Achiya was a precipitous port city nestled several kilometers inland within the spokes of a jagged natural rock formation, out of reach of the tremendous tides that washed the shore clean twice a day when the moons were in progression. Most people in Achiya made their living scouring the beaches after the tides receded. What they pulled out of the sea was often monstrous, and rarely palatable. But there were real treasures sometimes, too—bits of semi-organic heat shielding from some derelict, or the tuberous helmets that survived the long plunge taken by a spacefarer shot out of the sky.
But Zoe’s mother turned her back on the life of a scavenger and instead took to the sea itself. When she announced to Zoe’s grandmother that she would fish the sea, the story went, her grandmother had told her she was an arrogant ghost and God would punish her for her arrogance and turn the whole village to salt.
Zoe’s mother had fished that sea for forty years before it finally consumed her. Six days after she disappeared, the tide had surged further inland than its usual kilometer and set the colorful debris of her mother’s boat to rest just a few thousand paces from their stoop. Zoe remembered climbing down from the loft high up in the branches of the living abordna tree that supported their home and finding her aunt wailing over the wreckage.
Weeks later, a salty group of her mother’s peers hauled a vicious monster from the sea—ten meters long, four meters wide, covered in massive stinging tentacles that dangled with a thousand glittering optic nerves. It did not have a proper mouth or jaw, but a sucking maw that made up the core of its underside. They slit the thing open and found Zoe’s mother’s corpse there, perfectly preserved in one of the eight interior sacs the beast used to store its captured prey for later digestion.
Zoe remembered standing on the rocky beach. Thousands of tiny beetles migrated across the pebbles between the tides. When the moons were in recession, they hibernated. Her people were like those beetles, their livelihoods dependent on the long, ten-year cycle of the moons.
She became a data harvester, steeling in and out of great monsters like the one that had taken her mother, ransacking their guts for bits of flotsam they had ingested. A beetle casing here. An old semi-organic brain mesh there. Zoe did her best work during moontide, that long spill of dark when the nearest moon pulled hardest at the planet, peeling the ocean back like a flayed blanket of skin.
The goods she pulled out all went up into the city proper, for sale; she hiked through the winding streets, kept the sun off by moving from one tattered awning to another, offering salvage for a fraction of the cost of new, exchanging what the monsters ate for a bag of rice, a keg of beer, and once, a long length of muslin that put her in mind of her mother’s shroud.
She lived with her aunt up in the old abordna tree until her aunt’s vision went, and then her knees, and finally her heart, and Zoe sent her, too, back to the sea. For years, after, she expected that every behemoth she dug up would contain some scrap of her aunt; a toe, a bit of torso. But as Zoe, too, scuttled about on the beach like those beetles, year after year, ten-year moontide after moontide, she found no sign of her aunt while digging and skinning and squeezing.
As she, too, began to fall more often while descending to the beach, she considered the comfort that such an existence had offered her, and her people, the beetles on the beach, each of them making up a small piece of something far greater, cyclical as the seasons. Death and rebirth; the sea at once a murky incubator of life and a seething dumping ground of death and waste. This was life; its most potent metaphor. Birth and shit.
Moontide.
The moons so close she felt she could reach up to touch them. Her vision, not so great as the day they pulled her mother from the sea. Her balance, ever-worsening. Her mind, wandering. Her body, tired.
Achiya rose behind her, a tremulous beacon lit by swarms of fireflies. The city neither grew nor contracted, it hummed along, like the sea, like her own heart.
Stretched across the sand before her, here at moontide, a great bloody gob of slime-crusted organic matter lay inert, waiting. Zoe put her hands on it. Marveled at the ache in her fingers as she took up her knife and slit it open, filled with the same anticipation as the day they revealed her mother’s body. She hoped for a treasure, something from the sky.
Inside, she found a boat, a proper craft. Sturdy and gleaming like a new tooth. Zoe drug it away from the creature and pulled it down to the water, compelled there though she could not say why. The craft took the water as if born there, and perhaps it was. Zoe climbed inside, her hands still sticky with blood and viscera. She lay on the bottom of the craft and gazed at the moons. Is this how her mother felt, at sea?
She lay in the belly of the sea, the belly of the planet; she was the guts of the universe. Like her mother. Her aunt. All of Achiya, like the beetles and the tides and the moons. A great gory living thing. She was a bit of sinew, a length of bone, a knobby knee.
The craft began to drift. Zoe drifted with it.
They shared the same heartbeat. She felt it under her hands. The same rhythm as the lapping water. The same pulse as the stars.
She was the moontide.