Eeva has the compact, weather-shaped look of someone who has spent decades bent over tide pools: broad through the shoulders, sturdy at the hips, and usually leaning a little into the wind even indoors. Her skin is deep brown, stippled with tiny pale flecks of dried salt. She keeps her silver-black hair combed into narrow, precise braids and wrapped under a faded blue scarf, an unexpectedly meticulous ritual for a woman whose boots are always crusted with reef grit. She walks with a measured sideways roll, placing each foot as if testing a submerged ledge. When she stops, she becomes so still that people sometimes mistake her for listening to the water through the floor.

Eeva is tender with vulnerable creatures and blunt with powerful people. She can be generous with her time, then suddenly territorial if anyone treats the nursery as expendable. In calm moments she has a dry, wry humor; when frightened, she becomes practical to the point of seeming cold. She wants Dara close, but will not ask her to stay outright.

Eeva was born in a stilt settlement built where a stretch of marsh had been drained to make a safer landing. As a young woman she apprenticed under a reef tender, learning to raise coral fragments in baskets until they could survive the open shoals. A fever season killed most of the nursery's young coral and nearly took her daughter, Dara. Eeva spent three nights carrying water and medicine between the nursery and the settlement while a storm tore up the landing. Dara recovered, but Eeva's old mentor did not. That loss changed her from a patient craftswoman into a fiercely stubborn guardian of the reef's slow work. Now the nursery is threatened by warmer currents and a proposed channel dredging. Eeva refuses to abandon it, even as Dara begs her to move somewhere safer. She still trades favors with the fisher families and quietly asks passing sailors for news of reef conditions farther out.