There was once a diver named Yuki who could hold her breath longer than anyone in the fleet, and she was proud of this the way young people are proud of things that haven't yet cost them anything.
One season the boats anchored above an old wreck, drawn by rumors of pearl beds nearby, and Yuki went down farther than she ever had, chasing a glint of white in the sand near the broken hull.
It wasn't a pearl. It was a ring, still circling a slip of bone gone smooth and pale as driftwood.
She came up so fast her ears sang for three days. The other divers, smelling profit, asked what she'd seen down there worth surfacing like that, and she found she couldn't make the words come, only that she wouldn't be going back.
The boat's owner offered her double wages for one more dive. He said a wreck like that could set her up for years — rings, buckles, whatever else the sand was hiding.
Yuki sat on the gunwale a long time, looking at her own hands, which hadn't quite stopped trembling.
"There's a difference," she finally said, "between treasure and inheritance. What's down there belongs to someone who can't claim it anymore. That doesn't make it mine to claim instead."
The owner called her foolish. Maybe she was. She never told anyone exactly what she'd seen, only that it had a shape she recognized, and that the recognizing was the whole problem — you cannot un-know a hand once you've held what was left of it.
She kept diving, but only ever in waters with no wrecks in them, and she gathered fewer pearls than the others for the rest of her working life, and she never once envied them for the difference.
Years later, when she was old and other divers asked her why she'd quit the deep wrecks so young, she would only say: the sea is generous with what it's willing to give you, but generosity and permission aren't the same thing, and a wise diver learns early which is being offered.
Then she'd go back to her mending, and let the question sit unanswered in the room a while, the way some questions deserve to.
