During the daylight hours, the cleptapods sunned themselves beneath the surface of the water. Clinging to the towering sea stacks, they inspected their armor with slow precision, adjusting misaligned bones with elaborate patience. At night, they abandoned the forest of rocky outcrops to hunt.

Which was why, if she wanted to move from one sea stack to another, Destry had to wait until nightfall.

Over the past three nights, with nothing but rainwater and her own will to sustain her, she’d struggled toward the outskirts of the sea stack forest. Along the way, she’d had to ditch all of her ammunition and most of her metal, including the cannon that had kept that cleptapod’s beak from crunching her to a pulp. She’d spent her nights climbing and diving and swimming. Her days, shivering and feverish atop pillars of stone, hiding from the tentacled herd.

And while she hid, she hallucinated.

The first day, she’d seen a fish, or a whale maybe, leap out of the water, spread its wings, and fly toward the shore. Next, she’d seen mountains nudge up over the horizon, only to disappear the next morning. Then, when her fever got much worse, she’d imagined that she could sense an aliveness to the land, the water, the air. A sort of hum. A sort of meditativeness that made her feel as if the sea stacks were half a moment from deciding to be something else entirely.

Her stomach was a pit, her head a blacksmith’s forge. Her arm was a needling heat hanging limp from her shoulder.

Destry had survived three nights on the open sea.

She was not likely to survive three more.