The pull did not care about maps.
It ran through Almond and Fraisea like a second current, steady and certain, and for two days the Chainbreaker simply followed it, cutting through open water under a sky that had finally stopped throwing storms at them. The crew used the calm the way sailors always used calm, mending sails, sharpening blades, sleeping in shifts, and pretending the quiet would last.
It did not last.
On the third morning, Fraisea called the change before anyone else felt it. "The water's different ahead," she said, standing rigid at the bow. "Not deep. Not shallow either. Crowded."
Crowded turned out to be the right word. The Chainbreaker came around a bank of low fog an hour later and found the ocean ahead of her choked with wreckage, mast after broken mast rising out of the violet water like a forest that had drowned standing up, hulls tilted and half sunk in every direction as far as anyone could see.
"That's not a reef," Marcus said quietly.
