sustenance - one

Liliota Island smelled like this: vulcanized rubber and rust, mixed with the stench of the processors along Simoan Row -- tanks stuffed full of fish bloated from internal pressure, dying, dying, and dead. Just to the north, the dockyard smelled of salt and organic rancidity, the boats tied to them of fish scales and harsh lye. These scents, borne on a persistent zephyr, found their way up the ridge to the village, where it permeated bruised bricks and coated yellowing windows.

To Kaela, Liliota simply smelled like home.

Her mother worked at the Liliota Island Clinic, hospital for both islanders and fishermen -- Kaela herself was brought into the world there. From time to time, Kaela woke early enough to see Mama off to work, and wouldn't see her again until well after sundown. The day wrought a remarkable transformation on her: scrubs would be wrinkled, sometimes spotted with blood or pus from a fisherman with a fracture left open for infection. Shoulder-length hair frizzed, just a little more shadow under bright eyes like her daughter's. Mama's invincible smile, a kneeling hug right in the doorway, threw her daughter off just enough to keep messy questions unasked.

Papa worked a similarly daunting shift, often leaving home before his wife, coming back after. A lineman at Processor Three, he spent ten hours a day with a knife in his hand, incising a precise line along a fish's keel and stripping out the guts -- those were fed into boilers and powered the conveyors, or were sold as cut-rate bait to novice captains. He came home, hair like rumpled straw, him smelling of blood, and, on some nights, distillations cut with chemicals to imitate the legendary podanzo. The floorboards creaked violently under his ponderous frame. He developed a phlegmatic cough that never went away. Him being the only father she had, though, Kaela never regarded him with terror or disgust.

Kaela's only job was to walk herself to school, work diligently through textbooks her teacher's teacher would have used, and walk back. Once a week, a list materialized on the kitchen table written in Mama's slanting script. This Kaela took to Windjammer Market, a few korona fluttering like dehydrating fish in the bottom. The shades were always faded over the stalls and holes appeared between the produce and meat and beads and elixirs and toys, but the grocers always filled Mama's orders. They tousled her light hair, praised her for growing so well so young, and even tucked treats into her hand: a Kamanian sweet in gaudy wrapping, a vial of bubble-blowing liquid.

Being six years old, Kaela could make these errands because the basket never came close to full. Tonight's dinner would be a large green onion each, fried with drops of jejamom oil. She liked anything Mama cooked.

***

There were few enough residents on Liliota to allow each family an entire house — Kaela's even had stairs in it. Many other houses on Keplin street noasted multiple stories, too, most of them with decaying gutters or mold on the roofs. Autumn was especially harsh, when storms arrived from the Ourobis and whipped the island before departing to ravage Corth's western coast. Inside Kaela's house, there was a threadbare living room and a kitchen, upstairs were the two bedrooms and one toilet. Each room had a single light set in the center of its ceiling, and only the lights in the kitchen and Kaela's bedroom kept their strings uncut and within her reach. The electric bill was a constant spring of vitriol and ulcers for Papa and it wouldn't do to aggravate him with wasted light.

Kaela spread her groceries on a table that had seen feasts and tears. In addition to the green onions, there was a bottle of milk, a small tin of salt (it wasn't worth evaporating one's own around here), and, amazingly, several curls of fresh dhillweed. The processor allowed Papa his pick of one free fish a week — to have it seasoned with an herb was even rarer.

Her stomach rumbled. Mama wouldn't be home for a while, so she put the perishables into the icebox and took the stairs to her room on all fours. Her room was little more than a converted closet off her parents' bedroom. Her bed would have gone to the incinerator had Papa not persuaded the neighbors to let him have it. Her dresser cost him a week's worth of sleep to make; he spent just as long hacking her a window through the wall. A mile down the hill, when the processors weren't busy smothering the Ourobis Ocean with thick smog from their smokestacks, it spread over the world like a big blue bedsheet and tucked the island in.

Kaela pulled Kitty off of her dresser and set the patchwork toy on the windowsill. She started to blow bubbles into the air and cried out in delight as the orbs configured themselves into other shapes -- long, flexible snakes and segmented caterpillars, a mushy seagull. The toy man had given her a motive vial.

"Look, Kitty," she exclaimed, producing a soap kitten with some effort. "Make friends, nya?"

Kitty stared at the kitten until it popped. The plushie was clearly uninterested in reaching out to others.

Not that it bothered Kaela. Kitty still had her as a friend, and she felt good about that. She continued to blow bubble animals through the window: alley dogs, splayed lizards. Concentrating on something she found in a tide pool, she puffed hard and produced an iridescent slug with frills like lace.

The sun cradled the undersides of the quicksilver clouds with red light. The bell in the chapel down the road rang eight times, then nine. The sky released its last heat and turned to star-studded charcoal. Kaela slapped two mosquitoes on her arm and shut the window, the bubble vial empty in her hand. She dropped the vial into the trash.

The front door remained resentfully silent. Kaela listened to the clock on her dresser tick off the seconds. She gave up after her head began nodding, brushed her teeth, and put on her nightgown. Even as she crawled into bed, she expected to hear the front steps clatter under someone's feet, to hear hinges creak and a voice saying, "Kaela, I'm home." In the glow of her nightlight (a silhouette of a dragon breaching from the sea), she pulled Kitty into her chest. Though she wondered why she still hadn't been fed, why Mama and Papa were out so late, she soon

dropped away anyway and

slept