Mina’s husband leaves before sunrise on the days that he goes dragon-hunting.

Wei always kisses her on the forehead before he heads toward the docks. When Mina blinks awake, it takes a moment for the dark slashes of shadow to resolve into the curve of his mouth.

“Be careful,” she murmurs.

When Wei shifts closer, hands slipping underneath the thin shift she wears to bed, she remembers too late that it might have been smarter to feign sleep.

“Remember, I’ll be gone for two weeks this time,” he says. “Will you check on my mother while I’m away? I’ll bring you back a scale.”

He kisses her again, his mouth dipping to her neck before it moves lower. Mina’s body does not know what to think. Wei’s touch is familiar, works her up like he’s stoking a fire. But her body has not really felt like her own ever since Wei’s father began to ask about when they would finally have a baby.

“Let me wash first,” Mina says, tangling her fingers in his dark hair so she can pull him up.

Wei hums into her thigh. “You know I don’t mind that,” he says.

“I’ll rinse my mouth out at least,” she says, tugging at his hair more insistently, and at last Wei lets her up.

In the washroom, Mina digs through the basket of fancy soaps she saves for important occasions, which Wei never looks through and which she has also filled with the dragon scales he’s gifted her, just in case he does. At the bottom, she keeps a pouch of herbs from her homeland, for keeping without child, which her sister pressed into her hands before Mina made her new home at Dragon Pass Island.

“Just in case,” her sister had murmured. “It’s not so easy to get these everywhere.”

For a long time, Mina didn’t need them—the dragons have a thin, translucent membrane that shutters over their eyes which, when removed, can be sewn together and worn during copulation to stave off pregnancy. Wei used to wear one because she asked, but then his father asked about the baby and he stopped.

The leaves of the herb are tiny and the pouch can fit many, but Mina has been rationing for months now, and she is due to run out. She rinses her mouth after swallowing down one of the dried leaves so Wei will not taste its strange bitterness when he kisses her. Then she slips back into bed so he can slip inside her. She doesn’t manage to fall back asleep after he’s gone.

There are no dragons where Mina came from. The air back home smells the same, salt-dense, but the waves here do not feel the same even if they look it.

It took Mina some time to adjust when she first came to Dragon Pass, nearly a year and a half ago now. Wei told her stories about the island over the course of their courtship, which had been electric over the months her family’s trade ship spent shipwrecked at the port. Everything seemed to have a story—there was the tale of the village and how the ocean turned it into an island, the tale of the first fisherman, and of course there were the tales about the dragons.

“But they are still only stories,” Wei had reminded her as he gave Mina her first tour of the island. “They only bite if you let them.”

Still, Mina cannot help looking for the teeth. She likes hearing the stories and looking for the overlap, the confluence, where the half-truths shine through.

The story of how the dragons came to be, as Wei told Mina while they were courting, when Mina was so enamored she was listening more to the sound of his voice than what he was saying:

A fisherman and his wife and their daughters—back when they hunted fish instead of dragons as their main source of food—were out in the ocean together.

A storm came and crashed the boat against the rocks. The wife tumbled over the edge and the fisherman was too busy trying to bail out water to go in after her. Even if he’d managed to reach her, it wouldn’t have mattered. The waves were terrible and took the entire boat under.

Under the water, the woman struggled for breath. The ocean took pity on her.

I cannot save you, the ocean said, not in the form you are in. But if you are alright living in a different shape, I can give you that. It cannot be undone. You will not be yourself, not completely, but you will be alive.

I want to live, decided the wife. So she became the first dragon, and she didn’t realize until after the fact that the ocean had only enough power to save one.

There are fewer women on Dragon Pass Island than back home, which means they are cherished.

Wei says there was a sickness in some of the women. It was the worst generations ago, but it surfaces again sometimes. It killed his sister, Xing, who was many years older than Wei. Nobody talks about it much—it seems almost like another story itself now, shrouded in mystique from all the details that have been omitted—but the effects have trickled down.

Mina’s routine keeps her landbound. The island doesn’t let the women onto the boats, never mind that Mina spent half her life on a trade ship.

It was Yan, her mother-in-law, that explained this to Mina. “There are not enough women as is,” Yan said, “so they want to keep us safely on land. And the dragons—they act strange around the women. They are harder to hunt when they’re unpredictable.”

Yan has lived on the island all her life. She used to dive for sea urchins but now she makes the nets, and Mina does too. Sometimes they watch the children when their mothers are busy going to market or gathering seaweed along the shore or whatever other chore keeps them off the boats. Mina gets used to holding the babies in her arms, to supporting their tiny heads and feeling their tiny breaths rasp against her chest.

It was hard to adjust to Yan at first, too. She has stern angles to her face and doesn’t smile much—if she does, only with her lips pressed together, in a bare approximation—but she has crows-feet spiderwebbing around her eyes that suggests there was a time she used to.

“I’m worried she’s lonely,” Wei confessed to Mina one night, shortly after they’d first gotten married. “She didn’t get sick, not like my sister did, but after Xing died—well, Father and I were often away on the boats. I think she finds it easier now that you are here.”

So when Wei is home, he and Mina try to have Yan over, and when Wei is gone with his father and the other men for their rotation on the seas, Mina and Yan tie knots together for the dragon-catching nets. Back home, on the trade ship, Mina used to tie fishing nets with her father. Her mother and sister organized the stores of cooking spices and medicinal herbs they stocked but it was Mina and her father that caught the fish.

The days slip into one another, knot by knot by knot.

Dragons are not violent by nature, but they hunt what hunts them. They are big creatures, the length of a fishing boat, and far more vicious, if they want to be. Sometimes the men come back bandaged and near dead, and sometimes they don’t come back at all.

Those first few moments at the docks with the other dragon-hunter’s wives are always unnerving, no matter their efforts. They trade village gossip as they wait for the boat to come in to hide that they’re all wondering if the men’s return will bring mourning silence or raucous excitement.

Today, it seems, is a day of celebration.

Mina hears the shouts of the crew before she even sees the boat, but once the nets come into sight, full of twining, scaled bodies, she understands the exuberance, the frenetic energy. It’s the largest catch the island has seen in months.

Wei’s father, Haoyu, captains the boat. Though Haoyu is slow to give praise, he’s grinning proudly as his men haul the nets off and clamber onto the docks, as they let the dragon corpses spill onto the wood planks. Wei smiles when he sees Mina waiting for him.

“Come look!” he calls.

The iron-scent of brine gets stronger as Mina goes to greet him. The dragons are beautiful even when they’re dead, their serpentine bodies stacked up and up, their metallic blue scales glinting under the sun. This close, Mina can see how blank their eyes are through those thin layers of membrane. How empty.

Nausea curdles in her stomach.

“Good work,” Mina tells Wei, because it’s what he wants to hear. “You must be exhausted. You’re not hurt, are you?”

The curve of Wei’s mouth sweetens as he shakes his head. “We were lucky—no one got anything worse than a scratch. You did all the hard work, really, by making the nets.”

Mina attempts a smile.

“We’d better celebrate then,” she says.

It is routine now to have a nice meal with Wei’s parents after Wei and his father go on a successful hunt.

Mina makes the flounder how Wei likes, with the nice salt. Yan helps Mina boil some crabs. They join Wei and Haoyu at the table, who have already started on the rice wine and are flushed pink, once the food is done.

They speak of the hunt, how it was Wei who spotted the best places to lay the nets in waiting, and then of the island, how Mina and Yan watched the children.

“I heard Sui is pregnant again,” Haoyu remarks. “This will be her third, won’t it?”

Mina nods. “She’s almost two months along now. Yan and I watched her two girls while she napped.”

Haoyu takes another sip of his rice wine. “She and that fishmonger have had three children in as many years. It’s an excellent rate. When will you be expecting, Mina?”

Beside her, Wei tenses in preparation for a storm that’s already arrived.

“Haoyu,” Yan murmurs quietly, her expression carefully blank.

Haoyu speaks over her. “Did all the women in your family take so long to conceive?”

Anger simmers bitter in Mina’s closed mouth. Her father-in-law is an incurably proud man, proud of how many dragons his boat brings back and how Wei has learned the best ways to lure the dragons in, proud of how the knowledge will trickle down his lineage. Mina can’t help but wonder how he would have treated Wei’s sister.

The chair scrapes across the floor when Wei gets up.

“Mother,” he says, “let me get you some more water. You must be thirsty.”

“It’s alright,” Yan says quickly. “It’s getting dark anyway. Haoyu and I should be heading back.”

It’s a relief to finally walk Haoyu to the door, though even that isn’t enough to stop him from getting one last barb in.

“Three children,” Haoyu mutters under his breath as he steps over the threshold. “Imagine what the island would look like if everyone could manage three children?”

Well, Mina thinks bitterly. Haoyu had only the two, and now he has just the one.

After dinner, Wei’s expression doesn’t lighten, not even as he leads Mina to the bedroom and presses a hot kiss to the underside of her jaw.

Mina tries to coax a smile out of him, or at least some conversation. Being around Haoyu always makes everyone quieter.

“Did you miss me so much?” she asks, pushing Wei away gently to try and get a look at his face.

“I was stuck on a boat with my father for two weeks,” Wei says, tucking his face further into her, moving down to put his mouth down to her chest. “I have not seen you.”

He speaks in layers when he’s uncomfortable. Underneath the underneath: did you hear those things he said and how they hurt me? This is how you can help me fix it.

It used to be easy to go to bed together but now Mina fumbles as the clothes come off. Wei slots himself in her mouth, his fingers firm on her cheekbones, but he doesn’t come. He fits himself between her thighs and wants to finish inside her. Mina’s herb stash shrinks again.

After, once the sweat has dried, Wei is ready to talk. He sighs and says into the dark, “I’m sorry about dinner. You know how my father is.”

“Is what he thinks so important?” Mina asks, just as she has asked many times before.

“I know you want to wait longer before trying, but it’s complicated. My love for you can’t be weighed against my love for my family. He shouldn’t have said what he did, but we’ve already waited past when I thought he’d lose his patience.”

Wei is talking about lineage too, never mind that Mina is his family now too. Never mind Mina’s love for him, weighed against her family across the seas, who must be wrapping up a visit to a port and returning home. Some nights, she lies awake and wonders what would have happened if she’d left with them after they’d repaired their ship. If she’d married someone who lived close enough to her family’s port so that she could measure the time between her family’s visits in months instead of years.

Mina’s anger is cold and distant, an anger so tired and familiar she only has the strength to feel it crest before it drifts away again. “But how do you feel?” she asks.

“It’s our marital duty,” Wei says. Mina waits, but that’s it. He never knows how to respond to her when they have this argument again.

Finally, when Mina has nearly drifted away with her head on his chest: “Oh,” Wei murmurs. “I almost forgot.”

He gets up. Mina watches the shadows shift as Wei gathers his clothes from where they were discarded on the floor. He fumbles around for something in his pockets and returns with it presented in his palm.

Shimmering where the moonlight hits it, pearlescent, the size of the palm of her hand: a scale, as promised.

Dragon meat isn’t a popular export. It’s tough, stringy, and slimy all at once. But the scales—they sell for exorbitant amounts abroad, even more than the eye-membranes, though Mina doesn’t understand what they are used for.

“I don’t know either,” Wei said when she’d first asked, though his eyes had shifted from hers at the last moment, like they always do when he tells a half-truth.

Mina hadn’t pushed—she likes the scales because their colors make her think of home. She does not need them for anything else.

Wei’s mouth curves into a smile as he watches Mina turn it over in her hands. “I don’t know why you like them so much,” he says. “But they are lovely.”

When Mina goes to put the scale away, its shimmer is echoed by the pill her sister had slipped in with Mina’s things alongside the herbs. The pill was expensive because it could be taken after the fact and because it had been heavily treated to reduce side effects as much as possible, but mostly, it was expensive because it was the type of thing you had to know about to be able to ask to buy.

Mina admires the iridescence of the scale, the colors playing like water shot through with sun. Like the venation of the wings the cicadas had, when the winds came and blew them from the forest on the far side of her village to the sandy shore. She is homesick for the strangest things.

The thing is that Mina wouldn’t mind being a mother.

She thinks about it when she babysits. She imagines the swell of her stomach, as tender and slight as the moon, and the motion inside of her like the tides, rocking, of the baby. She imagines how simple love could be, how intrinsic, how it might feel to hold someone the way her mother held her. She could do it and it would be beautiful, and if she had a son he could hunt the dragons and if she had a daughter Mina could teach her how to tie knots.

But not minding and wanting are different things. The distance between the two is a chasm even Mina cannot placate herself into bridging. Maybe Mina will want to be a mother in a few years, but she doesn’t want to be a mother now.

On slow days, when Mina and her mother-in-law do not have to care for any children, sometimes they pick their way across the big rocks that jut out of the shore and do their net-making there.

The weather is uncommonly nice today. Mina and Yan sit on a large flat rock overlooking the waves with loops of rope coiled in their laps. Around them, the winds aren’t too strong and the sun is warm, and there is none of the fog that often obscures it to cover any of the blue sky.

Perhaps this is what makes Yan unusually talkative.

“When I used to dive,” Yan says, gazing into the water, “sometimes the dragons would get close to us. Closer than they are to us now. They never hurt us—if anything, they helped lead us to where the urchins were. To oysters that held pearls. Wei’s sister used to dive with me.”

Mina follows Yan’s gaze in the distance, to where the blue of the waves darken as the continental shelf gives way to deeper waters. The dragons come in schools with their luminescent eyes—first one bobs up to the surface, and then another makes a beautiful arc as it cuts the water and then dips below the waves again. Like this, it’s difficult to believe that they could be aggressive.

Mina loves to watch them swim, how their scales flash under the sun and have a lambent shine under the moon. Yan looks at the dragons like Mina does, just this edge of longing.

Mina picks up her knotting. “It must have been hard when she died,” she says, carefully. “Wei doesn’t talk about it.”

“I didn’t expect it, but I suppose nobody ever expects things like this,” Yan says, with the pained, placid distance of someone who has had years to reckon with it. “Wei was too young to remember what happened—Xing was around your age when she left us.”

“Wei said there was a disease on the island that took many of the women,” Mina says. Nowadays, the same thought keeps surfacing: if the need for more women is really what spurred her courtship. If Wei had wanted her just because of what her body could give.

Yan smiles, wry and without humor, without teeth. “Disease was just the name we chose for it,” she says.

Mina stills. The rope in her hands is coarse. Digs into her palms. “So what was it really, if that was just a name?”

“There are stories about where the dragons come from, you know,” Yan says.

In the distant waters, the grey-blue scales sheen and shimmer, undulating as the dragons swim. Looking at them makes Mina feel homesick too. Sister, their eyes seem to say. Sister, sister.

The story of the second and third dragons, as Yan tells Mina while they make the walk back to their houses.

The fisherman’s wife, though her skin had turned to scales and she had grown teeth and claws, had enough presence of mind still to think of her family. She was overcome with sorrow and regret when she realized that only she had been saved. In her last moments with her personhood, she begged the ocean to do something.

I can only save one, and I have chosen you, the ocean reminded her. But I have given you what I have. You can do what you will with it.

So the fisherman’s wife tore off some of her scales, some of her flesh, and some of her claws. Any part of her that could be consumed.

Take what you will of me, she said, begging her drowning family to allow her to save them.

The fisherman did not eat, fearing what kind of afterlife he would face as a dragon rather than a human, and so he died. But her daughters did, and they were transformed, and that is how the second and third dragons came to be. They did not know who they had been when they were human, so they did as dragons do and kept swimming.

“Of course,” Yan says, “everyone has their own variation of how the story goes. Some people say the fisherman ate and lived. Some say the wife did not give up any flesh, only the scales. Some say the wife remembered more of her human life than the rest, that she swam the seas and offered the same choice to anyone else who would make it.”

Mina’s mind whirrs. There is something underneath the underneath that she doesn’t know the shape of.

“But it is only a story,” Yan reminds her gently. She doesn’t quite look at Mina when she says it, just like how her son doesn’t when he lies.

Here is another thing Mina knows about stories: they are ways of saying things without saying them.

Eventually, the day comes that Mina reaches into her pouch from home and her hand closes around nothing.

Wei has been on the island with her the past few days, and the time has passed in a familiar, gray haze of routine: Wei accompanying Mina to the market and Mina tying her nets while she watches Wei inspect the boats for rot. They had dinner alone together because Wei is avoiding his father when possible, and it would have been uncomfortable to invite just Yan over.

But now it is after dinner, after the dishes have been washed and set aside, and Wei is waiting for Mina to come to bed.

“Mina?” Wei calls, again.

“One moment,” Mina calls back from the washroom, trying to keep the panic out of her voice.

Mina has been reckless. She’s been tracking her cycle with the kind of regularity she always does and hoping that it’s enough to coax Wei to finish in her mouth, or to clean herself out with a vinegar and wine mixture if he insists on finishing inside her. But it’s two weeks after her monthly bleeding now, which means she is fertile, and Mina cannot risk this.

She digs her fingers into the corners of her pouch, desperate, and there—the pill her sister gave her. To be taken after coitus.

“Mina?”

“Coming,” Mina says, and this time she’s trying to keep her voice from betraying her relief.

When Wei’s orgasm has put him to sleep, Mina leaves the warmth of the bed and goes to take her pill.

She rolls it between her fingers, the pearlescence. It’s so small in her hand. When she swallows it down, she tries not to mourn the loss. This is the last bit of her sister, gone away.

A curious emptiness nestles itself within Mina. It could be grief. It could be acceptance. Perhaps it could grow into the shape of a child, swell into life and flourish, if only Mina would let it.

The story about the dragons is only a story, but perhaps the fisherman’s wife did not regret what she’d done so much. Perhaps there had been a deep-seated part of her that had always wanted to run. Perhaps she’d had nowhere to go except the ocean, and perhaps the ocean saw that in her and pulled her out, fitted her so her body cut through the water like a blade, until she had teeth and claws and a way to give that to an entire history of women, looking for a way out.

There are not very many women on the island. Mina thinks about how dragons only hunt those that hunt them, and how their scales sheen and shift. If those scales were ground up and reshaped, they might look a little like the pills from the medicine stores.

Yan isn’t at the shore but she is at her home, when Mina knocks. It’s before sunrise—Wei isn’t due to fish or hunt today, so Mina will have to explain her absence to him when she returns.

“You look like you haven’t slept,” Yan says, the surprise on her face shifting into worry. “Come in, sit. Let me make you some tea.”

Mina does not come in. Mina reaches into the pocket of her skirt and shows Yan the pouch she has brought with her. Yan’s expression is carefully blank when she sees that it is filled with all the scales Wei has given Mina over the years.

“Those would make you a small fortune, overseas,” Yan says.

“They could be priceless to me now,” Mina says, “if only I knew what to do with them.”

“They do not do entirely the same thing overseas as they do here,” Yan says, and then she sighs. “Oh, Mina. Come inside.”

Yan serves them both tea and sits across Mina at the kitchen table. Mina scatters the scales between them.

“It’s as I said: Xing was like you,” Yan says. “My husband married her off, but she’d never wanted to be a wife or a mother on somebody else’s terms.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to have children someday,” Mina says, so used to saying this it comes out reflexively. She doesn’t know why she feels the need to defend herself.

“But you don’t want to have them now,” Yan sighs. “What happened to Xing was the same as what happened to all the other women. Even me, almost. There are ways to escape, but they’re not without their consequences.”

Mina thinks about all those nights she spent counting the days of her cycle, trying to decide if she could ration her birth control that night or not. She fails to keep the betrayal from splintering into her voice. “You never told me anything,” she says. “A story is just a story unless you make it something else.”

Yan meets her gaze, sorry. “I felt the same when I was your age, but I only delayed. I hadn’t thought Xing would choose differently. I didn’t—I don’t know if you will choose differently.”

A permanent transformation. Mina’s mother and sister must have known what to do with the scales, to make those pills they sold, to make them safe. But Mina doesn’t.

“And even that wasn’t without its consequences,” Yan adds, her smile wry and rueful.

Mina knows the stories have teeth: she sees them in Yan, the incisors.

She has never noticed before how sharp the slant of her mother-in-law’s jaw is. How her nails extend into fine points. How Yan usually takes care never to smile with all her teeth.

Mina grinds up two scales trying and failing to replicate the pill her sister had given her. The particles refuse to hold their shape no matter what Mina tries to bind them with, and even if they would, she’s not sure it would negate the side effects safely.

There is not the time to find a way to negate the side effects safely.

The next scale Mina uses, she only partitions to make it easier to eat. She takes a sixth each day, only as much as it might take to make one of those birth control pills. It disappears over the course of two and a half weeks.

The wild comes slowly. Mina longs to swim, to be immersed, to be off the island. Then her skin starts to itch. It’s soothed only by water, and even then, it must be salty.

When she sleeps, she has strange dreams of sharp teeth and bodies that crumple like paper and then unfold again. Sometimes she wakes up with tear stains. Wei doesn’t notice, or at least if he does, he pretends not to—he’s grown talented at not seeing the things in front of him.

When they have sex one night, Mina lies on her back with her ankles crossed behind Wei’s back as he rocks into her.

He falls into her when he finishes, head dropping, and she bites the slope between the line of his neck and his shoulder. It shouldn’t be hard enough to bleed, but her teeth are sharper than she remembers, and his blood slicks in her mouth, hot and tangy. Wei moans before the pain overrides the pleasure, then he pulls away like Mina’s burned him.

After that, they don’t have sex for a week, and after that, they only have sex with Mina’s face down in the sheets. Wei’s fingers must catch on the new spurs of bone Mina can feel budding along her spine, her ribs, her hips, but he doesn’t ask. Mina is tender everywhere, bone trying to escape her skin, her body trying to escape itself, the underneath surfacing at last.

Yan does not say anything until Mina takes the second scale.

Mina feels like she is all sharps, now—her skin has not split but she feels that it wants to. Wei does not initiate touch as much anymore. It seems the whole world is giving her a berth, everything feeling just a little hazier and further away than it used to be, like she alone is in a strange dream.

But she’s not really alone. Sister, the ocean had said to her.

At first, Yan only silently takes up more of Mina’s work as it becomes more difficult for Mina to focus her mind on the repetitive task of tying knots. Then she insists that the two of them stop going to the sea to do their work when it becomes clear that Mina cannot wrench her eyes away from the waves.

They are in Yan’s home today, babysitting Yan’s neighbor’s grandchild. Little Mei fits neatly into the crook of Mina’s elbow and is content to start wailing every time it seems Mina might stop rocking her. Mina watches Yan watch Mei, and wonders whose face Yan is superimposing over Mei’s. If Yan wishes her daughter were still alive. If Yan wishes she’d been able to raise her son into someone else.

“Are you going to tell me to stop?” Mina asks finally.

Yan sighs. “I only took one scale, spread out over many days,” she says. “Xing—she took three, I think. I begged her not to. But she hadn’t been with us, not truly, for weeks even before she took the last one.”

Here is the tipping point. Once the tide goes out it has to come back in.

Mina never used to want to be a dragon, but she didn’t want to be pregnant, either. She let the consequences keep coming once they crept up like shadows: sharpened teeth, new bone cropping up along her shoulder blades, the slow, subtle calcification of scales around her joints.

“My body will not be my own, regardless of what happens,” Mina says.

Yan swallows but does not speak. Silence falls, broken only when the baby starts crying again. Mina smooths a gentle hand over the softness of Mei’s tufts of hair, and says, “The moon is supposed to be near full tomorrow. Will you come with me? It’ll be a beautiful night to watch the dragons.”

“I have already lost one daughter,” Yan says.

“Losing does not have to be the word for it,” Mina tells her.

In the morning, the next day, Wei kisses Mina on the forehead before he goes to the docks.

He does not kiss her on the mouth or look her in the eyes—this is only a derivative, modicum of routine. Mina wonders if the skin of her eyelids has started to become filmy, to be thin and translucent.

“I’ll be home in three weeks this time,” he says, gaze falling on her slantwise.

There was a time his absence would have made Mina feel unmoored, like a piece of her heart had gone to sea. Now they could be two strangers. She doesn’t know what it would take for Wei to see her as she is.

“Be careful,” Mina tells him, and is careful not to cut her tongue on her teeth.

In the night, she takes the third scale whole.

It crunches so easily under her teeth as she slips her clothes off in the safety of the dark. Yan, who has accompanied Mina to the shoreline after all, bends to collect Mina’s clothing and folds it up piece by piece into neat rectangles, though Mina will never wear them again. Mina shivers as the wind hits her bare skin and Yan reaches out to rub warmth into Mina’s arms.

“You could come with me,” Mina says, but Yan is already shaking her head.

“If I was going to leave, I should have done it years ago,” Yan says.

Her face shines faintly with tears. She swallows and continues, “I will look for you,” but does not ask Mina to stay.

Mina has felt the water calling for a long time, the sinking and swelling of it, salt-mussed and benthic-deep, sister, sister. She wades until she can’t anymore, until the tides are taller than she is, and then she submerges. The water is cold but Mina will acclimate. It will cradle her and then she will be warm.

She thinks about home, the ship and her parents and her sister, all that she won’t be able to have again, at least not the way she used to. She doesn’t know why the dragons linger around the island when the whole ocean beckons, and by the time she understands, it won’t matter anymore. Maybe she will haunt the waters along the shoreline; maybe she will kill the men on the next boat she sees; maybe she will be the next body Wei brings back, to be cut up and sold for profit. Most likely she will do as dragons do, and she will swim and swim until she can’t.

There are no dragons back home, in Mina’s old corner of the sea. Maybe she will be the first.

Editor: Austin Dewar

First Reader: Elinor Bonifant

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department