Jasper Holloway dreamed of water on the morning he was due to leave for Tidefall Academy. It was not the sort of dream that felt strange until you woke up. Jasper knew something was wrong from the beginning, mainly because he was several metres underwater and breathing as easily as if he were standing in his bedroom.

He tested this by taking another breath. The water filled his mouth with warmth and salt, yet his lungs did not object. Nothing bubbled from his nose. Nothing stung his eyes. Around him stretched a blue-black emptiness with no visible floor, and when he looked upward he found no surface either. There was only a pale silver haze that seemed both impossibly far away and close enough to touch. Jasper reached for it. His fingers closed on water.

He tried swimming upward, but distance behaved badly in the dream. He kicked until his legs ached and pulled at the water with both arms, while the silver haze remained exactly where it had been. After a while he stopped, partly because the effort was getting him nowhere and partly because the darkness beneath his feet had changed. Something had moved.

Jasper went still. He could not see enough to know what was down there, but he knew it was not a fish. Fish moved with purpose. Even large ones flicked their tails, turned, vanished, returned. Whatever occupied the dark below him moved slowly enough to make the water itself seem to lean around it. A pressure settled behind Jasper's ribs. It was not pain and it was not quite fear. The closest word he had was attention. Something beneath him had noticed that he was there.

His heartbeat quickened, and the water answered with a soft pulse that moved away from his body in a widening ring. Jasper felt it travel rather than saw it. For several seconds there was nothing but the impossible silence, and then a deeper pulse rose from below. It passed through him like distant thunder. Jasper forgot that he could breathe.

He stared into the darkness until his eyes invented shapes for him: a ridge, a curve, something broad enough to be the back of an animal or the side of an underwater hill. The shape shifted. The silver haze above Jasper dimmed.

"What are you?" he asked.

His voice made no sound. The words seemed to leave him anyway, carried outward through the water as a thought rather than a noise. The presence below turned. For an instant Jasper saw things that were not around him. Moonlight split across waves taller than houses. A coastline lay black against a storm. Stone groaned under a weight no person could survive. Then came something stranger: the feeling of waiting so long that years had stopped being useful. The images vanished before Jasper could make sense of them.

Warm water tightened gently around his hand. He jerked it back, and the dream changed at once. The pale haze above him disappeared. Darkness folded inward. Something enormous moved below, not toward him exactly, but enough to make every part of Jasper's body decide that waking up would be an excellent idea. He sat upright in bed with his blanket around his ankles.

Morning sunlight filled his room. A magpie was arguing with something outside. Somewhere down the street a bin lid slammed, followed by a man's irritated voice. Jasper could hear the familiar hum of the air conditioner and, from downstairs, the cupboard door his father always closed harder than necessary. His room looked stubbornly normal. That helped.

The open suitcase beside the wardrobe did not. It was packed in suspiciously neat rows because his mum had supervised the folding. His navy Tidefall jumper hung over the back of the desk chair, the silver academy crest catching a stripe of sunlight. On the shelf above it sat the model ferry Jasper had built when he was six, still missing the tiny red lifeboat he had lost almost immediately and refused to replace because that would be "historically inaccurate". Today was the day he was leaving.

Jasper swung his feet onto the floor and sat there for a moment, listening to the house. His heart was still beating too quickly. He looked at his right hand, half expecting to find water wrapped around his fingers, but there was nothing unusual about it. He reached for the glass on his bedside table. The water inside trembled. Jasper stopped. It could have been the air conditioner. It could have been a truck passing outside. It could have been the movement of his own hand against the table. The surface settled.

"Fine," Jasper muttered. "Normal."

The glass, having no opinion on the matter, remained still. His mum called from downstairs. "Jasper! Breakfast before your father eats everything!"

"I heard that," his dad called.

"You were meant to."

Jasper smiled despite himself and got dressed. By the time he reached the kitchen, he had decided the dream was only a dream. That explanation lasted through half a piece of toast. Then, while his parents argued about whether one seven-year-old needed three separate bottles of sunscreen for a boarding school on the coast, Jasper glanced toward the sink. A single drop of water was clinging to the end of the tap. It rose upward. Not far. Barely the width of Jasper's fingernail. Then it fell normally into the basin. No one else saw it. Jasper looked back at his toast and decided, quite reasonably, that he would think about this later.

Breakfast took longer than it should have because Jasper's mother had decided departure morning was an excellent time to remember every practical concern she had accumulated during the previous month. She checked whether his toiletries were packed, whether the spare charger was in his school bag, whether he had written his name inside both jumpers and whether his hat had somehow escaped overnight. Jasper answered each question while his father ate toast and provided increasingly unhelpful commentary.

"Your mother has prepared you for every known form of disaster," he said. "If the Academy is attacked by missing socks, you'll be their best chance."

Jasper's mum ignored him. "And if you feel homesick, you call. You don't wait until you think it has become serious enough."

"I know."

"If your magic behaves differently around Tidefall, you tell somebody."

Jasper looked toward the sink before he could stop himself. His mother noticed. "What?" For half a second he nearly told her about the dream and the drop of water climbing toward the tap. The words reached the edge of his mouth, then retreated. Nothing had happened that he could prove. Dreams were allowed to be strange, and drops of water did strange things on taps all the time. Jasper did not know why this one had bothered him so much, which felt like a very poor reason to worry his mother on the morning he was leaving.

"Nothing," he said. "Just thinking."

His father folded the newspaper. "Dangerous hobby." Jasper smiled, but the dream remained underneath the conversation. He could still remember the pressure of that vast attention more clearly than he remembered most real things from the previous week. It bothered him that the dream had included no face, no name and no threat. A monster would have been easier. Monsters wanted something obvious. Whatever had moved beneath him had felt older than wanting in any way Jasper understood. He finished breakfast, carried his plate to the sink and watched the tap carefully while rinsing it. The water behaved perfectly. That should have settled the matter. It did not.

He had enough to deal with before nine o'clock.