Vexa Rill had drowned nine sailors with her tide-song, and she had loved each one for the short time it took them to die. Tonight the tenth stood at the bow of a wrecked schooner, salt crust in his beard, and he did not turn when she sang. She circled the hull in the dark water and pushed her voice higher, the notes that always pulled men over the rail like hooked fish. He kept coiling rope. Lightning had marked his forearm in a white fork, and she understood then what the old sirens meant by storm-touched. Her song could not find a door in him. She wanted him anyway, more than she had wanted any of the drowned, because he was the first who had ever looked past her mouth and kept working. She stopped singing. The silence startled him more than the song had, and he lifted his lantern over the rail. Vexa let him see her plainly: wet hair, human enough from the waist up, the rest hidden. In one hand she held a sleek blue squid with curled ivory tentacles, still alive, a creature sailors prized for ink and meat. She set it on the deck at his feet like a cat offering a bird. "I can't charm you," she said. Her own voice, spoken, felt raw and strange in her throat. "So I'm asking." He stared at the squid, then at her. He did not reach for a harpoon. He crouched, picked up the animal, and dropped it in his bait bucket. Then he sat down on the deck where she could see him, and told her his name. Vexa gripped the rail with both hands. She had never learned how to keep a man alive long enough to know one.

The sailor sat on the deck and waited for her to speak. Vexa still held the rail. She had watched men from below the waterline for fifty years, but she had never talked to one. She did not know what a woman was supposed to say to a man she wanted. Her sisters had taught her the song and nothing else. She opened her mouth and closed it. He waited. The lantern between them made a small yellow circle on the wet boards. She saw him glance at the bait bucket, where the blue squid coiled its ivory tentacles against the tin. He almost smiled. She took that as a door and pushed on it. "Do you always keep what a stranger gives you?" she asked. He said only when the stranger looked hungrier than he was. She did not understand the joke, and she said so. He laughed, short and surprised, and told her it was not a good joke. Something in her chest loosened. She tried again. She asked what sailors did with a squid like the one in his bucket. He told her about ink, about frying the rings in oil, about a stew his mother made. Vexa listened and asked more. Each question was a stone she set down to test her weight. None of them broke. She did not sing. She did not lean forward and show her teeth the way she had been taught. She only asked, and he answered, and the night went on. When the sky began to gray, he stood and said he had to sleep before his crew woke. He did not invite her aboard. He did not promise anything. But he told her to come back the next night, and to bring nothing this time, because gifts were for strangers. Vexa slid down the hull into the black water and did not feel the cold. She had kept a man talking until dawn. She had learned that a question was a kind of hook too, and that this one did not kill.