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out the names of the fish they were selling, and this led more people to their stand. Her uncle and grandfather treated her like a princess out of a story—like the girl Reneleka who emerged from an oyster, coiled around a pearl, and who had created the sea dragons. It was a story they told in Tenikemac. She felt as if she, too, had been magically created.
    Then one afternoon when she was sitting to the side of the stand, a woman came over and spoke to her. It seemed the most natural of events, one more person asking her questions. The woman was fidgety and furtive, but Leodora didn’t appreciate the meaning of this. She had only known kindness.
    The woman invited her for a walk, with a promise of an undisclosed surprise at the end of it. Leodora would have told her grandfather, but he was with a customer on the other side of the stall. She might have told Gousier, but he was haggling with still another person over the price of a halibut. The current assistant had wandered off.
    She strolled along beside her new acquaintance for only a few moments before the woman took her hand and drew her suddenly into the nearest crooked little alley, with the promise, “Your treat’s up here.”
    It was the same alley her uncle had shown her, full of tilting buildings, and she marched along bravely into the not unfamiliar gloom. Then a man unfolded from the deeper shadows, and she stopped. Leodora remembered him—he had passed by their stall two or three times and then asked her about the cod, listened with a wolfish grin to what she told him, and thanked her for her recitation. He hadn’t bought anything. He grinned at her again now. He had very good teeth.
    The woman shoved ahead of her and said, “Give me my money.” But the man shook his head. “When I’ve made the delivery, when they’re happy with their new arrival.” Both of them glanced down at her, and that was the moment she knew something was wrong, but the woman still gripped her wrist. The two began to argue. Leodora pulled with ever-increasing urgency to get away. The woman was too busy squabbling to notice. Abruptly Leodora broke the hold, but it was so sudden and she’d pulled so hard that she spun against the wall. The man was on her before she could get up. “All right, darlin’,” he said. The stink of him smothered her. “You come along with me now to get your surprise. No more working in a fish stall for you, not a lovely girl like you. They’ll like you where we’re going. You’ll be the most popular girl they have.” Smiling though he was all the while, his sweet words were more ominous than anything she’d ever heard. She twisted, but his grip was much harder than the woman’s, and the wall was at her back, offering no way to put distance between them. She started to scream. The man clamped his hand around her face and hissed at her. He ordered the woman to do something to silence her, and they both closed in where there was hardly enough room for one of them alone, and the acrid sweaty stink poured over her like the stench from rotting meat. The woman crouched, cooing, trying to sound tender beneath her jagged, hungry sharpness. Leodora fought for breath beneath a mask of filthy fingers. She grew dizzy.
    The grip abruptly lifted from her face; the stench and the man swept away as if by magic. The woman bit back a shriek, grabbed Leodora again, and tugged her down the alley and back out onto the boulevard.
    A crowd was collecting. They blocked the woman’s retreat, so that she cried out, “Someone, someone stop him!” and then, almost as an afterthought, “My child, my baby!” She wrapped herself protectively around Leodora, and the crowd obligingly opened a space for the two of them. Even as they moved into it, the crowd moved with them, stepped back as if to accompany them; but they weren’t following the woman. They were fleeing something else. Leodora twisted her head around to see.
    Her grandfather.
    He caught the woman before she