Year of the Demon

MUROMACHI ERA, THE YEAR 198

(1484 CE)

20

Kaida left the surface and returned to the world where she felt most at home.

The water was chilly today, but Kaida didn’t mind. She was happy to feel the two cold streams of it worming their way deep into her ears. Underwater, no taunts could reach her. Underwater, everyone was a mute.

Her sandbag pulled at her ankles, dragging her swiftly down to the coral bed. To her right she saw the other three ama fluttering down too: Miyoko, as slender and streamlined as a shark; Kiyoko, rounder, more like a puffer fish; Shioko, short and powerful, fanning her arms overhead to accelerate her descent. Shioko was always catching up, always trying to overtake the other two; Miyoko was always the leader; Kiyoko only followed along, always just another dolphin in the pod. At this distance they were no more than naked white blurs against the blue, but for Kaida it was so easy to tell which one was which.

Kaida was happy to see they’d chosen to dive on the Squid’s Head, an oblong mound of rock and coral three or four boat-lengths from her. Miyoko’s taunts had been especially sharp on the ride over to this part of the reef—hence Kaida’s relief to return to the silence of the aquatic world—and when Miyoko was sharp-tongued like this, evil words had a way of becoming evil deeds. The other two weren’t vicious like her; if anything, they were scared of Miyoko, maybe even as scared as Kaida was. Not that it mattered. Whether they followed out of loyalty or simply to avoid becoming targets themselves, they still followed.

The fact that Sen was their oarsman today made matters worse. He was a simpleton, born with no more wit than the gods granted a sea turtle. He had just enough sense to row a boat where he was told, and not nearly enough to tell the difference between a wicked smile and a friendly one. When Miyoko’s barbs made the other two laugh, Sen understood only that he was to laugh along with them. If Miyoko decided to do more than talk, Kaida could not hope for Sen to intervene, even though he was a grown man and the four girls were all in their teens.

Sand billowed up around Kaida’s feet as she reached the long fingers of brain coral that everyone in the village called the Tentacles. Schools of coral fish scattered from her like leaves on a stiff breeze, their whites, blacks, and yellows fluttering like a thousand pennants. A wave of cold rippled over her. She was two or three body-lengths deeper than the Squid’s Head, and looking up, she saw the others swimming with long, graceful strokes. They danced like three white dolphins behind the screen of coral fish stripes.

Kaida’s own movements felt clumsy in comparison. She hooked the stump of her left arm through the tether on her sandbag, and with her right hand she withdrew her kaigane and wedged its metal tip between the coral and the shell of the nearest abalone.

It was a stubborn one, and since she couldn’t abide the thought of chipping the beautiful green whorls of coral, it took her some time to coax it free. The other ama were already bound for the surface. They’d have more than one lousy abalone in their catch bags. Kaida’s lungs burned, but she refused to head back up.

She found a second oyster entrenched even deeper than the first. Passing it by, she found a third one, tiny by comparison. The fourth was worth keeping, so she went to work on it with her kaigane.

She couldn’t say what it was that made her look up. When she did, the three white dolphins were no longer diving on the Squid’s Head. Kaida looked up at the belly of the boat, hoping to see the other ama up there. It was only when she saw Shioko frog-kicking down at her that she knew she was under attack.

Two hands locked fast around her right wrist. They were Kiyoko’s, and Kiyoko was the strongest of them all; Kaida knew she couldn’t free her hand.

Slender forearms slipped around her midsection from behind like a pair of eels. That would be Miyoko. She always wanted to inflict the worst blows herself. Kaida slammed her head backward, hoping to catch her in time, but Miyoko was ready for it. She must have tucked her head, because Kaida’s skull cracked against something hard, not something soft and crunchy like a nose.

Miyoko’s squeeze came as fast as a hammer blow. Kaida vomited what little air she had left. Black spots swam like little fish in her vision.

Kaida struggled to free her right arm. She’d show Miyoko how deep a kaigane could cut. But Kiyoko’s stout hands held fast. By then Shioko was on her, and together the three of them pulled Kaida halfway up to the surface before they let her go.

But only halfway. Kaida couldn’t launch herself from the bottom, yet she wasn’t close enough to the surface to be certain she’d make it. Black spots were already encroaching on her vision. She had only a split second to decide: dive back down—never the easy choice—or try to reach the surface without the benefit of a push-off.

She swam straight up, kicking like mad. Her lungs heaved mightily, so hard she almost threw up. When she broke the surface her inhalation was a loud, gasping, birdlike cry. It was another five or six breaths before she could hear Miyoko leading the chorus of laughter.

Kaida puked into the boat, inspiring another fit of giggling. Sen, the oarsman, chuckled too; Kaida could feel the vibrations from his deep, dopey voice through the wooden hull. She spat a mouthful of vomit on his foot, regretting it instantly. He didn’t deserve it; he was only the closest target. He was too stupid to know any better. And now Kaida had no more vomit to spit at Miyoko or the other two.

She dived back under, as much to silence their laughing as to flush out her mouth. She stayed under for a while, filling her mouth with salt water and spitting it out, over and over until the taste of bile was gone. Then she surfaced, took her deepest breath, and swam down again to recover her kaigane and her abalone.

The other three did not follow her this time. Once was enough. No doubt they would content themselves to watch from the surface and comment on how saccadic her movements were. Even the silence of the water was not enough to shut them up in Kaida’s imagination. A seal without a flipper. A turtle without a fin. They’d called her as much and worse before. No doubt they hadn’t bored of it yet.

Kaida wondered what she could have done wrong to deserve sisters like these.

This time she had plenty of air when she kicked off the bottom, though the whole way up she thought about how far it was and how narrowly she had escaped drowning. Again. The trick of pulling her away from the seabed was Miyoko’s newest invention. She really was a virtuoso of cruelty. One of these days Kaida wouldn’t make it to the surface, and she wondered whether Miyoko would still be laughing then.

She was certain her other two stepsisters would not. Kiyoko only picked on Kaida to fit in. Like a remora, she attached herself to the shark in order to stay out of harm’s way. Shioko wasn’t evil so much as competitive. She was the youngest, always catching up, always plagued by the need to prove herself. When she showed genuine malice, Kaida saw it as a sort of emotional karate, practiced out of some vague sense that it might protect her fragile sense of self. Miyoko’s cruelty was purer, more hateful. She indulged her malicious urges for the sheer enjoyment of it. Kaida knew about the little animals she trapped sometimes, and what she did to them. Now that Miyoko had an ugly, crippled stepsister, she’d broadened her tastes.

Kaida broke through the crest of a big wave to see the other three already warming themselves around the little fire pit in Sen’s boat. By the time Kaida got there, the tea would already be gone—“spilled” overboard, no doubt, if they hadn’t actually drunk it all. That was all right. Anger would keep Kaida warm. She did notice, though, that the wind was blowing hard, and the waves were a lot higher than they’d been a few moments before. A storm was brewing, and it was rolling in fast and angry.

21

The moment it sailed into view, Kaida knew the strangers’ ship was doomed, yet somehow the sight of it inspired a surge of hopefulness in her. Every time she saw a ship, she dreamed of being aboard. Ama-machi was not a village in her eyes; it was a penitentiary, and the ships were the only way out.

The features that made Ama-machi an ideal place for a settlement were the very features that made it the harshest of prisons. Sheer black cliffs walled in the beach on three sides, protecting it from the worst of the storms and from raiders to boot. The waves rolled in relentlessly, battering down the rock over thousands of years, forming the cove and driving back any who sought to swim beyond it. They’d created the beach, and there the grass shacks of Ama-machi huddled like a bunch of ducklings nestling in close to their mother, the giver of life.

To the southwest, the line of toothy rocks known as Ryujin’s Maw marked the boundary between the cove and the open sea. The sea was the fourth wall to Kaida’s prison, pitiless, beckoning eternally yet never offering escape. Out there were the biggest sharks, the strongest riptides, the coldest currents. The jagged, broken wall of the Maw fended off all those threats, but in so doing it fenced in any young woman who dreamed of someday swimming off to the horizon, never to return.

It was only when a ship sailed into view that Kaida felt any hope of escape. Even this new ship, the one that sped under full sails just past Ryujin’s Maw, caused her heart to race, though she knew the strangers and their ship were soon to be swallowed up by the waves. The elders said there was no way to reach another village except by sea. The cliffs surrounding Ama-machi were volcanic rock, sharp and brittle, and even if they were as soft as baby skin they were still vertical where they were not overhung. Kaida had climbed to the top once, back when she still had two hands, for no other reason than to see what there was to see. But there were no other villages up there, nor even a road to reach them; she found only trackless overgrown hills and a down-climb so difficult it had nearly killed her.

Back then she still had reasons to climb back down. Her mother was still alive. Her father still knew she existed, even though he’d have preferred a son to a daughter. Even in those days Kaida found Ama-machi too small for her. The boys were boring and the girls were petty. It was a good thing she was the best ama her age—better even than a lot of the women in their twenties and thirties—because the only place she could go to feel sane was underwater. These days she wanted to escape even more than she had back then, but Kaida knew attempting the climb again would do her no good. How could she survive in hill country? There were no coral beds to forage for food, no waterfalls or rain catches for freshwater. She could not imagine how anyone could tell which direction was which; in her memory all those hills looked exactly the same.

No, the only hope of escaping Ama-machi was to sail to another village, and she would not be allowed to do that until she was fifteen. She’d told herself a thousand times to forget about escape, and yet every time a ship sailed into view her heart betrayed her. Every single time it leaped with hope.

This ship had no hope. It was the biggest Kaida had ever seen—far and away the biggest, in fact—and still she had no hope. She was red, the strangers’ ship, three-masted, all sails fat with wind as she raced the storm bearing down on her like a school of barracuda. Ribbons of foam whipped off the whitecaps at her prow. The colorful dragon that was her figurehead snarled in defiance as it surged straight for the Claw.

Kaida heard gasps from all around her, and though she could not take her eyes from the dying ship, she knew the whole village must have gathered on the beach to watch. Rain pelted her, and the others too, but the doomed ship was as hypnotic as it was horrifying.

The ship’s captain had no more hope of seeing Ryujin’s Claw than his wooden draconic figurehead. It was high tide; the Claw was submerged. And this ship clearly could not have been from anywhere near Ama-machi. Her captain did not know these waters. The elders always said outlanders never valued ama wisdom. They never hired locals to guide them, and so this stretch of the coast was dotted with a hundred shipwrecks.

The elders were wrong sometimes, but not tonight.

It was as if the gods conspired to let Kaida watch her hopes founder and drown. The clouds were black almost all the way to the horizon, but between the clouds and the angry sea was a long band of golden sky, and in the center of it, right at the horizon, the sun burned like a round red ember. The strangers’ ship sped past the sun. Each tooth of Ryujin’s Maw stood out as black as a shark’s eye against her red hull. No doubt the captain had seen the Maw. No doubt his steersman felt a wave of relief at having passed it unscathed. It was a common mistake.

The Claw ripped the belly out of the strangers’ ship, stopping her dead despite her bulk and speed. Dozens of tiny human forms tumbled forward, as helpless as baby sand crabs before a rogue breaker. Some of the crewmen disappeared overboard. Others struck the gunwales and clung for dear life.

A huge wave loomed over the port bow, big enough to toss any ama’s boat aside. An ama’s boat might have been thrown free of the Claw, but the strangers’ ship was too heavy, too bulky, impaled too deep. She took the wave broadside and it snapped her in half.

Someone on the beach screamed. Others shouted, but Kaida only heard them say stupid things. Of course those sailors would try to swim this way. Most would die in the attempt. The rain redoubled its assault, hammering Kaida, nearly blinding her. The other villagers on the beach would be holding their hands against their wet foreheads, creating an eave for their eyes. Kaida had but the one hand, but she cupped her eyes with it anyway, the better to see. Hypnotized and horrified, she watched.

The sailors in the water were learning now why the Claw was so dangerous. An invisible riptide tossed them from the Claw onto the jagged teeth of the Maw, just as if Ryujin was feeding himself. The sea dragon was insatiable. Kaida knew that all too well. He had devoured her mother, and taken Kaida’s left hand as a snack. And that had been in calmer seas than this.

Kaida saw the waves pulp one man after the next against the rocks of the Maw, not because she wanted to watch but because she could not pull her gaze away. “Look at her,” she heard Miyoko say. “She looks like she’s going to cry.”

“She does,” Kiyoko said, following along as passively as ever.

“Cry your big froggy eyes out,” said Shioko. “They’re halfway out of your head already anyway. Neh, Miyoko? She has eyes like a bug.”

Kaida refused to look in her sisters’ direction. Men were dying right in front of them, and somehow these three still found the time to pick on her. She debated dragging a boat out into the surf, and maybe recruiting her father and a few of his friends to help her mount a rescue effort. The thought lived only briefly; then she tossed it aside as easily as the sea tossed yet another outland sailor into the Maw. The surf rolled in hard enough to rebuff even the strongest oarsmen in the village, and if they somehow managed to row even halfway out to the Maw, even a hundred oarsmen couldn’t keep a boat steady in these seas. For the outlanders, a boat full of rescuers would only be one more weight to crush their skulls against.

And yet Kaida really did want to row out there to save them. She wished she didn’t care, or at least that she could keep from letting her care show. As it was, Miyoko had only to read her face to find ammunition for her next attack. “Poor Kaida,” she said, mock-whimpering. “Do you want to swim out there and find a husband? Maybe you should. None of Ama-machi’s men will have you.”

I wouldn’t have them, Kaida thought, and even if I would, half of them have already had you. Kaida had heard what Miyoko was doing to the boys of the village. She’d even done it to grown men. She’d done it halfway to Sen once with her hand, then run away giggling while he raged and cried. He’d tried to chase her, stumbling with his pants around his ankles and his member sticking straight out from between his legs. The whole village knew about Sen’s outburst, but not how Miyoko had started him off. But Kaida knew. She heard it from Miyoko’s own mouth, just like she heard all the rest: whispered boasts in the dark after everyone was abed, after Kaida’s father had finished rustling and puffing and grunting with Miyoko’s mother, after all the girls giggled about it to themselves. None of them knew Kaida could hear them, just as none of them knew Kaida could hear their insults over the drumming rain. Kaida never let it show.

Miyoko repeated her taunt louder. Kiyoko aped her, and Shioko tried to outdo them both. Go fishing for a husband. No, go diving for a husband. They’ll all be drowned and still they won’t have you. It was all so predictable. They didn’t need to shout for Kaida to hear them.

But they knew her every bit as well as she knew them. They knew she wanted to escape. They knew the outlanders’ ship embodied hope, and they knew what it meant for Kaida see it smashed to flinders. Yet they’d misunderstood Kaida’s hope for the sailors. She wasn’t malicious like Miyoko. She didn’t want to see these men die. And yet it didn’t matter to her if none of them survived. Even if none of them made it to shore, they were too many for their passing to go unnoticed. Someone would come looking for them. Someone whose ship would leave this place, with Kaida on it.

As she watched the last of them cling to the tips of Ryujin’s teeth, battered by the waves, holding on for dear life even though death was certain, Kaida felt a small swell of hope. Realization struck her: regardless of whether anyone expected to find survivors, a rescue ship was certain to come. It wasn’t just the sailors who would be missed. Their ship was massive, expensive, and probably laden with cargo. Others would come looking for it after all. And when they came, Kaida meant to leave with them, never to return.

22

When at last the outlanders came, they came not by sea but by land.

It was strange. Beyond strange. There was nothing up there: no roads, nor even footpaths; no villages; no food; no water. Yet there they were, a little line of men, black against the sunrise.

They came nine days after the big red ship had foundered, but Kaida knew immediately that they had come for the ship. Outlanders didn’t come to Ama-machi. There was nothing for them here—nothing, unless Ryujin’s Claw seized some treasure of theirs. That was why Kaida had been sneaking out every morning to dive on the wreck.

She was treading water over the skeletal hulk when she first spied the strangers. The sun had not yet risen high enough for its light to reach Ama-machi, so the village was still asleep. That meant Kaida was the only one to have spotted the strangers. If only she had already found what they’d come for, she could have delivered it to them before anyone else was even awake. Whatever the outlanders were looking for, Kaida could use it to buy her way out of Ama-machi forever. It did not matter where the outlanders took her, whether they took her back to their home or simply dumped her off as soon as they tired of her. Anywhere was better than Ama-machi.

She took a deep breath and duck-dived straight down. The wreck was below her—the front half of it anyway—purple, not red, at that depth. To her left loomed Ryujin’s Claw, sharp and menacing. A little school of hammerheads circled the Claw, but only five or six of them, not enough to threaten Kaida. Paying them no mind, she swam deeper.

The carrack’s bow pointed straight down into the chasm the villagers called the Whore’s Cleft, a name Kaida didn’t wholly understand. The only thing Kaida knew about whores was that the village didn’t have any and that they sometimes did was what Miyoko had been doing to the boys with her hand and her mouth in quiet, secluded places the village. The Cleft was the only rift in the wide, black shelf of rock that formed the belly of this side of the cove. The white sand of the sea floor was much deeper down, all the way at the bottom of the Cleft, deeper than any ama had ever dived in Ama-machi’s collective memory. Now the snarling dragon that had been the figurehead of the outlander’s carrack was buried in that sand, and their ill-fated ship had jammed herself between the sharp black walls of the Cleft.

No one else in the village would dare to dive here. Not since the shipwreck. Usually the hunting was good; the wide rock shelf lay at an easy depth and was pocked with hundreds of holes for abalone to grow in. On flat days one or two boats would risk rowing a little past the Maw and the Claw to anchor out here. This morning the sea as was as calm as a sleeping baby, but Kaida knew she would be the only one to dive here today. Everyone else was worried about the ghosts. Too many dead sailors, they said. Only three had washed up ashore (and of course Miyoko missed no opportunity to ask whether Kaida might beg one of them to mount her, to get her pregnant so she could keep him). Those three burned on a single funeral pyre, but there would be no such satisfaction for the spirits of those who were swallowed up by the waves. That meant dozens of hungry ghosts, so everyone else stayed well clear the great red wreck.

Kaida was more worried about sharks than she was of ghosts, and sharks didn’t concern her much. The big ones didn’t like the riptide near the Claw, and the little ones that could easily ride the riptide were more dangerous to fish than to people. Besides, the sharks she could see weren’t the scary ones. The ones to worry about were the ones she didn’t see. An ama knew what to watch for, how to tell an aggressive shark from one that just wanted to snatch her catch bag and swim off. But then there were the sharks that hit so hard they knocked you silly, and they disappeared so fast that sometimes an ama didn’t even know she’d been bitten until there was blood in the water.

So it wasn’t the sharks that bothered her. The ones she imagined being out there were scarier than the real ones. What really frightened Kaida was the wreck itself.

It yawned open before her, a blue pit deepening into blackness. Oddly it was the empty parts, the parts that weren’t there, that scared her most. The hull of the ship was arguably the most dangerous. Its mouth was a misshapen perimeter of spiky timbers and beams, hundreds of them, any one of them sharp enough to run her through if she didn’t judge the riptide right. Snapped spars, equally sharp, hung from tangled lines snagged here and there, swaying in the currents. They too could cut her open, or the lines could catch an ankle, even slip around her neck if the riptide and bad karma went against her. But for all of that, what scared her most were those deep, dark pits that once were holds. Two of them, one stacked on the other, separated by the jagged plain of the deck between them.

Kaida didn’t like closed spaces. Her throat grew tight whenever she felt the walls were too close. It was worse when she was underwater, and not because her racing heart burned up more of her body’s breath. Her cool, wet, quiet world was her home. She did not like feeling afraid here.

But whatever it was the outlanders had come to find, it would be in those deep blue pits or it would be nowhere at all. Ryujin’s Maw had chewed up the other half of their huge red carrack and spat it back out into the sea. Kaida had looked for it. She’d even risked a swim out to the Maw itself, to get a firm grip on one of the teeth so she could look underwater for as long as her breath would hold out. There were no timbers there, no corpses, only a few lines draped on the coral, undulating back and forth in a rhythm half a beat behind that of the waves.

So if the outlanders had come to find sunken treasure, they would find it in the wreck Kaida was diving on. She hovered over it. It took a lot to convince herself the walls wouldn’t close in on her and swallow her up. The tides were strong. The hull was weak. It wouldn’t take much to collapse the whole thing.

She dived deeper anyway. Not into where it was dark. Just past the toothy timbers that held siege around the open holds. The sunlight still made it here. She loved the way water caught the light, diffusing it, bending it into areas that should have been shaded. Sunlight didn’t work that way up above.

What should have been a bulkhead now lay like a deck beneath her. Ryujin’s Claw had ripped out half of it and the tides had demolished much of the rest, but there was still enough of a ledge for Kaida to hook with her stump and hang from while she inspected the inside of the hold. Just looking inside wasn’t so bad.

She saw some coins she hadn’t seen on previous dives. For the last eight mornings she’d brought her catch bag out to the wreck, and every time she swam back in to shore to build up her little treasury: a dead sailor’s coin purse; a bow case with some kind of pattern worked into the leather, the details of which were swollen and spoiled by the salt water; a jeweled brooch; a collection of hairpins, all contributed by the dead; chopsticks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, kept in a slender golden case; even a short sword, taken from the belt of a drowned man. She kept them all in a little hollow at the base of the cliff behind the village, buried in the sand so her sisters would not find them.

She had a feeling that nothing in her collection was valuable, but she thought that perhaps when the outlanders came, they might see how diligently she’d been collecting and how cleverly she’d chosen what to gather and what to leave behind. The coins, for example, were meaningless. There were probably hundreds more down there, but tens of thousands more in the great cities she’d heard about in the elders’ stories. A few more taken from the wreck wouldn’t matter. The hairpins, though, or the sword, or the chopsticks in their ornate case, any of them might identify the bearer. Perhaps one of the passengers was important. Or perhaps the outlanders had search parties looking for survivors. If the brooch belonged to some noble lord, Kaida could present it to the outlanders and they would know their lord had been aboard after all.

So Kaida did not bother swimming down to collect the coins. She did not want the outlanders to think her stupid. She swam back up to the surface, filled her lungs again, and dived on a different part of the wreck.

She went on this way for some time, and each time she returned to the surface, she assessed the progress of the outlanders. By the time the sunlight reached down far enough into the bay to strike the beach, the outlanders had dropped long lines from the top of the cliff and several men had descended them. Other men readied large wooden boxes, which Kaida guessed they would lower to the men below. The ones up top had a huge creature with them, its body bigger than a dolphin’s, with four tall, spindly legs. Its head was strange too, its neck long and thick, and it had a long tail of seaweed hanging from the back, just like an old turtle. She wondered if this was one of the horses she’d heard about in tales. If so, it was much bigger than she’d imagined.

Kaida dived again, this time gliding down along the starboard side until she reached a rent in the hull. She couldn’t guess what had staved it in, but through the gash she could see more dead sailors. One wore a breastplate, and it took her several dives to cut all the cords that fastened it to the body. She used another corpse’s knife to do the cutting, which she thought was very resourceful of her, and she tucked the knife into her thin rope belt for future use. She wondered hopefully whether Miyoko would think twice about threatening to drown her now.

She dived again, found the soldier she’d been working on, and pinched the breastplate between her knees to get a good grip on it. With her new knife she cut the last cord free.

The listless corpse lolled to one side, floating out from under the armor. In the next instant the breastplate pulled her right into the dark hold of the carrack. Armor was heavier than she’d expected, much heavier, and now she was in the dark and alone and there were walls on all sides of her. She let the breastplate go. Something massive gave a loud thunk just below her, maybe a big shark trying to bash its way inside. No. It was just the breastplate. The noise gave her a start nonetheless. Her throat tightened; her heart flopped and shuddered like a netted fish drowning on air.

The jagged blue window overhead was the only thing she could see. Everything else was black. She swam toward the blue, but something pushed her away from it. The riptide, making crazy currents over the hollow of the hold. It bounced her into something solid. The wall. It was caving in on her. She screamed a torrent of bubbles and swam like mad.

Then she was bathed in blue light and then she was at the surface again. It took a long time for her to calm down, and when she was calm again she was surprised she still had the knife in hand. She’d have guessed she would have dropped it in her manic scramble out of the hold—which, she realized now, was never in danger of collapsing. She’d bumped into things she couldn’t see. That was all. And all too easy to rationalize too, now that she was safely on the open water.

To the best of her knowledge, her sisters didn’t know about her fear of tight spaces. Kaida was glad they weren’t with her now. If Miyoko ever found out, she’d bury Kaida alive just for fun.

23

Kaida had only her knife to show for this dive, but she swam back to shore anyway. The whole way in she tried to persuade herself that she was returning because she was tired, not because she was still scared. By the time her feet touched down she still wasn’t convinced.

She followed her new morning ritual, which was to skirt the village, keeping her catch bag out of sight, until she reached the big camphor tree. Its biggest root was gnarled and arched like a crone’s finger, pointing at the sea cliff. Following that root in a straight line, she found her treasure cache, which for the first time she unburied in its entirety. Except for this morning, she’d always returned with a full catch bag, satisfied with the fruits of her labors. But now that she looked at her entire collection, it seemed insignificant. The wreck was so vast, and everything she’d reclaimed she could gather in her own two arms. Why should anyone care about what little treasure a crippled girl could carry? She wondered whether it would be enough to buy the outlanders’ favor.

Kaida gathered it up anyway, trapping the bigger items against her belly with her stump, collecting the smaller things in her right hand. She followed the little sandy strip between the sea cliff and the tall grass that filled the back quarter of the cove. She stayed low as she circled around toward the outlanders, lest one of her sisters see her and call the other two.

She saw Sen before she saw the outlanders. He followed a few other men, and Kaida was surprised to see her father at their head. He rarely left his bedroom this early in the morning. His new wife seemed to have fishhooks in him, or else their bed did, because since they’d married a year ago he seemed unable to spend so long as an hour apart from her.

He was a big man, his forearms as broad as the blades of an oar. A lifetime of rowing and rope making tended to shape a man’s arms that way. All the men of Ama-machi had muscular arms, and all the women had lithe swimmer’s bodies.

“Good morning,” her father said, and Kaida peered over the high grass to see him approach one of the outlanders. Her father smiled amiably, not his lady-killer smile but his pacifying smile. The stranger did not smile at all.

“We came to welcome you to our village,” her father said, though Kaida could tell he was lying. He had three burly men behind him. That was no welcoming party. And he used the same overly friendly voice he’d used when he’d explained to Kaida that he’d be marrying Miyoko’s mother.

There were four of the outlanders, though only one had even recognized the villagers’ existence; the others were busy untying the long box that those up above had just lowered down the cliff. Kaida could tell the stranger’s silence put her father ill at ease. He did what he could to mask his apprehension. “We wondered if we could help you,” he said. “It promises to be a hot morning, and you look like you’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of you. May we ask what you’re doing here?”

“I’m going to break every joint in your arm,” said the stranger. His voice was soft and calm, eerily so. Kaida placed him at a little over forty, with a bald head and a neatly trimmed black beard. From the way his jacket flowed in the light breeze, Kaida could tell it was of finer cloth than any in Ama-machi.

“Excuse me?” said her father.

“Starting with the shoulder,” the stranger said, “and working my way down. You’ll find me to be a man of my word.”

“Now listen here—”

One of the other village fishermen took a step toward the stranger. It was a mistake. Suddenly the fisherman was on the ground clutching his knee. Kaida hadn’t even seen the stranger move. Her eyes were on her father, fixed with horror.

The outlander’s hands were swift and slippery, darting like eels. One shot under her father’s armpit, the other over the top. Her father took a swing at him, but the stranger spun away from it easily. Then her father was facedown in the sand. Kaida heard it when his shoulder popped apart.

The elbow came next, louder than the shoulder. The stranger was kneeling on the back of her father’s neck, his deadly hands free now, his face impassive. The other three outlanders hadn’t even bothered to look up.

The last of the fishermen ran for his life, or perhaps for help, but Sen’s mind was too slow to see the sense in that. He lunged for the bearded stranger, who responded with a series of quick two-fingered stabs. One to the inner thigh, one below the ribs, and when Sen bent double the last one took him behind the ear. Sen crumpled as if his bones had turned to sand.

“Wait!” Kaida shouted, just as the stranger prepared to break her father’s wrist. She pushed her way through the grass and dumped her entire cache on the sand. “Here,” she said, “take it. For him. Let me have him back.”

The stranger looked at her with a mix of curiosity and amusement. Under his knee, her father howled like something inhuman, his cries punctuated by coughs and sputtering sandy sounds. His arm was like a rope in the outlander’s hands, boneless, jointless.

“Please,” Kaida said. She’d never seen violence like this, and with stepsisters like hers, violence was a part of her daily life. But theirs was vindictive, even joyful in its own twisted way. This was brutality at its purest, utterly devoid of emotion. “Please,” Kaida said, “let him go.”

“What have we here?” said the stranger, eerily calm and soft-spoken even after all he’d just done. “A little girl with half an arm and an armload of gifts. What are these?”

“From your ship,” she said. “I’ve been diving for them.”

“Have you, now? And what else have you found?”

Kaida looked at the other three strangers, who were still busily working at their knots. One of them looked over his shoulder, studied her for a moment, and went back to his work.

“This is all,” Kaida said. “This and my knife.” She put her hand on it, moved to pull it from her rope belt, then thought better of it. It wasn’t a good idea to draw a weapon on this man. “You can have it too, if you want. Just let him go.”

“Fond of blades, are you? I can see you like that little pigsticker better than all the rest. You keep it.” With his thumbnail he scratched his chin just behind his beard. “Who is this fool to you?”

Kaida swallowed. Her throat was growing tight, just as it did back in the dark hold of the ship. The way the stranger looked at her made her want to run away. She wished she could hear some sign of agitation in his voice, the tiniest little hint that the process of tearing another human being’s arm apart caused his pulse to quicken. She wanted to run, but she forced herself to stay; she even dug her feet a little deeper into the sand. “He’s my father.”

“And what is your name, child?”

“Kaida.”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to break your father’s wrist and fingers, Kaida-san. I am a man of my word.”

Without so much as a blink he snapped her father’s wrist. Another scream erupted from her father’s mouth, stifled by sand and a fit of coughing. Every cough jostled his maimed shoulder, which made him grunt and groan, which made him inhale more sand. His whole body trembled with pain. The stranger wrapped his fingers around her father’s thumb.

“You said arm,” Kaida said, spitting the words out all at once.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said every joint in his arm. His fingers aren’t in his arm, they’re in his hand. You don’t have to break them.”

The outlander cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. “Hm,” he said. After a moment’s thought, he said, “A fair point,” and he stood up, dropping her father’s arm.

It flopped to the sand like a boned fish. Her father cried out but did not move. Was it fear or pain that pinned him there? Kaida could not tell. “I am Genzai,” said the stranger. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Kaida-san.”

Kaida didn’t know what else to do. Somehow the words “pleased to meet you” slipped out of her mouth and she found herself giving a little bow.

That made Genzai laugh. His unflappable calm had unnerved her, but his laugh was worse. It was a deep, sinister rumble, barely a laugh at all. “You’re a brave little girl,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what all these trinkets are for?”

Kaida looked at the ground, where the mother-of-pearl chopsticks in their golden case lay atop all the other treasures she’d collected over the past few mornings. They didn’t seem like treasures now. She had imagined the outlanders would be impressed by all she’d gathered for them—clues, she had thought, as to what was in the wreck, or even who. She thought they’d thank her for saving them so much work. She hadn’t imagined one person could cripple three big men in the space of as many breaths. These people didn’t need her help. They were more than capable on their own. And now all her treasures seemed like a little girl’s toys.

“Well?” said Genzai.

“I thought . . . maybe . . .”

“Spit it out, child. Don’t tell me your courage has left you already.”

“I thought maybe you could take me with you. When you leave.”

Her father moved then. With an effort he raised his head to look at her. Half of his face was a white mask, sand clinging to sweat. “Kaida, what are you saying?”

“She’s saying your little village is too small,” said Genzai. “I should know. I come from a speck of a village like this myself. Little wonder that she wants to escape. Have you been buggering her? Your own daughter?”

He narrowed his eyes at her father, and for a moment Kaida feared he would go back to ripping bones out of sockets. At length he said, “No. She came to your rescue. Maybe she wants to leave because the men in your village need their teenage girls to rescue them. Is that it, Kaida-san? Is this place too small for a girl of such heroic bravery?”

“I’m not brave,” she said.

“Kaida, why?” said her father.

“Shut your mouth. We’re talking.” Genzai’s tone was still calm, exactly as it had been just before he destroyed her father’s arm. He scratched behind his beard, studying Kaida closely. “What makes you think I want to take a little girl with me when I leave here—a little girl with half an arm, no less?”

“You don’t. That’s why I brought you the . . . the treasures.”

That earned her another smile from Genzai. He laughed like an earthquake would laugh. “Treasures? Indeed. It must have taken you all morning to haul these up, what with that stump of an arm of yours.”

“Eight.”

“What’s that?”

“Eight mornings.”

“Oh, ho. Do you mean to tell me eight days ago, you woke up and decided to dive for ‘treasures,’ just hoping that someone like me would come along to ask you for them?”

“No,” Kaida said. Her face flushed and she looked down at the sand. She didn’t hope they would come. She knew they’d come. They had to come, because if they didn’t Kaida would be stuck in Ama-machi for two more years. At least two more, and even then her best hope of getting out was to marry some boy in another village just like Ama-machi. A bug-eyed, one-armed girl’s prospects for marriage were dismal indeed, and Kaida didn’t see much she liked in boys anyway. Most of them were mean, and the ones that weren’t had no more backbone than a jellyfish. Miyoko got them to pick on Kaida all the time. She enjoyed using her cruelty that way, the same as she enjoyed the baby sparrows she sometimes stole from nests, twisting their little necks to see how far they’d go. So either Kaida would get out with the outlanders, or else she’d stay here to get worn and hollow and brittle like a piece of driftwood.

But she couldn’t say any of that. Not with her father listening. Instead she just said, “I knew you’d come.”

“Then you have as much foresight as you have courage,” said Genzai. “Impressive in one so young. But useless nonetheless—and good luck for you that you are. Tell me, Kaida-san, what is it you imagine strangers would do with a little girl once they took her away?”

“I don’t care. Just so long as I get out.”

Her father gasped, as pained as she’d ever seen him. Genzai looked at her too, a hint of curiosity on his otherwise impassive face. “You make for interesting reading,” he said. “Too smart to be spouting such hopeless naïveté. In another girl, yes, but not you. You really are desperate, aren’t you?”

Kaida glared at him. She felt her eyebrows and cheeks scrunch up, heard her breath coming loud through her nose. “Just take me with you,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Kaida-san. I don’t have any use for little one-armed girls, not here and not where we’re going next. You keep your ‘treasures.’ Tell your father and his friends not to bother us again.”

24

It was everything Kaida could do just to help her father to his feet. His right arm hung from his collarbone as limp as a ribbon, and the slightest movement nearly made him faint from pain. A lifetime of diving made Kaida strong, but not strong enough to carry a grown man by herself.

No one else dared to go back for Haru-san, the fisherman whose knee Genzai had destroyed, or for Sen, who still lay curled in a ball. Kaida would have thought him dead if she hadn’t heard him breathing, his voice big and dopey even in unconsciousness. She had to go back for Haru-san alone, serving him as a human crutch, and since Sen was the biggest of them all, there was nothing she could do for him. She tried to talk some of the men in the village into retrieving him, but they would always listen to her father before they listened to her, and what they heard from her father was wails of torment as two of the elder women tried to reset his shoulder. There was no hope for his elbow; it would have to mend on its own.

Kaida overheard the elder women saying as much while she sat outside their hut, watching another long box sliding bit by bit down the sea cliff, lowered from above by the horse, perhaps. Now and again her stepmother, Cho, would walk by. She’d taken to pacing around the hut since she couldn’t bear to watch what was happening inside.

“You poor thing,” she said as she reached Kaida once again. “How scared you must have been. And bless your heart for bringing him back to me.”

“I didn’t bring him back for you.”

“Oh, of course not. He’s your father. I know that.” She crouched in the sand and put her hand on Kaida’s knee. “And you know it pains me how my girls pester you so. You do know that, don’t you? You poor dear.”

“Make them stop, then.”

Cho gave her a loving, pitying look, like she was trying to smile and frown at the same time. “You know that I would if I could, don’t you? It’s just in a young girl’s nature to be petty sometimes. And their father . . . well, he wasn’t kind like your father is. He hurt them in ways a father shouldn’t. Do you know that when he died, my girls didn’t even cry?”

Kaida remembered that. No one’s death was a secret in Ama-machi. When it happened, Kiyoko and Shioko seemed more relieved than anything, and Miyoko’s grief was so obviously fraudulent that afterward she’d actually practiced lying until it was second nature.

“They’ve been through a lot,” Cho said. “And you have too. Poor thing. Being a teenage girl is just hard, isn’t it? I was your age too, you know. I know how you feel.”

Kaida scowled at her. Cho knew nothing about how she felt. She had two good hands. She had a pretty face. And if the other girls made fun of her when they were young, it would have been for taking too many boys back into the weeds. Some whispered as much about her even now. Kaida knew her father had his dalliance with Cho even before his wife—his real wife, Kaida’s mother—was killed. It was only natural that they should get married so soon afterward. She was still fertile enough. He was without sons. Cho might provide him a few.

Just then Sen came stumbling groggily into the village. It seemed he’d woken of his own accord, for the outlanders had left that area. Now they were on northernmost end of the beach, closest to where the wreck had sunk. Their long, heavy boxes lay in the sand like a row of sleeping seals.

Two more outlanders were descending the ropes, which made for a total of six down near the village. A few more outlanders remained atop the cliffs. Kaida had heard horses needed caring for, which had always seemed strange to her. Nothing in the sea needed humans to care for it; these horses must have been exceptionally stupid. In any case, the horses were up there, and the outlanders with them reappeared now and then to to toss firewood off the cliff. Their kinsmen below collected it and stacked it by their encampment on the beach. They already had a mountain of it, and they were gathering more.

That meant they were planning to stay for a while. Kaida wondered how much time she had to figure out a way to abscond with them when they left.

• • •

Despite the morning’s hostilities, there was no good reason not to be diving or fishing. It was a perfectly good day for it, yet even by high noon there were still no boats on the water. The outlanders had everyone spooked.

Kaida didn’t fully understand why. She’d never seen violence like Genzai’s before, but for all intents and purposes she was the only one who had seen it. Haru-san had dropped before the fight even started, and by the time he hit the ground he was already clamping his eyes shut and gritting his teeth, as if he could somehow squeeze the pain out of his body. Kaida’s father felt all of the violence and all of its lingering ripple effects, but he saw very little. Anything Sen had seen was locked in that turtle brain of his and wasn’t coming out. The fourth fisherman’s memory was wildly fantastical, twisted out of proportion by blind panic. His story changed by the hour; surely no one took him at his word for any of it. So while Kaida was afraid of Genzai and his companions, she didn’t see why anyone else in the village had an excuse.

She thought about this for a while as she watched the sunlight play on the ocean. Waves rose and fell, all of them devoid of boats. Dinner in Ama-machi would be sparse tonight. Dinnertime conversation would not. Every tongue would waggle with tales of the outlanders, of preternatural speed and superhuman strength, with talk of portents and kami, with frantic speculation about what might have brought demonic outlanders and ghosts from the sea to visit Ama-machi at the same time.

It was stupid, Kaida thought. Embarrassing, even. Her whole village, everyone she’d ever known, cowed by four strangers. For all Kaida knew, only Genzai was dangerous. The other three might have been sand sharks, scary to behold but utterly harmless—unless you were a mollusk. Kaida harrumphed and frowned. She lived in a village of mollusks.

Part of her knew that was unfair. The fate her father had suffered was scary. Giving Genzai a wide berth was prudent, not skittish. Once she made that observation, Kaida realized she’d never grasped the difference between being cautious and being afraid. Every morning she’d gone diving on the wreck she’d felt what she thought was fear. Now she identified it as caution. And being cautious while diving on that wreck wasn’t weakness; it was . . . what had Genzai called it? Foresight. That was it. Swimming near Ryujin’s Maw was dangerous enough even when there wasn’t a wreck lurking out there, ready to swallow her up if the current swept her the wrong way. Being wary of that was no weakness at all. It was wisdom, if someone in her teens could be said to have any of that.

She’d just made her mind up to recruit a rower and go abalone hunting when she heard her stepmother calling for her. “Kaida, you’re father’s well enough to speak to you now. You poor little thing, you must have been worried sick. Come on inside.”

It was much cooler in the house, though it also stank. The elder women must have made a poultice of some kind, and whatever it was, it left a cloying bitterness in Kaida’s nostrils. Her father sat on a futon with his back against the wall, naked to the waist, his right arm wrapped up from his collarbone to the tips of his fingers in strips of whatever cloth was ready to hand. His arm reminded her of a sea cucumber, fat and strangely rigid, as if it would have been flexible if only it weren’t so swollen.

Cho had been in the doorway to call Kaida inside, but now she sat with her husband, stroking his unbound shoulder. Kaida stopped short when she saw Cho’s three daughters kneeling in a row beside her.

“Kaida-chan,” her father said. “Come here. Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid. How are you feeling?”

“They say my shoulder will probably get better soon.”

Typical, Kaida thought. Trying to seem strong in front of his women. “Come in,” he said. “Sit with your family.”

“Standing is fine,” she said, her hand resting on the doorframe. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Kaida-chan, you must get this evil idea out of your head. You cannot run off with those men. Think of what everyone will say.”

“I already know what everyone says. If I leave, at least I won’t have to overhear them anymore.”

“You’re thirteen. I will not have people whispering that my daughter is a whore.”

Kaida felt the muscles quiver below her right eye. She bit her lip to keep it from quivering too. For the briefest of moments she thought her father was cross because he’d miss her if she left. And perhaps some part of him would. But what he wanted most of her was for her to have been born a boy, and since he couldn’t have that, what he wanted now was for her not to malign his good name.

It wasn’t so long ago that he hadn’t thought that way. When Kaida’s mother was alive, he’d still wanted sons, but he’d still treated Kaida with affection. But after her mother was killed, after Kaida lost her hand, he’d never quite looked at her the same way. She felt like scar tissue, a reminder of what had once been whole, and it horrified her to think that her own father thought of her the same way she thought of the ugly, jagged, slick-skinned, distended worms that twisted this way and that on the stump of her left arm. When she looked there she felt anger and loss, and if she didn’t want to feel those things she just looked somewhere else.

“A whore?” Kaida said. “The ones who say that about me are sitting right there. I heard Miyoko this morning, saying I’d bought your life with my mouth. She didn’t mean talking to the outlander, either. Go on, ask her what she said.”

Miyoko gasped. “I don’t understand what you mean,” she said. “Kissing? What is she talking about, Mother?”

“Miyoko never said anything to me,” said Shioko. “Did she say anything to you, Kiyoko?” Kiyoko shook her head and shrugged.

Cho clasped her hands in her lap. “Kaida-chan, you’re a very sweet girl, but I won’t have you putting filthy ideas in my daughter’s heads.”

“They don’t need me for that. The boys put filthier things than ideas in their—”

“Kaida!” Her father winced in pain and bit down on the knuckle of the hand he could still move. Shouting must have shifted something in his arm. With his fist still pressed to his face, he said, “I will not have you speak of your sisters that way.”

“They’re not my sisters.”

“They are. I married their mother. That’s all there is to it. Now you will put this nonsense about running off with foreigners out of your head.”

He had more to say, but Kaida was distracted by a shout behind her. Over her shoulder she saw two of the outlanders standing by a row of overturned fishing boats. Genzai wasn’t one of them. Some of the villagers had gathered there too, forming a makeshift fence between the boats and the outlanders.

At last. Some backbone. Kaida twisted around to see what was going on. Someone shouted that this was his boat. One of the strangers replied, but Kaida couldn’t hear him over the protests of other fishermen. There was more shouting, and the fence closed in around the strangers.

The outlanders waited to react until they were wholly surrounded. Kaida could not see what happened first. What happened second was pandemonium. The fence disintegrated; the strongest men of her village scattered like sand crabs fleeing a shadow. Of the five that were left behind, three were bleeding from the mouth and nose and the other two nursed broken bones. The outlanders seemed unscathed. One of them stood at the prow of two boats and picked up one in each hand. The other did the same with the sterns and they walked back toward their little encampment on the north end of the strand.

When they came back for the next two boats, no one offered resistance.

25

Since no one but the outlanders was diving, Kaida had a lot of time to think.

She sat atop the Fin, a high, sharply angled rock in the middle of the beach, watching the waves and running through the conversation with her father—with her “family”—over and over in her mind, wondering how she could have made it go better. When that grew tiresome, which was almost immediately, she recounted the fight on the beach. To see Ama-machi muster its courage had caused such a swell of pride in her. It proved that hers was not a village of mollusks after all, that there were a few vertebrates among them. But then it was all the more heartbreaking to see their backs broken instantly, to see their courage crushed like a paper boat.

It surprised her how much she wanted to root for the people of her awful little village. Perhaps she hoped to see some saving grace, some virtue—any virtue—that made it shallow for her to want to leave. But there was no such grace, no such virtue. And in any event, even if she never rooted for the outlanders, she hadn’t yet lost her fascination with them, either. If anything, her curiosity bored deeper, pressing on her, demanding her attention. It seemed strange to her that the outlanders waited until they were wholly encircled before they attacked. As handily as they’d defeated the mob of fishermen, it was self-evident that they had risked little by giving their enemy a superior position. But why risk anything at all? The outlanders could have won just as easily by charging straight in.

The moon rose behind her, the sun sank before her, the stars came out one by one, and still Kaida could not figure it out. She thought about other things in the interim, to be sure: how Shioko’s malice was different than Miyoko’s; whether malice in order to fit in, to avoid being left on the losing side, was better or worse than malevolence for its own delights; why Kiyoko seemed to have no voice of her own, wicked or otherwise; why outlanders didn’t know how to dive—as, surely, they did not, if Genzai’s people were any guide; whether Miyoko had any control over her cruelty, or whether it was the true puppeteer and she the puppet; whether Kiyoko made any moral judgments at all; whether Miyoko was capable of feeling guilt or shame; what the difference was between Miyoko’s being amoral and Kiyoko’s having no position of her own to call moral or immoral; how the Fin came to be there; whether her father and Cho could go about their rutting with his arm as badly injured as it was; why her father had yet to thank Kaida for sparing all his fingers; whether standing by one’s word was an admirable thing if one spoke in Genzai’s merciless language. But wherever her thoughts meandered, they always came back to that fight on the beach.

All the ones who had fought—or been injured, anyway; it was hard to say the villagers did much fighting—were now in the one house left in the village where fires and lamps still burned brightly. All the elders were in there. Kaida’s father, youngest of the village elders, had to be carried there by his wife and stepdaughters. The fathers of all the village families were there, along with all the injured men who could walk or limp their way to attend. They were meeting to discuss how to deal with the outlanders. No one had announced as much, but there was no other explanation for the gathering.

That left the mothers and grandmothers of the village at home, and left the children to do whatever they had a mind to. No sooner did that thought occur to Kaida than she wondered what mischief Miyoko was brewing. That was when she heard footsteps in the sand.

They were nearly inaudible, all but drowned out by the hissing surf, but Kaida had sharp ears. “I’m going to break every joint in your hand,” she said loudly, “starting with the thumb and working my way across.”

“What?”

It was Miyoko’s voice, below and behind her, off to the right. That would put Kiyoko on her left flank, also down on the sand. Shioko, always needing to prove herself, would be climbing the spine of the Fin to push her off.

“Shioko-chan,” Kaida said, not turning around, keeping her voice as tranquil as she could, “I’m telling you, if you put your hand on me I will break every joint in it.”

“How did she—?” said Kiyoko.

“Never mind,” said Miyoko. “She’s a freak. Let’s go.”

“I can still get her, Miyoko.”

“You can’t,” said Kaida. “Climb down now, Shioko, while you still have two good hands to do it.”

“You don’t have two good hands,” said Shioko. “You’re a freak.”

“Follow Miyoko. It’s what you’re good at.”

Kaida forced herself not to turn around and watch them go. Part of her wanted to know what they’d been planning, and whether they’d brought anything with them to play their little game. Miyoko often armed her sisters with sticks and ropes, sometimes with an oar or a spare scrap of net, but this time Kaida wouldn’t indulge her own curiosity. Better to savor the moment. Better to let them think she didn’t need to turn around to watch their retreat. Better to know that the next time they called her bug-eyes, they’d have to wonder if she really did have bug-eyes in the back of her head.

Once again her mind returned to the puzzle: why did the outlanders allow themselves to be surrounded? Just now, Miyoko and Kiyoko had tried to flank her while Shioko moved in to push her off the Fin. Why wait until they were in position? Surely it was better to strike first, or at least to choose Kaida’s path and ward off the attack before her enemies seized the advantage.

At last Kaida could tolerate the riddle no more. She jumped off the Fin, sinking to her ankles in the cold, wet sand, and walked to the outlanders’ camp.

She caught their scent before she heard them. They had a fire going, but she smelled only wood smoke, not fish or rice steam or any other food. A steady breeze pushed at her, weighted down by the scent of salt water as well as the other smells.

As she drew closer the breeze carried a strange guttural chant to her ears. Closer still, she made out muted conversation, and she thought she could pick out a pattern in the chanting. She could see little of the outlanders, as they’d built up a high mound of sand and rock, almost like a dune. The glow of their fire rose from behind it, as if a tiny sunrise were about to happen just on the north end of the beach.

As she made her way around the leeward side of the dune, sand shifted behind her. She whirled, but not in time to keep something from grabbing her hair. She let out a squeal and grabbed whatever was holding her. She’d half expected to find Miyoko’s fist there, but it was a big man’s fist and for all she could move it, it might as well have been made of iron.

She clung to it anyway, hoping to support at least a little of her body weight with something other than her scalp. “I’ve caught us a fish,” said the one who caught her, and he dragged her by the hair into their camp. Her heels scrabbled for purchase the whole way, but there was nothing but sand to push against, no way to reclaim her balance.

“I seem to remember throwing this fish back into the ocean,” said a bemused Genzai. His deep voice unsettled Kaida in a way she could not quite understand, though she did understand that with a big man dragging her around by her head, the fact that she even noticed Genzai’s voice indicated full well how scary she found him.

“Let her go, Masa-san.” Kaida fell to the sand the instant Genzai spoke. “What are you doing here, little girl?”

Kaida looked up at Masa, who in turn looked down at her. He was surprisingly skinny for one so strong, but Kaida saw his skin was drawn tight across his chest and arms, as if there was nothing soft in his entire body. He wore his hair long and scraggly, and that was what made her remember him: he was one of the two on the beach who let themselves get surrounded. He cocked his head to one side, studying her as if she were an insect he’d never seen before. “She’s got ears like a wolf, this one.”

“Does she, now?” said Genzai.

“Heard me coming,” said Masa. “Me.”

“I didn’t,” said Kaida. “You got hold of me before I could get away.”

“True, but you started to turn around before I caught you. I must be losing my touch.”

Who are these people? Kaida asked herself. Masa was skinny, yes, but not so skinny as to slip between grains of sand. She’d walked right past him on an empty beach and never noticed him. She’d heard travelers’ stories of yuki-onna who could turn their very bodies into snow, and she wondered whether Masa had a similar ability to turn himself into sand. In the stories the snow was always whipped up by the wind, just as the wind sometimes whipped up sand into whirling spouts. She wondered if snow was some outland kind of sand.

“Well?” Genzai said. “What are you doing here? Has your father hurt your feelings? Do you want me to break his fingers after all?”

“No,” said Kaida, taking in the rest of the camp. Four men sat around a little campfire, all like Masa, skinny and strong at the same time, though among all of them Masa was the only one who struck her as friendly. Two of the others busied themselves around a second fire. They’d built a sort of house for their fire, a three-walled house mostly embedded in the little dune they’d piled up. Its walls were flat and straight, more of a wind shelter than anything, and as Kaida could not see the long boxes they’d lowered from atop the cliff anywhere, she guessed the outlanders must have broken down the boxes to build the little house. The floor of the house was a deep ring of stones filled with glowing red embers.

Tending the fire was a one-eyed hunchback close to Genzai’s age. The empty socket of his missing eye seemed to stare right at her. The hunchback worked constantly at a bellows, a device Kaida had only seen once before. She was little at the time. An outlander’s ship had run afoul of the Maw and they’d unloaded everything to row it ashore. The outlander had told her a bellows was a house for a little birdie, and when Kaida peeked inside he shot a gust of wind right in her face and made her giggle. That outlander hadn’t been sweating like this one. This one knelt beside the ember bed, and pumping his bellows seemed like a lot of work.

The one squatting beside him chanted ceaselessly, heedless that his wild, white, wispy hair might well catch fire. At first Kaida thought he was naked and entirely covered in hair, but as her eyes acclimated to the flickering red light, she saw he had clothes—or what passed for them, anyway. He wore nothing but tattered ribbons of threadbare cloth, seemingly colorless except for the orange glow of the fire. Clothes, beard, and hair alike floated on the breeze. He took something out of the fire, banged it with loud, ringing strokes of a hammer, and pushed it back in among the coals.

“I don’t remember you being so easily distracted, Kaida-san. Is it past your bedtime?”

“No,” she told Genzai. “It’s just—I’ve never—well, what are they making?”

“That’s none of your concern. What are you doing here? Have you come to ask to go with us again?”

“Go with us?” Masa said. His scraggly hair rippled when he laughed. “Where?”

“Anywhere,” Kaida said. “Anywhere but here.”

Masa chuckled again. “And what is it you think you’ll be doing once you get there?”

It was the same question Genzai had asked. Kaida thought it was weird that these outlanders all had the same question. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” she said. “Dive. Fish. Whatever you—”

This time Masa laughed so hard she was sure they’d hear it back in the village. Genzai laughed too, just once, a grunt more than a laugh. The hunchback at the bellows scowled and shushed them. “Silence!” he snapped. “We’re close now.”

Kaida looked at him. He was horribly ugly, and the embers made his wrinkled face as red as a demon’s, all crosshatched in black by the wrinkles. He scowled at her too, just for good measure. His missing eye was horrid, but Kaida couldn’t help looking right into it.

“Dive!” Masa said, his laughter still more in control of him than he was of it. “That’s rich. Is that really the only thing these villagers have learned how to do with girls?”

She looked at Genzai, who had regained his composure and now sat as still as the rocks around the campfire. Masa chuckled, brushed his disheveled hair from his face, and picked his teeth with a sparrow bone.

“You never answered my question,” Genzai said, his voice as flat as ever. “Did you come to see what my friends are making in the fire?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here, Kaida-san?”

He looked at her silently. The others too. Kaida knew the one-eyed man was the one her stepsisters would find scariest, but they were wrong. The one to be afraid of was Masa. She didn’t like the idea of someone that fast, someone she couldn’t hear coming. And Genzai frightened her still more, but she forced herself to stammer it out. “I’ve been thinking about this all day, and I can’t figure it out. You let them surround you. The villagers. You and your friend. And then you fought them. But you let them surround you first.”

Masa cocked an eyebrow at her.

“How come?” she said.

Masa let out such a guffaw that it knocked him backward onto the sand. Genzai just chuckled, a deep, grating rumble like big plates of rock shifting below the earth. “Silence!” said the one-eyed man, still working his bellows. “We’re almost there. No distractions.”

“Tadaaki-san has a point,” Genzai said softly. Masa gave a little nod and, still sniggering, settled himself back on his rock. “Kaida-san, do you mean to tell us you risked your life just to ask your question?”

Kaida scrunched up her nose. “I didn’t risk anything.”

“Masa here was ordered to kill or cripple any who approached.”

“She was already crippled by the time I got to her,” Masa said with a little shrug. “You’ve got more than sharp ears, little one. You’ve got heart too.”

“I’ll go,” Kaida said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“No,” said Genzai, “you shouldn’t have. But nor should you leave empty-handed. Tell her why you let them surround you, Masa.”

Another little shrug from Masa. “Who was the first one to throw a punch?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Kaida.

“And who was the first man I hit?”

“I don’t know.”

“The one who’s missing all his teeth, what did I hit him in the mouth with? A fist? A knee? An elbow?”

“How should I know? I couldn’t see anything.”

“Because we were surrounded,” said Masa. “No one else in your village could see either.”

“All they’ve got is their imagination,” Kaida said, to herself as much as to anyone else. “If you don’t let them see what you do, and especially if you let them have the advantage before you strike . . . the only thing scarier than the shark you can see is the one you can’t.”

“She’s a natural, Genzai.”

Genzai scratched the underside of his chin, just behind his beard. “Not bad, little one. Is that really the only reason you came here?”

“Uh-huh.”

He laughed that deep, disquieting laugh of his again. “Sleep well, Kaida-san. You can tell your family we don’t plan to stay much longer.”

Kaida nodded, bowed, and turned to go. As she turned, her eye caught a glimpse of what the wild, wispy, white-haired man held in his tongs. It was a demonic visage, a mask, the tips of its horns and fangs glowing as red as the embers themselves, as red as the setting sun.

26

Kaida hadn’t been privy to the previous night’s discussion in the elders’ hut, but by morning she understood the agreement they’d come to. Ama boats were out on the water again, but only in the southern half of the cove. The water was deeper there, and abalone hunting went more slowly, but the south end held the advantage of having no violent outlanders floating about.

Kaida liked the deeper dives. She could go deeper than her sisters—deeper than all the girls her age, in fact—and so she could be alone. A lot of the older women encouraged her diving skills or praised her for the strength of her lungs. A few whispered when they thought Kaida couldn’t hear, wondering at how unnatural it was for a thirteen-year-old girl to dive as well as women of thirty-three or forty-three. Everyone knew an ama came into her best years as she grew older.

But no one seemed to understand what Kaida thought was obvious: a one-handed ama had no choice but to stay at the bottom longer. She could not use her kaigane with one hand and pry with her fingers with the other. To catch the same number of abalone, Kaida had to spend twice as long under the surface as her stepsisters.

Pressure on the ears was a different question, but her lovely stepsisters had taught her much about pain tolerance too. And with one good arm, she couldn’t swim back to the surface as quickly as the others either. Of course she could dive deeper than they could. To Kaida the logic was as obvious as the sun in the sky.

Today the waves rolled in high and broad-shouldered, and down deep they stirred the sand more than usual. It cut down on visibility, so Kaida had a harder time keeping track of Miyoko, Kiyoko, and Shioko. It didn’t matter, though. Down deep, the advantage was hers and they knew it. That was another reason to like the south end of the cove; there were three fewer predators to worry about.

She wished she could see the outlanders. Out of caution, not fear, she kept her distance. Like yesterday, their boats floated over the shipwreck. After a whole day of diving on it they hadn’t found what they were looking for, which was hardly surprising; even from a hundred boat-lengths away, it was easy to see they had no idea what they were doing. They dived with their pants still on. With no weights to help them sink. Their boats were ama boats, but they didn’t think to use the braziers to help their divers warm up. Nevertheless, Genzai seemed to think they’d find their quarry today—or so he’d said last night, if Kaida understood him rightly. She guessed his confidence must have had something to do with the demon face that his friends kept putting back in the fire. She thought they seemed to be in an awful hurry to finish it, whatever it was, though Kaida couldn’t guess how it could help them find anything underwater. Better for them to learn to swim properly instead. The only other outlanders Kaida had ever met had come from trading vessels, and as near as she could tell, those ones couldn’t swim or dive either.

Even so, the thought of diving inside that wreck made the water all around her seem colder. Swimming under a little shelf of coral was one thing. Having it close her in on all sides was something else entirely. There were holes in the shelves sometimes, and sometimes the other girls would swim in through one hole and come out somewhere else. Kaida used to do it too back when she was younger—back when her mother was still alive. But not since. Never since.

Merely imagining it caused her to retch. Foul, burning bile scalded the back of her mouth. Her throat grew tight; she had to kick the sandbag off her ankle and swim for the surface in middive.

“Kaida?” said Haru-san, whose mangled knee prevented him even from rowing, but he liked the sun and the roll of the surf. Sitting in his hut all day didn’t suit him, so he’d come out with the divers even though he couldn’t do anything but keep Sen company. As Sen found his two oars companions enough, Haru-san busied himself by tending the embers in the boat’s little brazier. “Are you all right?” he said.

Kaida nodded, coughed, and swished some water in her mouth until the taste of bile went away. She hooked her stump over the boat’s transom and sneezed into her hand. “I’m fine,” she said. The tightness in her throat had gone.

“You’re usually down much longer than that,” said Haru-san.

“I’m going back down.”

She scowled down at the water. It was embarrassing, not being able to dive. Diving was the only thing she was any good at. Now she’d put Haru-san to the work of pulling her sandbag all the way up to the surface, and she didn’t even have an abalone to show for his effort. She grabbed the line he was hauling in. “Don’t,” she said. “Let me see if I can get it first.”

It was a good test, and a common one—but only in shallower water. The sandbags were almost the same color as the seabed, so retrieving them was a test of vision for little girls learning to dive. The deeper the water, the less light penetrated to the bottom, and the harder it was to discern the sandbag from everything else around it. Villagers had been testing their daughters that way for generations, but never at this depth. Simply following the oarsman’s line down to the sandbag defeated the whole point of the exercise, and the deeper a diver had to swim, the more likely she was to miss her mark. “Are you sure?” Haru-san said. “I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

“You don’t think I can do it,” said Kaida.

“Oh, don’t get grumpy with me. No one could find it that deep. Your own mother wouldn’t have found it, and she was as strong as they come.”

Kaida scowled. She meant this test to be a way to bury her fear, and with it her shame at having been afraid. It was her mother’s memory, the memory of her death, that had panicked Kaida in the first place. Bringing it up again wasn’t helpful.

“Just let me try,” she said.

She filled her lungs and blew them empty, filled and emptied again, filled once more and dived, not straight down like a cormorant but angling like a dolphin. Halfway down she spiraled and cut the reverse angle, trying to track back toward the sandbag. Even at the halfway point, she was deeper than any other girl her age could dive.

She thought about the wreck. At this depth she would have entered the yawning maw of its upper hold. Again, even the thought of being enclosed made her want to vomit. The memory of being dragged down by the breastplate gripped her like Masa’s fist. The darkness of the hold was terrifying, even from the opposite end of the bay. The mere thought of what might have been in there—

There it was. The sandbag. Shioko might have called them frog-eyes or bug-eyes, but Kaida’s eyes were awfully good at spotting things underwater. She reached the bag and tugged on the line, signaling Haru-san that she’d found it. Then she kicked hard off the bottom and let herself ascend, matching the speed of her bubbles.

Her fear of the dark hold had gone. But where? It vanished as soon as she saw the sandbag. As soon as something else captured her attention. Because what scared her about the hold wasn’t the hold. It was what she imagined it to be.

It was just as Masa had told her: imagination could always be relied upon to conjure greater nightmares than the world itself could ever produce. That was why he and Genzai and the others struck such terror in Ama-machi. The villagers contended not with the outlanders but with demons, hungry ghosts, dark sorcery—or so the elders said. And that was why Kaida and the rest were diving on the south end of the cove: imagined fear, nothing else.

Kaida’s lungs burned like huge hot coals by the time she broke the surface. She sucked in a deep, loud breath, then latched on to Haru-san’s boat and let her body go limp.

“My, my!” he said. “Am I glad to be out on the water today! I can’t believe I just saw what I saw.”

“Believe it,” Kaida said, panting.

“You must be exhausted.”

Just then Miyoko appeared, just as if he’d summoned an evil spirit. Her long, pale form fluttered up from under the stern and she too took hold of the little boat’s gunwale. “Oh, Kaida-chan, look at you. Are you feeling ill?”

“I’m fine,” said Kaida. “Come on, let’s go back to the bottom.”

Miyoko gave her an evil grimace. Haru-san didn’t catch it. Neither did Sen.

“Come on,” Kaida said again. “We’ll go down there together. Sisters.”

“Sisters,” Miyoko said bitterly. Usually she regarded Kaida not with hatred but with cruel curiosity, the same fascination she had with the mice she sometimes trapped in little fishnets to see how long they could hold their breath before drowning. Not this time. The hate all but seethed from her now. Haru-san and Sen, bless them, were still blind to it, dutifully hauling in their sandbags. Hand over hand, they steadily drew in the dripping lines, and Miyoko watched on with growing dread. Diving was the only competition she knew Kaida could win. Pride demanded that she compete anyway, and that pride could not abide a loss—not to bug-eyed, one-armed Kaida.

Kaida could almost hear the thoughts wriggling around in Miyoko’s mind, seeking some escape, just like the mice she liked to drown. Kaida couldn’t let that happen.

“Are you feeling ill, Miyoko-chan? Not too exhausted, are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said, her face a squinting, wrinkled mask of hate.

All the while the wet, braided lines hummed against the gunwale of the little rowboat. At last, with a cheery “Here you go,” Haru-san passed Kaida a dripping bag. He kept hold of the line while she slipped the tether around her ankle. Sen aped him, handing over Miyoko’s bag, and Kaida felt a little thrill of triumph when Miyoko took it.

Miyoko gave her sweet little smile and said, “You know, Kaida-chan, why don’t you go ahead and dive, since you’re all ready to go, and we’ll find something to do together once we’re back in the village? You know, something we can do with all our sisters.”

The veiled threat was not lost on Kaida. The wisest strategy was to deflect and retreat. Go back home, stay alert, and hope that Miyoko lost interest before she got around to mounting a full assault. Kaida’s instincts pointed her in exactly that direction, but she was feeling saucy. “You’re right,” she said. “If we’re going to find something we can all do, we can’t dive here, can we? Because I’m the only one who can make it all the way down.”

Miyoko fumed. Finally Haru-san and Sen took notice. Sen didn’t know what to do with it, but Haru-san snapped. “Kaida, that was out of line and you know it. Miyoko’s older than you. You ought to show some respect. Go ahead, Miyoko. Tether your sandbag. She opened herself to this. It’s your right to show her up.”

Miyoko managed a humorless smile. Kaida beamed. “First one to the bottom wins,” she said. She let go of the boat and plummeted.

To Miyoko’s credit, she made an honest go of it. She made it almost halfway down before she kicked free of her sandbag. Kaida looked up, letting the weight carry her down, watching Miyoko grow smaller and smaller as she kicked hard for the surface.

There would be a price for that. Kaida knew it, but somehow she feared it less than she used to. Perhaps it was because today they’d been diving where she was at her best. Or perhaps it was last night’s victory at the Fin. Whatever the reason, Kaida decided she liked not being afraid.

She stayed in the water after most of the other ama had grown cold and tired, even though her own teeth were chattering. Her legs were so sore that she was glad they were too cold to feel much. She waited until all three of her stepsisters were sitting in Haru-san’s boat, then picked a different boat to ride in on—not because she was afraid, but because she wanted to show them she’d outwitted them again. She made sure they saw her smirking at them too. That would come with a price as well, but in her newfound cockiness she chose to overlook that fact.

For reasons she couldn’t fathom, a strange thought floated unbidden through her mind: if Genzai could have seen me today, he’d have been proud.

27

The sand was warm, but Kaida knew she couldn’t lounge on the beach long enough to stop shivering. Her stepsisters would come for her soon. So instead of waiting for the sun to do its work, she forced herself to her feet and jogged along the strand to warm herself.

That was what she told herself anyway, though in truth she knew seeing Genzai again was inevitable. It was no girlish, swooning, romantic drivel. The village girls talked that way, sometimes even about men as old as Genzai. Kaida had no thoughts in that direction. If she were ever to love Genzai, it would only be for taking her away from Ama-machi. She did not go to him out of infatuation. She went because she could see the outlanders paddling back in from the wreck, and if they’d found what they were looking for, they would pack up their camp and disappear.

Grown men could row faster than she could run on wet sand, and though she had the shorter distance to travel, they had the surf to aid them. She drew within shouting distance as they beached the first of their rowboats. Their next three boats came in almost in the wake of the first, but Genzai had been in the lead boat and he was already marching toward Kaida, leaving ragged-edged footprints in the sand. Deep creases furrowed his brow and the corners of his mouth turned down.

“Take me with you,” Kaida said. “Please.”

“Go home, little one.”

“You found what you were looking for, neh?”

“No.”

Kaida looked past him. Two men bent down to lift something heavy out of the belly of one of the rowboats. She ran on toward Genzai, drawing close enough now that she could smell the sweat and salt water in his clothing. “You’re lying,” she said. “Whatever you found, I can see them taking it. Please, you have to—”

Suddenly she was flat on her back. Somehow he’d kicked her feet out from under her, though an instant before she was certain he hadn’t been close enough to do that. Now he towered over her.

“I am not one you should accuse of lying,” Genzai said, and Kaida found it strange to hear so much emotion in his voice. Up until now she’d only heard implacable calm. Now his words came out thick, tumescent, as if his throat wouldn’t let the words pass. “You know this already. I am a man of my word.”

“But I saw it,” Kaida said, trying to look past him, to get just a peek at whatever his companions were taking from the rowboat.

“You see too little and assume too much.” He reached down, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and twisted her head around so she could see full well what she’d been trying to catch a glimpse of a moment before.

His companions were carrying Masa’s dead body.

Masa hung loosely, held up by his wrists and ankles, his mouth leaking salt water. His long black hair hung from his head like clumps of seaweed, dribbling shining ribbons of water. When they dumped him on the sand, he landed bonelessly, limp as a rolled-up fishnet.

“There,” Genzai said. “Have you seen enough now?”

Kaida’s eyes were locked on Masa, whose eyes stared blankly back at her from behind the demon mask—the same one his friends were finishing the night before. Thin ribbons of blood striped his face, matted his eyebrows, trickled in nigh-invisible rivulets down his cheeks. The mask had killed him. Kaida was sure of it.

It was stupid, Kaida thought, diving with a heavy iron mask on; it was as good a way as any to drown yourself. Masa would have known that. Like Kaida, he was a survivor—and unlike Kaida, he was vibrant, full of life. There was no reason for him to kill himself. So had Genzai executed his friend by drowning him? Kaida didn’t think so. Genzai was distraught. No, it was the mask that killed Masa, and Genzai knew it too, but Kaida couldn’t imagine how a mask by itself could do that to someone. It was as if wearing the mask had caused him to lose his mind.

Now that was a terrifying thought. Kaida wasn’t afraid of hungry ghosts haunting the wrecked carrack, but the mask was something she could see, something Genzai’s friends had made with their hammers and tongs. She remembered the one-eyed hunchback, the man with the wispy white beard chanting his spells, their faces sinister in the red-hot glow of the mask. What had they done? Channeled some demon into it? Was that why it was demon shaped?

It wasn’t so long ago that Kaida had looked down on her fellow villagers for fearing Genzai and Masa as evil magi. Now she found herself fearing the outlanders and their witchcraft. What else could have killed Masa? And what was in that shipwreck that was worth dying for, worth risking a friend’s life for, worth provoking the wrath of evil spirits?

“Throw it away,” Kaida whispered, only half aware that she’d spoken aloud. “That mask. Melt it down. Let the sea turn it to rust.”

“It frightens you?” Genzai said.

“Yes.” She was not ashamed to admit it.

“It should. And you are a wise child if you can see how afraid you ought to be. So do not let foolishness escape your lips. That mask is too important to be destroyed. Someone will dive with it again, and may die because of it. And since I have so few of my own men to risk, perhaps the next one to dive will be you.”