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It’s about calm. She has learned this over years spent in the water, and it’s something she’s good at, a skill she has cultivated. It started because she didn’t want to leave the seals beneath the surface—she wanted her body to be capable of more, to be like theirs, so she worked at it. She learned about making her exhales longer than her inhales to decrease her heart rate. She learned about reducing her oxygen consumption. She learned about enduring the pressure that turns to pain, she understands that there is nothing to fear from pain. She is very good at calm.

Except, of course, where her dad is concerned.

He is stubborn and strict and unbendable. He refuses to talk about anything. He frustrates her. And maybe that’s normal for a seventeen-year-old, but ’s willing to bet most seventeen-year-olds don’t have to deal with their dads talking to their dead mothers and refusing to admit there’s a problem with that.

loves her dad. And she loves Shearwater, maybe more than any of them do, but she can see that, little by little, the island is killing them.

She doesn’t sleep much; it’s hard to sleep without walls or curtains over windows, and there aren’t many hours of true darkness on Shearwater at this time of year. She rises and swims with the males and the females who aren’t soon to give birth, she stretches her lungs and her muscles, she kicks and arches and follows the paths of their flippers as they move with so much more power and grace than she will ever have. King Brown, as Alex named him, does a showy loop and finishes by brushing his whiskers against her cheek, as if to say beat that , and she laughs beneath the surface. Silver, a young female, circles her once, twice, then trails her hind flippers through ’s hair, daring her. She kicks after the sleek pale seal, trying her best to keep up—they want to race her but she will never win, she is all too human and has to break for the surface. Silver’s face pops up beside her and can almost imagine a grin there, it’s in her eyes, the amusement, the triumph. “You win then,” says. “For the millionth time.”

She means to go and check on the woman in the lighthouse; she can’t stop thinking of her, of this body washed in that is somehow still alive. But on the beach she can hear a kerfuffle and she knows what it means.

She swims to shore and picks her way among the colony, trying to find the female who is first. She’s in one of the larger harems—this is King Brown’s group—so there are lots of females clustered around. It’s Freckles, sees, named for the smattering of dark spots on her face. She is flapping and moving awkwardly, tilting her head back and forth, and a couple of other females keep trying to duck their faces to her bottom, to where there is a dark little shape emerging.

stays back, giving them space, but she will be ready in case she needs to help. When she sees the placenta break and the head push out, she is worried because the pups are usually born flippers first—this baby’s eyes and mouth are shut and it doesn’t look to be breathing. But Freckles flaps and moves, she pushes. She turns her head back and reaches her snout down to the motionless pup, licking its face. She turns in circles to try to work it free, she pushes and pushes. grows more worried by the second—the pup is showing no signs of life and the birth is taking too long. She isn’t sure if she should try to help but something makes her wait.

And soon the dark little body comes free, it tumbles onto the sand and it moves, it lifts its head. Smiling, watches the mother seal nuzzle and lick this wet furry creature. The other babies will come now, all the females will start to give birth and the beach will be covered in bleating seal pups. It is ’s favorite time of year. It’s what she will miss most when they leave. She has always come down to the beach for pup season. Even before this inhospitable stretch of coast became her home. Her escape. Even before she learned that there is a different kind of fear from the one you feel when you hold your breath.

The air of Shearwater is thick with the spirits of the dead. knows this and isn’t bothered by it. Raff doesn’t believe her, but in the hours of true night she has seen them. The specters, flickering green lights out at sea or in the mountains above her, and even once quite close on the beach. She wonders if this means she is marked for a different kind of life, if it is yet another oddity that will ensure she doesn’t fit in back on the mainland. But she isn’t frightened of the dead. It is only the living who have the power to harm.