The sea was far too still before dawn had even broken, and Shizu knew from that moment that she shouldn't go down.
It was the sixth month of Meiji 21, the year the Thai calendar called Buddhist Era 2431, in Toba Bay. There was no wind. The waves were smooth as a sheet of hammered iron. The village elders had been saying since their grandmothers' time that a sea unnaturally calm was a sea listening to something. Wait a day or two. But merchants from the city were coming to collect abalone today, and none of the eleven women in the bay had enough rice left to wait until tomorrow.
Shizu tightened her sash and wrapped a white tenugui around her head. One side was embroidered with a five-pointed star drawn in a single, unbroken stroke. The other bore a grid of five horizontal lines crossed by four vertical ones. The five-pointed star was made in one continuous line so there would be no gap for anything bad to enter. The grid represented the many eyes that watched in our place. The elders said there was always something underwater watching us. So we had to have something watching it back.
Before going down, all eleven women held seawater in their mouths, tapped the rim of a wooden bucket three times, and made a short sound in their throats, like mice.
Chu, chu, chu.
Tsuru always went down first. She was twenty-four and had been diving since she was nine. She had taught Shizu how to hold her breath, how to descend without bursting her ears, and not to get greedy over the last abalone, because the last one was never truly the last.
Shizu went down third.
The cold water bit into her skin until her whole body went numb within three seconds. Light from the surface broke into green ribbons. Algae coated the underwater rocks in sheets. Shizu ran her hand along the crevices that had once been hers, pried out two abalone, stuffed them into the bag tied around her waist, then looked up at the light.
That was when she saw a woman below her, two body lengths deeper.
She was an ama, wearing a white sash, with hair cut to the nape of her neck just like Shizu's. She floated motionless above the sandy floor, her legs perfectly still. In her hands was an abalone larger than any Shizu had ever seen in her life—so large she had to support it with both hands. Slowly, she held it out to Shizu, like someone wanting to share something good with a friend.
Shizu didn't move.
The elders told this story every year, until the village children could recite it by heart. If you saw an ama you didn't know, deeper than you, and she offered you a beautiful abalone, don't take it. Don't answer. Don't even thank her. Because that was a Tomokazuki—a woman who had drowned and still refused to come up. She didn't want to give you the abalone. She wanted someone to go down and stay with her.
Shizu turned upward without turning her back on the woman.
She broke the surface, both lungs trembling. She let the air out through her mouth in a long, thin whistle that trembled at the end—the isobue sound everyone in the bay knew belonged to Shizu, just as she knew which sound belonged to whom.
She clung to the wooden bucket, breathed, and began to count.
Two whistling sounds came from the right. Three from the left. Four more farther away. Ten in all.
Shizu counted again, more slowly this time.
Ten.
Tsuru's sound was missing.
She didn't call out Tsuru's name. At sea, you weren't allowed to call the name of someone who hadn't surfaced yet, because if they heard you, they would turn around—and anyone who turned around in the middle of the sea was someone who had forgotten to count their own breaths. Shizu simply took three short breaths, then a fourth so deep it pulled her ribs tight, and dove headfirst at the spot where Tsuru's bubbles had last risen.
Tsuru was deeper than Tsuru should have gone.
She was kneeling on the sandy floor like someone taking a rest. Her headscarf had come loose and was caught in the seaweed beside her. Her hair drifted slowly, as if she were asleep. Her eyes were open, gazing toward the deep water, and her right hand was still clenched tight.
It took Shizu two dives to bring Tsuru up. The first time, she didn't have enough strength. The second time, she threw away the entire bag of abalone.
On the beach, no one screamed. All the women in the bay had seen things like this before. Together, they carried Tsuru up to the fire hut, built the fire twice as high as usual, dried her, combed her hair, changed her clothes, and did everything in silence, like people who knew exactly what had to be done and in what order. Tomorrow, they would bury her on the hill behind the shrine, as this village had buried its own for every generation.
Only her right hand wouldn't open.
One of the elders sat down and slowly pried her fingers apart, one by one. The little finger first. Then she stopped.
In Tsuru's palm was a pearl.
It was as large as the tip of a pinky, perfectly round, with no side that wasn't a side. Its surface glowed a grayish pink, in a way firelight from a woodpile should never have been able to make it glow. The entire hut fell silent at once.
In this bay, pearls weren't what people made their living from. The ama dove for abalone and seaweed to sell as food. A pearl was an accident a woman might encounter once in her life—or never encounter throughout all her years of diving. And if she did find one, it was usually as small as a grain of rice, misshapen and dull, worth only a few cents.
No one in the hut had ever seen one like this.
"Give it back to the sea," one of the elders said, her voice so flat it was more frightening than a shout. "What the dead bring clenched in their hands to the shore isn't something they found. It's something they were made to carry."
That night, Shizu slept in the hut as the fire slowly died down. The pearl was clenched in her hand, hotter than something like that should have been.
She didn't give it back to the sea.
She told herself she would sell it in the city and use the money to give Tsuru a proper ceremony, to repay her for raising Shizu for ten years. She told herself the same thing three times, until she almost believed it.
When the fire went out completely, Shizu heard a voice beside her left ear, as close as someone lying face-to-face with her on the same mat.
It was Tsuru's voice.
"Shizu," Tsuru said, "don't tell anyone I didn't go down for the abalone."