Chapter 12 The Volunteer

The hull was rotten at the waterline, and Moss could smell it before he found it — that sweet, sick scent of wood giving up its fight with the sea. He ran his hand along the planking, feeling for the soft spot the way Kael felt for flaws in her lenses. There. His fingers sank in. The timber crumbled like old bread.

“Here,” he said, and Ren the apprentice marked the spot with chalk. This was the third soft patch on this hull. The whole keel needed replacing, which meant the whole boat was finished, which meant old Tano would have to build a new one or retire. Tano would never retire, so Moss would be building a new keel next week. It was honest and useful work, but it was also very small.

He wiped his hands on his trousers and sat on the dock’s edge, his feet hanging over green-black water that lapped at the pilings with the lazy hunger of something that ate boats. The harbor was quiet in the late afternoon. Fishing boats were in. Merchant vessels were moored. The sky was the special orange that meant good weather tomorrow, but that meant nothing — weather in Tidemouth changed its mind like politicians did, except weather was more honest about its reasons.

Moss was thirty-one years old and had been a sailor since he was fourteen. He was very good at it, but he could not say why this fact felt like something was missing.

He had lost his parents young. A fever took his mother, and his father had been gone before that. The harbor took him in because harbors take everyone in. He grew up on docks and decks. He could splice rope, read currents, patch a hull, and navigate by stars on a clear night. He had been told since boyhood that these were valuable skills, and they were, but they were also the bars of a cage he had built for himself out of skill.

He had sailed south twice. The first time was on a dare, at nineteen — a day trip past the coastal shelf into the edge of the kill belts, far enough to smell the rotten-egg stench of H₂S before the wind shifted. His crew had panicked. Moss had not panicked, because panicking on water was the same as dying on water, and he preferred the alternative. They turned back. He thought about the smell for weeks afterward — that sour, poisonous sweetness that meant the ocean was exhaling death.

The second time was a salvage run at twenty-six. A merchant vessel had sunk in the shallows south of the cape, and its cargo was valuable enough to justify the risk. Moss led the expedition. Three boats. They found the wreck. They found the cargo. They also found a dead zone — water so anoxic that the fish floated belly-up in slicks of purple bacterial scum, and the air at deck level tasted like old coins. One crew member vomited blood before they cleared the zone. She survived, but the others had nightmares for months.

Moss had nightmares too, but his were different. In his dreams, the dead zone ended and the water beyond it was clear and blue and impossibly deep, and there was land on the other side — white, gleaming, cold — and someone was standing on the shore waiting for him. He never saw the person’s face. He always woke before the ship landed.

He had told no one about the dreams. In Tidemouth, dreams were either nonsense or omens, and Moss had no use for either. He was a practical man. He fixed boats and sailed boats and did not indulge in the kind of thinking that required believing in things you couldn’t touch.

But the dreams persisted. Some mornings, before the harbor woke, he stood on the southernmost dock and looked out over the water toward a horizon that meant nothing and wanted something he couldn’t name.

The posting went up at the harbor master’s office on the first day of the sixth month. Moss saw it on his way to check the tide schedule.

VOLUNTEERS SOUGHT FOR SOUTHWARD EXPEDITION BY ORDER OF THE TIDEMOUTH COUNCIL

Experienced sailors, navigators, and specialists needed for an extended ocean crossing in the service of the scholarly coalition’s contact initiative. Duration: unknown. Destination: the southern continent. Risk: extreme.

Compensation: lifetime provisions for surviving crew and families.

Report to the harbor master for assessment.

Moss read it twice. The words “southern continent” sat in his mind like a stone thrown into still water, the ripples spreading outward through everything he thought he knew. Southern continent. Not a myth. Not a story. A place, real enough that the city council — the same cautious, risk-averse group that took three months to approve a new dock — had authorized an expedition.

He read it a third time, then went back to work on old Tano’s hull. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. The caulking compound in his hands was gritty and familiar, the work was mindless, and his mind was anything but. He thought about the posting. He thought about the dead zones and the purple water and the smell of H₂S. He thought about the dream — the land on the other side, white and cold, and the figure waiting.

He thought about Kael. She hadn’t spoken to him in weeks. She’d been busy with whatever she was doing at the ruins — the whole city knew she was doing something, but nobody knew what. Now the posting connected to the scholarly coalition, which connected to Kael, which meant whatever she’d found up there had been real enough and important enough to send twelve ships into the Crossing.

The Crossing. The thing his grandmother had whispered about — the ocean that ate the world. The barrier between here and nowhere. And someone wanted to cross it, and they needed sailors, and Moss was the best sailor in Tidemouth, and he knew it, and the knowledge sat in his chest like a second heartbeat.

She found him at sunset. He was on the warehouse roof, which was where he went when he needed to think without the harbor’s noise. She climbed the ladder — she’d always been a good climber, better than him in tight spaces — and sat beside him without speaking.

They watched the sunset together. It was a good one — the kind that made the water look like it was on fire and the sky like something a painter would have been embarrassed to attempt. Colors that had no business being that bright. The kind of sunset that made you believe the world was worth looking at, even when you knew it was also trying to kill you.

“I found something,” Kael said.

“I figured.”

“You read the posting.”

“I read it.”

She told him everything. The signal. The math. The language she had built, concept by concept, over months of midnight exchanges. The body diagrams. The DNA. The people — because they were people, she said, not aliens, not machines, but humans — on the other side of the ocean.

Moss listened the way he listened to the sea: without interrupting, without fidgeting, with the stillness of a man who understood that some information needed to settle before you could know what shape it was.

When she finished, the sunset was gone and the stars were coming up.

“They’re human,” he said.

“Yes.”

“But different.”

“Modified. They changed themselves. Their genes, their bodies. They look different. Shorter, paler, bigger eyes. But human.”

“And they’ve been calling for five hundred years.”

“Their signal has. Yes.”

Moss was quiet for a long time. A fishing boat came into the harbor, its lantern bobbing. Somewhere, a dog barked. The normal sounds of a world that was about to become abnormal.

“You can’t go,” he said.

“No.”

“You need someone there.”

“I need someone who can see clearly. Who can adapt. Who can survive.”

“That’s a fancy way of saying you need someone stupid enough to volunteer for a suicide mission.”

“It’s not a suicide mission.”

“Twelve ships across the Crossing. What’s the survival rate?”

She didn’t answer.

“Kael.”

“Low.”

“How low?”

“I don’t know. There’s no precedent. Nobody’s done it.”

“Then it’s a suicide mission with good intentions.” He looked at her. In the dark, her face was shadows and angles, and the intensity of a mind that never stopped working. “You want me to go.”

“I want you to choose.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“It’s not. I’m telling you what’s there. The rest is yours.”

He signed on the next morning. Captain Lin accepted him without questions — she knew his reputation. The old fisher had been to deeper waters than anyone else alive, and she had spent the last month selecting her crew with the ruthless pragmatism of a woman who understood that this voyage would kill most of the people who attempted it.

“You’ve been south,” Lin said. “Farther than most.”

“Far enough to smell the death.”

“You’ll smell more.”

“I know.”

“You’ll probably die.”

“I know that too.”

She studied him with eyes that were old and sharp and without sentiment. “Why?”

Moss thought about the question. He had been thinking about it all night. He didn’t have a good answer. He didn’t have a heroic answer. He didn’t have the kind of answer that would look good carved into a memorial stone.

“Someone has to,” he said.

It was not enough, but it was honest, and it was the closest he could get to the truth, which was larger and stranger and more private: he had dreamed of the white shore for twelve years, and the person waiting on it had never had a face, and now Kael had told him there were people there — real people, changed people, people who had rewritten their own blood and lived in a sealed world at the bottom of the earth and had been calling for someone to come — and the dream no longer felt like nonsense or omen.

It felt like an appointment.

Twelve ships. One hundred eighty crew. Six weeks to build, provision, and prepare. Kael would maintain the signal. The coalition would fund the logistics. Hara would provide weapons. Renna would handle the politics of departure.

Moss spent the night before on the warehouse roof, looking south. The ocean was black and featureless and immense, and it was going to try very hard to kill him. He was not brave. Brave was a word for people who didn’t know what they were facing. Moss knew exactly what the ocean was and what it could do, and he was going anyway, which was not bravery but something older and less articulate — the compulsion of a man who had spent his entire life at the edge of the world and could no longer bear to not know what was beyond it.

The water lapped at the harbor stones. The stars turned. Somewhere to the south, fourteen thousand kilometers away, a signal pulsed in the dark. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11.

Moss closed his eyes and let the sound of the ocean fill the space where sleep should have been. He was going to walk on it.