Yari crouched behind a stack of crates outside the general store, her ears flat against her head. She had come for flour. Instead she caught the stranger's voice drifting through the open door, asking the shopkeeper about Barnaby — about a ship, a crew, and something called the Cat's Eye. Yari's heart kicked hard. She wanted a real adventure, something that mattered. She had not wanted it to start at her mother's door. She slipped past the leaning red barn at the edge of the village, where the stranger had been keeping a room. The door hung open. He was already gone. Yari ran. Halfway up the path to home, she heard it — a scream. Her mother's scream. The sound she had spent her whole life dreading. She did not stop at the cottage. She cut straight for the training yard, where Barnaby kept his old cutlass mounted above the bench. The grip felt heavier than the practice blades. The eye on the pommel stared back at her. The stranger came through the gate with her mother's shawl torn in his fist. He laughed when he saw the curved blade in Yari's hands. "That's not yours, pup." Yari planted her feet under the red-leafed tree and did not answer. He lunged. Yari moved the way Barnaby had drilled her — short steps, low guard, eyes on the shoulder. Steel rang against steel. He was stronger. She was faster. He cut her sleeve; she opened his arm. He swung wild; she slipped inside and drove the pommel into his jaw. He dropped to one knee, then to the dirt. Yari stood over him, breathing hard, the cutlass shaking in her grip. Her mother was alive. The stranger was not the last of them — she knew that already, from the questions he had asked. Whatever Barnaby had buried, it had just dug itself back up. And it had her name on it now.

Yari barely made it back to the bungalow before they swarmed her. Three grey wolf pirates came over the moss-shingled roof in a rush of boots and rope. She drew the curved blade, but a club caught the back of her skull. Her knees folded. The world tipped sideways into dark. A black streak shot from under the porch. The family cat hit the nearest pirate full in the face, claws raking deep across one eye. The wolf howled and flung him into the wall. The little cat landed hard, ribs heaving, gold eyes burning as rough hands hauled Yari's limp body toward the door. Then the sword on the floor began to hum. Low, deep, alive. The orange-striped cat froze. From the back room, behind a loose floorboard, an answering call rose — a thin, eerie note from a wooden chest carved with a watching eye. It was not a sound for ears. It was a sound for the animal under the fur. He ran to it. He could not help it. The pirates were already dragging Yari out into the yard, but his paws moved on their own. He pressed his nose to the carved eye on the lid. The eye blinked. The latch sprang. Inside, on dark cloth, sat a single pearl the color of a cat's gold iris — the thing the pirates had crossed an ocean to steal, the secret the old captain had buried under his own floor. The pearl pulsed once. Light poured up and over the small black cat in a slow, silent wave. Bones lengthened. Shoulders broadened. Gold eyes lifted higher off the ground. When the light faded, the thing standing over the open chest was no longer only a cat. It heard the pirates laughing in the yard. It heard Yari breathing. It picked up the humming sword in a hand that had not existed a moment before, and it walked toward the door.