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remembered August's solemn face, his warm eyes.
    Suddenly, he was looking at the moon through tears. He knew he could never return to Nantil. It was too painful. He wept about August and suddenly found himself weeping about his father. He cried until his ribs hurt and then finally fell asleep.
    ***
    He awakened at dawn and was up on his elbows, looking out across the lagoon, when a lone Laysan albatross flew by at water's edge. Albatross were seldom seen this far north, but there it was, with its big white body and seven feet of white-and-black wings, their tips as sharp as spears. It glided along without effort and then twisted its head and moaned. He could hear it clearly.
    A warning! Jonjen had said that an albatross had come by Bikini a long time ago and moaned. A typhoon hit several days later.
    Something terrible was going to happen to their atoll. The
tournefortia
tree had warned about it; now the albatross.
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In December 1942, Enrico Fermi and his team of physicists set atomic elements into a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on a snow-covered squash court of the University of Chicago. Known as Chicago Pile Number One, it was the second major step toward the making of an atomic bomb.

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    "It moaned just as it passed by me," Sorry said, the sight and sound of the big white-bodied bird lingering on in his mind.
    "Albatross often do that," his grandfather said, "But they don't come near here very often."
    They were by the canoe shed. Sorry was unloading all the things he'd picked up on Nantil. Lokileni, Tara, and Sorry's mother were a few feet away, watching.
    "Maybe it was lost," Sorry said.
    "They come around occasionally," his mother said. "Years ago, one followed your father's big canoe for three days. He was going to Wotje. They ride the ocean air currents and follow ships or boats. Why, I don't know."
    Jonjen, sitting cross-legged in the sand, said, "They are not a good omen."
    Sorry's mother looked over at her father. "I thought you'd say that."
    "Remember the typhoon," Jonjen said darkly, his eyes fixed on her with annoyance.
    "Of course I do," she answered. The lagoon waters had swept over the island waist deep, destroying all the dwellings and flooding the taro pits. Everyone took to the swayback palms, holding on to
sennit
loops. "No albatross caused it."
    "The albatross was carrying a message from God, a warning. We'd sinned," Jonjen insisted.
    Sorry's mother gave up. Arguing with her father was useless.
    Sorry said, "Let's hope we don't have another one."
    He had been seven when that storm hit, and he'd had nightmares for months.
    Typhoon season, especially in the western Pacific, was between July and October. Bikini wasn't on the usual typhoon route. But he couldn't think of anything else the albatross might be warning them about.
    Other families had come to the canoe shed to look at what he'd found on Nantil. Most of the time beachcombing was best on the barrier reefs, though the waves sometimes smashed things against the coral shelves. Things that floated ashore in the lagoon were usually from ships anchored there.
    Chief Juda would soon divide up what Sorry had found on Nantil, except the fine wooden chair. Sorry would keep it for his family. He couldn't guess why the white men had thrown it overboard.
    ***
    The rainy season arrived a month later, and just in time. The islanders had used a lot of coconut water since the past October. The tropical rainstorms of the summer months were often downpours, the heavy, dark clouds draining water over the atoll, curtain after curtain of it.
    But the first rain was gentle, and they ran around capturing, as always, what they could in anything that would hold water. Sorry went to sleep that night hearing the pleasant drum of raindrops on the thatch roof.
    The first real storm that year arrived during the day a few weeks later, adding more precious water. With it came thunder and lightning, unusual for the north Marshalls. This time there were wind gusts that