and smells of the hall faded entirely. A dim glow surrounded her, and a crackling charge tickled her brows and stood the hairs on her arms on end.
There lay her secret companion. Her treasure. The Coral Man.
She reached into the box to touch him. Fearful, awed, excited all at once. Her fingers traced the roughness of him. She could have shredded the tips if she’d pushed hard enough. The shadows cast by the lantern made his face seem more defined than it really was. She withdrew her hand, fingertips now coated with fine and vaguely luminous powder. There was powder in the box, too, a light dusting of it. She sniffed at her fingers, then put her tongue to them and tasted sea salt. Within that flavor lay her whole life before the spans: the cavern called Fishkill, the lagoon where she swam, the tales of her mother, the smell of the breeze entering her tiny garret.
Memories of the backwater island life she had abandoned.
I
BOUYAN
ONE
She was five years old the first time they let her go to Ningle. Ningle-in-the-Clouds, as Soter properly called it.
They carried their baskets of fish—her uncle and grandfather—on the path that wound beneath the canopy of trees, with the ever-visible span looming ever closer. Before then she’d only seen it from across the island, a great black stripe of cloud showing through the trees, which never moved, never broke apart, but hung in the sky like an omen. At night it transformed into a band of fairy lights coruscating in the sky. She wasn’t prepared for its true size. Almost an hour’s walk from her home, one massive leg of the span anchored somewhere deep in the bedrock of Bouyan beneath them. Steps had been carved into the side of it, each block so big that she had to clamber up with her hands—or would have if her grandfather hadn’t hefted her along with his baskets.
Soon he’d carried her so high that she closed her eyes and buried her face against his neck, smelling sawdust and varnish, the scents of his workshop, which clung to him even more tightly than she.
At the top he set down his basket and unwound her from his neck and back. Between them they had an old game where he swung her and swung her, and she laughed, screamed, giggled. This time, though, he only swung her once, then held her up, her feet resting upon stone. He said, “Now open your eyes, Lea.” She did, and was so awed by the view that she forgot to be terrified right away.
The island of Bouyan lay so far below her that wisps of cloud gauzed the treetops, and she could see clear across to a hint of their rooftops and even all the way to where a chimney of smoke signaled the location of the fishing village of Tenikemac, and farther still—to the sea itself, like a great sheet of glass upon which the whole world was set. She could see that the Adamantine Ocean stretched forever just like the stories said.
That day, standing upon the rail, with her grandfather’s hands enclosing her waist, she heard the call for the first time. It was not a voice exactly, not words, not something anyone else could hear. It whispered her name, spoke to her in the silences, invited her to find it, join it, embrace it. All without words. She thought then it was the ocean calling her. There was nothing else to see.
“Isn’t it fine?” her grandfather asked.
She turned her head to look at him, and now she was afraid. The wordless, communicating voice was frightening, and she didn’t know whether her grandfather was referring to it or to the view. He saw her fear and took her off the rail, assuring her softly, “It’s all right, child, it’s all right. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, you know.” She knew this to be true, but she wasn’t paying attention to him.
The moment he’d touched her, the ocean call had ceased. She listened hard, but it didn’t reappear.
She would not hear it again for years, but on that day—she was certain of this now—the caller had located her. It had sought her, knowing she was somewhere. Now it would be able to find her again.
Throughout the next year Leodora spent nearly every day on the span. It teemed and surged with life, with the noises of excitement, the smells of otherness, newness. Bright costumes and plumed caps dazzled her, and facial