The second half of the ocean did not feel like the first half, and every soul on the Chainbreaker knew it within a day of crossing the Bonefields.
The water had changed color again, violet deepening toward something closer to black, and far beneath the hull faint threads of gold light moved through the dark the way blood moves through a vein. The crown fragment had stopped being merely warm in Almond's hand. It hummed now, low and constant, a sound Lily swore she could hear even with her eyes shut and her hands nowhere near it.
"It's getting louder because we're getting closer," she said, on the second night, sitting with him near the bow while the rest of the ship slept in shifts. "Not louder like sound. Louder like a heartbeat getting closer to a chest."
"Closer to what's left of one," Almond said, and did not need to say more than that.
