"Have you been to any of the other islands?"
Tristan folded her arms. "Maui was the first one we came to."
"We started in Oahu, then Molokai, then here," Robi said. "Here is the only place we haven't had to hurt someone."
"I can't let my brother stay here. How much simpler can this be? There's aliens."
"The one you think you saw in the cave didn't hurt you, did it? Either they don't know about us, or they want to be left in peace, same as us."
"And if I take Alden with me, then what?"
Robi laughed and slashed a red sunbeam across her sky. "He doesn't want to go, does he? That's why you're here. Why you're talking to me like a person instead of some thirteen-year-old you know you won't see again once he goes off to high school."
Tristan clenched her jaw. "Watch what you say."
"Or what? You'll ground him?"
She interposed herself between Robi and the canvas, bumping the girl's thin shoulder with her chest, pressing her face close. "You're right. You can keep him here. Where you'll both die. Can you see the only move that leaves me with?"
"Enlighten me."
"Eliminating the thing keeping him here."
Robi's brows and mouth flickered. She stepped around Tristan to continue working on her canvas. "You need to spend less time thinking about what you think is best for Alden and more time thinking about what he wants. Until then, get the hell out of my yard."
Tristan felt her hand clasping. She had to leave before she said or did more. Ke called something from the elevated front porch. She waved vaguely and continued down the hill. Alden wasn't at the house. If she was going to be able to convince everyone to depart Maui, it was beyond clear she wouldn't be able to do so with an outrigger canoe. With the morning still young and cool, she jogged down the shore to Papa Ohe'o's. He was doddering around his yard, poking at weeds with a hoe.
He straightened, mouth half open as he identified her. "Lady Hermes, always on the go. Can I help you with something, or are you just passing through?"
"Random question," Tristan said. "But did Oprah really live here?"
"That would depend on your definition of 'live,'" he said. "I doubt she ran the empire from our little island. Did she own a house here, though? Yes."
"Where was it?"
"A few miles down the road. Past the old farmer's market. Boy, does it have a nice macadamia farm. But the Aweaus live there now."
She thanked him and headed up to the road. By the time she reached the farmer's market, where the canvas tarps had been pulled down by long-ago rains, and the wooden sign by the road had faded, paint falling from it in chips, it was mid-afternoon, hot and sunny. Past the market, she found a path to the shore and followed it along the rocks.
With its plate glass windows, columns, elaborate solar arrays, and guest home, the house was unmistakable. She walked past its frontage on the shore, staring straight ahead in case one of the Aweaus happened to see her. As she suspected, it had two docks, but these berthed a canoe and a rowboat.
She swore and moved on, thinking, rightly, that she was in a former "neighborhood" of high-powered estates, yet the best she found was a beached sloop, the sails of which had been completely destroyed. Even so, she dragged it to a shed near the beach while she hunted for spare sails or canvas. As she stepped outside, an engine rumbled dully overhead. She froze. This section of the jungle had been cleared for the manors, and although the grass and undergrowth had moved in as soon as the landscapers died, without the canopy of the trees, it felt horribly exposed.
She wasted the rest of the afternoon in a fruitless search for sails, then turned around for home. Alden wasn't there. This didn't surprise her, but her worries followed her as she rinsed herself off, sliced up fruit for the mash, and got the plastic tub of poi from its place beneath the counter. She ate outside to enjoy the breeze and the sunset—and thus it wasn't until the morning that she saw Alden's note tucked beneath the napkin holder on the kitchen table, her name scrawled in his awful handwriting. Inside, he declared that he had left with Robi and would not be back.
18
"That's kind of thin," Ness signed. "Not to say I think the Swimmers built their lab to cure cancer. But you're talking about traveling a quarter of the way around the world. That's an awful long ways to go when we've got aliens in our own back yard and we still don't know what they're up to."
Sebastian wagged his long head up and down. "The Swimmers here do the work of the Swimmers there. All arrows aim at Hawaii."
"They're working together? Doing what?"
"It is not said. It is not known."
"So all we know is that they're in Hawaii, they're working with the ones here, and they're probably up to no good? And for that, we're going to travel five thousand miles?"
Sebastian spread his tentacles. "Where else have we to go?"
Laughter bubbled up Ness' throat. It was the first time he'd laughed in days. "You got me there."
"Have you where?"
"Forget it. Just so we're clear, you want to use a boat we don't have to sail to Hawaii and mess with some Swimmers who might be up to nothing more sinister than learning human anatomy?"
"This is not the fool's thought you think it," Sebastian signed. "It is from my inside star. We must go. We must see."
After recent events, Ness wasn't exactly enamored with the wisdom of the inside star, but Sebastian was right. They had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. Whatever the Swimmers were up to here, it would apparently lead them to Hawaii eventually. Might as well cut to the chase. If nothing else, it would keep his mind off his recurring memory of the sub going up in a cloud of fire.
Beside the river, Ness finished toweling off, then dressed and headed back to their new farmhouse. The sun was dropping into the water, its rays bouncing from the ocean and piercing the leaves. He found Sprite around the back of the house eyeing a broken window.
"Sebastian and I were talking," Ness said, "and we think our next move ought to be—"
"Yes," Sprite said.
Ness scowled. "You haven't even heard the idea."
"Don't care. It's got to be better than sitting around."
Ness thought hearing the details of the plan would dissuade him, but Sprite just nodded along.
"Awesome," he said. "Let's do this. Let's go conquer Hawaii."
"That's not what we're doing."
"Well, maybe it should be."
With Sprite on board, and the mission defined, the next step was logistics. An incredible, daunting amount of logistics. Something of this scale was beyond anything he'd ever been responsible for—in the past, the Collective had arranged all such matters; Ness' role had been to execute their goals, not to shape them—but when he got up in the morning, his mind was clear. He dragged a table outside to catch a breeze and sat before it with a pen and pad of paper.
The way he saw it, they really only needed two things: a boat, and the fuel to get it to Hawaii. Well, and the tools and ability to navigate. And, now that he thought about it, adequate food and water to last the journey. Four things, then. Two of these four areas would be trivial: he could start producing ethanol as soon as they could locate something sufficiently still-like. With the river right there and the farms surrounding them, food and water would provide themselves.
That left the boat and its navigation. And he thought they were likely to find the two of those together. With this much established, he found Sebastian standing in the river, stabbing his pointed feet at passing fish.
"I'm thinking our first move is to put together a still," Ness signed. "I'll start cranking out fuel while you guys work on the other parts of the equation."
Sebastian nodded. "Done."
"Not until you get out of that water and give me hand, it isn't."
"Wrong. Done." He splashed from the water, legs scything, and strode across the shore into the woods.
Ness hurried to keep up. Sebastian led him to a barn made of rain-worn boards, unwrapped a chain
from the two broad doors, and opened them with a proud creak. Sunlight filtered through the cracks in the dim walls, illuminating tumbling specks of dust and sprigs of grass that had managed to spring up in the gloom. Sebastian extended a tentacle at three towering metal stills dominating the back of the barn amid coils of metal pipe. The outsides were caked in dust and Ness could only imagine what the insides looked like, but they were perfect, complete with built-in thermometers and testing equipment.
"Holy cow," Ness muttered out loud, then signed, "You thought of everything when you found this place, didn't you?"
"The home should serve the lives it contains."
"I bet. Well, we'll need plenty of wood for the boilers. Not to mention plants to make the fuel itself. Fruit would work great. Anything with lots of sugar." He moved to the cabinets lining the side wall and began to root around, quickly locating a hydrometer and a sealed bin of foil packets. He opened the corner of one and smelled the yeast. "Seems like everything else is ready to go."
He assigned Sebastian and Sprite to gather fruit and combustibles, then went about opening the hatches on the stills and scraping out the thin, whitish crust inside. That done, he rounded up the house's trash cans and found an oar that would make for a fine fruit-masher. By then, the others had returned with the first wheelbarrow of round, green breadfruit. Ness cut away the knobby skin, dumped them in the trash cans, and mashed them up, then dragged the ox cart down to the river for water.
By day's end, he had six trash cans going and was beginning to understand the scope of his project. He had no idea what kind of fuel economy your average trawler or yacht got, but it couldn't be good. One mile per gallon? 5000+ gallons to cover the distance to Hawaii, then? That did not sound ultra plausible, either for a reasonably sized vessel to carry or for him to produce (in a timespan shorter than years, anyway). They were going to need something with a sail, too. And to school themselves in that sail's use.
In the morning, they ate sweet breadfruit and catfish, which, much to Sprite's consternation, Sebastian preferred raw and whole. After, Ness dispatched Sprite to the town to the north, assigning him two missions. The first was a supply-hunt for sailing manuals, yeast, and any large supplies of non-perishable fuel, if any were to be found. The second was to scout around for large sailing vessels. Sprite left with his rifle and a grin. Ness didn't have high hopes. The town looked much too small for a marina. Who knew, though. Maybe they'd get lucky and the place would be a tourist mecca or a haven for millionaires.
Sebastian continued harvesting plant matter while Ness went house to house nabbing trash cans and lugging them to the barn. By that afternoon, he'd mashed enough fruit to partially fill a dozen cans. He used the cart to haul two empty cans down to the river, along with a big red bucket he used to fill the garbage cans gallon by gallon.
Downstream, a honking noise carried over the water. Thinking it was one of the big white cranes that populated the marshes, Ness didn't look up. It honked again, then awkwardly squawked the tune of "Shave and a Haircut." Ness straightened, hoe in hand, and climbed a short hill overlooking the river. Fifty yards down, an aluminum boat no more than twelve feet long inched up the river, its sail struck.
"Ahoy!" Sprite called, one hand squeezing the rubber base of a bike horn. He had taken off his shirt and tied it around his head. In his other hand, he held a long bamboo pole he'd planted in the shallows to arrest the boat against the current. He saw Ness and resumed poling himself upstream. "Check out what I found while you were playing Farmer John."
"You fucking idiot," Ness said. "That won't get us ten miles from the Philippines, let alone Hawaii!"
"You're the fucking idiot who thinks I'm such an idiot that I wouldn't know that." Sprite poled the boat into the reeds lining the shore, then vaulted over the side, landing in the grass. He stood, pulled his pack from his back, and produced what appeared to be a map torn from the front of a phone book. He pointed to a black dot on the coast. "It only needs to get us here."
Ness leaned in for a better look. The map was in a language he'd never seen before, but above a bayside city labeled Olongapo, the icon of a boat was clear enough. "Port city?"
Sprite nodded, t-shirt bandana flapping from his head. "If we strike out there, Manila's not too far away, either."
"Know what, we should bump this to the top of our queue. For all we know, there's a hundred yachts down there fueled and set to go."
Sprite saluted. "When do you want me to cast off?"
"This one's a group mission," Ness said. "Sebastian, too. I don't want to leave him alone. Besides, every now and then, he's useful in the funniest ways."
He got Sebastian, who helped pull the boat onto shore and set to disassembling and cleaning its outboard motor, tools flashing in his pincers. Ness went back to the barn to measure the remaining sugar in the first vats, which were thick with sluggish bubbles and smelled powerfully of yeast.
It was another few days before they were finished fermenting. Once it was as ready as it was going to get, he brought a red gas can down to the boat, the engine of which Sebastian insisted he'd fixed.
Ness filled it up, stepped back, and spread his hand at the boat. "All yours."
Sebastian gazed at him unblinkingly, then interpreted the figure of speech for what it was, wrapped a tentacle around the engine's cord, and pulled. It took three times before it droned to life.
They loaded up and puttered down the coast, trying to stay where the ocean was too shallow to get rowdy, yet keeping far enough from shore that nobody would have a good shot at them. They exited the bay and got going south. Within minutes, Sprite spotted the steady shine of a sail a mile to the west. Ness got out his binoculars, acutely aware of the blatter of their engine. The other sailboat began to turn, facing them. Ness touched his laser, reassuring himself it was there. Just as he was about to shut off the motor—not that that would do much good at this point—the sailboat turned its nose and struck out in the other direction.
"Clear," Ness gestured to Sebastian, who was hidden under a spare canvas. Speaking aloud to Sprite, and signing to Sebastian, he said, "Maybe we ought to cut the engine and learn how the dang sail works."
"It's easy, dude," Sprite said. "Biggest worry on a boat this size is making sure the tiller doesn't clobber you."
"You know how to sail?"
"Little bit. Most of the bridges between the islands were captured, or destroyed to keep outsiders out. When you want to go somewhere, why kill yourself rowing when the wind works for free?"
Ness shut down the motor and Sprite treated him to a crash course in sailing, which on a vessel of that size involved little more than making sure the sails weren't luffing and that the tiller was pointed in the direction you wanted to go (or, more accurately, its opposite). They futzed around with this throughout the day, Sprite running off on tangents about how it worked with bigger ships where you had jibs or multiple masts to worry about. Ness had brought along a pen and paper to keep a record of interesting events/landmarks and so forth and used this to take notes. Once he quit worrying about pulling the tiller too far and tipping the whole ship, he found he enjoyed the relative quiet of the wind swelling the sail and the ship slapping through the waves.
Now that they were running silent, Ness guided the boat closer to shore to get a better look at what might be docked along the way. The answer to that was nothing much: the towns and villages strung along the shore rarely showed any sign of boats bigger than their own, and on the two occasions they spotted a mast, it turned out the boats were beached and damaged beyond repair.
"Typhoons," Sprite declared, accompanied by an authoritative nod of his head.
Ness lowered his binoculars from the hulled vessel. "What if they've destroyed everything at Olongapo, too?"
"Then it wouldn't be much of a port, would it?"
He supposed that was true. As the sun got down near the ocean, they put in at a sandy beach, hauling the boat up the shore and striking the sails. In the morning, Sebastian
helped drag it back into the water and they resumed their course along the coast. Cook fires rose from the trees surrounding a small town, but the fields and forests otherwise appeared uninhabited. Ness had grown used to traveling below water, and seeing so much land with so little evidence of people, he thought he ought to feel sad, or nostalgic, or something. Instead, what he felt was rightness.
Hugging the coast, they swung southeast. Miles away, the gentle slopes of a volcano hung in the haze. Its peak was gone, torn away in a series of jagged bites. The land continued to curve until they found themselves headed north into a calm bay two miles wide and at least five long. Low green hills overlooked the shores. Two small islands split the bay's mouth.
"Let's pull in at one of these," Ness said to Sprite, who had resumed control of the tiller since they'd turned into the wind and had been forced to zigzag forward.
Sprite nodded and guided them around the small, sperm-shaped island guarding the approach to the larger one. The sea floor zoomed up beneath them, light blue sand mottled by darker coral. They landed on a sandy beach and threaded through a few hundred feet of jungle that ended on the edge of a man-made lagoon and a swimming pool gone green with algae. Cottages littered the north beach, roofs robin's egg blue.
It appeared uninhabited, but they stayed within the treeline, scanning the inner bay. An airport sat a couple miles to their right. To the left, a gigantic industrial port interrupted the greenery. Sunken cargo ships angled from the water. Towns encrusted much of the bay, including a large city another mile past the airport.
"There have got to be people here," Ness spoke-signed. "We can rule out the port. Too many goods to have been left alone. Anyway, we need something with a sail, not some mile-long container ship."
"Sporting marina," Sprite said. "Downtown waterfront?"
"We'd have to go there to find spare sails and such anyway." He pointed to a yellow patch on the shore behind the airport. "I say we put in there and search on foot. The bay's too exposed for my tastes. What do you think, Sebastian?"
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