A native Hawaiian teen travels to a luxury island resort in search of her missing twin and uncovers the dark side of paradise, in this YA supernatural thriller that''s Praise for THAT WHICH FEEDS US:

“With incisive prose that brings the plantation-turned-luxury-resort of Kōpa`a alive in all its excess and fruit-spoil, Kendall offers a striking Hawaiian gothic that is as terrifying as it is emotionally resonant. A deeply intimate tale of belonging, sisterhood and intergenerational trauma bookended by larger inquiries of colonialism exploitation—That Which Feeds Us bites with real teeth and is sure to leave its mark.” — Jihyun Yun, author of And the River Drags Her Down

“Set on a haunted planation, That Which Feeds Us is a fierce debut with vivid prose, where the lasting effect of colonialism almost suffocates you. The dreamy landscape and rich characters are lovingly rendered, and Kendall digs to the rotten core, making this the very best of YA horror. A must read.” —Jamison Shea, author of Roar of the Lambs

"This book hurt my heart in the best way possible. And it had one of my favorite micro-tropes (old money white assholes getting their comeuppance). The setting is so wonderfully set that you can almost taste the rot on your tongue. Just phenomenal." — Katee Robert, New York Times bestselling author

CHAPTER ONE

TWO WEEKS AGO

The week after she started at the mortuary, Lehua learned the dead didn't stay asleep.

The first time a deceased had woken up, she'd been assisting her new boss Avery in the embalming room. As the mortuary's newest initiate, Lehua was tasked with disinfecting the man's body with a soapy sponge, working each stiff limb out of rigor mortis, readying him for Avery's scalpel and drain tube.

Lehua had been running the sponge down one of his arms when the hair along the back of her neck rose at the sudden feeling of eyes on her face.

His brown eyes. The dead man's open eyes bored into her skull. His face etched sharp by the room's harsh fluorescent light strips. She clamped down on her scream but dropped the sponge, splattering her newly bought scrubs with soap and water.

Avery had only glanced at Lehua. Above her respirator, her kohl-rimmed eyes had crinkled into a smile. "Sorry," she said, fitting a small plastic disk-an eye cap, she would later explain to a less shaken Lehua-beneath the man's eyelids one by one, sealing them shut once more. "Sometimes, they wake up."

Lehua suspected it had been a test from Avery. A rite for new recruits. When Lehua had handed Avery her scalpel and watched the man's skin break beneath the blade near his collarbone, she had apparently proven herself. But since that moment, the man's eyes had been scorched into Lehua's memory, their color haunting the darkness behind her own eyelids. Walnut brown, gold-veined, like the hardened sap of a tree.

Lehua remembered those amber eyes now as she looked down at the body bag on the gurney. Its zipper pulled like an open wound. Under the tarp-like bag, the deceased-Sarah Brown-gazed ahead with glassy eyes.

Lehua had been at the Phoenix mortuary for half a year now and had seen plenty of open-eyed, slack-jawed corpses. Yet there was always a tight inhale, a squeeze in her chest, whenever the dead watched her work. She couldn't shake the eerie sense that she was moored to the dead's bedside in the hushed mortuary. But the quiet purpose centered her.

"Our work," Avery had explained when Lehua had first been hired, "requires precision."

Any mistakes, and she could ruin a family's goodbye.

Lehua rolled the gurney through the crematorium's double-wide doors. A row of steel cremators reflected the room's sterile light. Each machine was flanked by an adjoined observation room's glass window. Tonight those navy wainscoted rooms were empty.

Lehua pushed Sarah toward the nearest cremator. A wooden casket lay atop its conveyor belt. Using the body bag for leverage, Lehua hauled Sarah into the bare pine box. She folded Sarah's stiff hands onto her stomach, noticing the delicate nail beds, the polish on their filed ends, the pale outline of a ring, now gone. Sarah had been in her apartment, sans air conditioning, for a week before a neighbor had noticed the smell. Even in November, the stubborn heat in Phoenix had only cooled so much and her pale skin had started to blister.

On a copy of Sarah's photo ID, her white bob framed a furrowed face, fringing eyes like tanzanite. Normally, Lehua would try to match the corpse in front of her to the photo. She would clean Sarah's body, plumping her cheeks with cotton before shuttering her eyes once more, and then she and Avery would give her family a chance to say goodbye. Except Sarah had no family left. Lehua would be her only send-off, a depressing party of one.

Lehua flicked on the cremator's touchscreen and started preheating the furnace for Sarah's exit. She didn't carry the same dark humor as her boss. The dead they prepared weren't asleep, their ghosts on the verge of waking up. No.

Growing up, she'd inherited a legacy of native Hawaiian superstitions from her grandparents. "We never kill night moths," her grandfather used to whisper, gently cupping the dusty-winged creatures that darted inside their home. "They're the spirits of our visiting loved ones."

She thought she had already uprooted those seeds of island superstition when her grandparents had died and no night moths came to visit her. But when she'd met the man's eyes that first week at the mortuary, what had surprised her was how blank they'd been. How empty.

That's what's next? she'd thought, her heart seizing in her chest like it'd been trapped in a vice, strangling the remaining roots of her grandparents' stories. Back then, she'd felt like a fortune teller gazing too far into the future, unable to unsee what they'd learned. Now, it was with finality that she met Sarah's dead eyes. That's what's next.

Lehua stepped away from the casket, unlocked her phone to clock the cremation time, and froze.

Six missed calls. All from her twin. Ohia.

Lehua considered ignoring her, but whatever peace the mortuary's night shift and its collection of dead had brought her was lost. Ohia hadn't called in three months. Not since their fight.

Since Lehua had dropped out of college, they repeated the same conversation about how Lehua was "letting her future drift away" every time they spoke. Only it had ended differently the last time they saw each other. Ohia had looked at her accusingly from beneath her dark lashes, her mouth had crushed into a disdainful line, and she'd said: "You're wasting your life away."

Lehua had been too shocked to say the words rising in her throat now: Screw you, Ohia. But six calls in the last half hour alone meant something bad had happened. Because Lehua wouldn't be her sister's first call in an emergency. She'd be Ohia's last.

Lehua retreated into the observation room. Through the viewing glass, she could still see Sarah in her casket, blue eyes staring up as Lehua dialed her sister. She rapped her knuckles against the glass, waiting.

Ohia picked up on the second ring.

"There you are," her twin said by way of greeting.

"What's wrong?" The words were out before Lehua could stop them, but she had no idea how else to start. Growing up, she and Ohia had been inseparable. But a rift had been growing between them, even before their fight. Lehua had wondered if there was an elusive shorthand she was missing, the way twins like them were supposed to communicate.

Now the silence that followed went long enough that Lehua was convinced Ohia had hung up on her.

"Jesus, Le. Nothing's wrong," her twin finally answered, laughing low. "I'm going home. I got a job on a small island farm near Maui-"

"Oh," said Lehua witho…