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Wants to go lookin for her.’
    He gave a dismissive grunt. ‘She do better lookin for a husband. She say anythin else.’
    ‘Said there was a storm comin.’
    That made him smile. ‘Not tonight, I reckon. Come by tomorrow, Reve. You can help me clean up the place.’

CHAPTER FIVE
    Reve crossed the main track and climbed the path up to the top of the hill, found the spot where Tomas the Boxer had buried their father. He put down the fish box and sat on
it. There were eight white stones on the grave. Tomas had laid the first one, scratched an X on it so that they could find the place again; the hill had graves all over it, most unmarked. Reve had
been five. Every year, he had come back, first with Mi and then on his own, to place another stone.
    Eight years.
    After the burying, Tomas the Boxer had taken Reve and Mi to live with him. He had tried to be a father, but he just wasn’t very good at it, wasn’t patient with children, didn’t
know how to talk to them. He was strict; told them life was hard, that you had to fight for what you wanted and he was a hard man himself. People left him alone, even Calde stepped around him, but
unlike some parents in the village he never raised a fist against the children, and he’d listen to what they said, though he didn’t answer every question they asked, especially when
they kept wanting to know when their mother was coming home, which they did all the time in those first weeks they lived with him.
    Reve settled well enough. He followed Tomas around like a dog, was happy to copy him when he did his chores, fixed the skiff, mended the net, but Tomas never learned how to handle Mi. She was
always strange, collecting bits of plastic and glass and making little sand gardens wherever the fancy took her. And she wandered, day and night. She wouldn’t be disciplined, not by Tomas,
nor by the occasional woman Tomas brought back into the shack, not that any of them ever stayed long. Mi would stick her chin out and glare at them, unsettle them, and then they’d leave. She
hardly talked to anyone other than Reve, and he didn’t always understand what she was saying with such intensity, but he would nod as if he did understand because he liked her talking to
him.
    When she was nine, a year after Tomas had taken them in, she declared to Reve in a whisper that Tomas had a bit of the devil caught up inside him. She said she had seen it peering out of
Tomas’s eye. Reve looked at Tomas differently after this. He never could see any sign of the devil though. Even so, he started to have bad dreams and found he felt safer sleeping in the
little space under the shack.
    Her wandering made Reve anxious. He spent half his time looking for her. He usually found her hunkered down some place, mostly Uncle Theon’s cement-block pig house or up on the hill, by
their father’s grave. Once she told Reve that she heard a voice calling her and that was why she went off wandering. He never quite knew how much to believe Mi because she said such strange
things, mainly about what she saw in people, like seeing the devil creature in Tomas.
    It was about this time that Mi admitted to Reve that sometimes she couldn’t remember where she’d been. At first he didn’t believe her, but then he understood that those blank
periods frightened her. She called it walking in darkness. They were, he now realized, her first fits, little ones. The first serious one didn’t happen until she was eleven. Reve remembered
it well: just before she got that attack of juddering she accused Tomas the Boxer of killing their father. Just like that, out of nowhere, hard and cold; he remembered how her eyelids had flickered
and her voice hadn’t sounded like her at all. Tomas had looked like he’d been struck by lightning. He’d lifted a hand to slap her – and then she was gone, twisting and
falling and kicking her legs like she had electricity running up and down her spine.
    She was sick for a whole day after