THE BELLKEEPER'S INVENTORY

At the bottom of Saint Orison's bell tower, eighty feet below the waterline, Ada kept a ledger bound in eel skin. Her duties were simple. Each dawn she struck the brass bells until the streets above stopped flooding. Each evening she checked that the names of the drowned remained engraved on their rims. A name without a bell was a disaster; a bell without a name was a warning.

For seventeen years she had done the work without looking at the newest bell. It was small, green with salt, and bore the name NELL, though her sister had never been listed among the dead. Tonight the bell rang on its own. The water beyond the tower window turned black, then transparent, and Ada saw Nell swimming through it with her eyes open.

The keeper who trained Ada had said that the bells were anchors for the city's promises. Nobody had explained to whom those promises had been made. Ada could climb into the dry municipal archives and read the treaty, or follow Nell's impossible shadow into the flood.