Coquina's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Coquina had four hours of skin left before she cracked, and the market wharf wouldn't look at her. She sat on the crate they'd given her out of pity, tail hidden under a wet burlap sack, and watched the reef folk pretend she wasn't there. Two days ago the coral had gone quiet in the night. That was how she'd known the pearl was gone. Without it, the reef she called home would bleach white inside a week. The elder fisherman had held that pearl last, the same man who'd been lifting shells and sea-glass and worse from her water for twenty years while every person on this dock looked the other way. She'd already asked the netmender. She'd already asked the woman who sold ice. Both had shrugged and turned back to their work. Now she tried the tea seller under the pastel awning, a plump woman arranging a hanging basket of pink lilies and trailing charms above her doorway. "He took it inland," Coquina said. "That's all I need. Which road." The tea seller adjusted a ribbon on the basket. "I don't know any fisherman." "You've bought from him. Everyone here has." The woman's hands paused. Then she went back to the ribbon. Coquina slid off the crate. Her tail hit the boards hard. Heads turned along the wharf and then, one by one, turned away. A man coiling rope stepped inside his shed. A boy carrying oysters walked faster. The silence wasn't accident. They were closing around the fisherman the way they always had, and her clock was bleeding out under the sun. She dragged herself to the middle of the wharf where they all had to see her. She pulled the burlap off her tail. Scales flashed green and pink in the light. A woman gasped. A child pointed. Coquina lifted her voice so the whole dock heard. "My reef dies this week. You've all eaten off it. Look at me and say you didn't." No one answered. But a girl at the edge of the crowd, maybe ten years old, tugged at an old man's sleeve and whispered something. The old man cuffed her hand down. The girl caught Coquina's eye and mouthed two words: back room. Then she pointed, quick, at the tea seller's shop. The tea seller had gone white. Coquina hauled herself across the boards toward the pastel doorway. The tea seller stepped in front of the door. "You can't. He'll—" "He'll what." Coquina looked up at her. "He's not here. You are." The woman didn't move. Coquina shoved past her tail-first and pushed the door open. Inside, past a small swing hung with cherry blossoms and pearl-strung ribbons, a ledger lay open on a table. Names. Dates. A shipment address three days upriver, marked for a buyer at a shell-white castle she had heard of only in stories. She had her road. She also had three hours of skin, a village that now knew her face, and a fisherman who would hear she was coming before nightfall.