About
Around 1295 CE, a reef begins to die. On a low coral atoll in the ocean the world would one day call the Marshall Islands, the fish thin out, the coral bleaches from deep purple-brown to the colour of old bone, and a community that has lived on the same handful of sand for longer than anyone can count starts running out of time.
A navigator sets out to find something that might help. She goes east, across the largest empty space on earth, in a sailing canoe, with no instruments — no compass, no chart, no sextant, no writing. What she has instead is a body trained since childhood to read the ocean: the way deep swells bend around islands still below the horizon, the movement of stars across a memorised compass of rising and setting points, the behaviour of currents that run like roads between island chains too far apart to see.
