Tide Table

The tide table was taped inside the workshop door because terminals fogged and paper, traitorously, did not.

Joss Pell—no relation to intern Pell except the city’s fondness for recycling names—ran a finger down the column.

“High at 04:10.”

“That’s not a time,” said his niece Bee, who was twelve and visiting because school had a teacher conference and Harbor Reach had a spare bench.

“It’s water’s time.”

“Water should get a job.”

“It has one. It comes in.”

They were supposed to move a crate before the water decided the crate was a boat. The crate contained actuator housings for a Foundry workshop that still believed in thumbs. Joss respected that.

Forge Mutual had insured the crate as STATIC GOODS. The tide had not signed.

Bee held the lamp. Joss swore at a bolt. The harbor made its night smell: salt, oil, someone frying fish as if the century had not moved.

A woman from Municipal Water—clipboard, boots that had met worse—stopped on the quay.

“You’re not drawing from the civic main.”

“I’m drawing from the sea. It doesn’t invoice.”

“If it floods the meter pit—”

“I’ll sweep.”

She almost smiled, then remembered she had a pit.

Bee said, “Is the sea on Civic Network?”

“No,” Joss said.

“Good.”

They got the crate up onto the higher boards with a winch that had opinions. The water came anyway, polite and unstoppable, and licked the place where the crate had been.

Joss sat on a bollard.

Bee sat on a smaller bollard, which is how you learn a harbor.

“Dad says you should take the inside job.”

“Your dad works in Exchange. He thinks weather is a setting.”

“He thinks you sleep.”

“I sleep after the water does.”

Bee kicked the bollard.

“I like it here.”

“Don’t tell him. He’ll buy you a view in Spireward and call it love.”

The Municipal Water woman came back with two paper cups of something that had been coffee in a previous life.

“High is later tomorrow,” she said. “Don’t make me write you.”

“Write the tide.”

“I tried. The form wants a name.”

They drank.

The cranes stood like people who had decided not to go home.

Joss walked Bee to the tram. She took a photo of the tide table.

“For school?”

“For me. So I know when you’re lying about sleep.”

He watched the tram take her toward Glassmere’s kinder lights.

The water kept its job.

Joss went back to the workshop and moved the next crate a little higher than pride required.

On the tape, someone—Bee—had written in pencil:

WATER DOES NOT READ ROTAS.

He left it.

Forge Mutual could classify that as static goods if they wanted.