“If you want that lekerae for your ceremony,” she says, “you better fill that skirt faster.”

A smile tugs at my lips. Memi’s threats are as rigid as jpango sap. She is all sticky sweet. She’s been stocking up on kaeli for moons. Because tonight when the moon is highest, it will be my turn to dance the l’jyndego to the Ancestors. My turn to be presented to our clan as a woman in her own right. Kaeli lekerae is the first dish a girl eats after she becomes a woman. It is sacred, and to make it takes all day and thousands of berries at the precise sweetness.

I toss one in my mouth and move down the thorny bush, working my fingers between the leaves. I crane for another view of the water, hoping the sun has decided to wake and greet us too. But fog hangs, closer somehow, over stoic waves. An eeriness prickles my spine at the sight of the fog moving in from the ocean, hovering like a ghost. I scoot closer to Memi, picking berries in arm’s reach of her.

The Ancestors say the goddess of the sun smiles on us, washing us in her warmth. And her lover, the god of moon, smiles so radiantly at night—so captivated by her beauty that he glows too. But when neither shows their face, it is a foreboding day. A day for wrapping hands in prayer cloths and singing around the fire. The lines in Memi’s face say she senses it too, even if she doesn’t admit it aloud.

“Very good, then,” she says. “Come on. Before it gets too hot out here. You have a full day ahead.”

“Ya, Memi.” Today, the morning of my ceremony, I’d woken more tired than usual. I was up all night with Tomae picking out which silks and jewels to pair with my sash later today, deciding how to paint my face, and what beads would adorn my hair. Or messing up my hair more like. Little sisters are good at that. Tomae will not turn out for seven more years, so she’s wrapped up in furs still, fast asleep, while I’m out here. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve waited on this day for as long as I can remember. Since Memi would fold me on her lap and let her rings swallow my fingers. She’d wrap me in her gold robes and kick out her ankles, showing me how to dance in praise to the Ancestors.

It was fun then. I swallow. Now the thought makes my insides wriggle like a bed of worms. What if the Ancestors think me not good enough? What if I dance wrong and when Memi reaches to put the usapa around my neck, with its fine jade beads, what if…