Above World

by Jenn Reese

  Her eyes adjusted to the darkness quickly. She stashed her food pouch inside another pouch so that she wouldn’t be tempted to nibble as she walked, and headed up the beach. Getting to the Above World had been her first goal. Now that she was here, it was time to meet the Humans.

  She stumbled less and less as she walked. At first, her legs were being stupid. Her foot would stop short of the sand and she’d lurch forward until it hit the ground, or she’d pound her foot down, thinking it would hit the sand several centimeters after it did. The process became easier the less she thought about it. She needed to trust her body more, to stop thinking so much. The idea made her laugh. Overthinking was not usually one of her faults.

  She must have come to shore farther south than she’d intended. Not surprising, since navigation was one of Hoku’s hobbies, not hers. It was almost dawn when she saw the flickering glow of the Human village in the distance. She urged her legs to walk faster. Daphine said they could understand some of the Kampii language, but how much? Aluna didn’t want to insult them by accident.

  The smell hit her a dozen meters before she reached the first hut. Charred flesh. Smoke, acrid and foul, filled her nose. Where were the Above World’s currents to whisk the odors away and cleanse the sky? She pinched her nose closed and kept her mouth shut, relying on her breathing shell to bring oxygen to her lungs. It didn’t keep the stench out completely, but it helped.

  As she got closer, sickly light illuminated a small cluster of huts and enclosures. The walls of the huts were a patchwork of rocks and bricks, wood planks and dried mud. Some still smoldered. Flames licked out of pits scattered around the tiny compound and ate the remains of fences and roofs. She’d heard about fire, but never seen it. In the stories Daphine told, the flames were always red and yellow. But here, in the remains of the village, the fire burned green.

  She approached cautiously, her free hand clutching the hilt of her knife. As far as she could tell, the village was deserted. She peered into a hut. The inside was scorched, its contents burned to ashes.

  A strange scrape on the ground caught her eye. Aluna knelt and studied the marks in the hard-packed earth. Tracks. She could follow the trail of most ground-dwelling ocean animals to discover their hidey-holes, but she had no idea what sort of creatures made these marks. Some were probably Human — they resembled the tracks she’d been leaving in the sand all day. But others were unfathomable: huge depressions the size of her entire body, lines and scuffs as if something big had been dragged.

  A barely audible noise tickled the inside of her ears. A sniffle?

  She walked slowly and quietly through the Human town, careful to avoid the pits where green fires still burned and coughed up smoke. Tools crafted of metal and wood burned on racks by some of the huts. She didn’t know what they were for, but she bet Hoku could have figured it out.

  Some of the huts had little fenced-in areas attached. White-furred animals lay dead inside, their bodies slashed with spears or knives or some other bladed Above World weapons. She moved past them quickly.

  The sniffling got louder. She could hear it inside her ears, the way she heard other Kampii under the ocean. She ran toward the sound, ignoring the flames and scanning huts as fast as she could. Who was it? Had Daphine followed her? Was she hurt?

  And then she found him. He sat huddled in a small hut on the edge of the village, his knees folded tight against his chest, his breathing ragged. Sniffling.

  Hoku.

  SHE THOUGHT Hoku would smile and rush to her, throw his arms around her and hug her tight. Instead, he said blankly, “The whole village. Dead. Even the younglings. Even the animals.”

  Aluna knelt by his side. “Are you hurt? Do you know who did this?”

  Hoku buried his face against his knees. She wrapped her arms around him and held him close. She’d seen him like this only once before, on the morning of the last Deepfell attack. He’d lost an uncle and a grandfather to those killers that day.

  Eventually, he lifted his head and started to talk. The words spilled out in one long stream, crashing over one another like waves.

  He told her about the Trade Rock. About seeing Daphine and her brothers. About the Humans. About the horrible flying people-creatures and what they did.

  “Daphine and your brothers got away — I’m sure of it,” Hoku said. “There’s no way the dragonflier could have followed them underwater.”

  “But Pilipo’s wound —”

  “Not serious,” Hoku said quickly. “He’s gotten injured much worse on hunting trips. He’s smart, Aluna. They all are. They’ll be okay.”

  She let out the breath caught in her lungs and leaned her head against the wall of the hut. Her gaze fell on a small blackened object by the door. A child’s doll.

  “We should search for survivors,” she said. “Four Humans made it to the Trade Rock. Maybe others are hiding in the village somewhere. I haven’t seen any bodies.”

  Hoku stared down at his hands and looked as if he might throw up.

  “I found . . .” He gulped. “I found a pit. It was filled with . . . The smell . . . There were arms. . . .”

  “So all the stories about the kind of people who live up here . . . are true?”

  Hoku nodded.

  He looked so pale and thin. He probably followed her, convinced he’d find the Above World filled with artifacts and new tech. Instead, he’d been subjected to one horror after another. She’d left him behind because she wanted to keep him safe — but now that he was here, she couldn’t bear the thought of sending him back. No, they were on this journey together now.

  She reached into her food net and pulled out a hunk of fish. Hoku’s eyes widened when she offered it to him.

  “You sure?” he said. “You must be hungry, too.”

  “Not really,” she said. “I practically ate a whole shark not too long ago. I’m fat as a whale.” One lie was all it took. Hoku grabbed the fish, mumbled a quick thanks, and shoved most of it in his mouth in one bite.

  “Here, look at this,” he said with his mouth full. He reached into his waterlogged bag and pulled out a small glittering box.

  “What is it?” she asked. Hoku was already looking better. Amazing how quickly his mood could turn when food and tech were involved.

  Hoku jammed the last bit of fish into his mouth. “A water safe. Can you believe Grandma Nani had it? She said it was a gift to my family from Sarah Jennings herself.”

  “From Sarah Jennings?” While the thought of touching something Sarah Jennings once possessed made Aluna’s heart skip, she had her doubts about Nani’s claim. The old woman had once told her that a Kampii could live for a whole year inside the belly of a whale.

  Still, the box did look ancient. The silvery mermaid embossed on the lid reminded her of Daphine. She seemed so regal, so perfect. Except for being too skinny and not wearing enough clothes. “What’s inside?”

  His smile faded slightly. “I don’t know, exactly.”

  “You haven’t opened it yet?” He’d been shocked by the death of the Humans, and from finding their burial pit, and from the long swim, but still. This was Hoku.

  “Well, of course I’ve tried to open it,” he said, irritated. “The safe is locked. Look.”

  He lifted the flap hiding the numbers.

  “If you press a number, it cycles up one until it hits nine. Then it starts over at zero again. If you press this button on the side, it tries to open.” He demonstrated. Nothing happened.

  “It reminds me of the secrets dome,” Aluna said. “You have to blow on the conch shells in the right order so the hatch will open . . . and only the Elders know the order.”

  “Exactly!” Hoku said. “Elder Peleke calls it a combination lock.”

  “There must be dozens of possible combinations!”

  Hoku frowned at her.

  “Or . . . a lot more?” she said weakly.

  “A whole lot more,” he said. “I’ve already tried a few hundred. I’m going to be systematic about i
t and hope they didn’t pick 999999.”

  She looked at him. He looked at her. Hoku tapped in 999999 and pushed the button. Nothing happened.

  They both grinned.

  “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get moving,” Aluna said. “We need to find a splinter colony or another Human village. We may be swim — I mean, walking — for a while.”

  “Back when our ancestors lived, people were everywhere. I’ll bet there were more Humans in the Above World than there are sharks in the sea,” Hoku said.

  She snorted. “There’s no way there could be that many.”

  “It’s true. How many Coral Kampii are there — a little over two thousand? We’d be a tiny village in ancient times, just a grain of sand compared to the huge cities that used to cover the land.”

  “Well, I don’t see any of those huge cities now, and I don’t want to be here if the dragonfly-people decide to come back. Can you try to focus, please?”

  Hoku paled. “Focus. I can do that.”

  “The sand ocean is to the east,” she said, remembering a story Daphine had told her about the horse people of the desert. “I doubt we’ll find HydroTek so far from the water. I walked half a day from the south and didn’t see anything, so I say north. I can see mountains and trees that way. Maybe mountains are like our coral reefs, and people will be living in nests carved out near the bottom.”

  Hoku nodded and said, “North is good. Anywhere but here is good. I want to leave this place and never come back.”

  Aluna glanced at the charred doll by the door. “Agreed.”

  They headed north, following the coast. The sand grew rockier. The sun rose in the sky, and Aluna kept a hand over her eyes to shield them from the light. Hoku did the same. A few times they stowed their packs in the sand and dove through the waves, collecting mussels and hunting crabs.

  The day burned on. Aluna was surprised the Kampii hadn’t sent more hunters after them, but maybe the fight Hoku described had made them cautious. Good. She didn’t want any more Kampii risking their lives because of her.

  “What’s that?” Hoku said, pointing up ahead. Aluna squinted. The beach was littered with silvery-gray bodies.

  “Dolphins!” she said, and took off running. Maybe some were still alive. If they’d beached themselves by accident, she and Hoku could push them back out to sea.

  As she approached, the thick stench of blood clogged her nose. The sand under the creatures was stained dark, like a great crimson cloak dragged out of the ocean. A web of ropes lay over their bodies. The creatures hadn’t beached themselves. They’d been pulled from the sea and slaughtered.

  “The dragonflier-people,” Aluna said. “They must have come this way after destroying the Human village. But why would they kill dolphins?”

  She looked at the closest animal. It was long and sleek and gray, much like a slender shark. A dorsal fin jutted out of its back. But instead of flippers, it had arms. Instead of a wide, pointed snout, it had a hairless human head, great bulging black eyes, and tiny holes for ears. Its mouth, slightly open, contained rows of pointed, razor-sharp teeth.

  “By the tides,” she hissed, and took a step back. Hoku ran up beside her, breathing hard.

  “Are those —?”

  “Yes,” Aluna said. She looked at the two dozen other bodies lying torn and bleeding on the sand and gripped the knife belted to her leg.

  “Deepfell.”

  “ARE THEY DEAD?” Hoku asked. None of the Deepfell demons were moving. They lay tangled in big nets, like a school of caught fish. “They’re probably dead. Come on, let’s keep going.”

  “Wait. Some of them are missing . . . parts,” Aluna said.

  “Parts?” he echoed weakly. He scanned the bodies and saw one without a dorsal fin, another with half of its tail cut off. “Oh. Parts. I guess that’s what the patchwork people are after. And why they killed the Humans, too. Parts are like tech to them.” He tried not to think about the pit of dead Humans back at the village.

  Aluna gripped her dagger in one hand and knelt beside a Deepfell to check for a pulse. “This one’s gone,” she said, standing back up. “I’ll go check the others.”

  He watched her hop from one Deepfell to the next, checking for signs of life. Grandma Nani had been telling him stories about the Deepfell his whole life. “They gave up their humanity to live in deep ocean,” his grandma had said. “But if we were meant to live there, the price wouldn’t be so high.”

  The water in the deep-dark was ice-cold, the pressure so intense it would snap the bones of a Kampii in the flick of a tail. Strange creatures lived down there — monsters out of nightmares. Things with tentacles and teeth and no memory of the sun. And on those things, the Deepfell preyed.

  He’d been a youngling during the last Deepfell raid on the colony, but his uncle had been a hunter and one of the first to die. The Deepfell had ripped chunks out of him until there was nothing left for the sharks. His grandfather — Grandma Nani’s husband — had died trying to save him.

  “Hoku, quick! This one’s alive.”

  Aluna crouched by a Deepfell, her dagger hovering in the air between them. It didn’t look like the demon was going anywhere, not with that huge gash in its neck. It just lay there, quivering. Hoku hurried toward Aluna, giving the dead a wide berth and doing his best to step around the patches of red sand.

  “Look,” she said as he approached. “It’s trying to talk.”

  Hoku stared down at the creature’s face. Its lidless black eyes bulged like domes from its sockets. He’d seen other fish with eyes like that. The Deepfell needed to absorb every speck of light in the darkness of the deep. They never truly slept; there were far too many enemies lurking beyond their range of sight. But eyes weren’t enough, not in the deep ocean. He’d heard them at night, their high-pitched keening echoing through the colony as they hunted kilometers away.

  This demon lay before him, its mouth moving ever so slightly, its eyes aware and watching. Aluna dropped to her knee near the creature and lowered her ear toward its mouth.

  “Be careful,” Hoku said. “You know how fast they can kill.”

  She waved him into silence. Hoku saw the Deepfell pull in a shuddering breath and try to speak. He saw Aluna’s knife, still tight in her hand, its point aimed directly at the back of the monster’s neck.

  “I can’t understand you,” Aluna said. “What are you trying to tell me?” She lowered her ear even closer to its mouth.

  “We should go,” Hoku said quietly. He thought of his mother, and all the months she had mourned her father and her brother. Every year, she covered their family shrine with offerings on the anniversary of the attack. She remembered them, and she cursed the Deepfell. “We should swim away,” he said again.

  “It can’t breathe,” Aluna said, finally looking at him. Her face, normally bright with energy, seemed drained. Her brown skin had paled to the color of wet sand, and her knife hand began to shake. “He’s suffocating,” she said. “Just like Makina.”

  Hoku looked away quickly. He’d watched Humans get killed today, and he’d stumbled upon a pit filled with their dead. Now he stood on a beach covered with the slick gray bodies of the Kampii’s mortal enemies. But the worst thing he’d seen today by far was that knife wobbling in Aluna’s hand.

  “I don’t understand,” Aluna said. She was looking back down at the demon. Her knife lay useless in the sand as she gently pressed the rubbery skin around the Deepfell’s wounded throat. “They don’t wear breathing shells,” she said. “How do they get air from the water?”

  “They don’t have shells the same way we do,” Hoku said. “Their ancestors modified the inside of their bodies instead. They pull in air through those slits in their throats.”

  “See him gasping?” she said. “The slits are above his wound, so the air isn’t making it to his lungs. He’s not getting enough oxygen.”

  Hoku shrugged. “Even if we wanted to save it, there’s nothing we can do.”

&n
bsp; “But he’s going to die.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Hoku said. “If that monster had been able to fight, it would have tried to kill us!” He wished they’d never found these Deepfell, or found them an hour later, when the decision had been made for them.

  Aluna said nothing. For a minute, she just stared at him. He recognized that look: the furrow of her brow, the slight closing of her right eye, and the almost imperceptible twitching of her lips. Aluna was thinking, and there wasn’t a more dangerous activity in all the world.

  “I couldn’t save Makina or the other Kampii,” Aluna said. “I couldn’t do anything. In the City of Shifting Tides, I was useless.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “You’re brave and funny, and —”

  “Useless,” she interrupted. “I can’t fix their necklaces or stop any of them from dying.”

  Her hand gripped the small pouch around her neck. He knew her mother’s ring lay nestled inside, and that she never touched it unless her thoughts were dark.

  “Aluna, what are you —?”

  “I’m going to save someone,” she said. “I’m going to save the only person I can.”

  He watched her suck in a huge breath of air, filling her lungs. Both her hands went to the breathing shell at the base of her throat.

  “No! Stop! You don’t even know if it will work!”

  Hoku fell to his knees. He grabbed Aluna’s wrist with both his hands and yanked. Her body jerked, but she was strong. Much stronger than he was. Her hands stayed on the shell as she tugged and twisted, trying to dislodge it from its rightful place in her flesh.

  “No!” he yelled again, but it was no use. With a sudden pop, the breathing shell came loose. As she pulled it away from her throat, the shell trailed two long, thin metallic tendrils with a sickening slurp.