She was trying to remove something from a man’s ear during a violent storm—until she realized the thing moving inside him was alive.

Clara did not drop the poker.

She stood at the edge of the broken floorboards, her leather boots hanging two inches over the black void of the shaft, looking down at the dead man who had spent thirty years in an Inverness asylum.

"Father," she said.

Her voice did not echo in the shaft. The air down there was so thick, so dense with the smell of iron and ancient salt, that her words fell flat, dropping into the dark like lead weights.

The body suspended fifty yards below did not lift its head.

But from the two iron-lined funnels where his ears had been, two thin streams of pale-blue light shot upward—straight as surveyor's lines—striking the pine joists on either side of Clara’s feet.

The cabin shook.

Not with the violent, shifting motion of an earthquake, but with a smooth, vertical lift—as if the entire four-room timber house were an elevator car being raised by an iron cable.

The walls creaked; the cedar shingles on the roof popped from their forged nails, flying off into the silent night air one by one.

Behind her, Thomas Vance stood up.

He was still bound to his pine chair, but the heavy oak legs of the furniture were no longer touching the floor. He was floating three inches above the planks, his legs straight, his head tilted back at ninety degrees so that his white, salt-filled eyes were aimed directly at the roof-beams.

"The tide is in, Dr. Finch," Thomas said.

His voice was no longer high or musical. It was a combination of three distinct tones—his own rough, cooper's drawl, the high whistling of the man in the seal-skin coat, and the dry, precise, academic cadence of her father, Alexander Finch.

"The sea did not go away," the voice continued through Thomas’s mouth. "It was drawn off into the lower basins to clear the road. The three hundred needles are set."

Clara turned around slowly, holding her dislocated shoulder against her ribcage.

"What is the wheel?" she asked.

Thomas—or the three voices using his throat—smiled. His lips split along his old tooth-marks, showing white, dry gums that had no blood in them.

"The wheel is the drain-plug of the shelf," he said. "When the iron in the head is long enough, it turns the screw. When the screw turns three inches, the granite goes down, and the sea comes in from underneath."

"Why the ears?" Clara asked, her fingers tightening around the cold handle of the poker. "Why not the eyes? Why not the spine?"

"The eye sees only what is lit by the sun," the voice replied smoothly, its tone sounding more and more like her father's lectures at the Infirmary. "The spine feels only what touches the skin. But the ear... the ear is open to the dark, Clara. The ear is the only hole in the head that never closes while you sleep."

William let out a long, shuddering sigh from the hearth.

His body collapsed sideways into the ash-heap. The horn-handled knife remained in his left ear, but his hand fell limp across his chest.

The pale-blue light from his single white eye went dark.

"He is clear," the voice through Thomas said. "He was too young. His iron was brittle. But you, Clara..."

The floating chair moved two feet closer to her across the air.

"...you have your father's skull. The temporal bone is thick. The canal is straight. You could hold three needles without breaking the arch."

Clara looked at the floating man. She looked at his torn right ear—the dry, eggshell-like membrane that had formed over the extraction site.

She looked down into her apron pocket.

Her fingers touched the brass casing of her silver pocket watch.

She did not pull out the watch.

She pulled out the small glass bottle of carbolic acid—the one she had used on William. There was one ounce left in the bottom—a clear, heavy liquid that smelled of pine tar and burning logic.