Apex, February 2026
A group of friends — the unnamed narrator, Agnes, Peter, Lina, and Jin — are vacationing on a remote Japanese island known for its sea turtles, staying in an Airbnb run by an elderly couple, Nobuko-san and her unseen husband. On the first day, Agnes hikes into the woods alone and disappears. The group’s response is tellingly tepid: Peter theorizes about snakes, Jin shrugs it off as typical Agnes behavior, and the search efforts are half-hearted at best. The narrator, clearly Agnes’s closest and most complicated companion, is the only one who seems genuinely troubled.
Through a series of interwoven flashbacks, the story builds the history between the narrator and Agnes: summers at camp, a trip to New York, an incident in a school bathroom invoking the Japanese urban legend Hanako-san, and a pivotal revelation about Agnes’s older brother, who repeatedly held her underwater as a child. Agnes’s lifelong dread of and compulsion toward water — her dark humor about drowning, her tendency to test edges and boundaries — is revealed as the residue of that childhood violence. The narrator, too, carries invisible wounds: a mentally ill mother, bullying teachers, social isolation. Their bond is defined by shared suffering and a kind of dangerous mutual pull.
Agnes returns after nearly three days, wrist bandaged, skin strangely luminous, and offers only partial explanations. She tells the group she witnessed turtle eggs hatching on the moonlit beach and sensed something watching her. Lina mentions a local legend: the Turtle Eater, a creature that devours sea turtles and, when sated, takes the form of an attractive man to lure people back to its lair. Agnes deflects, but her cryptic manner unsettles the narrator. That night, Agnes invites the narrator alone into the woods and down to the beach.
At the ocean’s edge in the dark, Agnes wades in and vanishes. A sea turtle emerges from the surf and transforms grotesquely on the sand — shell splitting, flippers becoming limbs — until it assumes Agnes’s form. The creature strokes the narrator’s face with eerie tenderness, then closes its hands around her throat, then bites her wrist. As the narrator bleeds out, she pieces together the truth: Agnes encountered Nobuko-san’s husband on her first night, saw him feasting on a dying god-creature, and was coerced into luring her friends to the island as sacrificial prey.
But the real Agnes emerges from the water behind the creature, shattering its skull with a rock. In the rain and lightning, Agnes explains what she witnessed, and what she has decided: there are no wish-granting gods on the island, only desperate, diminishing ones that feed on believers. If a god can be killed and eaten, Agnes reasons, its power can be taken. She invites the narrator to join her — not as a victim, but as a co-conspirator. The story closes as both women sink their teeth into the fallen creature, the narrator finally stepping out of the audience and into the action.
Angela Liu is a Chinese-American writer/poet based in NYC and Tokyo. She is a two-time Nebula Award and 2025 Astounding Award Finalist. Her work has also been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, Ignyte, and Rhysling Awards. She previously researched mixed reality at Keio University in Japan with a focus on new narrative platforms and tangible interfaces for remote communication. Her stories and poems are published/forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Logic(s), among others. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram @liu_angela and on Bluesky @angelaliu.bsky.social.