Chapter 18: The Fishery Foundation Under the Tide Line

The tide was out by six-forty, which gave them until eight-fifteen.

Natsuko had worked out the window three nights running, timing the tidal intervals against the intervals Haruka had described in the visitor room — the eleven-minute lag, the specific draw of the bedrock shelf as the water pulled back from the north headland. She had filled four pages of calculations before she trusted them. Then she had filled a fifth page repeating the same calculations from a different direction, arriving at the same answer, and only then had she written the date and time in a box at the top of the page and underlined it twice.

She told the others on a Tuesday. It was the first week of September now, and the cicadas had quieted enough that you could hear the water from anywhere in town.