The half mile from the beaches was abandoned during the summer, but when the storm season came, boats were moored and pulled ashore, the shacks were occupied, and the rafters battened down for the winter. Thena was a little girl, and she remembered the sudden life that came from those ragged streets—it was before everything had gone electric on the beaches. So they brought their own powers and their own lanterns and she could see them flicker from the bedroom window she shared with her four sisters. She could hear laughter for much of the night and some of the day, and all told it scared her.

They were people of the water, of the floating ports that existed long before the city Midas ever sprawled its way proper between the river’s nine mouths. They knew the coral teeth that ate the bottom of boats that tried to get too close to shore. They knew the strangers that came to their bobbing businesses. They knew the sea monsters that dwelled in the sticky ocean floors. Thena was a person of the village, the town, what was not yet the proper urban stretch it would one day become; and none of her family knew these things. None of the rest of the town knew these things. They stayed clear of the rafters, and the rafter kin--save the few necessary merchants, who took their wares out to be sold on the extended coastline and generally benefited from it very nicely.

Thena though, she was too young to know of any of this. She knew only a few things. The stories adults told her: (fifty paces from the ocean and they’ll turn back into the water they’re made out of). The stories the children told each other: (you, you they’ll put you in a net and then they’ll put you in the water and they’ll make you bait for the ‘cuda and and and). But more than anything, she remembered this: on the way to the market, watching a couple of stocky boys kick a melon rind at each other for fun, listening to their laughter and feeling the sudden urgent tightening of the hand on her shoulder.

“They,” said her mother, softly. “They will take you to the ocean and never bring you back. Don’t you ever marry one of those boys, Thena.”

And then Thena grew up and married a man who did take her away and not ever bring her back, but his name was Costa Wezen and he was not a rafter.

Still. These things she did not forget.

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