Zira surfaced under a bruised moon and knew she was lost. The sea had given her a throne to claim, and the throne lay in a drowned kingdom somewhere beneath these waters, but the sea had not given her a map. Salt ran from her black hair. Her tattoos itched the way they did when the current wanted her to move and she could not. Three nights she had dived. Three nights the cold pulled her sideways, spinning her past kelp forests and broken hulls that were not the ruin she needed. The sea chose her for this, yet the sea kept its own house hidden. If she guessed wrong once more, the currents would scatter her a week's swim from any coast, and the drowned crown would keep sleeping without a siren to wake it. So she went where guessing ended. She climbed the pilings under a rooftop lounge in Crownfall, dripping onto lacquered wood, and Velvet Mirage was already pouring two glasses as if the hour had been on her calendar. "Relax," Velvet said. "I already know why you came." Zira set her hands on the bar to keep them still; her hands remembered a mortal she had once let go, and they twitched now at any table she did not trust. She told Velvet what she needed. A bearing. A line to a kingdom the surface had forgotten. Velvet listened the way she always listened, without moving her face. Then she named her price: a future favor, unspecified, called when she chose. Zira thought of the sea's rule that debts must be paid in kind, and agreed anyway. Velvet slid a folded chart across the bar, weighted with a brass earring. On it, three inked marks over open water, and beside them a name Zira had not spoken aloud in a hundred years. "An old client mapped the shelf before he drowned," Velvet said. "He didn't drown by accident. You'll want to start at the middle mark before the moon turns." Zira took the chart. Her hands did not shake. She had bearings now, and a debt to a woman who never forgot one, and six nights to reach the middle mark before the tide that would open the drowned gate closed again for a year.