Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(28) Home of the Dead

I tell myself I don't trust Taiki, but there is little in this ocean more unnerving than seeing him go still at the sight of something. His hand reaches out of its own accord and finds my wrist, locking it in a too-strong grip. He pulls me back an arm-span. The jellyfish isn't alone. We're trapped between a contested island above and at least a dozen mindless, stinging creatures below, and I might have sworn myself off upward swimming, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't tempt me now. My panic from the decimated Karu village is stamped in my body like a brand on bare skin. It's illogical—I know it is—but that doesn't stop my heart from thundering like a young women's hands trying to outdo another on a drum.

Taiki isn't moving.

We need to move. Those things will rise towards us, trail tentacles around us until they rob us of our escape, and then... then what? My mind conjures up a dozen ways we could die, whether screaming in pain, stunned and drowning, or eaten somehow by a jellyfish big enough to sit on top of. I tug my arm, but either fear is making me weak, or Taiki's frozen by something stronger than he is. Is he already paralyzed? None of the jellyfish have reached us yet.

None of the jellyfish have reached us yet.

The world swims in and out of reality as I fight to control my breathing. Taiki's eyes are still fixed on the pulsing circles in the water below, but their pulses are slow, almost lethargic, and they're not growing. Not rising. They're just hovering in place.

Taiki's grip on my wrist eases. Starting to hum again, he splits his watch between the open water ahead and the jellyfish below, and swims cautiously out from the rock wall. I follow. We glide out over the jellyfish, to find that a dozen of them is all there are. They're lined up along the wall, tentacles trailing out of sight, motionless but for the occasional pulse of their bells. None of them move as we sneak around them and dive like they'll come after us with a shark Kel's speed.

Taiki and I keep swimming until we're back in the Shalda-sana, then until the cliff-steep slope mellows to a less severe incline. The hug of the deep's pressure does not reassure Taiki. He shakes his head in alarm when I try to light a hand to talk to him, so we travel without a word: down the slope, then into the jagged maze that springs up from it like a strange stone garden. We stop only to let something with lights pass by. It moves like a jellyfish, but I'm pretty sure jellyfish don't split in half and then fuse again when they pass around a rock spire.

I'm surprised Taiki even knows where he's going. If these rocks are the bases of islands, I doubt his tribe ever risks coming this way—not with children and gomas and Risi shoals to attend to. Yet we move with the sureness of familiarity, between formations, through cracks, over rock faces, and up and down slopes. At one point, we even duck into a tunnel and navigate several forks without a single backtrack. We emerge into different-tasting water. The current here is friendlier than the one we left, washing us along rather than trying to send us back the way we came.

The night wears hard on me all the same. I barely slept last time we bedded down, and I'm pretty sure we've now swum farther today than the tribe does in a quarter-moon's worth of nightly surface migrations. I move up into Taiki's slipstream so I don't lose him in the dark as my vision begins to blur his stars. Even after a whole night of this, he's still diligent about our safety. Every few hundred heartbeats, he swings sideways to the rock slope and waits there, humming, until we've confirmed that we're alone. I want to complain about it, but I'm getting too tired to bother. I'd rather he keep watch than me. I fall in behind him, yawning, as we pull up yet again.

There's still no danger in the water around us. Taiki leans on a rock and rests his head on his arms, shoulders sagging. He's been singing at nearly every stop since the waters around Kuna, and he's clearly exhausted. I poke him. He still has the energy to startle violently. When he sees it's just me, he deflates again.