Strange Horizons, April 2026
Mina is a woman from elsewhere—a seafarer’s daughter who came to Dragon Pass Island when her family’s trade ship was wrecked at its port and who stayed when she fell in love with Wei, a dragon hunter. The island is a place where men go out on the water and women remain on land, where women are scarce and therefore “cherished” in the manner of things that are hoarded rather than truly valued. Mina has adapted: she ties nets, tends to her stern mother-in-law Yan, watches neighbors’ children, and waits for Wei to return from his rotations at sea. She has also, quietly, been taking herbal contraceptives her sister pressed into her hands before she left home—just in case.
The story opens on one of Wei’s predawn departures, and it never really lets us leave that charged, liminal hour. The marriage is drawn in fine, honest lines: Wei is not a villain. He is warm and proud and genuinely fond of Mina, and also entirely unwilling to see what she is actually asking him to see. His father Haoyu—captain of the dragon-hunting boat, a man who measures legacy in fish-per-season terms—makes the pressure explicit at a celebratory dinner, asking when Mina will finally be expecting, noting approvingly that a neighbor has managed three children in three years. Wei’s instinct is to deflect rather than defend. Mina’s anger is described as cold and tired, “so familiar she only has the strength to feel it crest before it drifts away again.”
The island’s founding myth—which Wei first told Mina during their courtship, and which Yan later elaborates—tells of a fisherman’s wife who drowned and was saved by the ocean, transformed into the first dragon because there was no other way. Her daughters followed. The story accretes meaning as the narrative progresses, each retelling layering in new implication. Zhou is precise about how myths function: they are ways of saying things without saying them. The women of Dragon Pass have been disappearing into the water for generations, and the island calls it disease.
Mina runs out of her herbal contraceptive. She uses her last recourse—an expensive, carefully formulated pill her sister had slipped in with her things. And then she has nothing. The dragon scales Wei has gifted her over the years sit in her washroom basket, shimmering. She begins to understand what they are really for.
The transformation is rendered in careful, corporeal detail: the itching skin soothed only by salt water, the sharpening teeth, the spurs of new bone budding along her spine and ribs, the calcification of scales around her joints. Wei stops initiating touch. The world grows hazier, more distant. Yan, who took one scale herself years ago and carries its consequences in the sharp angles of her jaw and the fine points of her nails, begins quietly absorbing Mina’s work. She does not ask Mina to stop. She already lost one daughter, Xing, to the water—Xing, who had taken three scales, who had not really been present for weeks before she finally submerged.
The story’s final movement is elegiac and clear-eyed. On the night of the full moon, with Wei gone to sea and her third scale taken whole, Mina wades into the water while Yan folds her clothes into neat rectangles on the shore. It is an act of mourning and of witness. Mina does not know exactly what she will become or do—she might haunt the shoreline, might kill the men on the next boat, might end up as cargo herself. Most likely, the story suggests, she will simply swim. There are no dragons back home. Maybe she will be the first.
“Underneath the Underneath” is a story about bodily autonomy routed through myth, about the way social structures launder coercion into duty, and about what it costs a woman to insist on inhabiting her own life on her own terms. It is also, genuinely, a dragon story—which is to say it takes its fantastical premise seriously, follows its logic all the way down, and finds that the teeth were always there.
Audrey Zhou is a Chinese American writer from North Carolina. Her short fiction is published/forthcoming in Strange Horizons, PseudoPod, and Lightspeed, among others. She is a 2025 graduate of the Clarion workshop, which she will spend the rest of her summers missing.
When not writing, she can be found taking long walks and curating oddly specific playlists of music. Find her @aud_zhouon Twitter and @audreyzhou.bsky.social on Bluesky.