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

(12) Ande: Into the Ocean

The villagers' and Sandsingers' lights fade quickly into the water as we take off into it. Their absence brings a wave of loss crashing over me. This isn't like leaving my village and Taiki's tribe to come back to the Sandsingers. Then, there were people I knew at the other end of the journey, or at least familiar waters. This time is different. Taiki and I will be each other's only company for the next half-moon at least, and there's nobody waiting for us. The next time we arrive somewhere, it will be Rapal, a Sami city that welcomes its "guests" the way my people welcomed spiders in our houses: allowed to stay only if they remained peaceful and out of our way.

I'm still excited, in a way. But Ruka's warning and my own realizations about the political tangle we're headed into have changed this to a more urgent and less straightforward journey. And unlike the prophecy and the Singer and all my concerns about that, I can't share my worries with Taiki. That's almost the worst part. We've barely left, and I'm already hiding things from him. To save other people's lives.

I've got more to unpack about that feeling, but I push it away for now. I need to focus on learning to navigate this part of the island chain. I'll have half a moon for thinking as soon as we hit the open water anyway—and hopefully just as long before we encounter any Sami and I have to deal with the implications of Taiki and I's difference in opinion.

Taiki signals that we're approaching another rock face: the same seamount the Sandsingers sheltered around while they rested and planned for the upcoming raid. We circle it, gathering food as we go. I have a feeling we'll soon treasure these rock outcroppings. If there's one thing I've already learned about the Sami-sana from my time in the three-moon deep, it's that food scarcity out there makes the silt hill I once woke up on look like a village feast.

Taiki has already slipped into traveling mode. He swims at a more measured pace, with smaller movements that slow him down a little, but are probably much more efficient long-distance. I watch closely and try to find equivalents that fit my own fins. By the time we've circled the seamount, I think I'm getting it—just in time for us to launch back into the open water.

We island-hop across the roots of islands for the first two days. Taiki says we'll be catching a current some ways up the chain, saving ourselves the time we're losing by not heading straight out into the Sami-sana. It's midnight on the second night when I feel the current's direction start to change. The taste of the water shifts suddenly. The island's dominant water flow hits a pair of islands here, which send an eddy of it spinning. Taiki lets the water grab him, and I duck into his slipstream. The current sweeps us out to sea. The three-moon deep opens up before us with such vast emptiness, I can feel it without any need for my actual senses. Taiki and I dive, and the true journey begins.

The current at our backs carries us at a speed I'd forgotten I enjoyed attaining. Still working on my swimming technique, I find that flaring my fins and slowing my tail-beats maximizes the time the water spends pushing me relative to the time I spend pushing myself. Like Taiki's technique, it slows me a little, but dawn reveals how effective it is. Which is to say, dawn comes when dawn normally does, and I find myself shocked at the light over the far-distant surface. I'm sleep-tired, but my body feels only a pleasant kind of exertion; the satisfying kind, like when you've run or danced or played well, but haven't killed yourself in the process.

Taiki tips forwards into a slower, more gradual dive. We pull up below the depth his tribe normally shelters at. There's less to breathe down here, but that successfully makes me sleepy, and we raft together with my arm around his back and his head on my shoulder. It almost makes me laugh how far I've adjusted to his tribe's standards of closeness. Once awkward as a courtship offer from the Telu boys I couldn't care less about, it's nothing less than comfortable now. Which is good, because we'll be doing this for a while.