Chapter Three: What the Light Is For

At 3:40 in the morning, the generator died.

The silence was the worst part. For ninety years the lamp had hummed, and now there was only the wind and the rain and the tick of the cooling brass. The beam swung once more, out of habit, and went dark.

Wren did not think. She took the hand lantern and the can of kerosene and the old striker from the hook where it had hung since before she was born, and she climbed.

One hundred and fourteen steps. She counted them in her father's voice.

Out on the water, in the black, something was moving toward the shore. She could not see it, exactly. She could only see where it wasn't — a long, low absence against the foam, patient as a tide.

She lit the backup wick with shaking hands. It caught. It held. She opened the shutters and let the little flame find the lens, and the lens did what it had always done: it took something small and made it enormous.

The light went out across the water. The absence stopped.

The bridge reopened at noon. The doctor said her father would be fine if he rested, which he would not. The man from Port Ellis drove out himself to shake her hand.

That night, Wren opened the ledger, uncapped her father's pen, and wrote in her own handwriting for the first time.

Light held. They did not come ashore.