CHAPTER ONE
It was the shaking that woke me.
Again.
Didn’t come from a single place, but everywhere all at once. The floor, the ceiling, my bed. The fan overhead, the chain switches on it swinging like pendulums, and the lights I’d strung all over my walls, swaying like twinkling stars, confirmation that this was not a dream.
Then it was quiet. Heavy. Total. The kind of silence that is louder than noise, as though the island was holding its breath along with me, like we were waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It took a minute for my mind to catch up to what was happening. Earthquake. Another one, as strong as the one six months ago. That one made my grandmother cry out into the night and mumble things I didn’t understand and that she wouldn’t talk about. I left it alone, but I never forgot.
Lately we had been having more earthquakes. The geologists called them “normal” because South Carolina includes a number of fault zones, and even though we were on a tiny sea island off thecoast, we still felt them. But Nana Ama, my grandmother, said it was the spirits and the gods angry about something. About what? She wouldn’t tell me. She’d stop talking and retreat into herself or lock herself away in her tiny cabin behind our house. It was set deeper into the woods, a place where she made her elixir and tinctures and sachets filled with herbs for islanders who needed healing or blessings. She never told me anything that mattered.
Storms, floods, hurricanes were what our sea island knew best. Not earthquakes like they had in California. The first was the big quake six months ago—the only one I’d ever experienced at the time. It was big enough to tear open the land in some places. Big enough to make our power go out and on again. Big enough to crack open something deep within my grandmother.
She had wailed into the dark. When I’d found her in her room, her sheets were damp with sweat and twisted around her legs. She climbed out of bed, barely registering I was there, and shot out of her room. All I could do was grab her robe and follow, desperately calling her name. She spoke to herself in dialects I didn’t recognize and had never heard her speak. She walked the perimeter of our home, murmuring to the trees, to the ground, to the land, like she was trying to soothe something ancient and angry. Our land, this island we’d owned for centuries—she believed it was offended. That we’d somehow broken a promise our blood had once made and the earthquakes were a result of our offense.
Her eyes darted left and right, like something was about to jump out at her from behind a tree. I’d never seen her show fear. I’d never seen her in pain. I didn’t know how to help her. She’d always been the one who healed others.
I had followed her through the winding path from our home, through the peach groves she cherished and got rich from, through the thatch of woods that separated us from the Atlantic Ocean.
She stopped on the cliff, that high ledge where she usually went to be for hours. I could hear the waves crashing against the rocks below. As she always did, she was looking up at the sky. But this time more intently, urgently, as if waiting for an alien mother ship to come down and swoop her up. I called her name. She didn’t reply. Just looked so intensely at the sky, at the clouds that were gathering, as if she was trying to peer through them into something beyond. She had started mumbling again, and this time I heard what she said, the words I hadn’t been able to decipher earlier when I’d found her in bed. My blood felt like ice in my veins because, when she said them, she spoke as if her heart had been torn from her body and smashed into nothing.
“Born to be the cure but instead became the disease.”
Something had lurched in me, and I shivered as her words slid around me like a constricting snake. I had no idea what she meant. It made no sense why she’d say that, because Nana Ama was a healer, had always been. She had spent her life, her energy, had gone hungry and without rest taking care of everyone else, including me. Magic happened in that tiny cabin of hers where she concocted her special elixir, tinctures, poultices, and herb-filled sachets.
There was no ailment Nana Ama couldn’t catch before it was too late. There was nothing she couldn’t diagnose from a mere perceptive look, a touch, or a feeling—a vibe she gleaned from the afflicted. Healing was Nana Ama’s gift. She just… knew when somethingwas wrong. And if the illness was too complicated for her to take on without too many questions asked of her, then she’d send the patient across the sea to the mainland to seek help from doctors.
So to talk about a cure becoming a disease rattled me. But she never spoke those words again. Didn’t acknowledge them the next day, when I’d asked what she’d meant. Instead she totally shut me out. Like she always did when she thought something was over my head. Well, it wasn’t.
Now here we were again—six months later and another Nana-shaking quake. The jostling stopped, but the tension, the dread, lingered, wrapping around me like a mummy.
She wasn’t in her bedroom like the last time. Or in the kitchen. Or in her favorite chair on the lanai,getting her thoughts togetheras she sipped warmed, honeyed coconut water or palm oil to replenish the energy she’d used managing this island and its people. She wasn’t in the front yard, or in her cabin. She wasn’t on the cliff. She was nowhere.
The threads of fear tightened around me, making it harder to breathe.
I finally found her when I doubled back and went through the peach grove. I don’t know how I’d missed her before. Maybe it was my panic. Now all I knew was relief. I weaved through the trees that stood like small guards at the edge of our land, their short trunks and stubby branches reaching to the sky as if in celebration. Usually, seeing them, the fruit that built Nana Ama’s peach empire on the mainland, comforted me. Their thick, shiny leaves would be like a thousand hellos in the breeze. But tonight the grove looked anything but comforting.
Nana stood among the trees as stiff as stone with her head canted to the side. One arm was wrapped across her chest, fingers gripping her shoulder, while the other hand hung limply at her side. If she heard me coming, she didn’t show it.
She stared deep into the trees, beyond the grove, past where I’d come from. Again, she looked like she was searching for something that wouldn’t show. I did a quick check just to make sure.
She once told me that if you stood in the right spot in the grove, you could see through it and the woods, straight to the cliff, and catch a glimpse of the sky. She said that blue reminded her of home.Home, home, the place across the sea where millions of our ancestors had been stolen, never to return. Being on our Golden Isle was like being in two worlds, Nana said. The worlds of then and now. It was the closest thing she felt to the culture she’d grown up on.
The air around her was charged with a strange energy, and I hesitated before interrupting her in this state.
“Hey, Nana,” I said softly, carefully, so as not to startle her. You weren’t supposed to surprise your elders, and my grandmother was the eldest of elders—though you wouldn’t hear that from me—but to everyone else she looked ageless.
Her quilt had slipped from one shoulder, its tips dragging in the dirt. I stepped closer to gently put it back in place, finding her body wound up beneath my fingertips. Her muscles were coiled tight, like she was ready to spring. The weird energy continued to radiate. Red and pulsing in waves. Keeping me at bay.
I didn’t think I’d done something lately to piss her off. And she didn’t seem sick. Nana never got sick, even though she wasold. Healers were strong, and the powers she’d been blessed with made her invincible.
When her face came into my view, my heart thumped in my chest and my breath caught. Her brows tented up in the middle of her forehead. Her lips were pressed so close together they nearly disappeared, replacing the warm, easy smile that was her trademark.
Nana wasn’t staring into the grove. Wasn’t really staring at anything at all. It was like she was here, but… not.
I was about to say something to break the eerie silence when she spoke first.
