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would happen tomorrow? She thought about the red mandagah jewel and more tears sprang to her eyes. Her grandmother might have been right-maybe she was marked despite herself. She couldn't know what it meant, but at this moment it felt like the worst of omens.

    Lana fell to her knees in the sand and felt some of the water from the receding tide seep into her leibo.
    "Great Kai," she whispered. "Please let everything be okay."
    She looked out at the ocean to see if there would be any response to her prayer. The waves continued breaking gently on the shore. Nothing changed.
    Then Lana realized that even now, in the moonlight, she could still see the outline of the death island.

     

2

    ANA MADE HER THIRD FULL CIRCLE OVER THE REEF that morning, straining her eyes for the slightest sign of movement over the sandy ocean floor. The other women swimming around her were doing the same, and she knew that the pockets of their leibo were as empty of mandagah jewels as her own. Lana had sensed something was wrong back on the morning of her initiation. She had only seen one fish-and that one was dying. In the six months since, the situation had grown progressively worse. The divers had consulted the elders and performed rituals of supplication to the water spirit, but nothing had helped. Lana couldn't shake the nervous feeling that had settled in her stomach like mildew. The day after her initiation, she had taken her cured jewels and hidden them in her clothes chest-maybe if she never looked at them again, she would be able to pretend that nothing had ever changed. But of course she couldn't. Many of the divers went days without harvesting a thing. Lana had become one of the most productive of the divers, but even she only harvested about one jewel each day. Two years ago, that might have been grounds for removing her privileges as a diver. Back then, ten jewels had been an average harvest. Today, it would be a miracle.
    A brief billow of sand on the bottom caught her eye and she pushed herself farther under the water. She smiled-it was a mandagah fish. It began to swim sluggishly away from her, but when she grabbed its tail, it stopped struggling immediately. Had she somehow found another dying fish? She turned it around. Its eye ridges were still a healthy pink, not the dull gray of the one from her initiation, but it stared at her in that same disconcerting way. She reached with her other hand to pry open its mouth, but its lips wouldn't part. She tried stroking its belly to relax it, but it still refused to open its mouth. Her vision began to go white around the edges-she knew she should surface, but she didn't want to relinquish her find.

    Then, without warning, the fish poked its sharp tail-hairs into her arm and wiggled out of her grip with a huge burst of energy. But instead of fleeing, it swam closer to her face. She floated, stupefied, as the fish kissed her forehead and dropped the jewel from its mouth. She reached her hand out and caught it, staring as the fish swam away. She stuffed the jewel in the pocket of her leibo and kicked up off the bottom.
    Her hand trembled as she examined her find on the surface, but to her extraordinary relief it was just a white jewel. An unusual color, but not anything that would mark her. She would just have to hope that no one had seen the fish's strange behavior.
    For months she had been having recurring dreams about the dying mandagah fish from her initiation. In the dreams, it would be crying-although she knew, of course, that mandagah couldn't cry-and it would always say "Goodbye, Lana. I'm bound to cross the gate." She would touch her finger to its lips and then to her forehead-just like she had done that morning-and then she would wake up. And now a second fish had willingly given her an unusual jewel. She knew the events of the past six months must be important, but she had no idea why, and because of the way she had hidden what happened during her initiation, she was too afraid to