with sticks and ropes, sometimes with an oar or a spare scrap of net, but this time Kaida wouldn’t indulge her own curiosity. Better to savor the moment. Better to let them think she didn’t need to turn around to watch their retreat. Better to know that the next time they called her bug-eyes, they’d have to wonder if she really did have bug-eyes in the back of her head.
Once again her mind returned to the puzzle: why did the outlanders allow themselves to be surrounded? Just now, Miyoko and Kiyoko had tried to flank her while Shioko moved in to push her off the Fin. Why wait until they were in position? Surely it was better to strike first, or at least to choose Kaida’s path and ward off the attack before her enemies seized the advantage.
At last Kaida could tolerate the riddle no more. She jumped off the Fin, sinking to her ankles in the cold, wet sand, and walked to the outlanders’ camp.
She caught their scent before she heard them. They had a fire going, but she smelled only wood smoke, not fish or rice steam or any other food. A steady breeze pushed at her, weighted down by the scent of salt water as well as the other smells.
As she drew closer the breeze carried a strange guttural chant to her ears. Closer still, she made out muted conversation, and she thought she could pick out a pattern in the chanting. She could see little of the outlanders, as they’d built up a high mound of sand and rock, almost like a dune. The glow of their fire rose from behind it, as if a tiny sunrise were about to happen just on the north end of the beach.
As she made her way around the leeward side of the dune, sand shifted behind her. She whirled, but not in time to keep something from grabbing her hair. She let out a squeal and grabbed whatever was holding her. She’d half expected to find Miyoko’s fist there, but it was a big man’s fist and for all she could move it, it might as well have been made of iron.
She clung to it anyway, hoping to support at least a little of her body weight with something other than her scalp. “I’ve caught us a fish,” said the one who caught her, and he dragged her by the hair into their camp. Her heels scrabbled for purchase the whole way, but there was nothing but sand to push against, no way to reclaim her balance.
“I seem to remember throwing this fish back into the ocean,” said a bemused Genzai. His deep voice unsettled Kaida in a way she could not quite understand, though she did understand that with a big man dragging her around by her head, the fact that she even noticed Genzai’s voice indicated full well how scary she found him.
“Let her go, Masa-san.” Kaida fell to the sand the instant Genzai spoke. “What are you doing here, little girl?”
Kaida looked up at Masa, who in turn looked down at her. He was surprisingly skinny for one so strong, but Kaida saw his skin was drawn tight across his chest and arms, as if there was nothing soft in his entire body. He wore his hair long and scraggly, and that was what made her remember him: he was one of the two on the beach who let themselves get surrounded. He cocked his head to one side, studying her as if she were an insect he’d never seen before. “She’s got ears like a wolf, this one.”
“Does she, now?” said Genzai.
“Heard me coming,” said Masa.
“I didn’t,” said Kaida. “You got hold of me before I could get away.”
“True, but you started to turn around before I caught you. I must be losing my touch.”
Who are these people? Kaida asked herself. Masa was skinny, yes, but not so skinny as to slip between grains of sand. She’d walked right past him on an empty beach and never noticed him. She’d heard travelers’ stories of
“Well?” Genzai said. “What are you doing here? Has your father hurt your feelings? Do you want me to break his fingers after all?”
“No,” said Kaida, taking in the rest of the camp. Four men sat around a little campfire, all like Masa, skinny and strong at the same time, though among all of them Masa was the only one who struck her as friendly. Two of the others busied themselves around a second fire. They’d built a sort of house for their fire, a three-walled house mostly embedded in the little dune they’d piled up. Its walls were flat and straight, more of a wind shelter than anything, and as Kaida could not see the long boxes they’d lowered from atop the cliff anywhere, she guessed the outlanders must have broken down the boxes to build the little house. The floor of the house was a deep ring of stones filled with glowing red embers.
Tending the fire was a one-eyed hunchback close to Genzai’s age. The empty socket of his missing eye seemed to stare right at her. The hunchback worked constantly at a bellows, a device Kaida had only seen once before. She was little at the time. An outlander’s ship had run afoul of the Maw and they’d unloaded everything to row it ashore. The outlander had told her a bellows was a house for a little birdie, and when Kaida peeked inside he shot a gust of wind right in her face and made her giggle. That outlander hadn’t been sweating like this one. This one knelt beside the ember bed, and pumping his bellows seemed like a lot of work.
The one squatting beside him chanted ceaselessly, heedless that his wild, white, wispy hair might well catch fire. At first Kaida thought he was naked and entirely covered in hair, but as her eyes acclimated to the flickering red light, she saw he had clothes—or what passed for them, anyway. He wore nothing but tattered ribbons of threadbare cloth, seemingly colorless except for the orange glow of the fire. Clothes, beard, and hair alike floated on the breeze. He took something out of the fire, banged it with loud, ringing strokes of a hammer, and pushed it back in among the coals.
“I don’t remember you being so easily distracted, Kaida-san. Is it past your bedtime?”
“No,” she told Genzai. “It’s just—I’ve never—well, what are they making?”
“That’s none of your concern. What are you doing here? Have you come to ask to go with us again?”
“Go with us?” Masa said. His scraggly hair rippled when he laughed. “Where?”
“Anywhere,” Kaida said. “Anywhere but here.”
Masa chuckled again. “And what is it you think you’ll be doing once you get there?”
It was the same question Genzai had asked. Kaida thought it was weird that these outlanders all had the same question. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” she said. “Dive. Fish. Whatever you—”
This time Masa laughed so hard she was sure they’d hear it back in the village. Genzai laughed too, just once, a grunt more than a laugh. The hunchback at the bellows scowled and shushed them. “Silence!” he snapped. “We’re close now.”
Kaida looked at him. He was horribly ugly, and the embers made his wrinkled face as red as a demon’s, all crosshatched in black by the wrinkles. He scowled at her too, just for good measure. His missing eye was horrid, but Kaida couldn’t help looking right into it.
“Dive!” Masa said, his laughter still more in control of him than he was of it. “That’s rich. Is that really the only thing these villagers have learned how to do with girls?”
She looked at Genzai, who had regained his composure and now sat as still as the rocks around the campfire. Masa chuckled, brushed his disheveled hair from his face, and picked his teeth with a sparrow bone.
“You never answered my question,” Genzai said, his voice as flat as ever. “Did you come to see what my friends are making in the fire?”
“No.”
“Then why are you here, Kaida-san?”
He looked at her silently. The others too. Kaida knew the one-eyed man was the one her stepsisters would find scariest, but they were wrong. The one to be afraid of was Masa. She didn’t like the idea of someone that fast, someone she couldn’t hear coming. And Genzai frightened her still more, but she forced herself to stammer it out. “I’ve been thinking about this all day, and I can’t figure it out. You let them surround you. The villagers. You and your friend. And then you fought them. But you let them surround you first.”
Masa cocked an eyebrow at her.
“How come?” she said.
Masa let out such a guffaw that it knocked him backward onto the sand. Genzai just chuckled, a deep, grating rumble like big plates of rock shifting below the earth. “Silence!” said the one-eyed man, still working his
