At exactly twelve-forty in the afternoon, twenty-five minutes into the overtime crossing, Pella Rook took her place at the center of the Ferry Museum gallery. She didn’t draw a magical circle on the floorboards with chalk, nor did she light sulfur candles or recite the fourteen ancient invocations of the College Codex. She simply sat on a low wooden bench, unpinned her hair so it fell loose around her ears. Then she took the bare copper wire between the calloused thumbs and forefingers of both hands.
Beside her, Eren Tal stood with his four-pound ash framing mallet resting on the rim of the bronze stop bell. His eyes were locked on her face. Inspector Korr Var held his watch in his left hand and his sounding log in his right, ready to call an immediate pullback at the first sign of load-bearing distress.
Pella closed her eyes and leaned forward. She allowed her breathing to slow to the deep, steady rhythm of the river at slack tide. The copper wire in her palms was dead cold at first—the bitter, biting cold of freezing mountain runoff. Then, slowly, shaking through the metal at thirty-two cycles to the second, came the presence. It wasn’t a voice of words. It was the overwhelming, sense memory of three hundred years of water. The smell of green willow roots soaking in spring mud, the crunch of rounded quartz pebbles rolling across a shingle bed, the cold, majestic weight of glacier ice melting in upland gorges…
