The pilings went first, and Nemi found out the way he found out most things, because someone brought him the broken piece.
It was the morning after the grove, and he had slept badly, and he was on the dock before the light came up trying to feel the pull in the boards under him, when the Harn boy came running with a chunk of dock piling in both arms like a thing he’d stolen. He set it down in front of Nemi and stepped back from it.
“It came off in my hand,” the boy said. “I leaned on the rail and it came off in my hand.”
Nemi crouched over it. The piling had been in the water since before he was born. Yesterday it had been the kind of old wood that felt new, dense and cool and sure of itself, the strange good wood of Pell that never rotted the way wood was supposed to. Now it was soft. He pushed his thumb into the grain and his thumb went in, and the wood came away wet and dark and stinking, rotted straight through, the whole thing gone punky in a single night.
He looked at the dock. Under the waterline he could see the other pilings, and two of them had the dark bloom on them already, the rot climbing up out of the water toward the boards.
“Don’t lean on the east rail,” Nemi told the boy. “Tell the others. Nobody leans on the east rail.”
He fixed it the only way there was to fix it, which was to cut the bad wood out and drive new posts, and he spent the whole morning at it, and it did not hold. He drove a new post at midday and by evening the water around it had gone dark, the rot reaching for it out of the ground the way a sickness reaches for the nearest healthy thing. He drove another beside it. Same. Whatever was in the ground now was hungry, and it did not care that Nemi had spent his life teaching wood to last. It unmade his work as fast as he made it.
That was the first time in his life Nemi could remember mending a thing and having the thing refuse the mend.
—-
By the second day it was everywhere, and it had stopped being a thing that happened to one dock and started being a thing that was happening to the island.
The tide came in hard. Not high, hard, the water shoving up the east shore with a weight it had never had, dragging at the boats, pulling the fishing skiffs against their lines until Maret’s people spent the whole day doubling the moorings. The foam still ran southeast across the rock, except now it ran fast, and the pull that had been a curiosity his whole life had teeth in it, and old Sella lost her footing in ankle-deep water and the tide took her ten feet before her son got a hand on her.
The soil near the ridge, the good ground where wood never rotted, had turned. Nemi went up to see it because he did not believe it, and he stood at the edge of the Harn family’s wood store and watched the rot come up out of the ground into the stacked timber, a season’s cut going soft and dark from the bottom up, and there was nothing to mend because you cannot mend ground, you cannot drive a post into a whole hillside and tell it to hold.
And under all of it, the hum.
It was not the hum he’d known. The old hum had been a steadiness, a thing in the back of the teeth you only noticed when it faded. This one had an edge on it. It had climbed up out of the ground into the air, and it did not soothe, it pressed, a low grinding note under everything that gave the whole island a headache it could not locate. Children cried and could not say why. Dogs would not settle. Vara stood at her stove with her jaw tight and said nothing, and Nemi knew the not-saying was because she could feel it too and had no name to give it that would not frighten someone.
He went from broken thing to broken thing all day, and his hands did what his hands did, and none of it held. The pilings rotted faster than he drove them. The moorings he doubled chafed through by dusk. He patched the Harn wood store roof where the soft timber had let a beam sag and the patch sagged with it. Everything he touched, he touched with the certainty of a man who had never in his life met a broken thing he could not eventually understand, and everything he touched came apart in his hands anyway, and by dark he was standing on the dock in the wrong hard tide with sawdust and rot on him and no idea what to do, which was a feeling so new he did not have a shape for it.
He was the mender. Things broke, and he fixed them. That was the arrangement. That had always been the arrangement.
The island was breaking in a way that was not in the arrangement.
—-
He found Sorrel awake in the spare room in the dark, sitting up against the wall, and Nemi did not light the lamp because he did not want to see his own hands.
“It’s the whole island,” he said. “The pilings, the tide, the ground up at the ridge. The rot’s in the earth and I can’t drive a post into the earth. And there’s a hum in everything now that wasn’t there and it’s getting worse, and I’ve mended nine things today and not one of them held, not one, and I don’t.” He stopped. Started again. “I don’t have anything for this. I’ve never not had anything for a broken thing before.”
Sorrel was quiet in the dark. Their breathing had the careful rhythm of someone choosing.
“Sit down,” they said.
“Tell me how to fix it.”
“Sit down, Nemi.” So he sat, on the floor, his back against the doorframe, in the dark. Sorrel’s voice came down to him from the bed, thin and even and full of something he had not heard in it before, which was dread.
“You can’t fix it the way you fix a net,” Sorrel said. “It’s not broken the way a net breaks. We woke it up. A thing that’s been asleep for generations, and we sat down and asked it to remember what it was, and it did, and now it’s awake and it hasn’t got the strength to hold its own shape yet. It’s like.” They searched for it. “It’s like waking a limb that’s been dead under you all night. Before the feeling comes back right, it comes back wrong. It burns. It won’t hold your weight. That’s the island right now. It’s coming back wrong before it comes back right.”
“Then it comes back right. If we wait.”
“Maybe.” A long pause, and in the pause Nemi heard Sorrel decide to tell him the rest, heard the breath they took to do it. “But there’s a thing I didn’t tell you. A thing I should have told you before I let you put your hands down in that grove, and I didn’t, because I have wanted this my whole life and I was afraid you’d say no.”
The hum pressed under the floor, under Nemi, under the whole dark house.
“Waking an anchor point doesn’t just wake the anchor point,” Sorrel said. “It’s a light, Nemi. In a very dark room. And there are people who have spent a very long time making sure no light ever stays lit. When we woke it, we didn’t just wake it.” Their voice went to almost nothing. “We told them where it is. We told them where we are. And I have spent my whole life running from them, and now I’ve stopped running, on your island, with your people, and I’ve lit the brightest light there is.”
