Nuala Beirne (Human, attendant of the Sceir Light)

She lit the lamp at the hour and went up to see it turn.

The inspector had gone up the spit with an hour of the falling tide in hand, which was more than most of them left themselves, and had thanked her at the door in the Board's own form of words, and she had given him the Board's answer. The sheet had gone with him. The book had gone back up the stair, to the shelf where it lived, where anybody who climbed the stair could have reached it down, and nobody had.

Dark came late at this end of the summer and came slowly, the water going from grey to a darker grey with the station's three working lights standing in it before the sky had made up its mind. Nothing on the water — there never was anything on the water that needed her — and the lamp went round over all of it regardless, two and dark, two and dark, the way it had gone round over a shore that had been rearranging itself when the first attendant climbed this stair, and had settled since, and was still settling, a plate at a time.

She counted it anyway. There was no call to; she had set the clock that morning and the inspector had timed it twice and written it on the Board's sheet, and the character was as true tonight as it would be at any hour of its life. Fifteen seconds, group to group, by a clock that was keeping the Board's time to the second.

It would keep it for a while.