Read Chapter 1: The Ferry

The boat cut through the grey-green water like a blade against slate, and Freya MacLeod pressed her face to the salt-flecked window of the passenger lounge, watching the island grow from a smudge on the horizon to a jagged crown of rock and heather. The ferry, the *Pibroch*, was a small, stubborn workhorse of a vessel, and her producer had booked her passage on it with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for a bargain flight to the sun. “It’s authentic, Freya,” he’d said. “It’ll give the piece texture.”

Texture. Sure. Texture was a good word for the smell of diesel and wet dog that clung to the scratched plastic seats. Texture was the thrum of the engine vibrating through her bones, making her teeth ache. What Natalie, her producer, actually meant was that it was cheap and it was slow, and slow was very cinematic for the documentary she was meant to be making: *The Last Light Keeper’s Hour*. A title that sounded poetic in a pitch meeting, and like an elegy now.

She pulled her phone from her pocket. Three bars of signal appeared intermittently as the boat lurched. She tapped Natalie’s number, watching the tiny island—St. Kilda’s Shadow, the locals called it, a name that made her skin prickle—shift and sway beyond the glass.

“Freya! How’s the boat? Getting some great B-roll?”

“Natalie.” Freya’s voice was flat. “The lightkeeper isn’t retiring. He’s being made redundant. The automation starts next month. There’s a difference.”

There was a pause, a digital sigh of impatience. “It’s the same thing, sweetheart. It’s the end of an era. That’s the story. The last human, holding the line against the inevitable. You can’t get that kind of poignancy from a solar panel and a GPS signal.”

Freya watched an old man on the deck outside. He was tying off a rope, his hands gnarled, his oilskin jacket gleaming with spray. He caught her eye through the window and held her gaze for a long moment, his expression unreadable, before turning away. It was the first of what she suspected would be many looks like that—a cool, sealed shut look that said *you don’t belong here*, *you’re watching the dying thing, but you don’t understand the thing.*

“The story is closure,” Natalie continued, her voice dipping into the soothing, we-know-best tone that made Freya want to throw the phone overboard. “The island is losing its last bastion of the old way. It’s melancholic. It’s *beautiful*. You’re not there to save it, Freya. You’re there to film its last gasp.”