The morning after the kiss, everything feels different.

  I wake before dawn, as I always do, but for once the dreams weren't of drowning. Instead I dreamed of warmth. of Corrine's hand in mine, of the way she looked at me in the lamplight, of the words we didn't say but somehow communicated anyway. It's been so long since I felt anything except rage and absence that I barely recognize the sensation stirring in my chest.

  Hope, or its shadow. Fragile as sea foam, but real.

  Not the world. the world is the same gray December morning it was yesterday, the same cold wind rattling the windows, the same distant sounds of fishermen preparing their boats in the harbor below. This safe house smells the same. fish and salt and the mustiness of old wood. Nothing has changed.

  Except everything has changed.

  Corrine is sitting by the window when I wake, watching the dawn break over the Channel. Her profile is soft in the morning light, her hair still tousled from sleep, her expression thoughtful in a way that makes my chest ache. She's wearing one of my shirts. borrowed sometime in the night, when the cold became too much. and the sight of it twists my heart.

  "You're staring," she says without turning around.

  "I'm wondering what you're thinking."

  "I'm thinking about London." She finally turns to face me, and I see a shadow in her gray-green eyes that I can't quite read. "About Celeste. About everything that comes next."

  I sit up, pulling the blankets around my shoulders against the cold. The marks hum their quiet rhythm inside my torso, connected to the sea that stretches gray and endless beyond the window.

  "What about London?"

  "I can't go with you."

  Words land like stones in still water. I feel their impact spreading outward, rippling through everything I thought I understood about what happened last night.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean." She stops, breathes, starts again. Her hands are clasped tight in her lap, white-knuckled. "I can't be there when you kill Celeste. I thought I could. I told myself I needed to see it, needed to witness the end of everything she represents. But I was lying to myself."

  "Because she's your sister."

  "Because I still love her." The admission seems to cost her. I watch her shoulders curl inward, watch her eyes drop to her hands. "Not what she's become. Not the monster she chose to be. But the girl she was before. the one who used to braid my hair and tell me stories about the stars. The one who held me when our parents died and promised she'd always protect me. That girl is still in there somewhere, buried under decades of devotion to a cause that doesn't deserve it."

  I want to argue. Want to tell her that Celeste made her choices, that the girl she remembers is gone, that love doesn't excuse complicity in murder. But looking at Corrine's face. at the grief that lives in her eyes, at the way her whole body seems to shrink around what she's saying. I understand what I didn't before.

  The emptiness doesn't just come from what was done to us. It comes from what we lost. The people we loved who became monsters. The connections we severed to survive. The parts of ourselves we had to kill so that the rest of us could keep living.

  "Where will you go?" I ask.

  "I don't know yet. Somewhere away from the congregation. Somewhere I can be." She trails off, searching for words that might not exist. "Somewhere I can figure out who I am when I'm not running, not hiding, not hunting. I've spent six years defined by what I escaped. I need to find out if there's anything else."

  "And if there isn't?"

  "Then at least I'll know." She crosses to where I'm sitting, crouches beside the bed so our eyes are level. Her hand finds mine, fingers intertwining. "I'm not abandoning you, Eleanor. I'm not running away from the mission, or from what we've built together. I'm just."

  "Choosing yourself. For once."

  "Yes." Relief floods her face. "Yes, exactly."

  I reach out, touch her cheek. Her skin is warm against my cold fingers.

  "I understand," I murmur. And I do. The empty in my own chest aches with understanding. with the recognition of someone who knows what it means to lose yourself in vengeance, to become nothing but a weapon aimed at a target.

  "You deserve to be more than a blade," I tell her. "You deserve to find out who you are when the fighting stops."

  "So do you."

  "Maybe. Someday." I meet her eyes. "But not yet. Not until the list is empty and the congregation is broken. That's who I am right now. The Tide. And I can't stop being that until the work is done."

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  "Yes." She squeezes my hand. "That's one of the reasons I love you."

  The word hangs between us. Love. Such a small word for such a vast thing.

  "Corrine."

  "You don't have to say it back. I know this is complicated. I know we're both broken in ways that might never heal. But I wanted you to know, before I go." She brings my hand to her lips, presses a kiss against my knuckles. "Whatever happens in London. Whatever you have to do to finish this. I love you. I'll love you when it's over, and I'll find you again. Wherever you are."

  "How will you know where to look?"

  "I'll follow the bodies." She almost smiles. "The Tide leaves tracks."

  We have two hours before the ferry.

  We spend them in a way that feels both urgent and tender. talking about small things, practical things, the kind of logistics that ground emotion in reality. What signals she'll use to contact me. What dead drops might still be safe. Where to hide money, how to move between cities, all the accumulated knowledge of two people who've learned to survive in a hostile world.

  But beneath the practicalities, a deeper shift is happening. A goodbye. A leave-taking. The quiet grief of two people who've found each other against all odds, and now have to separate before they've had time to understand what they've found.

  "The congregation will know by now," Corrine says as she packs her small bag. "About Ashworth. About all of it. They'll be looking for us. for you especially."

  "Let them look. I've been hunted before."

  "Not like this. The Hound. Marcus Sullivan. he's different from Ashworth. More patient. More relentless. He'll track you across Europe if he has to."

  "Then he'll die in Europe." I touch the blade at my thigh, feeling its familiar weight. "I've killed hunters before."

  "Sullivan isn't just a hunter. He's a true believer. Someone who thinks his daughter's death was a blessing." She stops packing, looks at me with fear, or its echo in her eyes. "Promise me you'll be careful. Promise me you won't let the void make you careless."

  "I promise."

  "I mean it, Eleanor. The mission isn't worth dying for. The list isn't worth your life."

  "What else is there?" The question comes out sharper than I intend. "Without the mission, without the list, without the hunt. what am I? A girl who drowned and came back wrong. A weapon pointed at targets that never stop appearing. The empty is all I have left."

  "That's not true." She crosses to me, takes my face in her hands. "You have me. You have Mei. You have the capacity for kindness that you've buried so deep you've forgotten it's there." Her thumbs trace my cheekbones, gentle as prayer. "The empty isn't all you are. It's just all you've let yourself see."

  "And if you're wrong? If the kindness is gone for good?"

  "Then we'll mourn it together. When this is over." She kisses me. soft, brief, a promise rather than a farewell. "But I don't think I'm wrong. I think the girl who cried for a stray cat is still in there somewhere, waiting for it to be safe enough to come out."

  The ferry leaves at noon.

  I walk Corrine to the dock, both of us wrapped in dark cloaks against the December wind. Harbor is busy. fishermen, merchants, travelers all moving with the brisk purpose of people who have somewhere to be. No one looks twice at two women saying goodbye.

  "If you need me. if things get bad. send word. I'll come. Whatever I'm doing, wherever I am, I'll come."

  "You said you needed to find yourself. To figure out who you are."

  "I did. And I do." Her eyes meet mine, fierce and certain. "But some things matter more than figuring out yourself. You matter more."

  Ferry horn sounds. low, mournful, the call of departure.

  "I have to go," Corrine says.

  "I know."

  "Eleanor."

  "Don't." I shake my head. "If you say goodbye, I might not let you leave."

  She laughs. a broken sound, half sob and half joy.

  "Then I won't say goodbye." She pulls me close, holds me tight against the wind and the cold and everything we're leaving unsaid. "I'll say. until next time. Until the work is done. Until the world is safe enough for kindness again."

  "Until then."

  She kisses me one last time. long, desperate, the kind of kiss that tries to say everything words can't hold. Then she pulls away, turns, walks up the gangplank without looking back.

  I watch until the ferry pulls away from the dock. Until it rounds the breakwater and disappears into the gray December morning. Until there's nothing left but the empty water and the cold wind and that vast empty space within me that feels larger than ever.

  Then I turn toward the train station. London is waiting.

  Our journey takes most of a day.

  I sit in a third-class carriage, watching the French countryside give way to the English coast, the gray water of the Channel churning beneath the ferry, the white cliffs rising like bones from the sea. The marks thrum their tidal rhythm, responding to the moisture, to the proximity of deep water, to the vast attention that's always watching from below.

  Twelve names remain on my list.

  Celeste. Marsh. Sullivan. And nine others. scattered across Europe, living their lies, believing themselves safe from the consequences of what they've done.

  I will find them. All of them. One by one, name by name, until the list is empty and the congregation is broken and there's nothing left but the void and the question of what comes next.

  But first. London. First. Celeste. First. the final confrontation with everything I've been hunting toward since the ritual in Dover.

  My train carries me through the English countryside as evening falls. My compartment is warm, the rhythm of the wheels hypnotic, but I don't sleep. Can't sleep. My mind is too full of what's coming, of what I'm about to do, of the woman I left behind at the Calais station with tears on her face and a promise to return. I watch the landscape blur past. fields stubbled with the remnants of harvested crops, villages huddled against the cold, the occasional grand estate rising from the hills like a monument to wealth and power.

  Somewhere in that landscape, Celeste is preparing. Consolidating. Building the defenses that will protect her from the Tide.

  She doesn't know I'm coming. Doesn't know that everything she's built, everything she's protected, everything she's sacrificed children to achieve. all of it is about to come crashing down.

  Let her prepare.

  Let her build her walls and gather her guards and surround herself with the congregation's most devoted protectors.

  It won't be enough. The Tide is coming, and nothing can stop the Tide.

  Beneath my ribs, the marks pulse steady as a heartbeat, cold as the deep water that made me what I am. Somewhere in the darkness below the conscious world, the entity that saved me stirs with what might be anticipation.

  It's waiting to see what I'll do next. So am I.

  London rises from the evening fog ahead. spires and smokestacks, the gray sprawl of a city that has swallowed countless secrets. Celeste's city. The congregation's heart.

  And somewhere in those tangled streets, if the woman on the ferry spoke true, my mother is waiting.

  Tide has come home.