Above World (5 page)

“While the Above World destroys itself, our colony grows. . . .”

In the distance, a whale sang. It was a sad, melancholy sound that cut through the water like a harpoon.
All whales are pessimists,
Hoku had told her once.

He was probably out there now, wondering what she’d done to anger the Elders. She’d tell him later, along with some embellishment. Hoku loved a good story.

But what if . . . what if Hoku were next? What if it had been
his
body she had found in the kelp forest? What if he died, afraid and alone, and the Elders had hidden him away like Makina, as if he had never even existed?

Aluna stared down at the ugly seed in her bowl and clenched her teeth.
Calm as Big Blue,
she told herself. But she didn’t feel calm. She didn’t even truly want to
be
calm. The wave inside her chest grew like a tsunami, pulling thoughts and energy from every part of her and growing bigger and bigger.

She unwrapped her legs from the resting stick and floated up.

“On your stick, Aluna,” her father said, the first words he’d spoken directly to her since their fight the night before. His tail swished.

“No,” Aluna said. The wave inside her crashed and rolled, thunderous loud. Elder Inoa was staring at her, mouth agape, breathing shell pulsing at her throat. “I can’t listen to this anymore,” Aluna said. “Our city isn’t
growing.
The Coral Kampii aren’t
thriving.
”

“Daughter, enough!” her father yelled. Aluna cringed, but couldn’t stop the anger now that it had begun to flow. She turned on him.

“Makina is just the latest victim of our ignorance, but there have been others. Too many others. My mother died, too,” she said, knowing it would hurt him. Wanting it to hurt. She couldn’t say it to him last night, in private, but she found her voice now in front of everybody. “You could have gone to the Above World for help when she got sick, but you let her die. Now our necklaces are breaking, and we’re still hiding in our shells.”

Her father swam forward, his eyes dark, his mouth twisted. She’d never seen him so angry.

“Aluna, daughter of Leilani,” he said, her mother’s name sounding like an insult, his shame at being her father evident in every syllable, “if you do not apologize to the Elders and return to your stick, you will be asked to leave this sacred place immediately.”

But she wasn’t done. Not yet. She stared right into her father’s eyes. “If you won’t find HydroTek and ask for help, then I’ll go to the Above World and do it myself.”

He stared back at her, his eyes dark with the promise of further punishment. It took all her strength not to cower before him. Silence filled the dome.

Finally, he said, “This girl is deemed unworthy of citizenship in the City of Shifting Tides and will not pass into adulthood this day. What say the council?”

“By the moon,” the Elders agreed in unison, clearly relieved.

“Leave now,
child,
” her father said through gritted teeth, “and return to your foolish games.”

The wave of anger inside Aluna roiled and churned. She lowered her gaze and fought it back. If she opened her mouth again, she had no idea what would come out. Her father would never forgive her for this. Never. Her entire family would suffer in their standing because of her.

She swam toward the exit hatch slowly. Her body shook, her legs threatened to turn to jelly, but she kept them moving.

When she got close to the exit, Elder Peleke called to her. “Leave the bowl, girl. You will return in no less than one year’s time to have your loyalty to the Kampii reassessed.”

Aluna lowered herself to the ground. She stared at the Ocean Seed. How could something so small and ugly be so powerful? Her back was to the Elders. Before she placed the bowl on the sand, she snatched up the seed and hid it in her fist. The tiny nugget burned painfully hot against her palm. She said nothing and swam solemnly to the exit.

As the hatch snicked shut behind her, Aluna heard Elder Peleke say, “Even our glorious city can produce, on occasion, a bad fish. . . .”

She swam to her cave before Daphine or Hoku could catch up to her. Why had she taken the Ocean Seed? She had no plans to use it, at least not now. Where she was going, she needed legs.

Aluna opened the small pouch she wore around her neck and pulled out the shiny silver ring that had once been her mother’s. She kissed the ring’s single purple stone as she did almost every night, then placed the stolen Ocean Seed within the ring’s circle and tucked both back into the pouch.

She ripped off her ceremony clothes and dressed in a pair of worn leggings and the top Ehu had given to her the first time she’d killed a shark. Daphine had sewn the shark’s teeth around the neckline in a clever pattern. Whenever Aluna wore it, she felt fierce.

She strapped on her knife and tossed a few pieces of cured fish into a small net secured to her waist sash. At the opening to her room, Aluna paused. She looked back at her swirly, glowing cave, at her comfy sticky-sponge bed, at her secret stockpile of spearheads and pretty shells, and wondered if she’d ever see any of it again.

Or if she’d ever see Hoku. The Above World was no place for a youngling like him. If she told him where she was going, he’d insist on coming with her. Keeping herself safe was going to be enough of a challenge. Keeping them both safe would be close to impossible.

The Elders were wrong. She wasn’t a bad fish. To her, duty meant something other than doing what you were told. To her, duty meant doing whatever you had to do for the good of the Kampii . . . regardless of the consequences. If the Elders had their way, they’d all ignore their problems until the whole colony dwindled away into nothing.

Aluna left the nest and snuck out of the city, avoiding the major currents and crossways and sticking to the shadows like an eel. Once she was free of the coral reef, she swam upward, toward the sun, and toward the shore.

H
OKU WATCHED
from outside the ritual dome, crammed between a Kampii woman who kept shoving him with her tail and a huge mussel farmer whose son was inside the dome with Aluna. The big Kampii kept asking what the Elders were saying, but no one answered him. No one knew.

Except Hoku. With his Extra Ears, he’d heard everything that had happened. Only he wished he hadn’t. He wished he’d never brought his stupid tech to the ceremony in the first place. He hated seeing his best friend humiliated, especially when he was powerless to help.

Well, he could do something now. He could find Aluna and distract her. They could hunt tasty starbellies or find a wreck to scavenge. They could head back to the glowfield with a plan for disrupting the jellyfish and fending off Great White. He could get himself into trouble, if necessary, so that she could come and save him. That always cheered her up. Usually, it cheered him up, too.

He pushed his way through the throngs of Kampii now gossiping about Aluna’s exit from the ceremony. He wanted to scream at them all, to tell them to be quiet, to leave her alone. He heard Kapono’s name mentioned, and Daphine’s, too. They’d be talking about Aluna and her whole family for moons.

He swam to the broken dome first, and then to their secret meeting stone. No Aluna. He checked the abandoned hull outside the city, the perimeter of the kelp forest, and her secret stash of weapons near the training dome. Nothing.

Finally, he went to the monument, the final resting place of Ali’ikai-born-Sarah Jennings. The monument was made from a smooth white stone unlike anything else in the city. Sarah Jennings’s face was carved into an oval on one side. Her hair was short and wild like Aluna’s, her eyes dark and severe. Aluna called them strong.

Aluna snuck away to the monument often, usually after a fight with her father. She didn’t want anyone to know, so Hoku pretended he didn’t. Sometimes she left offerings propped up against the structure’s base — artifacts from their scavenging runs, glittering shells, shark teeth. The sort of things he brought home to show his mother.

Aluna wasn’t at the monument, and there were no new offerings. The tight knot growing in his stomach was trying to tell him something. Something he was trying even harder to deny.

When he’d heard her get kicked out of the ceremony, a small selfish part of him had rejoiced. One more year! One more year of being best friends and doing everything together. One more year, and then they’d both be facing the ceremony together. He wouldn’t get left behind.

But he got left behind anyway.

By the end of the day — or maybe by tomorrow morning, since Aluna had a reputation for disappearing — the city would organize a search. Everyone would forget they were angry at her and band together to save one of their own. But they wouldn’t find her, because she wasn’t missing. She was
gone.
On purpose. To the Above World.

To save the Coral Kampii all by herself.

He flipped a starfish onto its back with his foot. She hadn’t asked him to go. He would have been useful to her in the Above World. He knew a lot more about tech than she did, and about other things, too. He’d read every book in the city at least three times, which wasn’t that impressive when you considered the city only had a few dozen books. But most Kampii knowledge passed from one generation to the next through stories and lectures — Aluna and most of the other Kampii couldn’t read at all.

She should have asked him to go. He flipped the starfish again, then headed back to his nest to settle in for a long day of worrying.

His parents were out helping with preparations for the feast — the feast that would no longer be in Aluna’s honor. He’d been looking forward to the celebration, had even planned on asking Jessia to dance. He couldn’t go at all now, not without Aluna. He grabbed some clams from the kitchen and swam down the cramped tunnel toward his room.

“Boy!” his grandma called from her cave. “Boy, get in here.”

He swam to her nest and hovered in the archway, gripping the smooth coral with his hands to keep from drifting. Grandma Nani had a window in her nest. Most days, she stared out it for hours, her old, saggy tail draped around a worn resting stick that his father should have replaced years ago. She kept her hair short. “So no imbecile tries to stick shells in it,” she always said.

Grandma Nani had been old when Hoku was a youngling, and nowadays she seemed like an ancient. Like someone out of the old legends. Her father had come from a distant Kampii colony during the last Exchange. He had swum a whole year to get here and had filled Grandma Nani’s head with wild stories about his travels. Hoku didn’t know what his grandma saw out that window of hers, but he was sure it was more than just a handful of fish or the occasional eel.

“Did you want something, Grandma?” he asked. Maybe she wanted lunch, or another covering for her sticky bed.

“I want you to tell me what happened,” Grandma Nani said, her back still to him. “Why aren’t you at the ceremony? Your friend is getting her tail today. You should be there to support her.”

Her words struck him like a harpoon to the heart. He couldn’t speak at first, not with so many thoughts and feelings swirling inside of him. And then, when he found his voice, it all came tumbling out. He told her everything. Not just what happened during the ceremony, but about Makina and necklaces. About where he’d looked for Aluna. About where he feared she had gone.

Grandma Nani bobbed quietly on her resting stick and said nothing until he was done. Then she reached over and took his hand between both of hers.

“You’re right, child,” Grandma Nani said. “That’s exactly where the girl has gone.”

“But how —?”

“Because your friend knows what must be done, and she knows no one else will do it,” she snapped. “And because that’s what I would have done, back when my body and my mind did what I asked.”

“But the Elders —”

“Are scared and shortsighted.” She waved her hand, as if dismissing the entire council. “They think the answer is turning inward. They think they’re honoring Sarah Jennings and our ancestors.” She snorted and turned to face him again. “They’ve forgotten that our ancestors were pioneers. Adventurers. Heroes!” She unwound her tail and swam over to one of the dozens of cubbyholes carved into her wall. “They’ve forgotten what it means to be brave.”

She pulled out a small box no bigger than one of his artifact jars. It shimmered in the water, part silver, part pearl.

“Come here, boy,” she said. “This is for you.”

He swam over, his eyes focused on the box. An artifact! Why had she kept it hidden all these years? He ran his fingers over the ornate design of a woman on the lid.

“She doesn’t look much like a Kampii,” he said.

“Because she’s not a Kampii. She’s a mermaid,” his grandma said. “Humans have always longed for the sea. She’s the dream that eventually gave us life.”

“What’s inside?”

Grandma Nani snorted again. “Secrets. Mysteries. I have no idea. My father came from far away, but my mother’s family has been here since the beginning. My great-grandfather said this box belonged to Sarah Jennings herself, and I believe him. Maybe it holds her memories of the Above World. Maybe it holds far more.”