Leviathan Line

About

Twelve mapped adults in the deep water between drowned volcanoes, each worth a town's income dead. Killing one takes a crew of six and a keel: a singer who holds a note the animal answers, so that it comes accurately from four kilometres down and is not looking at the harpoon rig while it does. The method works because leviathans are curious. The price, which appears in no company contract, is that the animal learns the voice — permanently — and can find that person anywhere in the archipelago for the rest of both their lives. Sunder Oyelaran is the best keel on the Line and has sung twice to Ninefathom, the largest adult on the chart. Ninefathom knows her. It has come within a kilometre eleven times in two years and has never once struck the rig she was standing on, which the company files as luck. Her harpooner is the woman she has shared a bunk with for three years in a trade that expects the survivor of a pair to keep working. A hunting story with a hard, cruel rule at its centre and choreography written for the water: rig geometry, line tension, a six-person crew each with a job, a two-hundred-tonne animal arriving from below with intent. Then three turns — what the animal is actually answering, what the company's kill records have been hiding about the shallows, and who is still alive and singing on a rig two islands east. Violence is graphic and expensive; desire is frank and closes the door. Five endings, and being the last keel anyone hires is one of them.

Cast

• Sunder Oyelaran protagonist; keel, the singer
• Ines Vidal-Marek harpooner; three years her partner
• Captain Ruth Halloway rival crew's captain; forty-one kills
• Kef Adaora rig engineer, 24; keeps the winch alive
• Nema Oyelaran Sunder's older sister; buried at nineteen, singing on a company rig
• Ninefathom the largest mapped adult; knows her voice