Her third mother had been the first to fit her with a prosthetic hand, which had pinched and dug into her skin and done nothing to improve her quality of life. The only things she hadn’t been perfectly capable of doing with one hand were things the prosthetic didn’t help her do anyway, lacking the fine motor control necessary to apply nail polish or thread a needle. If she’d been younger, maybe, or if she’d wanted it more, but the way it had been presented, like it was a great gift she wasn’t allowed to refuse, had only served to remind her that in the eyes of her adoptive family, she would always be the poor, pitiful orphan girl with a missing hand, the one they needed to help.

She had never wanted that kind of help. She had only wanted to be loved. So when the waterweeds by the turtle pond had looked like a door, so open and inviting, she hadn’t watched her footing on the muddy bank. She’d gotten too close. She’d tumbled in, and found herself somewhere else, somewhere that didn’t want to help her. Somewhere that wanted her to do the helping, and promised to love her if she only would.

She had spent a lifetime in Belyyreka, and they had always called her a Drowned Girl, even when she was away from the water, and she had never considered how literal that might be, not until she had fallen into a river and felt hands yanking her by the shoulders, away from the surface, away from the real world, back into the false one, where mothers left her, one after the other, where nothing ever stayed.

In Belyyreka, she had chosen her own prosthetic, a hand made of river water, which she could decorate as she liked, with weeds and small fish and once, with a tadpole that had grown to froghood in the sheltering embrace of her palm, looking at her with a child’s love before hopping away to find freedom. In Belyyreka, no one had called her broken for lacking a flesh and bone hand: they had seen it as an opportunity for her to craft a tool, a weapon, an extension of her own.

It had dissolved when that helpful neighbor had seen her floating face-down in the pond and pulled her to supposed “safety.” She had thought it lost forever.

Slowly, Nadya raised her right hand to her face and stared at it, its translucent flesh, its rippling skin. There was nothing inside it. She reached down with her left hand, laying it against the surface of the water. A turtle the size of a quarter crawled into her palm. She lifted it to her water hand, sliding it through the surface. It swam a content circle before poking its head up to breathe, nostrils breaking the “skin” between the left and right knuckles.