“‘Stone has soul,’ the poets claim.” Errol slid a drink across the table toward Mikhail. “You were a mason: what do you think?”

The old man muttered and shook his head. “Don’t know if I believe it, but the Bridge . . . mmm . . . sometimes she makes me rethink that truth.”

Mikhail the builder hunched on a stool, his eyes growing soft in the half-haze of memory. White wisps of hair stuck out from under his flat-topped builder's cap. Its gray color marked him as a stone mason, though he was centuries past his working prime now. He coughed, his gaze regaining its sharpness, and he stomped his mud-caked boots on the tavern floor.

Errol leaned forward, grinning at the ancient builder. “Got any ghost stories?”

"Depends. You buying the next round, too?"

Fighting to keep his hands from shaking with anticipation, Errol fished about in his belt pocket and snagged his last two coins, praying that his boldness would pay off. He slapped down the total sum of his wealth on the trencher next to Mikhail's last mug, forcing himself not to panic at zeroing out all his worldly goods. "Addison said you spoke with the storm spirit once, before the thunderclouds gathered and the gangs of thieves and cutthroats overran the Bridge's ruins, but I don't believe her. She likes to talk."

”Maybe I did, maybe I didn't."

"I'm thinking you did, since you're still alive and, well, the rest of the builders . . . " Errol trailed off with a shrug, but he knew he'd made his point by the way Mikhail scowled, his brow drawing into a blunt, heavy line.

"Got lucky," Mikhail finally growled.

"There's smart, there's lucky, then there's forewarned, or so the poets claim," Errol said. "Thinking you got a story worth hearing regarding that last one, Uncle."

"Thinking I might," Mikhail agreed after a long draught of rum, a lopsided smile playing on his lips. “You got a lot of poetical sayings for a young pup.”

Errol settled back to listen. An unfamiliar glow of satisfaction spread through his chest. His gamble might succeed after all, even though others from Shark Clan had already failed with the cantankerous old builder.

"Took three hundred years, from laying the foundation stone to when a cart rolled across the Bridge for the first time. The council members who had commissioned the project had long since died off by the time we set the final stone in place, but the councillors weren't really any different, if you catch my drift. Faces change, names change, but stupidity is common to us all."

Mikhail paused, flagging down a server to refill his mug, paying with one of Errol's hard-earned double coppers. After a noisy slurp of the refill, he belched and began anew. 

"Trade shot up like you wouldn't believe. Oh, Laurentum is nice enough these days, but she bled gold when you pricked her back then. Centuries of heavy use wore down the road, so the council commissioned a few of us to perform upkeep. I stuck around after it became a penal colony, because it seemed like home; most builders gotta wander, but I like to feel settled.

“One night I was near sixteen hundred feet up in the air, dangling from a harness on the underbelly of the Bridge, welding a cable link back on to a girder. Prefer stone, but the steelwork had to be done, so there I was, twisting about in the soft, dark air, sparks flying around my head like little firefish, when I heard her reedy little voice."

Mikhail chuckled, a sudden wonder in his weathered face rolling back the years. Errol could almost imagine the builder in his youth.

"I'll bet I looked like a sprite myself. I've always wondered if the lovely little stormer was confused, or if she talked to me because she was lonely. Either way, I'll never forget her words. She told me to flee before the howling gale destroyed the place and consumed my very soul. I didn't think much of it right away. She blinked out of existence, and I shrugged and kept working. I was almost done when the winds started to change."

He grew still, and the years piled back on as he relived the solemn events. His shoulders sagged and his eyes grew cloudy. "There was an anger that slammed into me in that first icy wind—near took my breath away. I clawed my way back up the rope, but it was the spirit's words that froze the black blood in my veins, not the cold. I stuffed all my tools in a bag and ran right then in the middle of the night. Somehow, I made it to shore before the collapse at the docks.”

“The rest of the builders weren't so lucky, were they?” Errol prompted.

“After all these years, I swear that I can still hear voices asking me to save them. Some nights are worse, closer to the harbor, when I can almost see the Bridge inside that maelstrom in the air."

"She also calls for you to save her," Errol said evenly, studying Mikhail's face for a reaction. The builder’s eyes went flat. Errol pushed his luck. "Most people don't know that the Bridge is alive."

Mikhail spat into his now empty mug. "Cause it ain't."

"A convergence of that many builders working with sacred stone quarried from holy sites around the world? You expect me to believe that the stone doesn't remember the past, or feel echoes of the future, after you infused a combined legion of builder's binding into the Bridge?”

Mikhail hissed in the back of his throat, scowling at Errol. He stabbed the remaining coin with a gnarled finger as black as coal, shoving the double copper back across the table top. His face twisted into a grimace, like he'd bitten into something sour. "Keep your money, young pup. Story's not for sale."

Whether it was the rum or a sudden surge of excitement, Errol wasn't sure, but a knot he hadn't even noticed loosened between his shoulders. After all the dead-end rumors and wasted leads, months of searching had culminated in Mikhail. Tonight, Errol might finally hear the truth about the Bridge for once.

"You haven't left town all these centuries later. She's talking to you, but you're too scared to listen." Errol lunged forward to grasp the builder's powerful arm, pouring a stream of volts into Mikhail to keep him rooted in his seat. "Tell me what you know, or they'll take weeks to scrape your skin off the floor."

"Storm's coming," Mikhail rasped. "The real one, and make no mistake. The Bridge, she ain't happy, and you know it, or you wouldn’t have found me. That's all you'll get, shark."

"Three hundred years of tempests off our shore, and you say the real storm is still coming?”

Mikhail wrenched his arm free with terrifying ease and stomped away, throwing a final warning glare over his shoulder in Errol's direction.

The knot forged itself again in between Errol’s shoulder blades, tying tighter than ever. He let out a shuddering breath as tales of the legendary strength of the builders washed over him. What good was lightning against a mountain of solid granite?

Laughing nervously, Errol swiped his last copper in the world off the table, flipping it in the air before he pocketed it again. He'd won the bet; his gamble had been worth the risk.

So why did he feel so scared?

Errol slipped out the tavern's back door and scurried toward headquarters. Maeda would be angry when she discovered that she'd missed the encounter, but Errol needed this lucky break to catch up to her. She had risen through the ranks so quickly that the Guild Master had been suspicious at first, but they'd simply accepted her as a prodigy since then—at least, everyone had accepted her except for Errol. Maeda had a way of running roughshod over objections, but he knew instinctively when he smelled a rat. 

It wasn't just jealousy, he muttered to himself again. Even to his own biased ears, it sounded a bit thin after the thousandth time. 

He didn't see a light in Maeda's window when trotted back to his dormitory. Small victory, but he'd take it. Tonight might pull the tides in his favor, depending on how much the Shark Clan Masters valued the information from the interrogation, but it still caught like a hook in his gills to think about her perfunctory two month’s probation as a lowly Dogfish.

He'd put in three long, hard years proving his worth as a Dog, and nearly another five to work up through the tiers in Mako before they’d forced the two of them to investigate together.

No matter, he told himself as he retired to bed for the night. If the Storm was coming, as the builder claimed, then it was best to keep his head down anyway. Maeda wanted to ascend to the pinnacle of the Guild? Fine. Then she could become the lightning rod that faced the wrath of the tempest.

Errol forced a short laugh at his weak joke, but as he rolled over in his hard, narrow bed, he again faced the fears of insignificance in the face of the impending Storm. Laurentum needed strong leaders, not a couple low- and mid-ranked Sharks who had wasted a year investigating a handful of wild stories of a sentient Bridge and approaching tempests of doom.

Even so, it couldn't hurt to reach out to a few higher-level contacts. Cedric could arrange for an audience with Indara. Errol rubbed his eyes. He best not be wrong. A failed audience with the archduke's most powerful adviser could kill his career as a Shark, covering him in disgrace. That could prove most dangerous to his health.

After all, like all good sharks, Maeda could sense blood in the water.