The nets were heavier wet. The wanderer felt it in their shoulders as they hauled the next section up onto the quay, the netting thick with salt and the smell of the channel at low tide — mud and brine and something older beneath.

Mari was already at work when they arrived, her hands moving through the mesh with the ease of years. She did not look up. The space between them filled with the sound of wet rope against stone, the occasional clink of a mending hook against the edge of the quay.

The harbor was quiet this morning. The storytellers' ship had slipped out with the tide before dawn, leaving only the local boats — fishing skiffs and a barge loaded with timber from somewhere upriver. The wanderer had watched the departure from the window of the room above the chandlery. The ship's lanterns had dimmed into the gray water, carrying its tales of glowing fish and crystal caves to whatever port would have them next.

Now the water gave nothing back but work.

"You're up early." Mari's voice came without looking. Her fingers found a tear in the mesh, began threading it closed.

"Couldn't sleep."

"The ship leaving?"

The wanderer pulled another arm's length of netting onto the stone. "Something like that."

Mari's hands paused — not long, just a breath — then resumed their work. The mending hook caught the light. Somewhere behind them, a gull called once and fell silent.

They worked in the quiet. The wanderer fell into the rhythm of it: haul, spread, check for damage, move to the next section. The labor had a patience to it. The nets taught themselves — where they wanted to fold, where the weight gathered, where the salt had stiffened the fibers into something almost like wire. A drawer that had been stuck for years, the wanderer thought, and then wondered why that image had come to them. Something about the morning. Something about how everything seemed to be releasing what it had held.

Mari stopped.

Her hands had found something in the mesh — not a tear, not a fish. She was still for a moment, then her fingers worked at the knot, loosening whatever was caught there. The wanderer watched her pull it free.

It was small. Smooth. The color of old bone, or perhaps stone that had been tumbled in water for longer than anyone could count. It fit in Mari's palm with room to spare. She turned it over, studying it the way a fisherman studies weather.

"This wasn't in the channel," she said.

The wanderer's hands stopped on the netting. They did not reach for the object. They did not step closer. Their fingers tightened on the wet rope, and they were aware — suddenly, completely — of how still the morning had become. The water lapping at the quay. The creak of the moored boats. The weight of the thing in Mari's hand, pulling at the air between them.

"The current doesn't run that way." Mari was not asking. She turned the object again, her thumb finding a groove worn into its surface — a channel, perhaps, or the remnant of a mark that had once meant something. "This came from upriver."

The wanderer said nothing. Their eyes found the object, and something in their chest went quiet — not calm, but still, the way water is still before a change in the weather.

They recognized it.

Not what it was. Not its name or its purpose. But the shape of it, the wrongness of it here in the delta where such things did not belong. The smoothness that came from water but not this water. The color that spoke of places where the light fell differently.

Mari was watching them now. Her dark eyes caught the same light that caught the scales drying on the quay, bright and difficult to hold.

"You know what this is."

Not a question. The wanderer felt the words land like stones dropped into water, spreading ripples they could not stop.

"I know where it's from."

The admission cost something. The wanderer felt it leave them — the ordinariness they had been building, day by day, in this place that asked no questions. The strangeness that Mari had been watching since that first morning when they walked out of the upriver direction. The distance they had been trying to keep.

Mari's hand did not move. The object stayed in her palm, patient as the tide.

"Everyone here knows the water only runs one way," she said. Her voice had changed — not louder, but closer, as if she had stepped toward them without moving. "We don't ask what comes down from upriver. We let it pass."

"And this?"

"This stopped." Mari looked at the object again. "In my nets. On the morning after a stranger from upriver decided they couldn't sleep."

The wanderer's hands loosened on the netting. They stood, and for a moment the sky seemed very large above them — pale and salt-hazed and empty of answers. The barge with its timber shifted against its moorings. The wet rope pooled at their feet.

"I didn't bring it," they said.

"No." Mari's thumb traced the groove again. "The water did. But you know what it means."

The wanderer looked at her — at the hands that had been mending nets since before they learned to walk, at the eyes that had been watching the water just as long. At the way she held the object: not as treasure, not as threat, but as something that had arrived and now had to be understood.

"There are places upriver," the wanderer said, slowly, feeling for the words the way Mari's fingers had felt for the knot in the mesh. "Places where things like this... were kept. Before."

"Before what?"

The water lapped against the quay. A fish jumped somewhere in the channel, the splash small and ordinary. The wanderer felt the morning pressing in around them — the wet netting, the salt air, the question that had finally found its way into the open.

"Before the people who kept them stopped keeping them."

Mari was quiet for a long moment. Then she closed her fingers around the object — not hiding it, just holding it — and looked back at the nets still waiting to be mended.

"Help me finish these," she said. "Then we can talk about what the water knows."