Chapter One: The Glass

The storm arrived the way bad news does on Cape Halloran — first as a rumor on the radio, then as a smell, then all at once.

Wren had polished the lens that morning the way her father taught her: soft cloth, no hurry, circles that never quite close. "You're not cleaning glass," he liked to say. "You're keeping a promise." She had rolled her eyes at that when she was twelve. At sixteen she still rolled them, but she also did the circles.

By four o'clock the sky over the water had gone the color of a bruise. By five, the gulls had vanished. By six, her father was sitting on the bottom step of the tower with his hand pressed flat against his chest, saying he was fine in a voice that was not fine at all.

"The radio," he said. "Call the station at Port Ellis. Tell them—" He stopped and breathed for a while. "Tell them the light is lit."

"It isn't lit yet."

He looked up at her, and for the first time in her life Wren saw her father afraid. "Then you'd better light it," he said.

The stairs were one hundred and fourteen steps. She had counted them a thousand times. Tonight she counted them again, out loud, because counting was something to hold onto while the wind tried to pull the tower out of the ground.

At the top, the great lens waited in the dark like a held breath.