As he came around to place his own hand over the scar, just below her own, she saw the frustration and bewilderment on his face. The kind you couldn’t fake or hide.
Her hand slid from the bark and she stepped back, suddenly feeling drained. Suddenly realizing all that had just happened. “You helped me, Griffin.”
“Yes. I did.” His brow furrowed. He came closer, erasing the space she’d just given herself. “You couldn’t see that’s what I wanted from the moment I sensed him?”
“I . . . no. I thought you were trying to stop me from getting to the prayer. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“You need to stop and listen, get out of your own head sometimes. That kind of thinking could have gotten you killed.”
“I could’ve sworn you were coming after me.”
She thought of Makaha, how Griffin had sworn that her friend had attacked, too. Look how wrong Griffin had been. She gulped down bile made of personal disappointment.
“Maybe if you’d listened,” Griffin said, “you would’ve known the truth.”
“I saw you were trying to help me too late. I couldn’t stop the fireball.”
“I know that. I saw it in your face.” Griffin’s gestures were curt. “And I know you were just trying to protect yourself, but you have got to stop thinking that you’re alone. It worries me. It saddens me. This whole thing is not about whether I’m for or against you. It’s not that black and white. I know that’s how you’ve been raised, what you’re used to, but that’s not how it is with almost everyone else in the world. Sooner or later you’re going to have to realize that.”
“But I thought—”
“Keko, I know.” His eyes closed briefly on a deep sigh, and when he opened them, they were wet. “I understand you.”
TEN
Keko turned away from Griffin’s dirt-streaked body and that patch of bloody skin between his ear and eye that would always remind her of what he’d just done for her. Very deliberately she walked toward the stone prayer. As she picked her way up and across the broken and upended slabs of lava rock, Griffin’s voice struck her back.
“You’re not still going on with this, are you?”
“What’s it look like?”
He made an exasperated sound. “Like idiocy.”
The prayer was so close.
“You need to rethink things.” He was coming after her again, not running but with quick, purposeful footsteps.
“I came all this way. I’m not turning back now. Please don’t try to stop me.”
“Jesus, Keko.” He caught up to her, grabbed her arm and spun her around. He’d put his vest back on but hadn’t zipped it. She wriggled free from his grasp.
“Can’t you see now why I came to Hawaii? I’m not going to leave you alone because that”—he jabbed a finger at the tree—“can’t happen again. And since this attack took both of us by serious surprise, you should be prepared that it might.”
She drew back, insulted. “You think I can’t take care of myself?”
He lifted his palms to her. “I know you can. I know that. Just”—one of those hands shoved into his hair and gave it a good tug—“you don’t really want to throw your existence away to something like that, do you? Life can be so much more than what you’ve made it out to be. So much more than what your culture has allowed you to have.”
If only he knew exactly what she was doing for her culture, he might understand. And for the first time, she actually had the urge to tell him so. Because this argument of his—this belief in her hubris and selfishness—was starting to do far more evil than good.
“I just want you alive, Keko.”
She turned away, because she was starting to believe him.
A few steps more, and at last she gazed down at the carving made by the Queen’s own hand over a thousand years ago. The slab of lava rock tilted sharply to the left now, the treeman’s uprooting creating a pile of disturbed ground right next to it, but the image of the carved person was still clear. A figure made of simple, clean lines, arms bent at the elbow in supplication. Tiny brown leaves and golden seeds and little piles of dirt clung to the shallow grooves. Keko gently blew them away.
“What does it mean?” Griffin’s voice was soft, inquisitive.
Keko frowned at it. “She is asking the Source to reunite her with her element. Her final wish.”
He moved closer to her side. “You said this thing told her where it was located. Can you read it? Do you know where the Source is?”
When she glanced up at him he wasn’t looking at the petroglyph, but scanning the canyon in a measured soldier’s way, wariness painted across his face.
“No. I can’t.” A feeling of unease and hopelessness skated down her spine. “It doesn’t say anything about where the Source is.” She dropped to her knees and frantically scraped away all the vines and dead brush and leaves from the waves of lava rock immediately surrounding the prayer. “There’s nothing more. Nothing more here.”
Griffin waved his hand, gesturing her to come to him. “Then I think you should get up and we should get out of here. We don’t know if that thing will come back. Or if he’ll bring friends.”
“No.” She reached out and placed a hand over the figure’s body, and suddenly realized what she must do. “I have to carve my own prayer.”
“What?”
“The Source answered the Queen’s final prayer in her hour of desperation, when she wanted it the most. I have to do the same, and there is no time more desperate than now. This was her prayer. I have to carve my own.”
“We should really get out of here.”
“We?” She met his eyes. “I’m not asking you to stay, but I’m not leaving either.”
Keko searched around and found two rocks, one that had been broken into a point that she aimed against a new lava slab. She used the wide edge of the other rock to make the first chip. It fell away and she breathed with satisfaction and growing excitement.
She carved for a long time, echoing what the Queen had drawn and whispering prayers and pleas to both the Queen and the Source. Griffin paced at her back but did not otherwise try to dissuade her.
As the day’s light began to leave the canyon and her work was thrown into shadow, Griffin’s silent worry had reached fever pitch. She didn’t allow herself to feel the same, because if the treeman had wanted to come back and attack, he would have done it by now.
“It’s dark,” Griffin said, as if she couldn’t read the sky. “We’re stuck here until morning. I don’t trust even you to negotiate that ledge at night.”
Keko unfolded her legs and gave her back a good stretch, the tightness in her wound making her feel alive, not halfway dead as before. The two rocks she’d used to carve her prayer were well worn down, as was she, but the prayer was complete.
“I’m staying here tonight.”
He rolled his eyes. “Well, I hope glory is worth it.”
She tilted her head to one side, and then the other, stretching her neck. “You keep assuming I’m doing this for me.”
His pacing stopped. “You’re not?”
She met his shocked stare with her even one. “No.”
She could sense his question before he asked it.
“What are you talking about?” When she didn’t answer, he dropped his voice. “What the hell do you mean?”
But Keko just shook her head and looked to the indigo sky. “And now we wait.”
The answer had come to her as she’d chipped rock into rock. The legend said that the Queen had carved her prayer in daylight and the location of the Source had been revealed under the moon. Keko would sit here and watch the rock until the same happened to her. And she had every bit of faith that it would.
“Keko—”
“I didn’t ask you to stay, Griffin.”
He regarded her for a long tim
e before lowering himself to the lava rock on the opposite side of the prayer, making himself comfortable by sitting on a balled up T-shirt he pulled from his pack.
They sat in silence, until the moon came out and the prayer came alive.
At first she thought it a trick of her eye—an aftereffect of the wound and the pain, coming on the heels of days of being chased. Fatigue, hunger, desperation, all pounding into her brain.
But no. The air above the prayer—her prayer, not the Queen’s—sparkled. Tiny winks of blue light hovered in space a couple of feet above the rock, growing in number and density with every passing second. Keko scrambled to her feet, heart hammering.
The chest of the basic figure she’d carved glowed blue-white. The figure was her, Keko, bearing the Queen’s treasure. Crowning her effigy, twinkling in stasis above the rock, were hundreds of little lights, like stationary fireflies.
The answer—the location—was in there. Somewhere.
The euphoria of the magic, of the Source actually acknowledging her and answering her prayer, died. Keko began to panic and scratch at her arms.
“But . . . what does it mean? How am I supposed to figure this out?”
Griffin’s knitted brow smoothed and he slowly rose to standing. “I think I know.”
She grabbed his arm above the elbow. “You do? Tell me.”
He tore his gaze away from the lights and looked at her with frightening calm.
“It’s a star map,” he said.
Her grip on him fell away and she whirled back to the prayer, trying to see what he did. “A star map? How do you know?”
He just looked at her. And looked. “Because I know the stars. Every single one of them.”
Their conversation from last night came roaring back.
“It seems to me,” he said, coming to her side, his hand waving just above the floating pinpricks of light, “that if the Chimerans came from the stars, too, in a way, that the stars would be the ones to guide you in the end. Maybe they have something to offer your people as well, not just the Ofarians.”
His words were drifting around in her head, bouncing off her desperation and adding to her confusion. “But what am I looking at?”
He pointed to the glowing blue-white spot on the figure’s chest. “That’s the Source. Positioned under certain stars, at certain angles right now. It would have been a different configuration for the Queen, all those years ago. Maybe back then, since she used the stars to guide her people across the ocean, she knew how to read them.”
“I . . .” It was too conceptual for her, too outside of any way of thinking she’d ever been exposed to, and it wasn’t clicking in her head. She turned her face to the sky and all she saw was a maze of light. She was so close. So close. And now this?
She looked back at Griffin, whose expression was watchful and utterly frustrating.
“Can you read it?” she asked.
He nodded.
Excitement spiked in her heart and made her fire flare in anticipation. “Well? And?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “How about a trade? I decipher the star map and you tell me why you are really doing this.”
She went cold. “What?”
He nodded to the place where she’d sat to do her carving. “What you said earlier, about how this whole thing wasn’t really about you. I can help you, but I need to know what I’m contributing to. You can understand that, can’t you?”
With a snarl of aggravation she swiveled away to stare into the darkest point of the canyon. The star map glowed at her back, sending diffused blue-white light into the reaches.
Of course she understood what he was asking. She’d want the same thing. You never got something for nothing. Only she didn’t think she could give him what he was asking.
“The star map is fading,” Griffin said behind her. Not taunting, not demanding. “If you want to go it alone, you could memorize as much detail as possible now, and then probably plug the points into a computer program to find the general location.”
At that she turned back around, pushing aside all her insecurities, all her self-doubt. She couldn’t afford to let him see that. “I don’t know how to use a computer.”
The subtle parting of his lips was the only thing that told of his surprise. He cleared his throat. “So you need me.”
Coming closer to the star map, looking down into the mess of floating lights and the brilliant, tempting X that marked the treasure, she knew she’d never be able to memorize all that detail.
“I want something more,” she said.
“Name it.”
The space between them screamed with tension.
“If I tell you,” she began slowly, “I want your word that you will never repeat a word of it. Not to Gwen, not to your dog, and absolutely never to the Senatus.”
“My god,” he whispered, “what is this about?”
“Your word, Griffin. What I could tell you would never hurt me—I’m far beyond that and I wouldn’t care if it did—but it would destroy others. It would compromise all Chimerans in the eye of the Secondary world. It would create huge rifts among my people and the island clans, and that scares me more than anything.”
As he stared at her she knew immediately that he would never agree to such an oath. All that she’d just said would steer him away from agreeing to her terms. In fact, it had probably churned up even greater determination in him to discover it on his own, without her stipulations. It had always been about the Senatus and the Ofarians to him. It had never been about her or her people. What she’d wanted or believed in had never factored into his role or objectives—
“Done,” he said. “I swear.”
All breath punched out of her lungs. “What?”
“I told you”—he inched closer, making the space between them even more pressurized—“I’m not here for them. I’m here for you.”
How on earth had she pegged him so wrong?
“The stars,” she blurted, because she knew how much they meant to him. As much as her Queen. “Swear on your stars.”
He drew a breath. By the twitch of his hands at his sides, she thought he might touch her, but he didn’t.
“I swear on the light of the stars, the power that brought the Ofarians to Earth and that which I hold dear, that your secret is safe with me, Keko. I will never use it against you or for my own gain. I will never tell another soul.”
Brave Queen . . .
And then he repeated it in Ofarian. She couldn’t understand the words but she knew what he was saying, could almost see the oath that his strange syllables and beautiful phrases wove around them both.
She covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t help it. It was all so overwhelming. So unexpected. Every motivation and emotion she’d assigned to him now felt false.
“Do you believe me now?” he asked quietly, and she knew he wasn’t asking about the oath.
Behind her hands, she nodded. If he were here for the Senatus—at their order or to wedge himself into their ranks by using her—he never would’ve agreed to this. He could be lying, but the stars . . . they were his religion, whether he recognized that or not.
She looked at the star map, whose brilliance had faded somewhat. Soon it would be gone, but Griffin had it all stored away in his head. Exactly what she needed. But could she actually give him what he wanted in exchange? Could she tell this ambitious man about the disease that was weakening her people? Her leader?
“I need time,” she said. “I need to think.”
He reached out to take her hand. Looking down at where her fingers were clasped lightly in his, she added, “I can’t think straight when you touch me.”
He let her go.
• • •
The most startling thing about waking up was not realizing she’d fallen asleep in the first place. Dawn smack
ed Keko’s eyelids open and she came awake with a gasp. Sitting up, she felt the tug on her shoulder wound and the gouges in her skin from where rocks and branches had bedded down for the night.
Immediately she looked over at her carved prayer, sitting there sort of ugly and harsh next to the time-weathered one made by her Queen. The starlight magic was gone. So was the glow in the figure’s heart. All that was left was the map and knowledge in Griffin’s head.
He appeared before her then, as though she’d called out for him. The faint light coming over the ocean cast his body in silhouette.
“Morning.” His voice sounded like he’d had lava rocks for breakfast. “We need to get going. Light’s coming up.”
He zipped up his vest—over a black T-shirt this time; it must have gotten chilly overnight—threw his pack over his shoulder, and turned his face to the relentless ocean. That’s when she saw the dark smudges underneath his eyes, the drawn line of his mouth, and she knew he hadn’t slept at all. Had probably paced the whole night, scanning for the return of the earth elemental, standing guard.
Keko pushed to her feet and dug into her pack for something to eat but came up empty. A little plastic cup filled with hard pebbles of who-knows-what was shoved into her hand. She looked up at Griffin.
It was different now, in the growing daylight, knowing that they each had something the other wanted. Knowing there were secrets. Knowing they were connected in even more ways.
She saw his conviction, his oath, in his tired, red rimmed eyes, and felt the anguish of an unmade decision wrestle in her gut.
“Freeze-dried soup,” he said. “Not good for much but energy. I’ll add water if you’ll heat it up.” He ripped off the top seal of his own cup, spoke Ofarian to drag water from the air, and poured it into the little containers.
She dipped fingers into the muddy-looking soup and added heat. Steam curled up from the water that plumped the powdered pebbles into things resembling vegetables and meat.
“Careful,” she said, handing him his cup. “It’ll be hot.”
“I like hot,” he said. “Remember?”
Too much. She started off toward the black sand. “I can walk and drink at the same time.” She downed the hot liquid in a few quick gulps.
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