Chapter 1: Salt and Starlight

The oysters were dying again.

Tanvi Ranade knew this the way she knew most things about the sea—not through logic, but through the low, insistent hum that vibrated behind her sternum whenever something in the water shifted. She pressed her bare feet into the wet sand of the Devgad mudflats and felt the wrongness pulse upward through her soles like a second heartbeat.

"Tanu." Her uncle's voice, rough from decades of salt air and unfiltered Wills Navy Cut. "The catch?"

"Bad." She didn't elaborate. Shripati-kaka didn't need elaboration; he'd been reading her face since she was three years old and had started crying because the fish in his nets were afraid. She'd said that—afraid—and he'd looked at her with an expression she wouldn't understand for another twenty years. Not confusion. Recognition.

The Devgad coast in March was a contradiction—the tail end of tourist season, when the Alphonso mango orchards were still hardening their fruit and the Sindhudurg fort sat like a sleeping animal on its island, indifferent to the selfie-sticks pointed at it from the ferry boats. The village itself was small enough that everyone's business was communal property: who was sleeping with whom, whose daughter had gotten into which college, whose son had failed the MPSC exam for the third time. The kind of place where secrets were luxury items—expensive to maintain, impossible to keep.

Tanvi had been maintaining one for twenty-four years.

She straightened up from the mudflat, pushing a strand of salt-crusted hair behind her ear. The oyster beds stretched before her in neat rows—her rows, her design. Three years of building this farm from nothing. Convincing the local panchayat that a young woman could run an oyster operation. Battling the Fisheries Department for licenses. Learning, through a YouTube channel run by a Kerala marine biologist and sheer bloody stubbornness, how to coax life from the tidal flats that everyone else had written off.

And now the oysters were dying, and she knew exactly why, and she couldn't tell anyone.

Because the reason was her.

The hum behind her sternum intensified. She pressed her palm flat against her chest—a gesture she'd been making since childhood, the way other people crack their knuckles or bite their nails. Calming the thing inside her. The light. The wrongness that pulsed in her blood like bioluminescence, like the plankton that sometimes lit up the Devgad shoreline in December and made the fishermen's wives whisper about omens.

"Kaka, I'm going to check the western beds," she called over her shoulder.

"Take Mihir with you. The tide—"

"I know the tides better than the tides know themselves."

A grunt. Half-disapproval, half-pride. The Ranade way of saying I love you, you impossible girl.

She walked west along the shoreline, her feet finding the familiar path between volcanic rocks that the sea had spent millennia sculpting into shapes that looked, if you squinted, like the faces of old women mid-gossip. The March sun was still gentle—nothing like the May furnace that would turn the coast into a shimmering hallucination. The air tasted of salt and the faint sweetness of cashew flowers from the orchards that climbed the hillside behind the village.

Her phone buzzed. She pulled it from the back pocket of her salwar—she'd long since given up wearing anything impractical on the mudflats—and glanced at the screen.

Tejas: Where are you Tejas: I can feel you being weird Tejas: Your chest thing is doing the thing again

She typed back: Mind your own sternum

Tejas: We share a womb, Tanu. Your sternum IS my business

She almost smiled. Almost. But the hum was getting louder, and when she rounded the last outcrop and saw the western beds, the smile died before it reached her mouth.

The oysters were open. All of them. Hundreds of shells gaping at the sky like mouths frozen mid-scream. And inside each one, instead of the grey-pink flesh she'd spent three years nurturing—

Light.

Faint, silver-white, pulsing in rhythm with her heartbeat.

"No," she whispered. "No, no, no—"

She dropped to her knees in the mud. Plunged her hands into the nearest bed. The light responded to her touch—brightened, reached for her fingers like a living thing. Like it recognised her. Like it had been waiting.

The oysters weren't dying. They were responding. To her. To whatever lived inside her that she'd spent two decades learning to suppress, to hide, to pretend didn't exist.

She yanked her hands back. The light dimmed. The oysters slowly, reluctantly, began to close.

Her phone buzzed again.

Tejas: What just happened Tejas: Tanu I felt that Tejas: That was big Tejas: Where are you

She stared at the screen. Her hands were shaking. Her chest was a cathedral of sound—the hum had become a chord, rich and terrifying, as if something enormous had just cleared its throat inside her.

Nothing,* she typed. *Oysters being dramatic.

She knew he wouldn't believe her. Tejas never believed her lies, because her lies tasted wrong to him—that was the twin thing, the bond that no amount of rational thinking could explain. He felt her emotions like weather. She felt his like tides. When he was angry, her blood ran hot. When she was afraid, his hands went cold.

Right now, her fear was probably giving him frostbite.

She sat back on her heels in the mud, breathing. Counting. An old trick Shripati-kaka had taught her when she was seven and had accidentally made every lightbulb in their house explode during a particularly bad nightmare. Count the waves, he'd said, holding her while glass crunched under his chappals. Count them until the light goes back to sleep.

One wave. Two. Three.

The hum subsided. Not gone—never gone, not since the day she was born and, according to Shripati-kaka, the entire village had lost power for six hours—but manageable. Contained. The leash she'd been holding since childhood tightened back into place.

She looked at the oysters. Closed now. Silent. As if nothing had happened.

But something had happened. Something was changing. The episodes were getting worse—more frequent, harder to control. Last week she'd cracked the screen of her phone just by holding it too tightly during a dream. Last month, every streetlight on the road between Devgad and Malvan had flickered when she drove past on her Activa. And now this. The oysters. Her livelihood. Corrupted by the thing inside her.

She needed to talk to Kaka. Really talk to him—not the careful, surface-level conversations they'd been having for years, where both of them pretended that the light in her blood was a minor inconvenience, like a food allergy or a tendency toward migraines. She needed to ask the questions she'd been avoiding since she was old enough to understand that the answers might be worse than the not-knowing.

What am I?

Why am I like this?

What happened to our parents?

Her phone rang. Not Tejas this time. The screen showed a name that made her stomach drop.

Mihir.

She answered.

"Hey."

"Tanu." His voice was the Konkan coast in human form—warm, unhurried, slightly amused by everything. "Your uncle says you've gone to the western beds alone. He's doing that thing where he pretends not to worry by worrying louder."

"Tell him I'm fine."

"I would, but he's standing right here giving me a look that says if you drown, he's blaming me at your funeral."

Despite everything, she laughed. It came out waterlogged, heavy, but it was real. Mihir Patil had been making her laugh since they were twelve years old, when he'd fallen out of a mango tree trying to impress her and broken his arm so comprehensively that the Devgad primary health centre had to send him to Kolhapur for surgery. He'd come back six weeks later with a cast covered in the signatures of every nurse in the orthopaedic ward and a grin that said worth it.

They'd been—something—for three years now. Not dating, exactly. Devgad didn't really do dating; it did understanding, which was a local euphemism for two people whose families had tactfully agreed to ignore their midnight walks on Killa Beach until the appropriate time for a formal proposal. Mihir carved furniture from locally sourced wood—beautiful, dense, Konkan teak pieces that he sold to interior designers in Mumbai through Instagram. He was kind. He was steady. He was exactly the kind of man her uncle wanted for her.

And she was lying to him. Every day. About the most fundamental thing about herself.

"I'm coming back," she said. "Five minutes."

"I'll tell Shripati-kaka. He's already started the sol kadhi, which means he's stress-cooking, which means you've done something to upset him."

"I exist. That upsets him."

"That's his love language, Tanu."

She hung up. Looked at the oyster beds one more time. The shells were shut tight, keeping their luminous secret. For now.

I am twenty-four years old, she thought, standing. Mud squelched between her toes. The sun was angling toward the Arabian Sea, painting the water the colour of beaten copper. Somewhere in the cashew orchards, a koel was screaming its two-note song—the bird equivalent of a car alarm, beautiful and unbearable in equal measure.

I am twenty-four years old, and I am running out of time to pretend I'm normal.

---

By the time she reached the house—a squat, whitewashed Konkani structure with a red Mangalore-tile roof and a jackfruit tree in the courtyard that had been old when her grandparents were young—Tejas was already there.

He was sitting on the front step, long legs folded like a grasshopper's, peeling a raw mango with a knife he shouldn't have been trusted with. Tejas Ranade had the fine motor skills of a drunk surgeon; he could manipulate blood—actual blood, inside living bodies—with microscopic precision, but couldn't peel a mango without leaving it looking like it had been mauled by a small, determined animal.

"You're early," she said.

"You're lying." He didn't look up from the mango. "The oyster thing. It wasn't nothing."

"Tej—"

"I felt it, Tanu. Whatever happened on the western beds, it was—" He paused. Searching for words. Tejas was the talker, the charmer, the one who could sell sand to a man dying of thirst in Rajasthan, but when it came to this—to the shared strangeness in their blood—even he fumbled. "Big. Heavy. Like a door opening."

She sat down beside him. Took the mango from his hands and began peeling it properly—long, thin strips, the way Kaka had taught them. The raw green flesh underneath was tart enough to make her jaw clench.

"The oysters were glowing," she said quietly.

He went still. "Glowing how?"

"Silver-white. In rhythm with—" She pressed her palm to her chest. The gesture said everything words couldn't.

Tejas put the knife down. His eyes—dark brown, same as hers, same as their dead mother's if Kaka's one surviving photograph was to be believed—fixed on her face with an intensity that most people found unnerving. Most people hadn't shared a womb with Tanvi Ranade; most people didn't know that behind the charm and the crooked smile and the inexhaustible confidence, Tejas was terrified. All the time. Of the power in his blood. Of what it meant. Of what it might eventually demand from them.

"It's getting worse," he said.

"I know."

"Mine too. Last night—" He held up his left hand. She saw the thin, healing cut across his palm. "I was sleeping. Sleeping, Tanu. And the blood—it just—" He made a gesture like something unfolding. "It tried to leave my body. Like it wanted to go somewhere."

The March air was cooling. In the courtyard, the jackfruit tree's leaves stirred in the breeze coming off the sea. Inside the house, she could hear Kaka moving around the kitchen—the clank of a steel vessel, the sizzle of tempering spices, the domestic sounds that had been the architecture of her entire life.

"We need to talk to him," she said. "For real this time."

"I know."

"Tonight."

"I know."

They sat together in the last of the daylight, twins on a doorstep, peeling a mango that would never taste sweet enough to offset what was coming.

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