The tide took Coral's raft while she watched from the water. Three years she had planned this launch. She had read the wind and read the tide and picked the one hour both agreed. Then a wave folded the deck like wet bark, and the lashing she had rebuilt a hundred times snapped in her hands. She swam back to shore with rope burns on her palms and nothing left to sail. She was thirty-one years old. She had lived alone on this island since she was six. She knew the number because she carved a mark into the same tree every birthday, one clean line for each year. The last mark ran crooked. Her hand had been shaking when she cut it. Somewhere across this water was a room she still remembered, a table with cake, a woman who sang every word. Coral did not know the woman's name. She only knew she wanted to reach her before her own hand shook too hard to carve at all. She dragged the wet wreck up the sand and dropped it. The palm lashing was the problem. It soaked through and stretched and gave. She had known this. She had launched anyway. That night she sat by her campfire, the one she built years ago from weathered stones. She turned a snapped rope over in the firelight and studied where it had failed. Palm fiber. Always palm fiber. It swelled in salt water and lost its grip. Then she looked at the fire itself. The coals had eaten deep into a driftwood log without breaking it. The charred wood held its shape. Heat hardened it. She had watched this every night for years and never once looked. Coral stood. She pulled a length of green vine from her stores and held one end into the low flame, turning it slow, the way she turned meat. The outside darkened. The fiber tightened and set hard. She bent it. It did not stretch. It held. She worked until dawn. She fed vine after vine to the coals, cured each one, coiled the hardened rope beside her. Her palms stung against the fresh fiber. She kept turning. By first light she had a coil of lashing that would not swell, would not stretch, would not fail in the wrong tide. She carried the coil down to the broken raft and cut away the old rope. The salvaged logs were still sound. Only the binding had killed her. Now she had binding the sea could not soften. Coral knelt in the wet sand and began to lash the first two logs. The cured vine bit tight and stayed. She pulled the knot hard and felt it hold against her weight. She had her vessel now, or the start of one. The next tide that agreed with the wind would not wait for her. She had to build the whole raft before it came.