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🌊 Previously in MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA: Easla survived the unholy waters and learned the Holy Crone had always known they weren’t deadly. Her grandmother ordered her to find the gods’ home and steal three of their silver jaws (one each for the Holy Crone, Easla, and Elly) by killing the gods who wore them. Then she cut the rope and left Easla on the sunken atoll, the same way she’d left Easla’s mother. At sunrise, Easla chose to seek the gods and beg them to save the whole village, and she dove into the unholy waters…

THE HOLY CRONE

The Holy Crone crawled from the canoe onto the empty dock, her weak arms quivering pathetically. She hadn’t lifted a paddle since she’d risen from apprentice, meaning the journey from the atoll had taken much longer than she’d planned. Stupid.

But even stupider would be to rush this. She stayed on her hands and knees, catching her breath and waiting for the shaking to stop.

Through the gaps in the boards, dead fish knocked against the pilings, pale bellies up, and the unholy waters’ rot hung over everything. One missed Offering, and this was the outcome. As though she were the one responsible for the stillbirths. Bah. How could they blame her for that?

She had done everything she could. She had pushed the primes for bigger shares for every pregnant matron. Pulled those women off barkcloth duty. Squatted at every birthing herself, pressing more blue coral onto their tongues than even a birthing matron was allowed.

But with each dead newborn boy, she knew more surely—there would be no Offering, which meant no harvest.

The knowledge of the village’s fate had loomed over her, and still, she had fed the villagers hope, even when she had none. What else was she supposed to do? Fulfilling the Ocean Law was the Holy Crone’s duty. So with no other option, she had offered a girl, knowing they didn’t want one. It was better than doing nothing and letting the village tear itself apart.

But they had killed the lagoon anyway, and the chaos she had worked to avoid would now happen. Damn them.

She leaned on Easla’s paddle and forced herself upright. Her back cracked with the change in position, and pain twinged down her spine.

Once she had turned the canoe toward the village, she hadn’t allowed herself to look back at her granddaughter cowering on the failed atoll, not even when Easla had cried out across the ruined lagoon. The Holy Crone had heard that begging before, from that same ring of coral, and she had survived it then. She would survive it now.

Let the girl hate her. She already did. This was what needed to be done.

She guided the canoe under the dock and secured it with ropes on both sides, hiding it out of sight. As far as the village knew, the Holy Crone had not come back from the atoll. Let it stay that way. She needed to find Elly.

With careful steps, she crept along the village’s walkways, avoiding every creaking board. She had memorized them over these past moons of dwindling births, on nights when she couldn’t sleep, which was most of them, learning which planks would betray her and which would not. Now her paranoia had become her preparation.

Light flickered through the palms ahead. Not the cookfires of what should have been the Offering feast. No, these were torches, jammed crooked between the Gathering Place’s boards. Voices shouted over one another, the Cowrie Prime’s booming loudest.

The Holy Crone stopped at the edge of the fire’s light.

Primes who had never held a paddle before tonight now held them crosswise, a wall of wood barring the way to the Harvest Hut. Behind it, girls hauled out every basket of last Offering’s red algae, every string of dried fish, the last of the catch from the fish traps, and dumped it all at the Cowrie Prime’s feet.

She watched as his blue-stained fingers split the meager remains into piles. Not enough piles for everyone. Not for long.

She had known this would come one sun, that the primes would take control once the harvest failed. She had prepared the best she could, for an overthrow, for long moons of hunger. Not for the lagoon itself to die in a single night. No one could prepare for that.

Something else was wrong, too, something beneath the shouting. She couldn’t place it, but did it matter? This problem was bigger than her now.

She searched the huddle of crying girls and matrons, a mix of red and undyed barkcloth. Her eyes passed over Relfy, sitting apart from the rest, her arms wrapped around nothing. She didn’t let them linger there.

At the group’s edge sat Elly, knees to her chest, the cowrie shell that fool of a prime had thrown at her clutched beneath her chin.

The Holy Crone stared until Elly felt her gaze and looked up. Then she leaned into the torchlight. A breath of visibility, and no more.

Elly bolted toward her. Too fast, too obvious.

The Holy Crone caught her by the arm and pulled her into the darkness, pressing a finger to her granddaughter’s lips. They waited, hearts pounding, listening for footsteps. None came.

The primes were too busy counting. The matrons were too busy waiting. Waiting to be saved by someone tired of saving.

In the Holy Hut, she and Elly would be safe. As safe as anyone could be now. Its ceiling was stuffed with red algae, and beneath its floor lay a hut’s width of bamboo tubes filled with freshwater.

Since the first Holy Crone’s death shortly after last Offering, she had been siphoning from the villagers’ supplies every few suns, refreshing her stores every few moons. It wasn’t enough to feed everyone. But she and Elly would hold on. Until Easla returned. Or until there was nothing left to—

Wood creaked, though neither of them had moved.

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🌊 Previously in MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA: The atoll sank, and the unholy waters flooded the lagoon, killing every fish, and a matron who fell in died, screaming that it burned. When her blue-coral-crazed father drowned Relfy’s baby, Easla chose to save Elly instead. Then, obeying the Holy Crone’s claim that only the gods could save them now, Easla broke her promise to her sister and paddled away toward the sunken atoll. There, her grandmother took her hand… and pushed her into the deadly waters...

My scream disappears into the sea. I thrash, bracing for the burn the Ocean Law promises any sinner who touches these waters. My back slams into coral, and I sit up, waist-deep on the sunken atoll, gasping.

The red water floods my torn palms and the gash in my heel, and the pain flares sharper than the lagoon’s salt ever stung any of my open wounds.

I scramble to my feet. The unholy waters still swirl around my shins. I clutch my hands to my chest and wait for the pain to spread, for the rest of my skin to burn.

It doesn’t. The sting stays only in my wounds. My nose itches from the rotten stench, but my skin stays whole.

The current pushes gently at my legs.

A sob of relief bursts out of me, then catches.

The Holy Crone. She pushed me. I shouldn’t be surprised. She banished her own daughter. But I did everything she asked. I thought that would be enough. She took my hand, looked me in the eyes, then pushed me in, knowing these waters would—

Wait, I’m alive. How am I alive? I lift a cupped hand and watch the red water drain through my fingers. “They’re…not deadly?”

A rope soars toward me.

My hands grab it before I even decide to, the way every girl learns to grab a line thrown her way. Its other end knots onto my canoe.

The Holy Crone still stands in it, now drifting backward into the lagoon. She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it. She presses a fingertip deep into her ear, digs, and flicks something small into the red water. Whatever it is, the current takes it.

“The village can’t be saved,” she says. “But we can save ourselves, if you do exactly as I say.”

I want to heed her words, but as I dip my hand again into the waters I was always told would kill me, my mind whirls with this new discovery. An impossibility. I can’t stop staring at the water around me, touching me. “B-but a Great Flood cleansed the world of sinners. The Ocean Law says these waters kill.”

“Only those that breathe water,” she says. “Not us.”

Not us? She was there. “You heard that matron’s screams. She was clawing at her canoe, screaming that it burned.”

The Holy Crone shrugs. “It stings, yes.”

“That matron died!”

The Holy Crone’s gaze doesn’t waver. “From a paddle.”

She says it with such certainty that my grip slackens, and the current pulls the rope through my raw palms.

I catch it at the knot before I drop it, my blood smearing the rough fibers of coconut husk. Was the matron’s pain from fear and not reality? Was her death from humans and not gods?

What did I truly see? The matron scrabbling at the canoe, tipping it toward her, the Oyster Prime’s son sliding toward the water. The paddle, ripped from the girl’s hands. The Oyster Prime swinging it down.

The paddle.

The waters didn’t kill her. That matron could have climbed back in the canoe. She could be holding her son right now. My stomach turns. All it would have taken was… “You could have told them.”

“In all that screaming?” The Holy Crone has the audacity to look annoyed. “Who would have heard me?”

“B-but before. You always knew. And you never…You never…”

She stares past me, into the haze. “What would it change? Where would anyone go? There’s nothing out there.”

I turn to look at the waters I’ve been taught to fear. Red-gray waves chop in from the haze, endless. If we knew they weren’t deadly, would we have desired to explore? What would we have found beyond the haze—an endless flooded world as the Ocean Law says, or more lies? So many lies. I twist the rope in my fists. “The gods never said they would accept a girl, did they?”

Behind me, the Holy Crone sighs. “The other option was to give up. It was better to take action. That’s what you must now do. You must go.”

My stomach drops and my breath comes faster. “You’re b-banishing me?” She can’t banish me. Not after everything I’ve done to be good. Not now. I spin back to the lagoon, or what remains of it, and pull fist over fist, dragging her and my canoe toward me.

The Holy Crone sets her feet and lets me pull her in. Her eyes stay on me, narrowed. “No, I’m sending you. Find the gods’ home.”

My hands go still on the shortening length of rope. She knows where the gods live?

“Swim into sunrise. Dive to the seafloor.” Her words are spoken clearly, but they seem to come out faster than the freshwater spring. “The gods wear silver jaws that let them breathe water.”

The gods wear what? “That’s not mentioned in the Ocean—”

“Don’t question me.” Her voice snaps across the water, and my mouth shuts on reflex.

“I know of a place.” She lowers her volume, though there’s no one here but me and the waves. “With food. Fresh water. We can’t reach it without those jaws. It’ll be hard, but I know you can get them.”

I squint at her, trying to make sense of all this nonsensical. “Enough god jaws f-for the whole village?”

She shakes her head. “Only three. You, me, and Elly.”

Another face rises before I can stop it. Relfy, clapping across the water. Her baby’s bubbles, popping one by one. “What about Relfy?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

Her eyes don’t soften. “It will already be a great risk. And Relfy? She is not family.”

I can nearly grab the canoe’s side. Instead, my fingers dig into fists. “But the gods abandoned us. Why would they help me now?”

“They won’t. So you’ll take.” The Holy Crone’s so close, I can see the wrinkles bunched beneath her inked-out forehead tattoos. “Without the jaw, the god drowns, same as any of us.” Her thin upper lip curls. “I’m not telling you to ask for help. I’m telling you to kill the gods.”

She pulls a knife from her skirts and slices the rope.

It goes slack in my bloody hands.

“No!” My voice cracks. “Don’t leave me here!” I lunge, but she shoves off with my paddle. Leaving me like she left my mother.

Her eyes hold the same crazed look they did that sun. “You already know the truth, Easla,” she says, the current carrying her out of reach. “We can’t save us all.”

The coldness in her tone sends a shudder down my spine. “Please no!” I cry out, and I’m reminded of how my mother begged when we left her broken on the atoll. When I sat in my canoe in the lagoon’s calm blue last harvest, while the entire village floated in our half-circle, and we watched my mother’s banishment.

At first, she didn’t stay. She dove off the corals and swam for us. For Elly and me. She swam like she was racing, arms tearing through the water, her braid coming loose behind her, and for three strokes, four, I believed she would reach us.

Then the first Holy Crone rose in the canoe my grandmother paddled, raised a paddle high, and swung it down on my mother’s shoulder.

Something snapped, like a mangrove root breaking. That arm stopped moving, and my mother sank lower, but still she kicked toward me.

Then the first Holy Crone grabbed her by her braid and hauled her over the side of the canoe, and Grandma Almti paddled them back to the atoll, where they rolled her onto those same corals and left her like a gutted fish.

Now my grandmother paddles away, and I’m the one left behind.

Blood drips from my hands into the red-gray water. It chases her. I could too. I’ve swum every sun until my arms gave out, training for a race from atoll to village. This is that distance.

But my feet won’t leave the coral. If I swim after her, will she raise my paddle the way the first Holy Crone raised hers? She told me where to go, and it isn’t to the village. Even now, with the atoll sunk, the lagoon dying, and the gods abandoning us, I can’t make my body disobey her.

So I stand, the red waters tugging at my legs, until her shape thins into the haze and disappears.

Slowly, the sun sinks behind the village. The red waters darken to black.

At some point, my legs start to shake, and I drop to my knees. Bony fingers of coral dig into my shins. I sit back, and the water laps at my waist and soaks my barkcloth dress to the ribs. Everywhere the cloth clings, my skin prickles and itches like a thousand urchin spines. I curl in my knees and wrap my arms around them. Each wave that rolls over the wall slaps my chest and throws spray into my face. It catches in my throat, and each cough scrapes deeper than the last, until my eyes burn and stream.

My mother was killed by the gods for living impiously. And I am to be impious and kill the gods to live? How does that make sense? I drop my face into my hands and tear at my hair, pulling it loose from the braid that hurts my scalp. I’ve tried so hard to obey the gods. Now, the Holy Crone wants me to kill them?

Doubting the gods is a sin. Killing them would be worse than any sin I have a word for, and what could be worse than an afterlife of eternal flood and blood? I dig my thumbnail into the scars on my thumb and press until the sting drowns the thought.

The thought rises anyway. The gods sank our atoll. They let the fish die. They didn’t send the harvest.

Are they testing us? Testing me? Has the Holy Crone lost her way? She’s supposed to hear the gods. She’s supposed to speak for them. But now she wants them dead.

When that matron fell in, the Holy Crone lay curled in the bottom of my canoe, staring at nothing. I’ve seen that same lost look on matrons after their birthing goes wrong, rocking their arms with no baby in them. Loss turns people strange. The jaws, the gods’ home—some of what she said may be true. But to kill the gods?

I press harder into my skin, until blood beads under my fingernail.

In the lagoon, a smear of torchlight glows through the haze where the village should be. On any other Offering night, that glow would mean the feast.

Shouts drift over the water, too far off for words, but they don’t sound like celebration. And why would they?

There’s no harvest.

Has Elly eaten?

Gods. I’ll never leave you, that’s what I told her at the top of the palm tree. Then I gave her seat to the Holy Crone, and she sat in our father’s canoe instead. And then I paddled away while she screamed about my promise. I told myself the apprenticeship would keep her safe.

But the woman I gave it all up for cut the rope and left me here.

This next sun was meant to be my race. I would have won. I would have stood at the Holy Crone’s side. But there’s no race now, no village left to lead.

I tuck my chin to my knees and watch the village’s faint glow flicker through the haze.

Three jaws. For the Holy Crone, me, and Elly. Relfy is not family. And the rest of the village, the matrons who wouldn’t meet my eyes and the girls who refused to share my canoe? They will all be left to die, the same way we all left my mother. Why should I care? None of them ever cared for me.

But my mother, she knelt for Relfy. At the trial, she dropped before the mangrove chair and begged for both of us. “They’re just girls,” she said. Relfy wasn’t her family.

And the Ocean Law says it too: Only one swimmer endured. From Atoll, through Lagoon, until she found our new home. Others would have rested, but this woman returned. Bringing canoes, and saving us all.

Saving us all.

Not three.

The haze lightens to gray, then pink. With the light comes the morning wind, the way it always does, and it pushes at my back.

Upon this atoll, the gods gave the first Holy Crone our laws. As the first Holy Crone swam, her successor must too. The matrons were meant to race by those words at sunrise.

Which is now.

Maybe this is my race. Maybe our loss has twisted the Holy Crone’s words, and the gods speak through what remains of her grieving mind.

Perhaps it’s the gods who want me to find the gods.

So I will. But killing them won’t save anyone. I’ll find them the way the first Holy Crone did, and I’ll beg them. Only the gods can save us now.

The unholy waters lap at my skin, whispering their sinners’ song. Inviting me to sleep, to drown. The ocean doesn’t care who it claims. But I’m not ready to join my mother.

So I stand, my legs stiff, my skin stinging, and I wade to the atoll’s outer edge. The wall drops away into the depths and red-gray waves chop in from the endless haze.

I fill my lungs the way I do before every dive, then I jump, and like the Holy Crone told me to do, I swim into sunrise.

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🌊 Previously in MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA: Determined to win the Holy Crone's apprenticeship, Easla paddled her grandmother out to the atoll for the Offering, giving away the seat she'd promised Elly, who was left paddling their father. As the village took blue coral for prayer, the Cowrie Prime consumed far more than his share. The sea chose Relfy's baby, though Relfy had smudged her daughter with dirt and tucked something white into the basket. Then a rumble sounded beneath the water, the atoll sank, and the unholy waters rushed in…

The atoll is gone. Where the white ring of dead corals just stood, unholy waters now roll in over…nothing.

Pain flares behind my eyes, and a sting bites into my hands where they still grip my paddle. The gods wouldn’t take our atoll. We’re their chosen people.

I turn away, and the headache softens. Yes, we are the gods’ chosen people. Warmth seeps back through my chest and shoulders, loosening spaces I didn’t realize had clenched tight.

In front of me, the Holy Crone still stands in my canoe with her hands raised in prayer, palms up, fingers tipped toward the sea, like she’s waiting for the gods to finish answering.

That’s it. They must still be answering. I misunderstood what I just saw. I keep my eyes away from the horizon and search for more proof of what I believe.

The villagers float motionless in our circle of canoes. A Sand Dollar matron still wears the blissful smile the blue coral brings, the smile of someone glimpsing the gods’ promised afterlife. Proof. Everything is fine.

But wait, above that smile, her eyes bulge wide, fixed on the sight I won’t look at. And in her lap, her baby screams red-faced, yet the wails land muffled in my ears.

Then a voice pierces the dullness. “Look! The harvest has risen!”

I follow the matron’s pointed finger and lean over the side of my canoe, looking down instead of at what I saw but can’t explain. The atoll can’t be gone. The haze must be blocking it.

All around, canoes tip toward the water, the whole village leaning with me.

Beneath us, shadows appear, growing larger as they rise.

I grab onto the sight like a rope. This is the red algae the Ocean Law promises. Follow these rules and the red algae grows. I keep my eyes on the blue waters, not the murky red-brown slowly staining them darker. Here comes the harvest we’ve been expecting, enough to fill the Harvest Hut until next Offering. The thought wraps me back into the blue coral’s comfort, warm as the dock’s boards at high sun.

Somewhere nearby, a matron laughs. She must feel as silly as I do for doubting.

The first shadow breaks the surface in a flash of red, and my heart leaps. The red algae—no. Scales? Fins? It’s…a snapper, its mouth gaping open and shut, gulping at the air.

The matron’s laughter stumbles, then starts again, higher.

One fish. It means nothing. It must have swum up too fast, chasing the harvest. The red algae is still coming.

Another fish breaks the surface.

Then…hundreds. Parrotfish, grunts, minnows, all crowding up from below, gasping at the surface the way I gasp when I’ve stayed down too long.

One snapper tips onto its side. Its tail twitches, then stills, its white belly turned to the sky. Then another tips. And another. Dying.

The matron’s laugh breaks into a scream.

Whatever bliss the blue coral gave me scatters like sand in the wind. I’m left with sudden clarity. No atoll to hold back the unholy waters. No lagoon. No harvest of red algae.

A shooting pain rips through my head, and this time, nothing smooths it over. Break even one and the sea always knows. My heel throbs where the bark tore in.

More screams echo out. Paddles plunge into the water, and canoes lurch in every direction, knocking into each other.

Did we break the rules? But the gods said a girl was wanted!

No, the Holy Crone said a girl was wanted. Did she lie? Did the gods lie? These questions are sins, worse than any song my mother sang. But I can’t stop them.

The splashing paddles fling red spray of unholy waters into the air. It catches in my throat, and I cough, harder than the poisoned air has ever made me cough. Around me, coughs overpower the screaming. Pained faces turn toward my canoe.

Toward her.

I turn too, making eye contact with the woman who will fix this. “Holy Crone, w-what should we do?”

She stares at the reddening water like she doesn’t believe what she sees. “This…is the end,” she breathes, so low only I can hear. Then her knees fold, and she sinks into the bottom of our canoe.

The defeat on her face knocks the air from my lungs. Tomorrow, I planned to win the right to stand at her side. Now she lies curled at my feet like a frightened child?

I lean onto my knees—breath racing, mind whirling. My thoughts drag like a net through mud, the blue coral still fighting to show me glimpses of the gods-promised afterlife. But every dead fish I look at pulls my head a little clearer.

A tainted lagoon means no more fish. No snapper for my basket, no minnows for the younger girls’ nets. The mangroves drink from this water, and the palms, and the bamboo. They’ll die too, and the crabs that hide in their roots. Everything we eat comes from this lagoon. Without it, we’ll starve.

The gods wouldn’t abandon us over one failed Offering…would they? I close my eyes and rub my temples. My palms sting, then burn, rubbed raw from the climb down the palm tree with—

Elly.

Her name slams into me, and my heart thrashes like a fish on my spear. I have to keep her safe.

I grab my paddle and search the churning circle. There—our father’s canoe, a few lengths away. Elly huddles at its front, arms locked around her knees, while Dams fights to hold them steady in the choppy water. I dig in toward them.

There’s a shriek to my left.

I whip around.

The Oyster Prime’s paddling girl has swung their canoe hard toward the village, and the young son’s mother—still leaning out over the side, staring at the dying fish—tumbles in.

She flails in the unholy waters. “It burns!” she screams, her words pitching shrill. She claws at the canoe she fell from, hauling herself up with both arms.

The Oyster Prime yells, and his paddling girl does too, but the matron only struggles harder, her shrieks swallowing their warnings. Their canoe tips toward her. Inside, the little boy slides toward the low edge.

The Oyster Prime rips the paddle from his girl’s hands. I’ve never seen a prime hold one. He swings it high, clumsy, two-handed, and brings it down on the matron’s head.

A loud crack echoes across the lagoon.

The villagers stop shouting.

The matron stops moving.

The canoe levels, and the Oyster Prime drops the paddle then drags his son into his lap.

In between the matron’s lifeless legs, a school of minnows bobs to the surface, their tiny mouths gaping open.

“The unholy waters killed her,” a matron cries. “As the Ocean Law says!”

The crack of the paddle still rings in my ears. But the minnows—nothing struck the minnows. And they’re dead too.

“We’re all going to die!” a girl shouts.

“Get off the water!” a prime bellows.

“The fish traps!” someone cries. “Pull them before those fish die too!”

Every canoe turns and races for the village, entangling one another. Girls shout at girls to pull harder, primes shout at everyone, babies wail.

A canoe cuts across my path.

I backpaddle hard to keep from ramming it. Beyond it, Elly’s canoe drifts farther away.

In the bottom of our canoe, the Holy Crone stares at nothing.

I steer around and nearly crush Relfy’s basket, still bobbing in the churned water. I brace my paddle and stop beside it.

The sea chose her. No one takes back what the gods have chosen. But the gods just took back our atoll. Our promised harvest. Did they even choose this baby? Or did they refuse her, the way they refused the rest of us?

Through the shouts, a whistle rises—two notes. Easla. The same call that found me in the lagoon this morning. I know exactly where to look.

Three canoes away, Relfy lunges for her paddling girl’s paddle, her long black braid whipping over her shoulder. A Whelk matron drags her back by the shoulders and pins her to the bench, and their girl paddles hard for the village.

Relfy’s lips purse in another whistle, but the screams swallow it. She slams her hands together instead. Sharp claps crack across the water, again and again. Then she jabs a finger at me. At the basket beside me.

Her baby, rejected by the gods. I can read the emotion on her face like she speaks it out loud. Save my baby.

I look down. Inside the basket, a tiny cheek peeks out from the barkcloth, still smudged with dirt. That thought from before that I couldn’t reach—now I can. Relfy’s baby is never dirty. She put that smudge there on purpose. She never wanted her baby chosen.

The claps come faster.

We’re all going to die, and the gods have abandoned us. What does it matter if I take back an Offering the gods didn’t want? I lean over as far as I can and scoop up the basket, careful not to touch the deadly water it drips.

Across the water, Relfy’s clapping stops.

In bundled barkcloth, her baby coos. Wedged beside her is—

My breath catches, and I nearly drop the basket. My cowrie shell. I reach for it slowly, like it’s a fish that might spook. I lift it from the basket and stroke it with my thumb. Its weight in my palm is the same as when I gave it to Relfy last Offering, out on the lagoon. Its white, freckled with black spots in the same striking pattern that first caught my eye. A tiny hole marks where her string ran through it, the string she’s worn every sun since, hidden beneath her barkcloth.

She kept it. Even after I refused her scallop this morning, after I told her to rid herself of my cowrie. She gifted it to her daughter.

A new confidence settles in me, an anchor holding me tight. If the gods have abandoned us, then how I act no longer matters. I can spend these last suns with Relfy, be the carefree, happy person my mother always wanted me to be. I lift the cowrie shell to my lips.

A deep voice gasps. “It’s a sign.”

My father’s canoe bumps against mine. He leans across the gap, his shell-trimmed cape slipping off one shoulder, and snatches the cowrie from my fingers. Studies it. His eyes are glazed, his pupils swallowing their color, and blue still stains his fingers from the bowl of blue coral he wouldn’t give back. “A cowrie shell for the Cowrie Prime.” He grins, revealing blue-stained teeth. “The gods want me to lead.”

My stomach drops. The lagoon is dying, and my father is…smiling?

He chucks the shell over his shoulder. It cracks against Elly’s shin, and she flinches, but he doesn’t notice. Under his shifting weight, their canoe rocks, and behind him, Dams braces her paddle to steady them.

“Elly, come here now,” the Holy Crone says from my feet. Her voice is slow and quiet, more begging than demanding.

Elly stares at the strip of red water between our canoes. Her fingers whiten on the canoe’s edge, but she doesn’t let go.

“Come on, Elly,” I say, balancing the basket against my hip and holding out my free hand. “Just, s-step across.”

At my voice, the Cowrie Prime turns. He looks at me—no, through me. It’s like he doesn’t recognize any of us. His eyes drop to the basket on my hip, where Relfy’s baby rests inside. “The Offering must be given,” he recites in a prayer-like intonation.

Doesn’t he remember? I clutch the basket to my chest. “No, Cowrie Prime, the gods already rejected—”

Before I can blink, my father snatches the basket from my hands and hurls it into the unholy waters. Then he grabs Elly’s paddle from her lap and raises it overhead, aimed at the basket. To sink it. To drown Relfy’s baby.

I grip my canoe’s edge with one hand and stretch across the gap with the other, reaching for it.

But his swing throws his weight sideways, and his canoe lurches. My fingers are a hand-span from the paddle when I see Elly sliding across her bench, toward the unholy waters.

What can we say about those choices made between breaths? Do we choose to blink? To inhale, to think? I want to say I’m stronger than my body, but my body moved, and my body made its choice.

My hand lands on the edge of their canoe instead. I find myself stretched across the gap, shaking hard and barely breathing, holding their canoe level so Elly doesn’t fall in. Dams grips Elly by the back of her dress.

Above me, the paddle comes down with a heavy slap.

Then my father lifts it, water streaming from its tip. “The gods have accepted our Offering.”

I go limp, my muscles catching before I collapse into the water below. Like Relfy’s baby just did.

In my head, Relfy claps. Louder, louder. For one breath? Ten? Gods, it’s all I can hear. I stare at a shaking Elly, at the cowrie shell in her canoe’s bottom, anywhere but where Relfy’s basket once was. Don’t look.

But I do. Because I need to know.

Tiny bubbles float to the surface. So small, so delicate. Popping then disappearing like the little baby they came fro—

“Paddle,” the Cowrie Prime orders Dams. He points toward the village, and their canoe slips out from beneath me.

The Holy Crone’s sharp fingernails dig into my shoulder, yanking me back before I fall in.

I sink onto my bench and stare at the flat, tainted water. No more bubbles. I need to tell Relfy what happened. Need to tell her I tried. Our final suns…together. That bubble of hope bursts, too.

The Holy Crone drops my paddle onto my knees. “Take us to the atoll.”

I stare at her. The atoll? It sank. I watched it sink. There’s nothing out there but dead fish and deadly waters.

“No!” Elly’s cry pierces my heart. She reaches for me, leaning like she might jump out and swim, but she looks at the red water and shrinks back. “Don’t leave me, Lug,” she calls across the growing distance.

I look back at Elly, no reassurances coming to my lips. I can’t even smile. I turn to the Holy Crone, and it hurts to speak, but I force out words. “Sh-shouldn’t we return to the village?”

She grabs my shoulders, forcing me to look at her. Within folds of saggy skin, beneath the black cross inked across her forehead, her yellowing eyes bore into mine. The woman curled at my feet is gone. This is the Holy Crone once more. “Only the gods can save us now,” she says.

The gods. Upon the atoll, they gave the first Holy Crone our laws. If they’ll speak to anyone, it will be to her, out there.

Behind her, the unholy waters keep rushing in, pushing us back toward the village. Back toward Elly.

“The sea slug stays with her jellyfish,” Elly shouts from behind. “You said so.”

I turn. Elly stands at the end of her canoe, so small in front of our father’s broad back, strands of her blonde hair whipping loose around her face. Her tiny hands are balled into fists, and her shoulders heave with sobs I can hear across the water. She looks like she did at the top of the palm tree, staring at the atoll where we left Mother.

Up there, I promised I’d never leave her. I promised to turn my canoe to face the village, so she’d never have to look at the atoll again. Then she begged me to sing, and I recited the Ocean Law at her instead. I gave her seat in my canoe to the Holy Crone.

Dams’s strokes carry them farther into the haze, but Elly still reaches for me.

The village. That’s where I need to be, but what help can I offer? Relfy waits for a baby I couldn’t save. I have no food to give, nowhere left to hunt it. In the village, we’ll all die. Unless the gods save us, the way the Holy Crone says.

And she’s told me where to go.

I’ve never refused the Holy Crone. No one does. Obeying is how I’ve kept Elly and me alive since last Offering.

I turn my canoe away from the village.

“Don’t go.” Elly’s pleading now, her shouts growing hoarse. “Please don’t go.”

Ahead of me, the Holy Crone’s silhouette lines up with the haze-scattered reflection of sunset, and my resolve strengthens. This is the right choice. I dig deep and paddle a long stroke. I can’t save us, but the Holy Crone will. She’ll convince the gods to love us once again.

“You promised!” Elly calls.

“Faster,” the Holy Crone hisses.

My raw palms tear open further. Skin sloughs off onto the handle, but I paddle again and again, focusing on the pain instead of my crying sister. With each stroke, her cries fade more into the wind.

Soon, a whining crunch scrapes the bottom of our canoe.

I jerk and peer over the side. Beneath the murk, pale coral reaches up, close enough for me to touch with my paddle. The atoll? But I watched it sink.

Coral crumbles. It breaks apart piece by piece. It doesn’t drop all at once and wait beneath the surface.

I paddle in place against the inflowing current. Blood slicks my grip, forcing me to hold tighter. The throbbing makes me gasp. “Do it now. Pray.” Here, where the gods first spoke to her. Let her ask them to fix this, then let us go home.

The Holy Crone stays seated, like she’s waiting.

A wave slaps our canoe, and red spray spatters the wood near my foot. I flinch away. We can’t stay here. Why won’t she pray?

I stand up and hold out my hand to help her up. “Please, Holy Crone. Before the waters—”

With sudden steadiness, she rises on her own. Then she takes my hand. For a breath, we stand face to face, my hand in hers.

Then she yanks my arm, pulling me off balance, and drives both palms into my shoulder.

My hip slams into the canoe’s side, and I tip out over the unholy waters. The waters that killed that matron. That choked every fish in our lagoon. The waters where sinners burn.

I grab for the Holy Crone, but she leans out of reach and only watches as I fall. Giving me to the sea.

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🌊 Previously in MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA: Easla saved Elly from a deadly fall, but answered her sister’s cries for their mother with Ocean Law instead of comfort. Then the boy the village prayed for was born a girl. The Holy Crone, Easla’s grandmother, declared that the gods would accept a girl instead, meaning any baby girl born since last Offering could be chosen, even Relfy’s daughter. But for one breath, Easla saw fear on the Holy Crone’s face…

No one speaks. The only sounds are the splash of our strokes and the crying of baby girls. Every canoe in the village follows in my wake, our stilt-huts shrinking behind us into the mangroves and the haze.

At the docks, the villagers cheered as they piled into the canoes. I joined in, loud enough to be heard, but I couldn’t stop picturing the Holy Crone’s face from the Gathering Place, that one breath of fear flashing across it. Then we entered the lagoon, and voices faded into whispered prayer, and I no longer had to pretend.

The Holy Crone sits on the bench in front of me, so close I could reach out and touch her gray braid.

Once per harvest, we make this crossing—a reversal of our ancestors’ journey. From the atoll, the first Holy Crone swam across the lagoon and found our village waiting at its center. So from the village, we paddle back, out to the atoll to pay our respects.

As we go, we’re meant to focus on the gods and our gratitude.

I try. I thank them for the harvest of red algae that will soon rise, and I beg them to carry me through tomorrow’s apprenticeship race the way they carried the first Holy Crone.

But every stroke tears at my palms, rubbed raw from climbing down the palm tree with Elly on my back, and the sting scatters my prayers. My mind wanders to more dangerous thoughts.

What will happen with this Offering? The Ocean Law demands a boy, and we have no boys to give. The gods told the Holy Crone at the Gathering Place that this will be a celebration of girls, and I believe them, I do. Who wouldn’t believe the gods?

But the Holy Crone isn’t behaving as she should. We’re meant to keep our hearts with the gods and our eyes on the atoll. Her moves are subtle, but her braid betrays her. Its gray strands—frizzing like an old, worn rope—sway out of sync with our canoe’s rhythm, hinting at small turns of her head.

She must be peering into the lagoon, looking down and around like she’s…waiting for something? Is she still afraid?

No, this is what the gods want. They told her so. I should hold no doubt in my heart. The gods save the pious, and we’re about to please the sea.

My paddle catches, and I double-stroke to maintain my speed at the front of our procession, where the Holy Crone is expected to be.

Her apprentice should be the one paddling her, the only matron who takes up a paddle, as the first Holy Crone once did. But she has none, not yet. At the docks, while girls dragged out the extra canoes, and matrons handed down their babies, and primes waited for their girls, I ran straight to her and asked for the honor.

Two others my age reached her a breath behind me. The Holy Crone didn’t look at any of us. She just stepped into my canoe and settled onto my empty second bench, where Relfy once sat.

Now it holds the Holy Crone. I drive my next stroke deep, and our canoe surges forward. I’ll show her what kind of apprentice I’ll be. Attentive. Precise. I’ll hold our place at the front. I’ll stop us at the right distance from the atoll. I’ll keep the chant without missing a word. And tonight, I won’t wince when I am inked with my given-to mark.

Tomorrow, on the one sun besides the Offering that a matron may enter the water, I’ll win the race to claim the title of the Holy Crone’s apprentice, and this seat will be mine for good.

I can already feel the difference. When I untied my canoe, matrons watched, but for once their eyes slid past me, settling on the Holy Crone, not searching me for sins.

And when I guided us out through the mangrove tunnel, the whole village followed. I wasn’t shunned. I led.

This is what piety earns. Isn’t it?

The Ocean Law makes it sound simple, a clean white atoll separating the Sinners from the Chosen People. They died, and we lived. Because we were good, and they were not.

But since last Offering, I’ve had this nagging thought, a tiny splinter stuck inside me. The Sinners poisoned the gods’ air and sea, so the gods drowned them. But Relfy’s kiss didn’t poison the air. My mother’s laughter didn’t poison the sea.

And I sinned as much as either of them. I kissed Relfy. I listened to my mother’s songs, let her unbraid my hair, answered to the name Lug. Yet I wasn’t touched. So which side of the atoll am I on?

My canoe drifts off course, and I adjust it back, heading in the opposite direction of the setting sun. We can’t see the atoll yet, not with the haze. But like the gods, it’s always there, protecting us from sin. Surrounding our lagoon in a perfect circle and protecting us from the unholy waters beyond.

My thoughts may wander impiously for the gods to hear, but it’s my actions that matter. I distanced myself from Relfy. I held strong against Elly’s sinful demands. This is how I show my dedication to the gods. And tomorrow, I’ll show it in the water.

I pull another stroke, and the atoll appears—a low wall of dead, sun-bleached coral breaking the surface, curving toward me in both directions.

I haven’t come this close since we left my mother here. Every sun, alone in my canoe, I could have broken the law and come looking. No one would have known. But I never did. I know she’s gone. Still, I search its length for her shape. Nothing.

Beyond it, red-gray waves batter the white ring, clawing to get into our calm blue lagoon. Only the gods’ grace keeps it standing.

The unholy waters’ stench rolls toward us in a blast of rotten fish and decaying seaweed.

My nose itches, and my eyes water. I think this is the right distance. I plunge my paddle in and hold it against the water, whirling our canoe to a stop.

The Holy Crone doesn’t turn around, but she doesn’t correct me, either.

The others dip their paddles, canoe after canoe halting where I decided we should. I straighten on my bench, squaring my shoulders the way the Holy Crone does.

The villagers fan out from my mark. Matrons uncover bowls of powdered blue coral, the gods’ gift for prayer, and pass them hand to hand across the gaps between canoes.

The bowls go first to the primes, who lounge on their benches, capes spread wide despite the heat. Rows of shells along the hems glint in the low sun.

Nearest me, my father the Cowrie Prime waits for a matron to stretch across the gap with his bowl. His hand rests on his belly, and the string of cowries at his throat rises and falls with his labored breath, as Elly and Dams paddle to keep him in place.

Primes take first in everything. When the red algae rises, we’ll haul it into the Harvest Hut and the primes will measure it out each moon: how much for each hut, which matrons eat well and which go thin. By tonight’s feast, I’ll know which of them will determine my shares for the rest of my suns.

It’s easy to see whose hut eats best. In the Oyster Prime’s canoe sits the youngest son in the village, already two harvests old, wrapped in barkcloth and propped in his mother’s lap. Her plump hand never leaves his shoulder. Her cheeks are round as a pufferfish.

When the bowl reaches them, the Oyster Prime takes his share, and then his son’s mother takes hers, before any other matron can reach.

The two girls who also approached the Holy Crone at the docks bring their canoe in beside the Whelk Prime’s and stop without a splash, a perfect display of strong arms and controlled strokes. They know as well as I do that he measures his matrons’ shares evenly.

Whoever he chooses of us, I’ll have no say in it. But tomorrow, these two will race me for the apprenticeship, and they’re the ones to beat. The older matrons haven’t swum since they were given. These girls have spent every sun on the water, same as me.

I roll my shoulders and stretch my fingers. The sea salt will find every split in my palms, the raw spot where the tree bark tore into my heel, but I’ll swim through it. I have to.

I keep scanning the circle, finding Relfy before I can stop myself. She sits between two Whelk matrons who keep their backs half-turned to her and cradles her baby girl. When the bowl comes to her, she takes her fingertip’s worth last.

A smudge marks the baby’s cheek, which is unusual. With no matron friends, Relfy often sits alone by the Gathering Place’s freshwater spring, washing her baby over and over. Relfy’s baby is never dirty.

The sea could choose any of tonight’s baby girls, and there is no greater honor the gods can give a matron. I should want it for Relfy. But that baby is the only one who sits with her at the spring. If the sea takes her, Relfy will sit there alone, and I can’t go to her.

The closest bowl is nearly to us. In front of me, the Holy Crone draws a long breath and lets it out slowly, the way I do before a deep dive. Her fingers tighten on the edge of the canoe, and her head turns, peering into the water again.

A splash draws my attention. Elly’s paddle has slipped into the water, and she fumbles after it, her eyes never leaving the atoll, grief etched across her face. Behind her, our father doesn’t stir.

Dams braces her own paddle to hold them steady and stretches past him to fish Elly’s out, her face tipped to the open water like she’s drinking it in.

I promised Elly a seat in my canoe, facing the village, so she wouldn’t have to look at the atoll. Then I saw the Holy Crone at the docks and ran to her instead. It was the right choice. The apprenticeship will keep us both safe.

Elly’s eyes catch mine, and she turns away.

That earlier frustration floats free from where I buried it. I flex and unflex my aching hands. I saved Elly’s life. Every choice I make is for her. But because I didn’t sing, didn’t sin, didn’t act as our mother would—

A bowl is pressed into my hands. The powdered blue coral, held by the Holy Crone. I didn’t see her eat her serving, but her jaw moves, and with a sigh, her gaze softens.

Forget Elly’s tantrums. I’d like the bliss of the promised afterlife, too. I lick a finger and press it into the bowl, my gaze drifting back to my little sister’s canoe. She holds out a bowl of blue coral to our father. He scoops a double handful and licks his palm clean, then dips again before she can pull the bowl away.

That’s a sin, but no one tells a prime to stop.

I tap the correct amount—a fingertip’s—to my tongue.

It dissolves, and my muscles relax. My thoughts do too. The sting in my palms fades, then the throb in my heel, until I can’t remember why they ever hurt.

Schooling fish shimmer beneath us, their silver sparkles catching the sunlight—a gods-gifted glimpse into the blessed afterlife.

In neighboring canoes, villagers join me in the experience. Elly’s grieving scowl becomes a smile. Relfy grins at her dirt-smudged baby, and one of the Whelk matrons who turned her back before rests a hand on Relfy’s shoulder. My father sways on his bench, eyes glassy, lips moving as if he hears something the rest of us can’t.

My jaw unclenches. I can’t think why I could’ve possibly been worried.

The Holy Crone stands and holds her hands out in prayer, palms up, fingers tipped downward. “When we come to the water…”

In every canoe, villagers rise. Our waves ripple inward, awakening the water’s still surface. I join the call-and-response, my heart quickening, my smile widening. This is how we show the gods our love. “The Offering begins.”

The Holy Crone looks around the circle, her yellowing eyes staring into our souls. “We stand together…”

“To wash away sins.” With my words, I can feel my burdens lighten. I was wrong to doubt earlier. I have no doubts. I may think impious thoughts, but with prayer, the gods forgive me.

“Those who are pious…”

“Will offer their son—” The words roll from every canoe at once, the way they have every Offering of my life. Our voices catch together. Earlier, saying son with no son to give would’ve struck like a spear. Now we look at each other and laugh at the slip, a shared moment of ease. “Will offer their daughter,” we finish together. This is a special celebration. We don’t need a son.

Out of the corner of my eye, Relfy kisses her baby girl’s forehead, brushing the tiny born-to Whelk mark there. She settles the baby into a basket. There’s something else inside. Something white.

“To give to the sea…” The Holy Crone nudges me.

I look away from Relfy as she pushes the basket out onto the water. “And the sea will choose one.”

Other baskets float toward Relfy’s. The other baby girls. The Offerings.

“Follow these rules…” The Holy Crone leans forward, tilting our canoe. Studying the beautiful lagoon.

“And the red algae grows.” I balance her weight, soaking up the sun’s heat. My cheeks ache from smiling. I can already taste the red algae’s salty, bitter flavor. Soon, it will rise.

“Break even one…”

“And the sea always knows.” Our voices fade as the baskets drift in the flat lagoon. As we wait for the Holy Crone to hear the gods’ choice, and for the sea to show it to the rest of us.

Relfy’s baby gurgles in her basket.

The Holy Crone repositions her feet, and our canoe wobbles.

Nearby, the basket with Relfy’s baby dips in the tiny wave.

With a satisfied gasp, the Holy Crone thrusts a gnarled finger. “The gods have accepted our Offering of a girl.”

Heads nod in the surrounding canoes. Of course the gods did. They told the Holy Crone they would. Paddles stretch out, retrieving the unchosen babies.

The basket with Relfy’s baby is left floating in the lagoon.

Wood groans. I look down. My knuckles have gone white around the handle of my paddle, and blood smears the wood beneath my palms. Mine. I don’t feel it. I don’t remember how they were hurt. I’m smiling—this is good, this is what the gods want—but my hands won’t loosen.

Water trickles into her baby’s basket, and Relfy watches on with a smile. Something nags at me, an itch I can’t reach, but the blue coral makes me giddy, and a laugh bubbles out of me. Soon, the harvest will rise. The red algae the gods promise. We’ll haul it in until our canoes ride low, enough to fill the Harvest Hut until next Offering.

We watch the water, waiting.

There’s a faint rumbling, a sound I’ve never heard before, so quiet I might be imagining it. Steady but muffled, like it’s deep underwater. Through the hazy bliss of the blue coral, the sound sharpens in my ears—cracking and snapping, the sound of a child stomping coral.

The hairs on my arms rise.

Ripples chase across the water, coming from the direction of the atoll.

I’m staring, we’re all staring, but what we see can’t be real. Our gods-given atoll sinks into the sea, the whole white ring dropping at once, as far as the haze lets me see. Coral shears and splinters, chunks spinning off into the foam.

Then, like a great flood of blood, the unholy waters rush in.

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🌊 Previously in MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA: Easla chose the safety of the Ocean Law over her forbidden connection with Relfy—the same strict laws that cost Relfy her tongue and their mother her life.

Now, as the village prepares for the annual Offering to the sea gods, a matron’s scream echoes through the coconut grove, sending Easla’s sister, Elly, slipping from the top of the palm tree...

It happens in less than a breath. The matron’s shout from below, Elly’s hand sliding out beneath mine from the top of the palm tree. My hunting instincts take control, and I snatch at my little sister’s fingers like they’re a lobster in the rocks. But they’re not a lobster’s spiny shell. They’re sweaty, slick. They slip through my grip, and I scream.

So does she. But. . . she’s no longer falling. Her other hand clings to a frond near the coconut she was reaching for. She dangles in the open air.

Oh, thank the seas. “Don’t let go,” I gasp out. “I’m coming.” I hug the tree and shift around its girth, closing the distance between my sister and me. Get to her. Now. My feet fumble for each foothold as I move sideways, my climber taut between my ankles.

The tree’s ridges snag my dress.

I untangle and sneak a glance down. The walkway is a thin brown thread below. A fall from here would be deadly.

The frond in Elly’s fist groans.

She shrieks and kicks against the tree, swinging from her one arm and making the frond bend lower.

“Stop moving!” I shout, though I know Elly is past rational thought. She won’t be climbing down on her own. No, I’ll have to carry both of us. Somehow.

Elly’s climber spins in a circle around her ankle.

I watch it, mind racing. The climber I borrowed from Dams can hold me. But Elly’s weight too? It’ll pull us both backward off this tree. Unless…

On the next kick, Elly’s climber flies off her foot.

It arcs through the air and I catch it, then I shimmy lower until I’m pinned between Elly’s dangling body and the tree. This will work. It has to. I bite the knot of her climber between my teeth and worry it loose. “Keep holding,” I puff out in small bursts.

“I want Mama,” Elly cries. Her feet kick my back. “Where’s Mama!”

I whip Elly’s untied climber around the tree and grab its opposite end with my other hand. Fumbling with motions I can’t see, I wrap it around that wrist and hold tight. My hands are full, but now I’m cinched to the tree. “When I say so, drop onto me.” I wedge my toes into the palm tree’s cracks and squeeze with my knees, bracing for her weight, praying this will work. “Let go, Elly!”

Her knees knock my shoulder blades. She doesn’t let go. “I’m not Elly! I don’t want to be Elly!”

My palms slide on the climber, slick with sweat. I readjust my grip. “I said let—”

The frond snaps.

Her sudden weight slams onto my back. My bare feet slide down the trunk, and something sharp drives into my heel. I bite back a cry and yank on the climber in my hands, curling my fingers tighter than they ever gripped the blue coral’s pestle. We jerk to a stop.

Elly goes still for a breath, then she sags against my back and sobs, big heaves that shake my body as much as hers. Her fingers latch onto my neck like a starfish gripping coral. “I’m the moon jelly. I’m Oonj. Like Mama called me.”

My heart thumps in my fingertips. They cramp from being bent so tight. I loosen the climber and we drop a hand-span, my stomach jumping into my throat. My heel throbs around whatever’s buried in it. I brake the climber. Hands, focus only on my hands.

Elly whimpers in my ear. “Sing to me, Lug.” She squirms on my back, throwing our balance to the side.

My foot slips, and I shove into a notch to stop our fall. Pain lances up from my injured heel.

I gasp. My vision blurs. Gods, I need her calm. Sing? I know which song of our mother’s she wants. How could I forget it? Elly the Jelly. Oonj is my moon. I close my eyes and pretend I’m back on the overgrown dock, letting the words rise in my throat. I’ll sing, just in the tiniest whisper.

Shouts rise up from the walkway below. Not the rhythmic waves of birthing cries that I’d heard at the Cowrie Hut. These are sharp, frightened. A single word carries with the wind—boy. Something’s wrong.

I swallow the song whole and hush Elly with what little breath I still have. Maybe the matrons won’t hear, over the shouts and the distance. But maybe they will. Always listening, always waiting. To prove their own piety by catching others in sin. One misstep will send us tumbling. That thought shakes me worse than Elly’s quivering sobs, making my decision for me.

“We may only raise our voices in praise of the gods, Elly.” I emphasize her name as I stare at the palm tree’s splintering cracks. Rigid. Unbending.

She hiccups another cry. It turns into a cough, hacking out the poisoned air. “No, call me Oon—”

“The gods did not give us names so we may change them.” My hands are lobster claws. All they do is open and close. Release and brake. The air thickens as we descend, grit scraping the back of my throat with every gasp. I won’t let them hear her sins. Gods or matrons.

“Stop that, Lug. You’re being—”

“The braid is the seaweed. By wearing the braid, we welcome the harvest.” With each controlled fall, I recite more of the Ocean Law, drowning out her requests.

Elly’s nails dig into my neck. “I hate you,” she whispers.

Her words sting worse than salt in the eyes, but I make them wash over me like water. When she’s older, she’ll understand. This is how I keep her safe. This is how I show my love.

On the next drop, Dams’s blue eyes rush into view. We made it. I release the climber and collapse onto solid wood. My fingers throb as they uncurl. I finally take a look at my heel—a shard of bark as long as my finger buries deep there, already dark with blood.

I grit my teeth and pull it free in one motion, then press my sweaty palm hard against it until the bleeding slows.

Dams helps Elly off my back without meeting my eyes. She must’ve heard. All of it. Enough sins for both of us to answer for, if anyone else heard too.

My heart still pounds in my ears. I look up and down the walkway twice, searching for a flash of red-dyed barkcloth, listening for a matron’s light tread, the clacking of shells, Elly’s name hissed in accusation. Nothing. Only shouts further down the walkway, not here in the coconut grove. Whatever it is, it can’t be good, but it’s not about us.

I let my shoulders drop. “Thank you, Dams.” Then I touch my sister’s arm. “Enough.”

Elly jerks away. “I’d rather be dead with Mama.”

The fraying rope of my nerves unravels to a single thread. I want to be the kind and patient person our mother was. But our mother’s careless actions led to her death. I will not lose my sister, even if my choices make her hate me. “Elly Born-to Cowrie, you need to—”

Dams clears her throat. She picks up the green coconut I harvested. “We should go—”

A conch shell bellows through the trees, its deep pitch announcing the Offering.

I don’t wait for Dams to finish. I grab my sister by the elbow and pull her down the walkway, responding to the conch’s call for both of us.

* * *

Elly and I are swept into the rushing tide of matrons and girls, across walkways stretching over water, past bamboo forests rising from the sea—each step bringing us closer to the Gathering Place and the Holy Crone’s call. The baby boy must’ve been born. But why were there screams? I shush Elly’s protests and lean closer to the nearest matrons.

Their whispers prickle the air, hanging thicker than the humidity. “Never has this happened,” an Oyster matron says, stroking the same spot on her skirts again and again.

The matron beside her clasps her hands in prayer. “May the gods forgive our failing.”

Their panicked looks answer my question. The boy must’ve come out dead, just like all the other ones.

That realization makes my heart pump faster. The gods demand a baby boy for their annual Offering. It’s what the Ocean Law requires for our gods-blessed harvest, what we’ve done since my grandmother’s mother first came to the village. And the harvest has always followed. But we have no newborn boys to offer.

Were the birthing matrons not pious enough? Will the harvest of seaweed still rise? I stumble after the matrons, my fingers digging into Elly’s arm.

“Ow!” She yanks out of my grip and runs ahead.

I’m about to chase after her, but she’s already swallowed in the crowd. We’ve arrived.

At the large deck’s center, the Holy Crone sits in a high-backed chair of gnarled mangrove roots. Behind her, our gods-gifted freshwater spring flows, rising up from the sea.

The crowd thins as the villagers spread into a wide arc around the Holy Crone’s chair. The primes and the few rare sons take the ends, close enough to touch the Holy Crone’s skirt. Matrons fill in beside them, leaving us girls at the arc’s open center, in the clearest path of the Holy Crone’s watchful eyes.

Stay calm. Show your faith. Trust in the Holy Crone to guide us. I align myself with the other girls of sixteen harvests, spacing myself so I’m farthest from last harvest’s youngest matrons. From Relfy, her daughter asleep at her chest. I know exactly how many bodies stand between Relfy and me. I always know.

The Holy Crone holds the pink-and-white conch in her lap, where it disappears into her skirt’s folds. Her eyes, buried similarly within the folds of forty-eight harvests of pale and sagging sun-mottled skin, skim the gathering crowd. Watching. Waiting. “Bring forth the newborn.”

As we wait in heavy silence, my eyes wander to the primes gathered at the Holy Crone’s sides. The Whelk Prime stands nearest to her—soft-bellied with smooth, unscarred skin the warm red-brown of mangrove bark. A string of whelk shells hangs heavy at his throat, one for every girl he’s been given.

He’s said to be the kindest of the primes. That would be nice. And if he picks me, I would sleep in the same hut as Relfy. I could—no. It’s not worth imagining. And it’s not my choice, anyways.

The arc shifts, and the new mother steps through the line of girls, half-carried between two Cowrie matrons. Her steps are unsteady, the hem of her skirt still dark and wet. She won’t lift her eyes from the deck’s warped boards as she presents the swaddle of barkcloth. The baby that was supposed to save us.

Why is this happening? Why are all the boys—

The bundle squirms and coos. Alive.

A collective intake of air sweeps the Gathering Place. I lean forward, along with every other villager, seeking a better look. But no, upon the baby’s tiny forehead, an even tinier born-to Cowrie mark has been inked.

Across from me, my father the Cowrie Prime huffs. “A girl?!”

The words are a condemnation. With them, I’m whisked back to last Offering. The same words, the same tone, whispered by everyone around me. “A girl?” But they weren’t speaking of a baby then. They were speaking of me.

It was darker then, the sun already set. In the glow of the torches, the remains of the Offering feast lay scattered, half-eaten and forgotten. Instead, the villagers curved in their arc around Relfy and me.

My body still hummed with giddiness from the fermented bamboo sap Relfy and I had drunk. It was risky what we’d done. Foolish. But the bubbly joot had numbed our common sense, and when I’d been sent to the Joot Hut to fetch more of it for the celebrating matrons, Relfy had followed.

A dark hut, alone, just the two of us. It was only for a moment.

The first Holy Crone—the one who had discovered our village forty-eight harvests ago— sat in the mangrove chair then, my Grandma Almti still hovering at her side as her apprentice. “A girl?! And they were kissing?” The Holy Crone looked like she’d swallowed a fish bone.

“A girl!” the matron who’d discovered us spat out the words. “A girl and a matron.” She shook her cup of joot like a spear. “I saw with my own eyes. Sinful touches in the darkness.”

The joot still tickled my nose, but I no longer wanted to giggle. I wanted to run. Every muscle in me tensed, but I was a fish in a net.

The Holy Crone leaned back in her chair and tapped her ear, listening for the gods’ counsel. She waved a hand for silence then nodded. “We shall drown them in the freshwater spring. Both of them.”

Some matrons hissed. Others gasped, but those turned to hisses, too.

My head was too joot-muddled to do anything but gape. This was it. My life’s end.

Someone pushed past me. My mother. She fell to her knees before the mangrove chair, her hair in a well-oiled braid, her body in well-practiced prayer position. “Please, Holy Crone, they’re just girls.” She seemed perfectly pious, but like wood catching fire, a new energy blazed through the crowd.

“Bah! Par Given-to Cowrie is a sinner too,” a matron called out. “I’ve seen how loose her braid becomes.”

“She whispers then smiles, nothing good behind that,” another matron shouted. “She’s a heathen protecting heathens.”

The crowd became a frenzy, sharks smelling blood. Accusations and judgments whirled louder, until the Holy Crone raised her hand. “At sunrise, we will have three drowning—”

Grandma Almti gripped the Holy Crone’s arm, stopping her before she could finish, and bent close to whisper in her ear. She spoke too low for me to hear, but her face held that same focused frustration it always did. Except, for one breath, it slipped—and I saw fear.

With my life’s last breaths now countable, I stared at my grandmother with the deepest intensity, praying she would somehow save me.

But for a woman named for the palm trees soaring above our village, Grandma Almti always kept herself low, cowering and bending. There was no way she could stop this.

The Holy Crone nodded, and Grandma Almti tiptoed forward, past my mother on the ground, looking between Relfy and me. “Who tempted whom?” she asked, her hands twisting in circles.

Sinful memories flooded my mind. The answer was both of us. Again and again. The first hand-hold was Relfy. The first kiss was me. But those truths wouldn’t help us. Only one response would, and it evaporated off my tongue like joot left out in the sun.

“I did,” Relfy said. Her hand hovered at her throat, clutching my hidden shell beneath her new red-dyed barkcloth. She glanced at me, and in my mind, I heard the words she’d said to me earlier that sun, out on the lagoon in our canoe. I am Relfy Given-to Cowrie. “Easla was pushing me away when we were found.”

Matrons clicked their tongues. They swung their braids in disapproval.

Grandma Almti scuttled back and hunched by the Holy Crone’s ear, whispering more.

I said nothing. Did nothing.

The Holy Crone stood. “My apprentice has suggested new forms of punishment. Why deprive the village of a matron and a future matron? Easla Born-to Cowrie is innocent, so she has no sin to be punished for. The temptress, Relfy Given-to Whelk, however, brought shame upon her prime and tainted a blessed evening, so she shall lose her tongue.”

Relfy’s hand flew to her mouth, muffling her gasp. Her knees buckled, but she refused to fall.

I wanted to reach for her, but my body didn’t move. I was spared. Grandma Almti saved my life. And Relfy…she took the blame.

The Holy Crone flicked a hand toward my mother, still knelt below the mangrove chair. “And Par Given-to Cowrie will no longer be drowned at the Gathering Place’s spring.”

I found Elly’s face in the crowd, my mind spinning as I tried to keep up. I nodded to show her everything was fine. As fine as it could be. Elly’s own mouth was already shaping into a smile, revealing her gapped front teeth.

“No,” the Holy Crone continued, and with the weight of her pause, my attention snapped back to her. “Par Given-to Cowrie shall be banished to the atoll, where she can die slowly with her sins.”

Elly’s scream tore through the air.

A matron’s hand clamped down, cutting it short, and then all I could hear, apart from the ringing in my ears, were grunts of satisfaction from everyone around me.

B-banishment? I stared at Grandma Almti, waiting for her to stop my mother’s punishment, like she had stopped mine. But Grandma Almti cowered by the first Holy Crone’s side and said nothing more.

The conch blows again, and it’s no longer the first Holy Crone seated upon the mangrove chair. It’s Grandma Almti, back straight and shoulders flat, a shark’s teeth necklace gleaming at her throat. Not the hunched apprentice she was only one harvest ago. Not my grandmother anymore. She’s the Holy Crone now, and she holds the newborn girl. “Silence.”

The crowd goes quiet. Only the flowing of the freshwater spring can be heard.

The Holy Crone closes her eyes, her mouth pinched in thought, then she gasps, eyes flying open. “I have heard the gods.” She taps her ear. “This is not a failing. It is a celebration. This harvest will be”—the Holy Crone holds the newborn high—“the Offering of a girl!”

The matrons cheer. Some drop to their knees and weep.

The tiny newborn girl squirms in the air, her born-to mark still wet on her forehead, and I realize—this means any girl born since last Offering might be chosen. This one. Or Relfy’s daughter.

The Holy Crone rises. “Come. We must row to the atoll.”

Villagers push past, humming with excitement.

I should too, but I stand fixed. It’s not my place to question what the gods tell the Holy Crone—only she can hear their counsel. But for one breath, before the Holy Crone turns to follow the others, her face reveals a different expression. The same fleeting one I glimpsed last Offering, when she whispered in the first Holy Crone’s ear. Then, she was trying to fix a problem.

Now, is she trying to fix another? My grandmother says this will be a celebration, says she’s heard the gods, but the look I saw on her face?

It was fear.

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When the conch calls me back to the village, it calls me to the Offering. First will be the newborn boy the villagers all pray for, to be drowned for the gods. Then the girls who’ve turned sixteen harvests, to be given to the primes to breed as matrons. That includes me. After tonight, this water will no longer be mine.

My lungs contract, attempting an inhale, but I clamp my lips and count the seafloor’s corals until the discomfort passes—the same way I’ve learned to swallow every feeling the gods don’t allow.

My old hunting partner, Relfy, used happy thoughts as her breath-holding trick, but thinking of happy thoughts makes me think of her, and thinking of her leads only to unhappy thoughts, of the silence that was carved into her. So counting corals it is.

I swoop once more through the school of fish, then I kick upward until I burst out of the water. Grabbing the side of my canoe, I release my held breath and suck in an inhale. Though I’m prepared for the poisoned air, its harshness still cramps my lungs.

I break into coughs. My salt-stung eyes beg for a rest, but up here, I might hear the conch’s call. I’m not ready yet. I never will be. I prepare another breath-hold, pursing my lips and bringing air into my belly, then chest—

A canoe cuts through the gray haze, its paddler wearing the red-dyed barkcloth of matronhood.

I deflate like a pufferfish. A matron? But they aren’t allowed in the lagoon.

The paddler takes form. A long braid of squid-ink black, a strong body of soft curves, and those wide, expressive eyes always seeking mine. Relfy.

My chest tightens like I’m still holding my breath. We aren’t allowed to be alone together. Not since last Offering. Not since we—no, she. . . I fix my gaze on her tattooed forehead, avoiding her full lips and the injury they hide inside. I hang from my boat, as limp as my dead fish, and make no effort to close the distance. Perhaps she seeks a different girl.

But Relfy glides closer, her face scrunched in a closed-lip smile that reaches nowhere near as high as it once did. I watched that smile fade over the past twelve moons as Relfy sat alone on the docks, ignored by her fellow matrons. Avoided by me. That was easy enough to accomplish. We girls spend our suns on the water; matrons cannot leave the village.

Yet, she’s found me.

Relfy whistles, and though her tongueless mouth can no longer speak, the memory of her sing-song voice dances in my head like wind rustling the palms. Easla. Calling for me.

The dull pain I’ve buried deep lurches awake, a spear to my heart. I want to swim to her, be near her. I’m sorry. I should shout it. Instead, I shake my head, and my tangled braid snakes through the water. “You shouldn’t be here.” It comes out sharper than I intended.

Relfy rummages at her feet. From a sling wrapped around her chest, a scruff of black hair peeks out. The baby girl I’ve only seen from a distance, no older than three moons.

I don’t even know her name—which creature Relfy chose for her. Something quick, like Relfy’s squirrelfish? Or colorful, like the sea slug I was named for? I want to ask.

But that’s how I know I can’t. Wanting is how all of this started.

Relfy sits upright. She’s holding out. . . a scallop shell.

My hand slips from the canoe, and I sputter out a mouthful of saltwater as I glance around. Within our pocket of haze, the lagoon is empty. We’re finally alone. I swim to Relfy and place my hand on hers, the scallop shell cupped between us. Hiding it? Accepting it?

Only last Offering, our hands were reversed. I held a black-spotted cowrie shell, and Relfy’s hand rested atop mine. As we huddled together in our shared canoe, still dripping saltwater from harvesting urchins, I lowered my voice in a mockery of a prime’s, repeating the same words the man who chose her that night would use. The relationship she was meant to be in, the one the gods allowed. “I, Easla Born-to Cowrie, take you, Relfy Born-to Scallop.”

I offered the cowrie shell lightly, smiling like it was a joke. Even then, the Ocean Law called louder than a conch in my mind. Man is the Atoll. Woman is the Lagoon. Two Atolls can bring no life. Two Lagoons will not survive. We weren’t breaking the gods’ rules. Not truly. But still, my hand retreated.

Relfy scooped up the shell, her eye contact strong. “I am Relfy, Given-to Cowrie.” Then she pressed her face to mine and we laughed against each other’s lips. Laughed because there was nothing else to say. Laughed because with our eyes closed, harvested urchins poking into our feet, we could pretend this was real. As we lingered there, afraid to pull apart, to end what we had, our laughter faded and our kisses tasted of salt.

Relfy’s hand shifts beneath mine, and it’s no longer last Offering. I’m no longer hopeful. Her voice lingers in my ears, confident and caring, but it’s a voice I’ll never hear again. Because of me. Because of us. Something that cannot be.

Blinking back the sting in my eyes, I pick up her scallop shell. A hole has been carved through it. I peek at Relfy’s neck, where a thin string still hangs. Only I know what’s tucked beneath her barkcloth. My cowrie shell, hidden but there. She wants me to do the same.

Relfy leans forward and traces my tattooed forehead: the wave-like curves of my born-to cowrie shell, the straight bar of womanhood inked after I first bled, and below, the bare skin where no given-to shell has yet been carved. Her fingertip presses into that empty space, and we both know what will fill it tonight—a prime’s shell. Never hers.

I should tell her what she wants to hear. A few words to show her we’re still us, that we can make this work.

But we can’t. Not if we want to survive. Relfy has already lost her tongue. In trying to stop that, my mother lost her life. How much more are we willing to lose? I dig a fingernail into my thumb, where crescent-shaped scars cluster. The sharp sting brings me back to reality. Alive with pain is better than dead with none.

I drop her scallop shell into the lagoon.

Relfy chokes out a sound, but I don’t look up. The water is so perfectly clear, I can see her shell drift toward the sand, spinning and soaring like I was only breaths ago. Burying itself away from watching eyes, watchful gods. I take a deep inhale, my lungs pinching from more than the air’s grit. “No more, Relfy,” I whisper, like I don’t want even her to hear.

Relfy’s eyes are as dim as those of the snapper I killed. But this way, she’s alive. We’re both alive. I glance at my basket of fish, at the empty second bench it sits below. We do what we must to survive. I nod at her necklace. “You should remove that.” Then I roll into my boat, refusing to look again at the matron who risked a forbidden canoe ride to visit. The friend who risks more by wearing my shell, the friend who saved me with her sacrifice. Someone much more than a friend.

Relfy whistles. The way it rises sounds hopeful—an unanswered question—but it fades behind me as I paddle. Toward the village that smothers me, the matrons who watch me, this lie I live. And away from the lagoon I love and those trembling lips I desperately want to kiss again. I know who holds the power over my life, and it’s not me. Not yet.

Soon, I’m winding my canoe through a tunnel in the mangroves, ducking to avoid low-hanging limbs. The laughter of other girls itches my ears before I’ve even reached the tunnel’s end. My arms ache from paddling fast enough to put distance between Relfy and me, but I dig another stroke and pull into view of the village.

The docks bustle with action. Younger girls haul up nets and shake out minnows. Older girls huddle in pairs in canoes, rinsing bloody scales from their arms. Some of them will be given to the primes alongside me tonight. If they’re saddened by this, they don’t show it. Not to me.

I glide through their half-circle. They nod in greeting, but their eyes catch on my empty second bench and, as always, those smiles fade.

After Relfy returned to the docks as a matron last Offering, that night’s celebration marred by what was done to her, no girl has asked to take her place as my hunting partner. They fear they might catch Relfy’s sin, her punishment, her ruin.

Good. Let them keep their distance. I was coward enough to stay silent while Relfy took the blame, and for twelve moons since, I’ve said nothing, done nothing. Like I’ll continue to do. Alone is what I deserve.

I drift to a stop, grabbing my rope and throwing two half-hitches around the nearest piling. Then I haul up my fish.

From behind their nets, the younger girls gasp. In their boats, the older ones go quiet. My snappers far outweigh theirs.

As the whispers start again, low and sharp, I glance back at the mangroves. I don’t know how Relfy plans to slip back unseen with a stolen canoe, but when she does, I need to be elsewhere. I hop onto the dock.

In front of me, two girls hunch over their mortars, grinding more blue coral than any prayer calls for.

One glances up, and when her eyes catch mine, they drop just as fast. “The matrons keep asking for more,” she says into her mortar, a bead of sweat rolling off her nose.

So the pregnant matron’s birthing has already begun, which means this coral’s bound straight for the Cowrie hut, and its crowd of matrons. The perfect witnesses to see I’m nowhere near Relfy when she returns.

I crouch beside the girl. “I’ll finish this. Can you descale those?”

She goes still—wary, the way they all are around me. Then she works her fingers loose from the pestle, flexing them one by one. I’ve spent enough suns at a mortar to know that ache. However she’s been taught to feel about me, it’s no match for the chance to stop grinding. She passes me the pestle, careful not to let her fingers brush mine, and turns to my fish.

I take the stone mortar and rise, grinding the coral fragments as I leave the girls behind and wind through the maze of docks that forms our home in the lagoon. The blue coral releases a heavy stench as I crush it, a misleading contrast to the bliss and courage the powder brings once it melts on the tongue. I turn a corner into the Gathering Place.

Ahead, the Cowrie Hut rises on stilts from the sea, its thatched roof strung with the black-spotted shells that give its name.

Matrons huddle in the doorway, same as when I left at sunrise. Then, they whispered their predictions, talking over one another in their fight to be heard.

“She’s craved fish soup,” a Whelk matron said as she shooed my little sister and me out of the hut. “Definitely a boy.”

“And her belly hangs low,” a Sand Dollar matron said, barreling in with swaths of barkcloth, forcing me to press my sister against the wall so we wouldn’t be knocked over. “A boy, I know it, praise the gods.”

They raised their voices louder, nodding so hard their shells clacked, as they all claimed the same outcome. A boy. The only boy that would be birthed for this Offering, since all the others had come out dead. The boy we would offer to the gods before we girls of sixteen harvests offered ourselves to the primes.

Now, those same matrons from this morning wait with closed mouths and tapping feet. The pregnant Cowrie matron must be close.

As I approach, I avert my gaze to the powdered coral in my hands, displaying my piety as clearly as I can. Girls are not allowed to watch a birthing—not until we’ve experienced one ourselves.

The Sand Dollar matron snatches the mortar. “Thank the seas. He’s nearly here.” She passes it back, and it moves from matron to matron, disappearing into the hut.

The blue coral is forbidden outside of prayers, where its euphoric bliss gives us a glimpse of the gods’ promised afterlife. Only birthing matrons are allowed more.

Inside, she cries out, and the matrons wail in response. The unified sound is a crashing wave, frightening and powerful—women telling a woman, we hear you, we feel your pain.

The cries crescendo, but I keep my mouth shut, as I should, forcing a faint smile to my lips. The unease in my stomach intensifies. This will be me. This is what the gods want.

The matrons drop into silence.

My foot takes a step, and it’s in the wrong direction. Away. I dig my fingernail into my thumb. No, let them see me here, not with Relfy. Helping. Good. “May I bring—”

“Where’s the coconut water?” A Scallop matron pushes out and glares at the Sand Dollar matron. “The Holy Crone has asked twice.”

I drop my gaze so it can’t look like I’m peering inside. The Holy Crone’s in there. The woman who used to be my Grandma Almti, before her new position made her something more. I imagine she’s squatted by the birthing matron’s side, delivering orders she knows will be obeyed, her face set in that permanent frustrated focus that warps the black cross inked down and across her forehead, blocking out her old marks. As Holy Crone, she’s no longer born-to or given-to. She executes the gods’ will. She never worries of survival. She decides it.

The Sand Dollar matron scowls and cranes her neck, holding a flat hand sideways to the sun. “I asked the girl two fingers ago.” Her hand folds into a pointed finger and swings toward the coconut grove. “And she’s still there!”

Atop the tallest palm, a small figure perches among the fronds.

The Scallop matron tsks—slow, drawn-out clicks of the tongue—and shakes her head, her well-oiled braid rolling on her large chest. “A pious girl would’ve had it back by now.” Her narrowing eyes slide to me. “Should we be concerned for Elly’s piety?”

Seas, it’s my sister they speak of. My throat thickens. I clear it, and it turns into a cough—the dry, scraping kind the poisoned air leaves in all of us. “I-I’ll see to it.”

Before they can respond, I run toward the grove, my feet slapping the sun-warped boards harder than they need to. Of course Elly’s being difficult. She has been since our mother’s banishment. I know this is how she grieves, but a small part of me prays she would take care of herself, so I don’t have to carry the burden for both of us.

Reaching the palm trees, I slow, burying the frustration. Numbing my own grief so I can attend to hers.

Elly’s foraging partner Dams leans against the tallest palm, swinging a loop of barkcloth around one finger. She straightens when she sees me. “She won’t come down. Hasn’t dropped me a single coconut either.”

I don’t blame Dams for the edge in her voice. Last Offering was their tenth harvest, which meant they earned their first canoe. But the lagoon is where we last saw our mother, so Elly refuses to leave the docks.

The Holy Crone allowed it. A safety concern, she called it. A girl who panics on the water is a danger to herself and others. So Dams is trapped here too.

Except once this boy is born, we’ll paddle out for the Offering to the gods, and everyone must attend, including Dams. And Elly. I wipe my hands on my dress, leaving streaks of fish scales. “Give me the climber.”

Dams hesitates, her gaze flicking up to where Elly must be, then back to me. She chews her lip—afraid, I realize.

“They’re not going to banish her for a coconut.” I keep my voice level, if just to comfort myself. Not for a coconut. Right?

Dams hands me the climber—a strip of barkcloth knotted into a loop. “Gods willing,” she murmurs, and I think she means it.

I tug the knot, expecting slack, but it doesn’t budge. “You tied this well.”

“Yes, I—” She scratches her neck and drops her voice. “Earlier, I could hear Elly. . .” She glances down the walkway toward the huts. “I haven’t told anyone. But you know I’m supposed to.”

Singing. She doesn’t need to say it out loud. Elly’s done it before. A sin.

How does a song hurt anyone, my mother’s voice whispers in my head, but I shove it down where it belongs. Thoughts like that are what got her banished. To hear a sin and say nothing is to share in its evil. If a matron catches Elly singing while we stand here, Dams and I are as guilty as she is. I suck in a breath and release it slowly.

Tonight I’ll be given to a prime. That I can’t stop. But tomorrow, I have a chance to make this better.

The old Holy Crone died after last harvest, and Grandma Almti rose to take her place—which means, for the first time in thirty harvests, the Holy Crone needs an apprentice.

Tomorrow, all of the matrons will race for that honor, out in the lagoon where the first Holy Crone proved herself. I’ve trained every sun, alone, swimming laps around the village until my arms gave out.

Win, and I’ll stand at the Holy Crone’s side. Maybe it won’t be enough to keep my sister safe, maybe nothing is. But piety is the only thing I have, so I’ll give more of it than anyone else: be perfect, be useful, be worth keeping. It’s not much of a plan, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

Tomorrow. If Elly doesn’t get us in trouble before then.

I slip the climber’s loops around my ankles. The matrons were already asking after that coconut. It won’t be long before one comes complaining. If she finds Elly up there refusing to work, if she hears Elly singing, the plan is done. And so are we.

I grip the tree and jump onto its rough bark, splaying my knees to the sides. I haven’t climbed since I received my canoe, but I haven’t forgotten the motions. Bend, hop, pull with one hand, grip with the other. I sync my breath to the movements, exhaling as I leap, inhaling as I steady and prepare to go again. I don’t look up or down, only at the trunk’s ridges and cracks.

I’m out of breath and huffing when I see toes curling around the trunk from the other side. Elly’s. I close the remaining distance with small hops, careful not to crush her hands beneath mine. At the top of the palm tree, I bring myself eye-to-eye with my little sister.

Her blonde hair whips around in the wind. She stares past me into the lagoon, tears streaking down her dirty cheeks. In her squatted position among the coconuts, Elly holds perfectly still, so unlike the moon jellyfish our mother named her for. The baby who never stopped bouncing and squirming. Now, Elly grips the palm tree with fingers as white as sand.

I look over my shoulder to where she stares. The stretch of mangrove trees that grows over a dock. Our mother liked to take us there on our rest-suns. Canoes couldn’t approach it, and we could spot villagers before they walked in.

Mother would sit in the shade, leaning against a piling and weaving a basket, and she would sing. It was forbidden, what she did. We may only raise our voices in praise of the gods. That’s what the Ocean Law said, and this wasn’t prayer. But her voice was too beautiful to silence, so I would sit at her side and repair nets, practice knots on my climber, whatever I could to keep my hands busy, until I blinked and it was sunset, and my hands had forgotten their task.

On cooler suns, she’d even untie her braid. Shake out her hair and rub her sore scalp. Another small sin. Always in private.

The first occurrence, I dropped my climber and gasped. “The braid is the seaweed. By wearing the braid, we welcome the harvest.” I recited the words always told to me, the Ocean Law flowing from my tongue as smoothly as water spilled from the Gathering Place’s freshwater spring.

Mother fanned her sun-lightened hair over her shoulders, leaned over, and tapped my nose. “Why do we have the Ocean Law, my little Lug?”

Another sin. Calling me by a different variation of my sea slug. The gods did not give us names so we may change them. But I didn’t know how to disagree with my mother, other than reciting rules. I wasn’t much older than Elly then, or Oonj as Mother would call her there. Old enough to want to be older, but young enough to not know what that meant. “To. . . to protect us.”

Mother’s mouth crooked into something that wasn’t a smile. “To control us.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed. But Elly rushed past, chasing a crab down the dock, and pounced, hands cupped. The crab skittered on as Elly shook her tiny fist. “Once I have my canoe, I’ll catch every crab.”

Then Mother laughed, a full-bodied chuckle that claimed space, demanded attention. A laugh I never heard from any other matron. I didn’t disagree again because I wanted to be as happy as her, so I listened to her songs, let her unbraid my hair too. Responded when she called me Lug instead of Easla. And Elly as Oonj. Only there. Only with her. Maybe it wasn’t the gods who were strict, but the villagers.

I was wrong. Those peaceful rest-suns misled us into believing our hidden behaviors would go unpunished. But all sinners pay for their sins. Relfy, my mother, and through their losses, me. None of us can escape the gods.

I look away from the overgrown dock. Beyond it, the lagoon glitters bright blue. Up here, the haze thins enough, I can see the red-gray waves of the unholy waters, held back by the stark white ring of sun-bleached corals encircling our lagoon. The atoll. The place the Holy Crone abandoned our mother. Abandoned her own daughter. The place we’ll be returning to soon.

I lean into Elly’s view, blocking the atoll. “You won’t have to look at it. I’ll turn the canoe to face the village—”

“I’m not going. I won’t.”

I reach for more Ocean Law to recite, words I’m not sure I believe, but I say them anyway. Because we all do. “The Ocean Law says everyone must attend.”

“I don’t care about the Ocean Law.”

The same defiance our mother had. I squeeze the tree tighter with one hand and release the other, rest it over Elly’s. Like mine, it’s scarred from climbing for coconuts. “Then care about me.” Her arms tremble. Her muscles are fatiguing. “We need to get you down.”

She’s staring at the atoll again, her eyes unfocused. Reliving last Offering. “What if you leave me too?”

“I’ll never leave you.”

Her green eyes cut to mine. “Promise?”

I twist a bright-green coconut until it snaps free. Give the matrons what they want. Avoid attention. “No one will banish us.” I whistle twice and wait for Dams’s responding whistle below. Then I drop the coconut. “The sea slug stays with her jellyfish.”

Elly’s lips purse into a tiny pucker. “How do you know the Holy Crone’s apprenticeship will keep us safe?”

The question lingers in the air, resisting even the breeze. I don’t know, I can only hope. But I can’t say that to Elly. I bring my hand back to hers and rub my thumb across it in a small circle, creating the shape of our shared cowrie. “Because the gods save the pious.”

Elly nods like she understands. “May we please the sea.” She blinks back her tears and reaches for a coconut.

Below, a matron screams.

Elly flinches, and then she falls.

Index | Next Chapter »

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