The Signal

The wind came off the water like something with a grudge, and Mira leaned into it the way she had been taught. Forty-one steps to the lamp room. She had counted them since she was six.

The signal started just after moonrise. Three short, one long, and then a pause so exact it could not have been weather. She wrote it down twice before she let herself believe it.

Nobody had lit a lamp on Corrow Rock in eleven years.