Year of the Demon

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