The Nine Steps

A lighthouse keeper on a remote island discovers that the waterline is creeping up the shore every night and never coming down, and that the thing the sea is trying to show him is not water.

When a new doctor takes a post in a rain-soaked mountain village, the villagers warn her never to leave a light on for the moths in autumn, because they are not drawn to the warmth but to something worse.

A night nurse at a residential hospice begins to notice that her dying patients describe the same quiet visitor, in the same words, at the same hour. When no one on the day shift will believe her, she starts keeping her own record, and finds the visitor has begun keeping one about her.

At an isolated high-desert observatory, astrometrist Viveka Skoglund measures a faint source whose position defies the sky's own geometry, and as her crew quietly changes around her she must choose between her instruments and the people she lives with, at the cost of her own certainties.

A fresco conservator travels to a snowbound mountain abbey to restore its decaying Last Judgment, but the painted figures shift and multiply beneath her solvents—and the brothers who hired her have reasons of their own for keeping the wall unseen.

After a birth that ended badly in the city, a nurse-midwife takes a quiet post in Grithfen, a tidal fen village where certain newborns are owed to the water under an ancient bargain. Asked to deliver one such child, she must choose between the trust that shelters her and the price of refusal.