The town smelled like fish and coal smoke and something frying in oil.
I stood in a narrow gap between two buildings—barely wide enough for my shoulders, which said more about the shoulders than the gap—and watched the port through a curtain of shadow. My legs ached. My stomach had stopped growling a while ago and settled into a low, constant squeeze, the kind that makes the world tilt at the edges if I turned my head too fast.
I'd eaten something yesterday. Yesterday. Before the fire, before everything—morning, a kitchen, food on a table. The memory belonged to the child whose body I was wearing, and it came with warmth and voices I refused to examine. That was less than a day ago. It shouldn't feel like starvation. But this body was small, and it had been through enough to make a single missed day feel like a week.
A yellow raincoat hung from me like a collapsed tent. I'd found it stuffed behind a refuse pile at the edge of town—child-sized, muddied, one sleeve half-torn, the fabric stiff with dried grime. Someone had thrown it away or lost it in last night's rain. It covered my head well enough. The color was too bright for hiding, but without it my face was bare, and a bare face was worse.
The port was small. A wooden pier jutting into the curve of the bay. Fishing boats clustered near the shore, hulls dark and wet, nets draped to dry across their sides like shed skin. Further out, a few larger ships sat heavier in the water—masted, wide-bellied, the kind that carried cargo or passengers between islands. One of them had a gangplank lowered, and people moved along it in a slow line. Families. Traders. A woman adjusting a bundle on her back while a child tugged her sleeve.
A passenger ship.
My mouth filled with something that wasn't quite hope. Too thin for that. More like the ghost of an idea—fragile, already cracking.
If I could get on board. Just walk up the gangplank. Blend in. A child traveling alone isn't strange if the child looks like she belongs—
My fingers tightened on the edge of the wall.
I don't belong.
The raincoat was filthy. My shoes were caked in mud, one sole peeling away at the toe. My hair was tangled, salt-crusted. I looked like what I was—a child with nowhere to go.
But the line was long. The gangplank was crowded. People jostled and shuffled forward without looking at each other. Maybe—
I moved before the thought finished.
Out of the gap. Along the edge of the street, keeping close to walls, stepping over a puddle that reflected a sky I didn't look at. My heart beat somewhere behind my eyes. The noise of the port grew—voices bargaining, a man laughing too loud, the creak of rope, the rhythmic knock of hulls against the pier.
The line moved. I slipped toward its tail end. Kept my head down. The raincoat's hood drooped over my forehead, and I let it. A few paces ahead, two men argued about the price of dried squid. Behind me, no one. Just open pier.
The gangplank. Close now. Wooden boards slanting upward, worn smooth by a thousand feet. A crewman stood at the top—broad-shouldered, sun-darkened, a clipboard tucked under one arm. He wasn't checking everyone. Just glancing. Most people walked past with a nod or a word.
One more step. Two.
"Hey—hold on."
The crewman's eyes landed on me. Not suspicious. Not yet. Just the automatic attention of someone whose job was to notice things that didn't fit.
"Where's your ticket, kid?"
My throat closed.
Say something.
"I—my mother's already on board." The words came out thin and too fast. "She told me to catch up. I went to—I think I got the wrong ship—"
The lie collapsed before it finished. I could hear it breaking—could hear how a real child might have said it, breathless and annoyed, and how I was saying it instead, voice shaking, eyes darting.
The crewman frowned. Not unkindly. He shifted his weight and looked down the gangplank behind me, scanning for an absent mother who did not exist.
"Which cabin? What's her name?"
Don't answer. I'll make it worse.
"Sorry—I think I got the wrong ship."
I stepped back. Turned. Walked—didn't run. Running would have been louder than a scream. My legs wanted to bolt. Every nerve in this small body howled at me to sprint. But I locked my knees and walked, one foot after another, back along the pier, past the dried-squid argument, past a dog nosing at fish bones, past a girl my age—Robin's age—sitting on a barrel and kicking her heels while she ate a rice ball the size of her fist.
I didn't look at the rice ball.
I kept walking until the passenger ship was behind me and the pier curved and the crowd thinned, and then I leaned against a stack of crates and pressed both hands over my mouth and breathed.
Stupid.
The word was sharp and deserved.
No plan. No ticket. No name. No story. I just walked up and hoped—what? That the world would let me pass because I needed it to?
My hands were shaking. I curled them into fists and pushed them against my thighs.
At least the crewman hadn't been suspicious of me—not the way I'd feared. He'd seen a lost kid without a ticket. Not a wanted criminal. Not an eighty-million-berry bounty in a muddy raincoat. He'd already forgotten me. Probably.
The port didn't care. Around me, the ordinary morning continued. A woman hung laundry from a second-floor window, humming something I couldn't place. Two old men sat on upturned buckets near a bait shop, one of them mending a net with fingers that moved without his eyes. A cart rattled past, piled with barrels, pulled by a man whose back was a landscape of old sun and older labor.
Normal life. Normal people. None of them running.
I pushed off the crates and kept moving along the waterfront. Past a row of moored fishing boats. Past a warehouse with its door propped open and the smell of salt and sawdust breathing out of it. I wasn't heading anywhere specific—just away from the passenger ship, scanning the pier, looking for anything that resembled a second chance.
The first ship was done. The next one—a cargo hauler further down the pier, squat and rough and wide—was still being loaded. Workers moved around it like ants around a sugar pile, carrying crates and barrels between the pier and the deck. Some hauled. Some stacked. A man on deck worked a rope-and-pulley system that squealed with every load. The smell of cotton and tar drifted from its hold.
I slowed, watching from the edge of the pier.
Most of the activity was concentrated near the ship's gangway. Crates in uneven rows waited on the pier—some sealed, some open, their lids leaning against them. Further down, away from the main cluster of workers, a man with a clipboard stood beside a smaller stack of crates and held a Den Den Mushi at arm's length.
I was walking past when it happened.
I'd been looking right—toward the passenger ship I'd just failed to board, toward the fishing boats, toward anything except where I was going. My thoughts were still tangled in the crewman's face, in the sound of my own lie falling apart. I was barely watching the path in front of me.
The Den Den Mushi flashed.
Ka-chak.
I flinched. Turned. The snail's eyes blinked once, and the man behind it scowled—not at the snail, but at me.
"Move it! You're in the shot!" He waved his free hand like he was shooing a cat. "I've been cataloguing this shipment since dawn and I don't need some—" He took in my raincoat, my muddy shoes, the hood shadowing my face. His scowl deepened. "Go beg somewhere else, kid. This isn't a playground."
I stepped back. My mouth opened and closed without producing sound.
The man had already turned away, repositioning the Den Den Mushi toward the crates. Muttering. Something about deadlines and incompetent suppliers and children who didn't know how to stay out of the way.
I walked. Faster now. My pulse drummed in my ears.
The flash. The snail's eye. The angle.
Had I been in the frame? I'd been walking past—head turning, face half-toward the camera. The hood was up, but hoods shifted. If the image caught even a sliver of the face underneath—
My fingers found the raincoat's collar and pulled it tighter.
It's fine. It's nothing. He was photographing cargo, not people. Even if I'm in the background—who would look? Who would care about a blurry child in a dirty coat behind a stack of crates?
The reassurance rang hollow. Because I knew—in the way I knew too many things now—that the world had a way of collecting small evidence and assembling it later into something lethal.
I needed to leave this island. Now.
The cargo ship was still loading. I circled back toward it, keeping my distance, watching from behind a row of barrels that smelled like vinegar. The workers had thinned slightly—some had moved aboard, some had disappeared around the far side of the ship. On the pier, a man was working his way along the remaining crates with a hammer and a pouch of nails, tapping lids shut. Tap-tap-tap. Steady. Methodical.
I watched his rhythm. He worked left to right. Each crate took about a minute—position the lid, three nails on one side, two on the other, move on. Behind him, the sealed crates waited to be hauled aboard.
To his left: three open crates. Lids resting beside them. Unattended.
The nailer was four crates to the right, bent over his work. The nearest workers were on the ship's deck, occupied with ropes and rigging. No one was looking at the open crates.
My legs moved.
Not because I decided. Because the gap was closing—the nailer would reach those crates soon—and my body understood something my thoughts hadn't caught up to yet: there was no better option. Every minute on this island was a minute too long.
I was beside the nearest crate before my mind finished arguing with my legs.
It was large—wooden, rough-planked, the kind built to be used and reused until the grain split. Inside: bolts of cloth, folded but loose, and a few empty burlap sacks crumpled at the bottom. Space. Enough for something my size.
I climbed in.
The cloth was coarse against my legs. I curled myself down, pulling the burlap sacks over my body—not to hide, not really, just to make myself less. Smaller. A shape that could be mistaken for cargo. My knees pressed against my chest. My chin tucked.
I reached up and pulled the lid back into place. It rested on the rim—loose without nails, just wood against wood. Light filtered through the cracks in thin bright lines, slicing across my arms.
Then I was still.
And in the stillness, the full weight of what I'd just done landed on me like a falling wall.
I climbed into a box.
A wooden box on a pier on an island I don't know, in a world where I am eight years old and wanted dead, and I climbed into a box and pulled the lid shut.
My breathing went wrong—too fast, too shallow. The box was small. The air was warm and close and smelled like cotton and dust and old wood. The cracks of light striped my skin like bars.
I can't get out once the lid is nailed. I can't—
Footsteps.
Close. Getting closer.
The crunch of boots on the pier's wooden planks, and then the nailer's rhythm—closer now. Tap-tap-tap. The crate next to mine. The wood vibrated through the side and into my hip.
I stopped breathing.
Tap-tap-tap.
Silence.
Boots shifting. A grunt as he moved. Then the sound was directly overhead—
TAP. TAP. TAP.
Each strike shuddered through the lid, through the wood, through the cloth, through my bones. I pressed my palms flat against the burlap and locked every muscle and thought one single word on a loop—
Don't move don't move don't move—
The nailing stopped.
The lid was sealed.
The lines of light vanished—not all at once, but nail by nail, gap by gap, until the darkness was complete.
I was inside.
No way out.
Something lurched in my stomach—not hunger this time. Panic. Pure, animal panic, the kind that doesn't listen to reason. My fingers clawed at the burlap and I nearly screamed—nearly pounded on the lid and begged to be let out like the child this body was—
But the footsteps were already moving away. The nailer, on to the next crate.
I pressed my fist against my mouth and bit down on my own knuckle until the pain was louder than the fear.
Breathe.
The dark pressed in.
Breathe.
I breathed.
Time became something I could only endure. Sounds reached me through the wood—muffled, distorted. The scrape and thud of crates being moved. Voices, drifting in and out.
"—grab the last row, Dosa, we're behind—"
"—this one's heavier than it looks—"
A grunt. My crate shifted. Tilted. My body slid against the cloth and I caught myself with both palms, biting back a sound.
"The hell'd they pack in here? Feels like rocks."
A second voice, hoarser, out of breath: "Everything feels like rocks after six hours, old man. Just lift."
"I'm telling you, this is heavier than the rest."
"And I'm telling you, break's in twenty minutes. Move."
The crate swung. My stomach dropped. For a terrible, weightless moment I was suspended—and then the crate slammed down on something hard and the impact jarred through my spine.
I tasted blood. I'd bitten my tongue.
More crates settled around me—thud, thud, scrape—each one narrowing the world, stacking the darkness higher. The sounds changed. The open air of the pier faded. The echoes tightened. I was inside the ship now, in a hold somewhere below the deck, surrounded by cargo that didn't know it was keeping company with a girl.
A hatch groaned shut above.
The dark was total.
And then—after a silence that stretched long enough to become its own kind of terror—
A tremor.
Low. Steady. The kind I felt in my teeth before I felt it in my skin.
The ship was moving.
The sea's rhythm found me through the wood—slow, patient, vast. The crate swayed with it, a gentle rock that should have been comforting and wasn't.
I uncurled my fists. The knuckle I'd bitten throbbed.
The fear didn't leave. It didn't lessen. It just—settled. Moved from the surface to somewhere deeper, like a stone sinking to the bottom of a lake. Still there. Still heavy. But no longer thrashing.
My body decided before I did.
The cloth beneath me was rough but warm. The rocking was steady. My eyelids, which had been clenched so long the muscles burned, softened. The darkness stopped pressing in and began to simply be—not a threat, just an absence.
I didn't want to sleep. Sleeping meant letting go. Sleeping meant trusting a world that had given me no reason to trust it.
But this body was eight years old. It had been running since Ohara burned. And it didn't ask permission.
The last thing I felt was the ship's pulse through the wood—steady as a heartbeat that wasn't mine.
Then nothing.
Just dark.
Just the sea.
Just—
To be continued…