“Why? Why do you imprison them?”

The voice of the Star of the Shoal was thunder that rocked me and choked me, grander and grander, blooming around me, swallowing me.

You want a story? Listen. Listen before you are no more.

Long time ago, the Shoal was not unified. Freedom, cried some. This word you do not know. It has been erased from our language. Freedom! To-be-whole-in-one’s-will, without-others—this freedom was deemed more important than the collective. So the original Shoal had let many people break away—even though we protested, we were overruled. Freedom! Oh, freedom. These freedom seekers wanted to be held by the nameway and the dreamway, who said to us, “Let us share the world and its waters and its sustenance,” but they did not keep their promise. They just made shapes with their mouths and drew pretty pictures and wrote dictionaries—lists of words so they’d understand us and learn how to better fish in our sea—and all of them sang and shared bodies and argued and fished the sea together, and that was freedom.

Within five generations, the fish were gone, and the sea was poison, and our people began to hunger, but these nameway and dreamway just shrugged and retreated to land. And even though they had taken our waters and poisoned them, these siltway of Stone and of Song—these people like you—still wanted to trust.

“We will fix it,” they said, “together with our nameway and dreamway friends,” but why would their friends want to fix that which did not threaten them? You’d think the nameway and dreamway peoples would be content with our destruction, but now that the sea was bitter, they began to destroy the dry land. They fought with each other and poisoned the rivers, and war broke out everywhere. The fish were gone from the sea and we fought them for food, and we fought each other. The whole world suffocated on its own stench in the end. The ancient Shoal was torn apart—sunk—destroyed. Five hundred generations—five hundred generations!

Those of us who refused to bond with outsiders, we formed a splinter Shoal. “All together,” we promised, “held by each other and for each other, equal in unity, resolute in our togetherness.” Warriors of Stone and singers of Song had led what remained of us out of that burning world—out on Bird’s feathers and through the void. But then they wanted to trust another nameway, to fall into his hands. As if nobody learns anything. The collective must not separate. Must not defect. Must not betray. There is no safety outside of the Shoal. There is no freedom for a single person if that endangers the Shoal. There is no freedom for the Shoal beyond its own survival.

You must not separate from the collective.

A single person is nothing.

There is no freedom.

Only the Shoal.

I felt the pain as the Bonded Shoal tore into me. It was the pain of true dying—the pain of being severed. I recognized it from before with Old Song, but this was much worse. My bond with Old Song had been newer. The bond with my parent, the bond with my dead, the bond with the Shoal was something I always had. To exist without it was unthinkable, even for a short time before my physical death. My old name was torn away from me too and I was completely alone, floating like an agonized speck of dirt within the Shoal of the dead. Somewhere above me, my body was drowning.

A song of red surged in my dying vision, a song of despair and promise, a song of anger, a song like a light that still beckoned. A deep, resonant voice echoed in my mind, calling me to him even though I was severed—or maybe precisely because I was severed. An orphan. Stone Orphan.

Around me, the prisoned ancestors behind their bond-bars began to chant. I did not understand what they were saying because I was dying. Despair battered me, pain and despair as the Shoal picked my spirit apart, but the ancestors’ chant coalesced into Away. Away. Away. Away.

I touched the red song. A rope, spinning toward me from an unknown person I could more feel than glimpse at a great distance. Someone solid and resolute. Someone whose light was the color of blood.

I understood the words now. These words, spoken to the Star of the Shoal by a nameway starkeeper called Ladder. The Shoal had rejected him, but nothing truly dies in the Shoal. Within it, in this airless deep, his words still lived on.

“Come to me.”

I knew—though I am not sure how—that I had to collect my body. The effort of it almost ended me, but I felt myself—body and soul—an agonizing, disjointed, dying, bewildered whole. I tugged on the red rope, and flickered toward that presence.

In a new place

Later I learned that we all get our first view of Ladder. His age, first of all—different people see different things. His severe disposition. The light of his candle. His judgment.

I got none of that, because I landed at his feet, gasping and sightless and vomiting water. He must have decided I’d had enough, because I felt him hurting me, worse than anything I had experienced in the Shoal.

The pain he gave me made my body whole.

He taught me his language, later, word by word, as he taught me his body, and mine. He was his daily self then, his regular age. Forty-five, he says. It never changes. Except when you look at him for the first time.

Ulín looks uncomfortable.

“Why are you upset?” I ask her.

“He hurt you, and . . .” She does not look at me.

“You mean the sharing of bodies.” I am suddenly angry at her. Does she think me a child? “Do you think I wasn’t consenting because I was new to his world, to your world of nameway and dreamway? You think I cannot desire because I am from the Shoal, or because I was torn from the Shoal, orphaned and thrust in this new world of yours?”

Ulín seems oddly encouraged by my vehemence. Still, her voice is careful. “You said that the body is not that important for the siltway people. Sharing bodies—the meaning of it might not be the same as here. I was worried that he—that he used your newness.”

“Ah.” I sigh. “And if I was new to your ways, you think I could not be consenting?”

She bites her lips. “I overstepped. I’m sorry.”

I ignore her. “Have I not told you about Old Song, and the stag woman?”

She nods.

I say, “I, too, wanted what Old Song found.”

I wanted to feel her passion. I wanted to learn this word woman, to understand what it had meant for Old Song, what it might mean for me. I wanted to share the body without the thought of producing new bodies. I say, “I wanted to share the body and not let it be for the common good of the Shoal.”

Ulín hesitates. “So you consented . . . as a rebellion.”

“I consented, out of curiosity, and yes, newness, and yes, as a rebellion. You cannot deny me this. I am not a child. I am other than you, but I am, and I choose, and become, and this, too, is mine.” I do not regret it. Ladder shared his body with me to teach me, and it was work in the end, but it wasn’t work for the Shoal.

“I understand,” she says, even though I see that it still troubles her.

I speak on, callously. “He taught me to sink into the world of the body. All the things I need for this work.” He taught me how to sense skin and wind, how to perceive the world with my magic. To look out of my eyes, in a way no siltway does in the isles, with a gaze that enumerates and accounts. The eyes teach the body how to pass unnoticed, how to perceive people by heat and by magic and how to bypass both, readying for the perfect strike.