She waited ’til her eyes had adjusted enough to see Cal, then she began to make her way, slow-sure, so Adder could follow. There was a kind of path, but very narrow. In places, she had to hug and hold the rock wall.
“What’s down here?”
“You will see.”
“How did you find this?”
“Been searching long.”
Secrets, secrets … she heard the word on the air. Was it the flowers whispering, or Cal, or voices in her mind?
Down into the deep, Moss followed the hunch of Cal’s back, the path descending sudden-steep. Rock water dripped onto her neck, shivering her. She turned to Adder, worried that her clumsy paws might stumble, but Adder was secure and tongue-lolling. This cavern was far bigger than any of the caves they had explored as Small Things.
“Are there lizards down here?” she called forward.
“Not seen any.”
“How deep is it?” She skidded as the path got steeper still.
“All way to the sea.”
The saltwater smell got stronger. She squinted into the dark and—there!—Moss could see now: a huge, shadowy shape below. Was this what Cal meant? Her birthday surprise?
She edged a little closer. When Cal reached behind to grasp her arm, she felt the tension between his fingers and her skin as a warm buzz. It reminded her of bumble-wings, beating swift.
“Almost there,” he said, keeping her hand in his.
From what she could make out, the shape below was moving, gentle-slight up and down. Was it a vision this time, or real?
They climbed down into the cavern, with only the sound of Adder’s paws on rock. Now there was more light, sun from outside. She heard the thick, rushing sound of the sea. Then they were in a huge rock room. Ahead was an archway, the sea beyond. It was all so sudden-bright.
“A belly in the rocks,” Cal said, spreading his arms wide. Then he pointed ahead at the shape. “Belly been holding this.”
There, floating on this secret inlet of water, Moss saw it proper.
But how had that gotten here?
“You found it?” She bumped into Cal’s back in her rush to see it better. “But it was all gone!” She climbed down the rest of the way quick-fast. “Finn and me found pieces on Western Beach, and I found more before that in the cove! So, how?”
Then her breath caught. Because her thinking didn’t make sense—’course it didn’t. Cal had found this birthday surprise long before she had found Finn, or even the smashed-up pieces of his boat in the cove. And because it was not Swift—the name of Finn’s boat—that was painted in black letters on the side of this one. It was another name.
Cal came close, lacing his fingers in hers again. “This been here long time … this been waiting.”
“But who … ?”
This boat did not look wrecked. It just seemed a little old and tired-looking, with its dark red paint faded. And, something else …
This was a boat she knew. Remembered.
“It can’t be,” she whispered.
Cal nodded at her, like he was wanting her to say it out loud. She shook her head, but still …
“Pa’s boat?
She was staring at its side, at the painted letters there. A name so similar to Finn’s boat, but …
“The Swallow,” she said. “Its name!”
Sudden-quick, there were a hundred thoughts, no … memories, inside her, arrived like bees in a swarm. Being in its cabin. How it had moved on the waves. Pa telling stories on its deck about the island they were sailing to …
Magic Isle … Flower Island … A place to cure pain …
She shut her eyes, swaying. Had these memories been inside her all along?
She ran her eyes over all of it. Then, careful-slow, she climbed down the final section of rock to touch the old, fraying rope that moored the Swallow to the cave. She could remember tying that rope in another place once, on a proper metal ring … throwing it to Pa in a harbor. Harbor? Was that what that place was called? With the wooden pathways and all those other boats bobbing?
What were all these new-sudden thoughts inside? Memories? Stories? She’d thought before they were dreams.
She realized now what Cal had meant. “When you said there was a way off the island …”
He nodded. “This.”
Still, though, she could not believe it. Pa’s boat, here?
How?
Because Pa’s boat had wrecked in a storm. On the rocks and the reef around the island. He must have told her and Cal a thousand times.
Cal watched her. “Pa tells stories, Moss. He been doing it long time. Come-see.”
Quick-fast, he leapt from the rocky outcrop where they stood, and landed on the boat’s deck. Moss followed Cal’s path and leapt too. She held her arms open for Adder and caught her with an oomph. When she turned, Cal had already disappeared inside the boat’s cabin, leaving the door open.
She ran a hand across the boat’s side, touched the rudder, then grasped its edge. She had done this before. She could remember her hands—so much smaller then, but grasped tight around this very rudder. She remembered turning it and feeling the boat sway.
Rudder—even that word she had not remembered ’til now.
She followed Cal into the cabin, and this—this!—was familiar too. It was a dull familiarity, more like the half remembering of a dream. But there was the bed Pa had slept in—she could remember him sleeping in—only it was no longer made up with bedding. And there was the cupboard—where she had made her own bed once, curled quiet and dark. She frowned—why had she been sleeping in there? She blinked and pressed her fingers to wooden walls to steady herself, sudden-fast, as light-winged as a flutterby. How small must she have been then?
Now the cupboard doors were open, with no clothes inside. She thought of Pa’s shirts, all faded and holey in the hut beside the cove: They’d come from here. Near-everything in their hut had come from here, hadn’t it? The bedding. All those books in Pa’s cave! She walked around the cabin in a kind of fever daze. Apart from looking old and tired, the empty cabin was perfectly sound. Seaworthy. What, then, about Pa’s tales? Of their shipwreck so many seasons ago? Why was this boat bobbing here?
Nothing left, my bird … Only what I could save in the storm.
“You remember?” Cal said. “From when you were very small?”
She nodded. “We came on this. I … I remember the journey, some of it.”
Even if she still didn’t understand.
“He left other stuff,” Cal said. “Look-see.”
From the floor beside the bed, Cal tugged out a wooden trunk. He opened it with a creak and pulled out loose papers. Moss knelt.
“Look,” Cal said again. “See.”
The papers felt soft as skin, damp and cool. She recognized Pa’s handwriting—the cursive. Here was another of his scrapbooks! Though the words were mostly faded and smudged, she saw fragments of sentences.
… think I am coming closer to finding, to knowing …
One last mystery … last place for dreaming …
Hope for the world … for me … healing my brain, my illness … away from unkindness … where I can be … free …
Had he just forgotten to come back for all this? Forgotten his boat was here at all?
Like in the other scrapbook at camp, there were sketches too. A stormflower, so real-looking. The cliffs and Lizard Rocks. She flicked on. Soon the sketches were swirls and circles, with jagged lines through the middle, confused and unhappy somehow. Ahead a few more pages was a different sort of sketch again: a small girl, crouched in the corner of a boat. She had dark, frizzed-out hair and big green eyes. Moss swallowed.
“You,” Cal said, face close over her shoulder.
But she knew it already. She traced her fingers over the picture.
It was how Pa had seen her once. She should show this to Finn, make him see how close she’d always been with Pa, how she’d been with him all along. But there was a swirling in her stomach,
and she knew she wouldn’t say anything.
“Keep going,” Cal said.
She turned another soft page. Here was another sketch of her as a Very Small Thing, but this time with her arm around a patterned dog. Moss recognized her too.
“Jess,” she whispered. But she was so much younger and smaller, all legs.
The dog in the picture was a bit like how Moss first remembered Adder, too. She stroked her finger along the sketch-dog’s back. Moss had lain curled with Jess on this very floor—she remembered that!—Jess had nuzzled her ear. Moss turned and pointed the sketch toward Adder.
“Can you recognize your mum?” she said. “She was on this boat once, too.”
Adder stared goofy back, not even proper looking. She pointed her snout and whined at the cabin door.
“There is more,” Cal said, turning to the next page.
There, Moss breathed in sharp. Skidded backward. He was back. The man from her dreams and visions.
Here!
The angry man.
“Again?”
Cal caught her, pressing palms to her spine. “You know him?”
And now she was back in the ocean. Near-drowning! This man stood over her, pushed the water toward her. She gasped and shook her head. She was back in the cave where he’d shouted and pointed. She placed her hands over her ears. She didn’t want his noise, or the throbbing it gave.
With feather-light touch, Cal pried her hands away. He held her fingers in his. “The man from your dreamings? From the sea?”
She nodded. “The visions.” She found Cal’s fire-eyes instead of looking back at the page.
Pa had drawn him. In a long-ago sketchbook that he’d since forgotten. Why? Had he seen him too?
This picture made her want to run and hide, go someplace dark. “Turn it over,” she said. “Please.”
She felt Cal’s breath on her neck as he moved the pages. Moss thought she’d be glad to see the angry man gone, but he was still there, in her mind. She shut her eyes, but he was there, too—shouting, hurting, pointing. How had Pa known?
Cal stopped on a page. “An other thing.”
Cautious-careful, Moss looked. A loose piece of paper, folded many times and stuck inside the scrapbook. She breathed out, glad not to see another angry man, but then frowned as she unfolded it. On this page were two sketched blobs: one bigger, one smaller. It looked like a sort of map, shaky drawn … ancient.
Moss traced the bigger shape with her fingertips, over its scalloped coves and long, straight stretch of beach. She recognized, too, the shape of the rocks and how they pointed, as a finger, to the sea.
“Our island,” she said.
“Flower Island,” said Cal, pointing out words, written beneath in unfamiliar handwriting.
The other blob was another island drawn, too. Much smaller.
“Bird Island,” said Cal, again pointing out words not written by Pa.
Then Moss understood. “The land on the horizon?”
“The Flicker-land.”
She nodded. The word real was written below it. There were numbers and letters there like she’d seen in Pa’s atlas. Coordinates?
“Also called Bird Shite Island.” Cal smiled. “But Pa saw it. He knew it was here!”
Moss wanted to catch the smile on Cal’s face like she’d done on the rock in the sea. This map was why he’d wanted her to see this sketchbook, not because of the pictures of her as a Small Thing, or even because of the angry man. This map was proof that Cal’s Flicker-land was true, that he’d really seen it.
“Pa been lying,” Cal said.
“Or forgetting, maybe.” Moss chewed her lip, thinking. “Doesn’t explain why we only see it sometimes, though. Why it flickers.”
Cal kept her gaze. “Maybe that land is not the one that’s flickering.”
Moss frowned, trying to understand.
Cal shrugged. “Maybe we’re all flickering? All of us here?”
He held up his hand to her again, and there, for a moment, his scale-sheen faded. Gone, then back again. He smiled like a fish-tail spin. Silver-sharp.
Something made sense—Moss felt the wisp of knowing it. Finn had said their island was not on maps. Pa had called it a dream island … Flower Island … It seemed to bend and shift … Like the magic of Cal did, too. She shook her head, could not grasp—quite—at what all this meant.
There was a rumble beneath them, making Moss sit back on her heels. The volcano had not given up, then.
“Our island’s not happy, whatever else it is,” she said.
She looked up at a wooden ceiling she remembered staring at before. Then across at the circular window that she remembered once thinking had looked like an eye. Why had Pa lied that all this had gone? No boat? No way to leave?
“Nothing what seem,” Cal said.
Not even Cal. Not Pa. Maybe not her? Her whole world flown up like ash from a fire.
“What is real, then?” she murmured.
Cal took her face between his fingers and she watched him so close, followed the way light glinted in his eyes. He was the most beautiful thing here, not the flowers, not the magic.
She leaned forward quick and kissed his warm, soft lips.
Real.
So real.
She was sure.
But the feeling that came with this touch … that was more dream.
He grinned. Now she saw the scale-sheen in his cheeks flicker: the tattoo of scales fading, then coming back, then fading, then returning again. If she kissed every part of him, over and over, would it fade forever? Maybe she should try.
As she was thinking it, he kissed her back, his tongue ting-tingling on hers. Spark-wild as the flowers! Was he checking she was real too?
She laid her head against him, considering. “What if we leave and it’s not real there, either? What if everything always flickers?”
Because Finn seemed full-strange as anything she’d known! What if where he came from was more dreaming still? She felt a tremble in the boat again, heard rumbling in the cliffs. Adder whined, snout pointing determined at the cabin door, when rough water rocked the boat harder.
Moss left the sketches, climbed up from the cabin and onto the deck. There were endings to be grasped still!
On deck, she saw tiny scratches in the wooden floor, and quick-fast remembered—again!—knife-scratching them when she’d been a Very Small Thing, counting days at sea. The lines were straight and even, not made in storms or rough tides: lines scratched in sunny, calm days.
“No flooding,” she whispered, tracing them. “Just as Finn told it.”
“I got the plan,” Cal said. “We take the boat. Them two boys sail. We go to Flicker-land, or beyond. We go ’til we find.”
“And Pa?”
Cal’s eyes hardened.
And now, watching him, something inside Moss was a resisting thing, a swirling-wild thing. She could not leave Pa, not just like this, even if he’d not told truth …’course she could not. She needed what was real—needed to know why he had hidden things away. And, anyway, he was … Pa. The swirling feeling grew. Made her fingers tremble. She thought of Finn’s words as they had ridden.
… maybe he’s a fugitive … done something wrong … not right in the head …
Seawater smashed against the boat as the rocks shuddered harder. A part of her wanted to smash her fists hard against Pa too—make him talk, hit him like he had hit Cal on the beach. She shook her head. Maybe there was truth appearing on the horizon like Cal said, but there was truth still to find here, too. She could not leave ’til she had it clasped tight.
She took off her boots and handed them to Cal. “Keep safe for me. ’Tis not time to take the boat yet.” She walked to its edge. Saw sandfish hiding in the shadow of the hull—flipping and swirling—where Cal must have caught them those days before. “I will bring Pa back,” she said, firm. “Then we all leave together.”
She dived into the inky black water. And Adder followed.
She sw
am farther out of the cavern, heading toward the wide sea. The rocky archway was tall enough to sail a boat through. Was this what Pa had done, so long ago? Lied about their boat wrecking and put it here instead?
Away from the cave was true-choppy water, as tangled-churning as the mess in her mind. Thoughts were swirling, dangerous-fast. A riptide. Tempest-brain.
Their boat was not wrecked. Pa knew about the Flicker-land. Pa had lied.
And the sketch of the angry man … how did Pa know about him?
She kicked her legs harder as she felt a shiver up her spine.
Adder kept up with Moss, despite how quick-fast she swam. Ghost-pale, huge stingers came and kept pace with her too. Moss hummed sounds to their twisting bodies so they wouldn’t sting.
Moss swam from the rocks and into the light. The sea was rough-wild beyond the shelter of the cave, its current dragging her toward still-deeper parts … toward the horizon and Cal’s land and that possible point of forgetting. She bobbed her head up to see.
Cal’s land was there. Firmer now. More real. Covered in birds like its name. It didn’t look like a place they could sail to and live. Did Finn’s homeland look more welcoming? Beside her, Adder strained to see too.
Maybe, with Adder being half wild dog—half islander—she wouldn’t forget anything when they left. Then Moss wondered something else: Maybe forgetting was another one of Pa’s stories. Maybe she shouldn’t feel worried about that at all.
But Moss was worried. If she forgot this island, who was she? And with so few memories of before, would she find her old home so easy? Did she even want to? As she stretched her arms out, slicing through water, Finn’s words drummed in her mind.
Nothing like you.
Not the same.
So who was her Pa, really?
She would find out.
Soon, she was above the reef again, swimming faster and harder back to shore. She looked down, opening her eyes against the salt. The stingers were still there, not so far below. So, too, were the pinks and greens and oranges of the coral reef, the darts of purple fishes, the sashaying red of the anemones. There were starfish and sponges and seaweed, everything swaying in the pull of the tide. Moss and Adder glided over it all. The stingers followed, eyes swivel-fast to watch them, guiding them in.
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