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Chapter 1. Scorched Palm and a Severed Chain 

The clock above the employee entrance read 4:47 when I punched in, the old mechanical machine jamming for half a second before it stamped my card. Forty-seven minutes past four in the morning, and already the heat had settled into my lungs like something breathing from the inside. I tucked my hair behind my ear—the golden blond strands slipping through my fingers, the dark brown ones catching on my calluses—and walked into the belly of the resort.

Three things crushed me before I even reached the linen cart.

The first was the eviction notice I'd taped to the refrigerator three days ago. I'd memorized it by now: You are hereby required to vacate the premises within thirty days. Seventeen days left. I'd counted last night, lying on my mattress with Mateo's breathing drifting through the thin wall, my fingers tracing the number into my own thigh like a prayer I didn't believe in.

The second was my mother's empty pill bottle, rattling in the trash when I'd taken out the kitchen bag this morning. The pharmacy wouldn't refill it until I paid the two hundred dollars outstanding. Two hundred dollars might as well have been two thousand. Might as well have been the moon.

The third was the missed check-in with my probation officer three days ago. I'd called her office yesterday, gotten a recording, left a message that probably wouldn't matter. The system didn't care about reasons. It cared about compliance. And I was, verily, not compliant.

So I stripped beds.

The resort's sheets were always warm, always faintly damp with the sweat of tourists who'd slept with the air conditioning set too low and the windows sealed against the mosquitoes. My arms sank into the cotton, pulling fitted sheets from queen-sized mattresses, shaking them out in the gray light that filtered through the plantation shutters. The smell of sunscreen and something floral—lotion, maybe, or the residue of a shampoo I couldn't pronounce—clung to every pillowcase.

My spiked arm sleeve pressed into my forearm as I worked, the leather warm against my skin, the brass spikes cool when I turned my wrist just so. I'd made it myself three years ago, sitting on the floor of the upstairs apartment with a hole punch and a hammer, Mateo watching from the doorway with his notebook clutched to his chest. It was a comfort, that sleeve. A weapon, too. But mostly a comfort—something I'd built, something that fit, something that reminded me I could still make things instead of just breaking them.

"You're here early."

I didn't turn around. I knew that voice—too young to be so tired, too careful to be anything but worried.

"Go home, Mateo." I pulled another pillowcase free, the fabric tearing at the seam because the resort bought cheap linens and expected them to last forever. "You don't have to be here."

"You don't have to be here either."

Now I turned.

He stood in the service corridor with the buzzing fluorescent light behind him, his dark curly hair disheveled, his eyes too old for sixteen. In his hands, a crumpled stack of pesos—his weekend earnings from the fruit market, still smelling of avocado and the particular dust that settled on every surface of Calle Pedro Clisante.

"I don't need your money," I said.

"Yes, you do."

"I said I don't—"

"You'll take it anyway." He stepped forward, pressed the bills into my palm, his fingers warm and slightly sticky from the mangoes he'd been carrying. "Because you're my sister, and I'm not going to watch you starve so you can pretend you have pride left."

The words hit like a punch to the diaphragm. I closed my hand around the pesos, felt the edges of the bills crease against my calluses, and nodded once. Just once. Anything more would have undone me.

"Fine," I said. "But you're eating dinner with me tonight. No arguments."

"I never argue with free food."

That was a lie. He argued with everything—my hours, my bruises, the way I came home with blood under my fingernails and told him I'd cut myself on the industrial washing machine. But he let me have this one, and I let him have his lie, and for a moment we stood there in the service corridor like we were the only two people in the world who understood that survival was just a series of small surrenders.

Then the screaming started.

At first, I thought it was a tourist having a panic attack—it happened sometimes, the combination of heat and alcohol and the particular terror of being somewhere you didn't speak the language. But then the screaming multiplied. Became a chorus. Became something that didn't belong to human throats at all.

I shoved Mateo behind me without thinking, my hand going to the butterfly knife in my back pocket, the familiar weight of it grounding me. "Stay here. Don't move. Don't—"

"I'm not a kid, Shaina."

"You're sixteen. You're a kid. Stay."

I ran.

The service corridor opened onto the pool deck, and the pool deck opened onto the beach, and the beach was no longer a beach. It was a catastrophe. A creature the size of a delivery truck had emerged from the Atlantic, its hide black and cracking like old leather left too long in the sun, smoke curling from the fissures in its skin. Its eyes burned red—not the red of anger, but the red of something that had been twisted, corrupted, turned inside out.

The Re'em. I didn't know its name then. I just knew the shape of it: massive ox-like body, horns that curved toward the sky, hooves that gouged the sand with every step. A tourist in a floral swimsuit was screaming, frozen in place directly in the creature's path. The beast lowered its head.

I moved before I could think.

My boots hit the sand, the grains coarse and dark between the laces. The creature's horn caught the first light of dawn, and I saw something in that horn—something that looked almost like Hebrew letters, carved into the bone, glowing faintly. Not painted. Grown that way.

Ancient civilization, something whispered in the back of my mind. Your blood remembers.

I didn't know what that meant. I didn't have time to find out.

The tourist finally ran, and the creature's head snapped toward me instead, its red eyes fixing on my lime green ones. For a moment, nothing moved. Not the smoke curling from its hide. Not the waves behind it. Not my heart, which had stopped somewhere between the fourth and fifth beat.

Then the beast screamed.

The sound was wrong—not a bull's bellow, but something higher, something that belonged in a throat that shouldn't exist. It turned and ran, its hooves throwing sand in a plume behind it, and by the time the first police siren wailed through the tropical dawn, the creature had vanished into a mist that smelled of cinnamon and old paper and something else. Something that reminded me of the Hebrew Bible on my nightstand, the one I'd inherited from my grandmother, the one I never opened.

My pulse raced. My hands shook. And somewhere behind me, in the service corridor where I'd left him, Mateo was watching through the gap in the door, his brown eyes wide and his silver chain pressed to his lips.

________________________________________

The apartment on Calle Principal was dark when I finally made it home.

Not the dark of night—the sun had risen hours ago, and the heat had turned the upstairs rooms into an oven. No, this was the dark of a place that had given up on being anything other than a holding cell. The blue metal door still had the eviction notice taped to it. The stairs still had no handrail. The kitchen still smelled of coffee grounds and the particular sweetness of mangoes rotting in the trash.

I locked the door behind me—three locks, all of them old, all of them useless—and leaned my forehead against the wood. The mezuzah on the doorframe brushed my hair. I touched it three times, the way I always did, the habit older than my memory of learning it.

Something followed me home.

I'd felt it on the walk from the resort, a presence at the edge of my vision, a shadow that moved against the wind. The royal palms had whispered in a language I almost understood. The bougainvillea had trembled even though there was no breeze. And somewhere behind me, on the other side of the street, a shape had stood in the doorway of the abandoned botanica—watching, waiting, breathing.

I pushed off from the door and walked to my bedroom.

The back bedroom, with its mattress on the floor and its heavy bag hanging from the ceiling hook. The floorboards with their scuff marks in a half-circle, the same footwork pattern I'd practiced alone at two in the morning for two years. The shelf with the worn Hebrew Bible, the Krav Maga belt, the photograph of my mother on a beach in the 1980s, before the illness took her smile.

The Bible was open.

I hadn't opened it. I never opened it. It sat on that shelf like a paperweight, like a promise I'd made to my grandmother on her deathbed that I'd keep it safe, not that I'd read it. But now it lay on the mattress, the pages parted to a section I didn't recognize, the ink seeming to glow in the dim light.

I picked it up.

The words were Hebrew—I could read them, but they slid through my understanding like water through a sieve. Ezekiel's vision, my mind supplied, though I didn't know how I knew that. The wheel within the wheel. The fire infolding itself. The living creatures with eyes all around.

The page burned.

Not metaphorically. The paper ignited under my fingers, the flames blue and gold and something else—something that wasn't fire at all, but light pretending to be fire. I dropped the Bible, but the fire followed my hands, crawling up my palms, wrapping around my wrists, searing the air with the smell of ozone and old incense.

I screamed.

The light exploded from my palms, cutting through the wall like it wasn't there, severing the chain of the heavy bag with a sound like a bell being struck. The bag crashed to the floor, and the light kept going, tearing through the floorboards, leaving glowing cracks in the wood that pulsed with a heartbeat that wasn't mine.

And then, silence.

I stood in the wreckage, my hands bleeding from the burns, the glow fading from my skin like the afterimage of a camera flash. My chest heaved. My vision swam. And from the hallway, Mateo's voice cut through the ringing in my ears.

"Shaina?"

He stood in the doorway, his face pale, his eyes fixed on the ruined wall, the severed chain, the smoke rising from my palms. For a long moment, he didn't speak. Didn't move. Didn't breathe.

Then he said, "What are you becoming?"

Not what happened. Not are you okay. But what are you becoming, as if he'd known all along that this was coming, as if he'd been waiting for the moment when the girl who raised him would finally turn into something he didn't recognize.

I didn't have an answer.

So I sent him away. Told him to go to Doña Carmen's, to stay there until I called, to not look back. He argued, because he always argued, but the fear in his eyes was louder than his voice. He went.

And I sat alone on the ruined mattress, with the eviction notice still taped to the kitchen counter, with my mother's empty pill bottle rattling in the trash, with the floorboards torn open and the heavy bag's chain lying in a coil on the cracked wood.

The shadow from the street was gone. But something else had taken its place. Something inside me. Something that had been waiting, patient as the roots of the ceiba trees, for the moment when I finally broke open.

I touched my inner wrist—the scorpion tattoo, my grandmother's name in the ink, my zodiac sign carved into my skin. The burns on my palms throbbed. The light had left my body, but I could still feel it, somewhere deep, coiled and waiting.

What am I becoming?

And the scariest part wasn't that I didn't know the answer.

It was that, for the first time in four years, I wanted to find out.