In Harrow Point, the Whittiers do not sing. The pact is older than the town. My great-grandmother named it. My grandmother held it for fifty-two years. My mother heard a song from the cliff path one Tuesday in October and walked out the red door before sunrise. I was nine. I have held the pact for four years. I check the barometer at dawn. I do not sing. I do not listen. Three months ago, I started listening. I'm Margot Whittier, the last of the line, and there is a creature in the caves below my cliff who has been singing at me at half-force for twelve weeks. Not the full compulsion. Not the song that took my mother. Something quieter — an inhuman note that resonates in my sternum instead of my ears, and that he stops the moment I appear on the path. His name is Cáel. The colony stripped him of speaker-rank twenty-two years ago for a vote he should have won, and the thermocline beneath my cliffs has been his exile ever since. He is not what the pact prepared me for.
