by Jenn Reese
Calli watched but said nothing.
“Spears first,” Electra said.
She and Calliope plucked long spears from the rack affixed to the basin wall. Aluna hefted the weapon in her right hand. The spear was thin and light, even a little wobbly. Kampii spears were short and sturdy. Underwater, the Aviar spears would snap in half.
“Ready positions!”
Calli stood opposite Aluna, both hands on the wooden shaft of her spear. Aluna took a traditional hunter pose, with some frustration. A hunter never stood on the ocean floor if he could help it. You wanted the ability to swim in any direction during a fight, so you swam or hovered in the water, ready to move any way you wanted. Fighting on land made her feel cornered before she even started.
High Senator Electra stood between them, her own spear gripped firmly in one hand.
“Let me see what you know, but slowly!” she said. “I don’t want to see any blood.”
Aluna darted forward and drove her spear toward Calliope’s gut, a very basic but useful maneuver. She hadn’t intended to go so fast, but without the ocean’s thick embrace, her moves blurred with speed.
Calli let out a squeak and dropped her spear. Aluna’s weapon was batted off target at the last possible moment. Electra followed up her first hit with a shove that sent Aluna careening across the platform.
“It seems our waterlogged cousins can’t understand simple instructions,” Electra said. “Let me try a different approach.” She beckoned to Aluna. “Get up and stand ready.”
Calli tried to protest, but Electra cut her off.
“Quiet,” the high senator said. “Stand over there and make sure the wingless girl doesn’t fall to her death prematurely.”
Aluna stood up and wiped the dirt off her cheek. She was fast as a shark up here! She took up a ready stance across from Electra and grinned.
The high senator attacked.
Aluna dodged. She jumped left and right, nimbly avoiding lightning-fast pokes from Electra’s staff. Electra held the staff in the middle, but when she lunged, the shaft slid forward between her hands, gaining a full meter of length. The first two times, the spearhead almost nicked Aluna in the arms.
Aluna countered with a forward roll into a strike. Rolling on solid ground hurt a whole lot more than flipping in the ocean, but the effect was similar. Electra seemed surprised to find Aluna at her feet and backed up hastily to get out of range.
Aluna pressed her attack. She spun and struck, spun and struck. Electra regained her composure and parried the blows with increasing speed. Then she did something Aluna had never seen before. She spun her spear in a wide arc, faster and faster. So fast that it whirred in the air.
Aluna stumbled backward. She couldn’t see where the spear was. It looked as if it were everywhere at once! No weapon moved like that in the ocean. Water was thick and clung to everything. But air — air seemed to exult in velocity. Electra loosened her grip and the arc of the spear increased, creating a great whirling blade of air that she moved from side to side.
Electra advanced, one corner of her mouth twisted into a smile.
“Stop!” Calli yelled. Aluna could barely hear her over the whir of Electra’s weapon and the thundering of her own heart.
She looked left and right. No hidey-holes. She looked up and down, but without wings, there was nowhere she could go. She was running out of options.
Electra’s stance changed. Her spear thwacked into the padding on Aluna’s ribs and sent her tumbling to the right. A second knock to the head, and she went rolling back to the left. And still, she couldn’t even see the spear for all its deadly spinning.
But Electra had developed a rhythm, and Aluna dodged before the next blow struck. This time instead of getting out of range, she slid between Electra’s feet and rolled onto her back. She brought her own spear through Electra’s legs, then thrust it lengthwise against the back of her opponent’s knees, forcing them to bend.
Electra toppled backward and they tangled in an awkward pile. Both of them scrambled to their feet, but the high senator was faster. The sharp, cold point of Electra’s spear dug painfully into the soft skin of Aluna’s throat, exactly where her breathing shell used to be.
The senator took three deep breaths in through her nose, and three quick breaths out through her mouth.
“Not bad, girl,” she said. “You’ve obviously had some training, and you think well under pressure. You’ll never be a decent warrior without wings, but you have the potential to be better than horrible.”
Aluna pushed Electra’s spear point away from her throat, took a step back, and returned to her ready stance. Her head throbbed, her ribs ached, and she was ready to push as much as she needed to to learn everything the senator could teach her.
She looked Electra full in the eyes. “Again.”
HOKU HUNCHED over his desk, his legs wrapped around the bottom rung of his stool, and slowly unscrewed another piece of the artifact. Somewhere in the distance, he heard knocking. No time for that, he thought. It wouldn’t be long before Aluna found some way for them to escape, and he intended to learn as much as possible about Aviar tech before they left.
Louder knocking. Definitely his door. One more screw . . .
“Hoku?”
He pulled himself away from his project and saw Calli standing in the doorway. She wore the same kind of loose leggings and billowy shirt as she had when they’d been in their prison cells, only this time her clothes were bright green instead of blue. The soft fabrics suited her far more than the silvery armor she’d been trapped in during their audience with the president.
“Calli — er, I mean, Vice President,” he said. Reluctantly, he unwound his legs from the stool and stood up.
“Just Calli,” she said. “May I . . . can I come in?”
“You can probably do whatever you want, you know?” He hoped he didn’t sound bitter. He actually didn’t mind being a prisoner. Captivity was a lot more fun than cowering in a Human village or hiking along the beach.
Calli stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. She nodded toward the tray of fruit and bread and meat sitting by the bed. “You didn’t eat? I thought you were hungry.”
He looked at the food. His stomach whined. He’d forgotten all about it.
“I guess I got a little distracted,” he said. He felt heat on his cheeks and turned quickly back to his desk.
“You took apart the lamp!” Calli said.
“It started to get dark, and this torch started to glow all by itself,” Hoku said. “I want to see how it works. Don’t worry, I can put it back together.”
Calli joined him at the desk. “Electricity,” she said, and touched one of the pieces. “This is the power receptor. It takes energy from the air and uses it to run the lamp.”
He touched the receptor, an inch away from where she was touching it. “But where does the energy come from? I couldn’t find a power source.”
“From our generators,” she said. “They’re like really big batteries that store and transmit energy.”
“But where —?”
“From the sun,” she said, talking fast. “Did you see all the sun traps on the cliffs when you flew in? All those black panels? Those are like nets we use to gather energy from the sun.”
“You store the sun’s light so you can use it to make other light later?” Hoku said. He touched the round glass bubble jar that had been emitting the glow.
Calli nodded. “To make light, and to do other things, too. Like run our necklaces. Filtering oxygen from the air takes power, and they’re far too small and light to contain generators themselves. I’m sure your breathing shells work the same way.”
He ran his finger over the seahorse imprint on his necklace. He’d always assumed the power for their shells came from somewhere inside the City of Shifting Tides. But President Iolanthe had said that LegendaryTek wanted to control them. They must have kept the power source at HydroTek, far away from the Kampii, who actually needed
it. He swallowed.
“Our shells are failing,” he said quietly. “The generator must have been damaged or destroyed. That means all our shells are going to stop functioning when they run out of power.” He fell back onto his stool. “There’s so much we don’t know. I’ll never be able to learn it all in time.”
“Then we’d better get started,” Calli said, pressing her lips into a thin, determined line. She handed him a stack of items from her other hand. “Here. I brought you some books.”
He held out his hands and she put three books in them. Actual, real books. Grandma Nani had taught him to read, but the City of Shifting Tides didn’t have a big collection. Before he turned twelve, he’d read all the books that weren’t hidden by the Elders.
“Before the Battle of the Dome, we got all of our energy from SkyTek,” Calli said. “But now we use the sun traps and wind traps, and sometimes waterfalls, for our energy.”
“And when something breaks, you fix it yourselves,” Hoku said.
“Exactly! We make our own babies now, and grow our own wings. Of course, my mother made a lot of enemies when she defeated Tempest and his Upgrader army. Word travels. A lot of people want our tech. We have to keep it hidden, and we’re not allowed to talk about it.”
He smiled. “Except you told me.”
“I guess I did,” Calli said, smiling back.
Hoku walked over and placed the books in a neat row on the bed. He ran his fingertips over the cover of the first one.
“That one explains the basics of electricity,” she said. “We aren’t supposed to read it until next season, but I couldn’t wait.” She picked up the book and flipped through the pages until she found the one she wanted. “Look,” she said. “This whole chapter is on using energy from the sun.”
She held it open for him. On the first page was a picture of the sun, with lines indicating its light hitting an artifact like the Aviars’ sun traps. He had to know how it worked! The Kampii lived underwater but had ample access to sunlight. Maybe he could float a web of sun traps on the surface of the ocean. They’d have plenty of their own power then!
He opened the book, admiring the clear print and silky pages. Skimming the list of contents at the beginning made his heart trip over itself.
“Are you going to read that right now?” Calli said with an odd tone in her voice.
“Huh?” He looked up, suddenly remembering where he was. And who he was with.
Calli laughed. “It’s okay, I’ve seen that look before. I’d be the same way if I got to read books about Kampii tech.”
“Not that you could find any,” Hoku said bitterly. “The Elders don’t really encourage this sort of education. They think we’re better off forgetting the past. Every generation, we lose a little more knowledge. We’re getting dumber instead of smarter.”
He sat on the edge of his bed, leaving plenty of room for Calli to sit next to him, or to sit far away. She chose somewhere in the middle.
“Wait,” he said. “Where’s Aluna? I thought she was with you.”
Calli rolled her eyes. “She’s probably still up there practicing. I left after the first hour, and they didn’t even notice.”
Hoku tried to keep his smile small, but failed. “I know exactly how you feel,” he said. “One day she was four hours late for our exploring trip because her brother decided to show her how to throw a harpoon. And then all she did was talk about it for the rest of the day.”
“Is she a great warrior in your culture?”
Hoku shook his head. “Girls can’t be hunters. The Elders say we don’t have as many people as we should, so the girls are supposed to do safer things. So they can have babies.”
“Your females actually carry the babies inside them? Like in ancient times?”
“Of course,” he said. “How do you do it?”
“Little food beds,” Calli said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “After we choose which eggs to use, a special machine combines them. We take the final seed and plant it in a tank filled with all the nutrients the baby needs to grow.”
Hoku shook his head. “So you really don’t need men in the colony.”
“There are other Aviar colonies that grow boys,” she said. “Far to the north is Talon’s Peak, and I’ve heard that the president there even has a male consort. Niobe and Hypatia gossip about it all the time.”
Hoku laughed, and he told her about his parents.
Calli sat there, stunned. “I can’t even imagine what your world is like.”
“You should visit sometime,” Hoku blurted. “If you want, I mean. I’m sure I could modify your breathing device, assuming I haven’t made us a bunch of new breathing shells by then. But how could we protect your wings? I wonder if your bones are too thin and light because of the flying. Maybe if we . . .”
She looked at him and smiled, and his insides turned to jellyfish. He would build her anything she wanted. Anything at all.
ALUNA SAT WITH CALLI on the rim above Skyfeather’s Landing and studied the landscape. She’d been here more than three weeks, and she still hadn’t figured out how to get herself and Hoku off the mountain and away from the Aviars.
She looked down the mountainside, toward the sea. Far below, jagged rocks gave way to scrubby green trees, then bigger trees, then suddenly the vast shimmering blanket of blue ocean. There was no beach, no gentle transition between the Above World and her home.
If she could only find a way to the cliffs. She pictured herself scrambling down the rocks, dodging between trees, and diving a hundred meters into the water. Too bad the Aviars would probably catch her before she made it ten meters down the mountain. Wings were so unfair.
Aluna picked a stone from the pile in her left hand and threw it as far as she could. It bounced three times on the rocks and disappeared.
“You’re amazing with the spear,” Calli said. She tossed one of her own stones, and it fell not far from where they were sitting. “I can’t believe how fast you’re learning. If you had wings, they’d beg you to be a warrior.”
“But I don’t have wings, do I? This isn’t my home, and it never will be,” Aluna snapped, with more anger than she’d intended. She took a slow breath, then continued more calmly. “Calli, you know I have to leave.”
She’d been trying to bring up the subject most of the day. It shouldn’t have been that hard, but she genuinely liked Calli and the girl so desperately wanted a friend. Aluna threw another rock and watched it ricochet out of sight. “I have to save my people. You understand that, right?” She said it to remind Calli, but also to remind herself. She had a place here with the Aviar, a useful place. In many ways, she fit in with the bird women far better than she did with her own people. But she’d never truly belong.
Besides, the Coral Kampii needed her. She couldn’t bear the thought that more Kampii might have died while she’d been stuck in this place.
Calli didn’t say anything. She didn’t throw another rock, either.
“Oh, fins and flippers!” Aluna said.
“It’s just . . . I know you’re being forced to stay here and all, but the last few weeks have been . . . nice,” Calli said. “I like spending time with you and Hoku.”
She gave Calli credit for not stumbling over Hoku’s name this time, though the girl still turned red as a shrimp. Young love looked so incredibly messy, with all the mumbling and smiling and saying ridiculous things. Good thing Aluna had never fallen into that trap. None of the boys back in the City of Shifting Tides had ever inspired her to embarrass herself like that. Life was easier without the complication. Taking care of Hoku was enough work without throwing another boy into the mix.
Calli stammered on. “I was hoping that you might want to stay. You seem to like the fighting, and I know Hoku has a lot more books to read. And, well, I’ve always dreamed of having a sister. . . .”
As Calli’s words trailed off, Aluna thought about Daphine and how her older sister had practically raised her from birth. Fed her,
dressed her, held her when she cried . . . mocked her gently, before their brothers could jump in with harsher words. Without Daphine, what would have happened to her? As frustrating as her sister’s perfection was, she couldn’t imagine life without her. By comparison, Calli’s life seemed so lonely — full of women and politics and important things, but no real friends.
“I promised to help you escape, and I will,” Calli added hastily. She dropped her handful of rocks into a pile by her side. “I was just hoping you’d stop wanting to leave. I was dumb to even think it.”
Aluna shifted to her feet and dropped her remaining rocks back to the earth.
“I wish it were different. I like you — I really do,” Aluna said, and she meant it. Calli smiled. “But we’re captives here. We can’t leave, and we can’t truly be ourselves. If you and I got in a fight, you could probably have me punished, maybe even killed.” She looked at the girl, the so-called vice president of the Aviar, and felt a surge of pity. “We can’t truly be sisters like this.”
Calli stood up suddenly, but kept her eyes on the ground. “We’re supposed to be practicing. I don’t want to get in trouble.” She grabbed her spear off the ground and readied it. Aluna didn’t have the heart to tell her it was upside down.
She pulled out the weapons she’d been learning, a pair of tiny, sleek talons. She held a silver canister in the palm of each hand. With a flick of her wrist, the tips of the canisters opened and two sharp claws attached to long, slender chains flew out. She spun the chains in the patterns High Senator Electra had taught her. Not only could she stab someone’s eye out, she could use the talons to wrap around her opponent’s leg or neck or weapon. She did that to Calli now. One of her talons shot out and wound itself around the grip of Calli’s spear. Aluna yanked. Calli’s spear jerked out of the girl’s hands and landed straight into Aluna’s.
“Wow,” Calli said. “That was fast.”