list, at the 38th, surprised by how much she disliked it, and how simply. It was the feeling she used to get in meetings, when a louder person stood up and said her findings in his own voice. “He’s going at six.”

Gus was quiet for a while. Then he looked at the air in front of him and said, quite steadily, “Where is Danny Hale?”

“How do you get to be senior?”

He looked at Rosamund’s sheet of paper, still in Nora’s hand: First clear will be recorded. Then he looked at her.

“Then we go at five,” he said.

They spent the rest of the day doing the things that would let them go at five.

Imogen’s store cupboards gave them two head torches, a coil of rope and a first-aid kit. A fishing-tackle shop on Chapel Hill gave them a gutting knife for Nora and a pair of chest waders that Gus put on and took off again in disgust. The owner had taken one look at the axe and the lifejacket and opened up for them. Rosamund gave them her scouts’ sketch of the route across the mud to the arch, and the advice not to go near the channels at all, which they already knew. Nora practised Anchor on the hall’s fire door until she could make the mark in three seconds without thinking. She made it once more and fed Spark through it until the emergency light above the door lit. A small boy watched her do it with his mouth open until his mother pulled him away.

By the middle of the afternoon the hall had started comparing.

It began at the tea urn, where everything in the hall began. Somebody said what they’d been offered and somebody else said what they’d taken. Within an hour three hundred people who had spent the morning not saying the word units were talking about classes with the desperate cheerfulness of people at a wedding where nobody likes the groom.

Imogen had taken Hallkeeper, Uncommon, over something called Clerk of Works. “I’ve run this hall for nineteen years,” she said. “I wasn’t going to start being a clerk now.” Her one skill was called Open House, and as far as anyone could tell it meant that people who slept under a roof she was responsible for slept better. Nora, who had slept for an hour against Gus’s collarbone and woken feeling like she’d had six, believed it.

The car-wash brothers, Jarek and Tomasz, had taken Breaker and Mender. “One breaks it, one fixes it,” said Jarek. “Same as always.” The bus driver, Dennis Maguire, was a Wayfinder and kept apologising for it. One of the sixth-form teachers had been offered something called Lamplighter, the same as Nora, and had taken it. She stood by the main doors at dusk making a soft white light in her cupped hands. The children came and sat round her in a ring as though it were a fire.

Margaret Ogden had not chosen anything.

“Raymond and I do things together,” she said, when Imogen asked her gently. “Thirty-eight years. He’d want to choose with me.” She looked at the doors. “I’ll wait.”

And at half past five, at the urn, Bernadette Okoro, who had cooked school dinners in Greyhaven for thirty years and had taken a Common class called Hob Cook because it was the only one that hadn’t frightened her, finished her eleventh vat of soup. A notice appeared in the air above the steam, for the whole queue to see.

The hall cheered. It was the first time anyone in Greyhaven had cheered since the sea went quiet. Bernadette stood with the ladle in her hand and read it twice, slowly. Thirty years she had fed other people’s children, and nobody had ever once written down that it did them good. “Oh, give over,” she said, very red, to nobody. She served the next bowl, and Nora saw her wipe her eye with the back of her wrist. Gus, in the queue with the lifejacket over his arm, laughed out loud and then looked startled at himself for doing it.

In the evening the man who had been sitting in the mud found them. He was Jamal Saddiq, the lifeboat’s second coxswain, and he had a bandaged hand and a face that had not decided what to do with itself.

“The crew are calling them hookjaws,” he said first, as if that were the important thing. “For the mouths.”

Then he said what he had come to say. “He went back for Kev. Danny did. Kev went down and Danny went back for him. That’s what he did. I wanted you to know that’s what he did.”

“I know,” Gus said. “That’s what he always does.”

When Jamal had gone, Gus sat on the stage steps and laid the yellow lifejacket out flat beside him and smoothed it with his hand, the way you might straighten a blanket on someone asleep.

“Twenty-three,” he said. “Units.”

Nora opened the notebook she had carried for eleven years of surveys. Below the date she wrote wardstone, and under that, after a moment, Danny.

“If it collects them,” she said slowly, “it’s taking them somewhere. You don’t collect things you’re going to throw away.”

He looked at her.

“I don’t know that,” she said. “I’m not saying I know it. I’m saying that’s what the word means.”

“Then we go and find out what it means,” Gus said. He stood up and went to sharpen the axe.

Out beyond the hall windows, beyond the town, the drowned city lay pale under a rising moon. At eleven o’clock a new notice slid into every waking eye in Greyhaven.

Down at the bottom of Chapel Hill, somebody started to scream.