Devil's Spit was eleven miles down the coast, a station Thomas had known only as a name on the chart and a dark stretch on nights when its own light had still worked, before the Trinity House budget cuts closed it and left whatever equipment still functioned to rust with dignity. He had not known anyone kept it warm.

They talked — if the word applied to a conversation built from dots and dashes across a storm — for the better part of an hour. Mira Okafor was not, it emerged, a ghost, an operator's widow, or any of the half-formed shapes his mind had been assembling in the dark. She was thirty-one, ran weather relay for a marine survey outfit out of the decommissioned station because the pay was decent and the isolation suited her, and had noticed his light three months ago and started sending to it the way a person might wave at a lit window on a dark road, without much hope of a wave back.

The earlier signals, the ones he'd spent a fortnight decoding like scripture, had been nothing stranger than her testing the set after a repair, sending the same string of letters over and over the way you'd say a word aloud to see if it still worked. KES TREL PO INT, badly spaced, badly sent, meaning nothing at all until tonight, when the storm had cleared enough air between the stations for a proper signal to land.

Thomas found he was smiling in a way his face had nearly forgotten how to do.

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