The river is a god. The god is hungry. For fifteen years, Osogó has carried its dead. He is the ferryman---the silent man who rows bodies across the water in the dark and asks the living nothing. He walked into the river once, to drown. It refused him. He has never learned why. So when a warlord's wife steps onto his jetty with a fistful of gold and a destination she will not say, he expects only another crossing. He does not expect the girl folded into the bottom of his canoe: eleven years old, a scar on her shoulder, a mouth that will not close, and more of this war already behind her than most men live to see. She tells him his boat smells of dead fish. She asks the questions no one can answer. And against everything he has made himself into, she is impossible to ignore. In a drowning country where the water takes whole villages and the war runs on children, a man who buried his soul at the bottom of the river is about to learn what it costs to come back up.