The rain in Kellanport never fell straight. It slanted sideways, swept in off the Midreach with the bite of salt and the stink of algae — the kind that got into your clothes, your lungs, and your teeth if you stayed out long enough. Ira Finch was used to it. His coat had more salt stains than buttons, and the brass compass in his pocket rattled in time with the wind as he stood on the pier, waiting for the contact who was already thirty minutes late.
Around him, the port was alive with its usual pre-Swap chaos.
Cargo cranes groaned overhead, swinging crates toward ships bound for anywhere but here before the world shifted again. Sailors bartered for extra rations. Whole families sat in the shadows of stacked shipping containers, clutching their travel permits like prayer slips. And everywhere — everywhere — the street hawkers shouted promises: Maps to the new world! Best predictions in the city! Swap-proof property in the Northern Isthmus! All lies. All bait for the desperate.
Ira had made the same pitch more than once, but with less shouting and more… elegance.
His eyes tracked a girl moving through the crowd, hood up against the rain, braid swaying down her back. She couldn't have been more than twenty. She moved with the wrong kind of confidence — the kind that said she either didn't know how dangerous Kellanport's docks could be or she did and thought herself untouchable. She didn't spare the hawkers a glance, didn't flinch when a crate slammed onto the pier beside her hard enough to shatter its nails.
Zadie Merrin.
He'd met her twice before — once in the company of a drunk baron who claimed she could "see the Swap in her sleep" (the man had lost three estates betting on her visions), and once in a dim tea den where she'd calmly predicted the exact moment a brawl would break out between two rival gangs… and then left just before it happened. She had the kind of face that never fully committed to one expression. At the moment, it was caught somewhere between boredom and suspicion.
"You're late," Ira said as she reached him.
"No," she replied, voice flat, "you're early."
They stood in the rain for a moment longer, just two figures in the moving blur of the docks, before she glanced over his shoulder. Ira followed her gaze and spotted an airship floating low over the port — dull iron belly, patched canvas sails, the name Greywater scrawled in faded paint along the hull. A rusted figurehead in the shape of a bird clung to the prow, missing one wing.
The pilot brought her down sloppy, rope ladders swinging wildly until they slapped against the pier. A man climbed down, boots landing heavy on wet wood.
Captain Yusef Kader — "Rust" to the people who liked him, "that bastard deserter" to the people who didn't. The sea-weathered leather of his coat was as worn as the creases around his eyes, and a streak of white ran through his beard like lightning frozen mid-strike. He carried himself like someone who'd been in a hundred bad situations and lived through ninety-nine of them.
"Finch," Rust said with a nod. "And the dream girl. Didn't expect to see you both together."
"That makes three of us," Ira said.
Rust ignored him and looked at Zadie. "You still seeing things you shouldn't?"
"I'm seeing rain, dock rot, and two men who think I'm here for their benefit," she said. "Was there something else you wanted to ask?"
Rust grinned, slow and wolfish. "You'll do."
The wind shifted, bringing with it the low moan of the port's warning horns. The sound vibrated in Ira's chest, deep enough to rattle bone. Nine short blasts, then a pause.
Nine days to the Swap.
Everyone on the docks stopped for a heartbeat. Even the hawkers fell silent, as if the air itself demanded it. Then, slowly, the noise returned — louder now, more frantic. Deals were struck in whispers and shouts. Cargo was shoved onto ships without manifests. Somewhere behind them, a man began to weep.
Ira's hand found the brass compass in his pocket, turning it over between his fingers. In nine days, Kellanport might be on the other side of the world. Or under the sea. Or gone entirely, like so many places before it.
And in a vault beneath the drowned bones of a city no one remembered, he had found a map that claimed to know exactly where every place would be when the world changed again.
He hadn't told them that part. Not yet.