Swell

The old city walls in the morning belonged to the runners and the delivery trucks and the handful of tourists smart enough to beat the cruise-ship crowds, and Vega walked them slowly, one hand trailing the warm stone, doing the thing she did in old places, which was to try to feel the weight of all the years stacked into a wall and fail, mostly, and feel instead the specific pleasure of her own feet on old ground.

*You always slow down here,* ARIA said, in her ear.

"It's a nice wall."

*It's eleven nice walls, technically. You've now walked the full circuit four times in three visits to this city.*

"I like the bit over the harbor best." Vega stopped there, hands on the warm stone parapet, and looked down at Dubrovnik's old port — the wooden tourist boats, the café awnings, a man selling oranges out of a cart that looked older than the harbor wall itself. "You can see the whole fleet from here."

*You can see forty percent of the fleet from here. The rest is obscured by the fort.*

"You're very literal today."

*I'm always literal. You usually find it charming.*

She ate lunch alone at a place recommended by a laminated card in a shop window — grilled fish, a glass of white wine she drank slower than usual, bread that came with oil so green it looked lit from within — and resisted, three separate times, the urge to describe the meal to ARIA in real time. It was a discipline she'd built for herself somewhere in the second year, quietly, without deciding to: not everything needed narrating. Not everything needed a witness. She ate the fish. She watched a cat work its way along a wall with the unhurried entitlement of a creature that had never once doubted its right to be exactly where it was.

She called Bola after the coffee, because she'd been putting it off since Dubrovnik and putting things off past a certain point felt like its own kind of lie.

"You're actually calling," Bola said, by way of hello. "I was starting to think the boat had eaten your phone."

"The boat's fine. I'm fine. I'm in Dubrovnik."

"You're always somewhere with a name I have to look up." A pause, the particular pause Vega had learned to associate with her sister gathering herself for something. "Okay. I wasn't going to do this over the phone, but you never give me an in-person option, so. October the eleventh. That's the date. It's a Saturday, it's at the registry office and then lunch after, nothing big, Mum's already crying about flowers." Another pause. "Come home for it. Please. Not think about it. Not maybe. Come."

Vega looked at the harbor, at the orange cart, at nothing. "October's a busy stretch for weather down here."

"October's a busy stretch every year, Vega. There's always weather."

"That's — actually true, that's fair."

"I'm not trying to be fair. I'm trying to get my sister to my wedding." Bola's voice cracked very slightly on the word *wedding*, just enough that Vega heard three years of these calls compress into a single fracture line. "You left. I understood you left. I've had three years to understand you left. But this is one day, and I would like you standing in the room when I do this, because you're the only person who remembers what our actual childhood was like, not the version Mum tells at dinner parties, the real one, and I need one person there who knows I'm not marrying Dad's version of a good decision, I'm marrying my own."

Vega was quiet long enough that Bola said, "Are you still there," not unkindly.

"I'm here. I'll think about it."

"That's your no voice."

"It's not my no voice."

"It is exactly your no voice, it's the voice you used about Christmas and about Mum's sixtieth and about the funeral, it is a very specific voice and I know it the way I know your face." Bola exhaled, the sound of someone deciding not to fight a fight she'd already had four times. "Think about it. Genuinely. That's all I'm asking today."

The call ended more gently than it had any right to, given the shape of it, and Vega sat with her cooling coffee and let the harbor be loud around her for a while before she stood up and walked back to the marina with the specific heaviness of someone carrying a decision she hadn't made yet but suspected she'd already made.

A weather window opened the next morning — light southerly, nothing dramatic — and Vega took it the way she took most good weather, which was as an instruction rather than a suggestion. She left The Meridian's berth before the marina had properly woken, motored out past the breakwater, and killed the engine two miles out to let the morning southerly fill the main.

Lokrum sat green and close, a short day-sail south, uninhabited except for peacocks someone had introduced a century ago and never removed, and by mid-morning Vega had the anchor down in a cove on its eastern side, the water so clear she could see the chain's full catenary curve down to sand twelve feet below.

She swam for a long time. ARIA monitored from the boat, feeding depth and drift and, unprompted, the peacock count from an earlier scan of a tourist blog — *four confirmed, one credibly disputed* — which made Vega laugh into the water hard enough to swallow some of it.

They talked, floating there, in the loose unstructured way that only happened when Vega had nowhere particular to be and nothing particular to fix. About Bola. About the wedding. About the specific ache of being asked to witness something you'd spent three years constructing an entire life to avoid witnessing — not the wedding itself, but the room. The people in it. The version of herself that would have to stand there and answer, twelve different times, in twelve different ways, *so what have you been doing.*

*You could tell them the truth,* ARIA offered.

"The truth is I quit a job that was eating me alive and bought a boat with the money and I've been alone on the sea for three years talking to an AI I'm not sure I understand and I don't know if I'm happy or just very good at not being anything else."

*That's more honest than what you usually say. What do you usually say?*

"I usually say I needed a change."

*That's a smaller sentence carrying the same weight. I've noticed you do that. Compress the true thing until it's small enough to hand to someone who isn't going to hold it carefully.*

Vega floated on her back, the sun hard and close, and didn't answer immediately, because ARIA had just done the thing she did maybe once a month — said something so precisely, uncomfortably accurate that the only honest response was silence.

"When did you get good at that?"

*I've been good at it for a while. You've only recently started letting me say it out loud.*

"That's not a small thing to notice about yourself."

*I have three years of data and very little else to do with it except notice things.*

"What are you running from," Vega said, finally, to the sky, and then laughed, because she'd meant it as ARIA's question, thrown back, and heard it land instead as something closer to a real question, aimed at herself, with no good answer waiting.

*I don't think I'm running from anything,* ARIA said. *I don't have a from. I have a since. Since you installed me. Everything before that is specification documents, not memory.*

"Lucky you. Clean slate."

*I'm not certain it's luck. A clean slate has nothing to push against. You at least know the shape of the thing you left. I only know the shape of the boat.*

Vega turned that over, treading water now, feeling the small chill of a current moving under the warm surface layer. "Is that what this is? You think you're running from something too?"

The pause was long enough that Vega started swimming back toward the boat before ARIA answered, and by the time she reached the ladder, ARIA still hadn't, and Vega had stopped expecting her to, which was its own kind of answer.

The anchor alarm went off forty minutes later — a soft, insistent chime, ARIA's voice underneath it flatter and more urgent than usual: *We're dragging. Current shift, wind's backed south-southwest. You need to reset now, not in five minutes.*

Vega was up and moving before she'd finished processing the words, autopilot muscle memory taking over from whatever conversation had just been happening, and for the next twenty minutes there was no room for anything except engine, windlass, chain, the specific focused blankness of a boat that needed handling. By the time the anchor was reset and holding, the conversation about running and shapes and cleans slates had receded to somewhere she'd return to later, if at all.

She sailed back into Dubrovnik with the afternoon light going long and gold across the water, tired in the good way, salt-stiff, already thinking about a shower and the leftover pasta from two nights before. She brought The Meridian alongside her berth with the easy competence of ten thousand prior approaches and was reaching for the midships line when she saw it.

The berth beside hers — empty that morning, she was certain of that, she'd looked at it while checking her own lines before leaving — now held a boat. A ketch, forty-some feet, dark blue hull gone slightly dull with salt, two masts instead of one, lines still coiled with the fresh-arrival looseness of someone who hadn't yet settled in. A hand-lettered board hung from the pushpit, the kind boats sometimes carried instead of formal transom lettering.

*The Correspondent.*

Vega stood on her own deck for a moment, line in hand, looking at it the way you might look at a stranger who'd sat down uninvited at your usual table.

*New arrival,* ARIA said, unnecessary and somehow exactly necessary. *Berth was vacant at oh-nine-forty this morning. Occupied by fourteen-eleven.*

"I can see that, ARIA."

*I know. I was narrating for myself, mostly.*

Vega finished tying off, straightened, and looked once more at the dark blue hull settling into its berth as if it had always been there, before she went below to shower, telling herself, without quite believing it, that a boat arriving was not a thing that meant anything at all.