VASTMERE: The Whalefall Road

The story

On the morning the ocean vanishes, twelve-year-old Mira Vantle wakes to find her cliff town's fishing fleet hanging from its ropes over four hundred feet of empty air, and a dry, steaming seabed stretching to the horizon. In the last shallow pool below the piers she finds Pell, a young fog-ray stranded and drying, and drags him into the mist where he can breathe and fly again. Old Tobin, the town's one-armed former deep-diver, shows her the sea-charts: the water has poured out through the Mouth, a colossal stone basin at the world's low point, and the ancient moon-lock that holds it shut has been broken open. Mira, Tobin and Pell set out along the Whalefall Road, a spine of enormous whale skeletons the old divers used as waymarkers, past a stranded fleet standing upright in silt and a petrified kelp forest that chimes and shatters in the wind. They collide with Bo, a scavenger boy looting the wrecks, who is working for Captain Halda Grieve — a salvage baron whose iron dredger walks the seabed on hydraulic legs, harvesting a thousand years of sunken cargo and welding the Mouth open so the water can never return. Grieve captures Pell for her menagerie and takes Tobin's dive-harness; Bo, sickened by the caged ray, cuts them free and switches sides. In the drowned coral cathedral where Pell's herd sleeps in the last fog, Mira learns the moon-lock is not machinery but a bell of whale-bone that must be struck at moonrise. The three children ride Pell up the dredger's crane while Tobin jams its legs, and Mira climbs the rim of the Mouth as Grieve's welders fire below. She swings the bone hammer; the bell tolls; the plug drops; and the ocean comes roaring back up out of the dark. Grieve's dredger is swallowed as she leaps to a wreck-raft and is hauled aboard by the children she hunted. Water climbs the cliffs, the hanging boats float again, and Ardmoor Quay wakes to a harbor full of sea — with Pell's herd turning in the fog above the masts.

Cast

• Mira Vantle Wants to bring the ocean back before her town dies of it
• Old Tobin Wants to walk the seabed he once dove, one last time, and get the girl home
• Bo Ashgrave Wants to stop scavenging for a monster and prove he isn't one
• Captain Halda Grieve Wants the seabed kept dry forever so its treasure stays hers
• Pell Wants to find its herd and the fog it can breathe
• Ardmoor Quay set