Asha pushed and hacked through the lush forest, retracing the path she thought she’d taken the night before. It was difficult to discern if she was heading in the right direction or not; yet Asha couldn’t think of what else to do. She had woken up stranded in the middle of an alien wilderness without so much as a resonator to defend herself.
“I’ve got to focus on the positive,” she told herself. “I don’t have a weapon or a cloaking chip, but it could be worse. One machete is still better than zero.”
After what felt like an hour, she could see a clearing in the distance, and she pushed ahead harder and faster. In just five minutes, she reached the clearing, covered in tall, indigo-blue grass. In the center was a collection of broad-leafed trees with large, orange fruits hanging from them.
She considered climbing, until she realized that it was too steep. After all, if she fell and broke something here, who would come to her rescue? Who even knew they were here, anyway? Surely, Mira had told the Confederation where they’d landed, but would they tell anyone on Avani what had happened?
In the end, Asha resorted to throwing rocks up to the fruit, but none would fall. It frustrated her, because the higher the sun rose into the sky, the more her stomach ached.
Just as she was about to move on, she noticed a scurrying high up in the trees. She threw another rock and watched as a dark creature slithered down and behind the tree. A huge leech? No, it was too large. She followed it around to the other side of the tree and beheld a hole tucked between patches of grass that led deep underground. The tree itself was growing out of the hole, and to either side of it were some of the orange fruits. Most of them were smashed or half-eaten. Yet one of them looked fine, and after scanning it with her wristcomm, she took a bite.
A sweet, smooth flavor filled her mouth, and after making sure that her wristcomm was still able to illuminate, she stepped down into the hole. The small passage was more of a crevice than a cave, and it extended ahead into the darkness. With great care, Asha followed the passage down and ahead, enjoying her snack as she explored.
Angular black rocks formed the passage walls, and after following the passage for a while, she noticed something pale on the ground up ahead. Asha quickened her pace. The shape was familiar, but it wasn’t until she was a few meters away that it became obvious what it was.
Asha gasped. At her feet, partially covered by the black rock, was a perfectly formed skull.
CHAPTER 18
WHAT REALLY IS
By the light of her wristcomm, the ivory skull glistened in a way that made her feel sick. She’d certainly seen raw bone before, but seeing it in this place, a place so wild, implied that there was no shortage of predators on this world. Kneeling down, she examined it. The skull was small, like the head of a small child, and half buried in black sand. She decided not to disturb it.
She sat on the cave floor and looked down at the sand.
“What am I doing down here? I’ve got to find Mira.” She slowed her breathing. “But how am I going to do that? And where is everybody else? If I just knew something. There must be a reason everything has changed. Why did the path overgrow? Where is Lakshmi?”
Asha stood up in frustration.
“WHERE IS EVERYONE?”
Her words echoed down the tunnel for a great distance. This tunnel system was more expansive than she’d ever guessed.
She followed the tunnel deeper until she came to a large, shallow pond in the middle of an expansive underground chamber. Her wristcomm wasn’t bright enough to see the ceiling, but she thought she could make out the ghostly apparitions of stalactites hanging from a great distance above. Here the paths diverged, and she had the choice to take a slippery path down, or a drier path upward. Her intuition told her to take the drier path, and after following the curving walls, she could see a faint source of light beyond one of the curves in the rock.
The path became steeper, and Asha scrambled over coarse, black sand. Up ahead, light filtered through an overgrowth of indigo ferns that blocked a wide opening in the rock; and beside them, embedded into the left side of the rock wall, was a strange contraption: a panel with a lever poking out from it. Beyond, she could hear waves crashing in the distance.
Asha walked up to the strange device and studied it. Whatever it was for, it didn’t appear to have been used in decades, and she brushed away some of the vines and moss that had grown over it. Through the cracks in the panel, she could see a gear and some other strange notches connected to a rope. The stone lever appeared to reach deep inside of the mechanism to interact with those components, and without thinking too much about it, Asha tried to pull the lever down.
It wouldn’t budge at all. She tried prying off the panel’s cover, but it was stuck on tightly. If she had her resonator, this would be easy, but she would need something special to get to the machine’s components. There weren’t even any thin rocks around that she could use, and she decided this wasn’t going anywhere. The sound of the ocean lured her.
“I’ll fix you later,” she said to herself, and pushed aside some of the indigo leaves and stepped through into daylight. Just ahead of her was a thick patch of indigo, but to her delight, a black sand beach was just beyond.
Asha hacked through the indigo leaves and branches until she set foot on the coarse ebony sand once more. She set the machete down, and a feeling of joy swept over her, inspiring her to kick off her shoes and run along the expansive beach for a while, breathing in the sweet, crisp air and admiring the crystal blue sky that was stretched out above her. It all reminded her of Avani so much, except that it was warmer here, and wilder.
Farther up, she saw something familiar, something reddish half buried in the expanse of sand. She walked over to the reddish shape and brushed the sand away.
“My jacket!” She shook it to get the sand out. “So, this must be where I was last night.” Asha examined the expansive beach once more. There was no trace of the previous night’s festivities. “No evidence of the bonfire, no fallen log to sit on, no trace of people at all.”
She stood up and put her hands on her hips.
“What is this place? Some netherworld zone? If nothing is as it seems, then how do I know what really is?”
Asha tied her maroon jacket around her waist, and her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten much today, and it was starting to become a problem. Farther up the beach were a few fruit trees, and she searched the area and was able to find a few of the small orange and yellow fruits that she had eaten at the bonfire the night before. Carefully, she peeled a yellow one and smelled its flesh. It smelled sweet, and Asha enjoyed a small breakfast as she sat on the black sand.
The thought of Zahn returned to her. Would she ever see him again? For that matter, would she ever get off of this rock and find anyone at all? If she could find someone who knew about this place, she might be able to find a lead.
“I bet Lakshmi knows something.”
Her gaze rested easily on the sight of the waves crashing upon the tenebrous sand.
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute!” She got up and ran over to the crashing waves. “I can breathe you. At least, I think I did.” She studied the water. A few black rocks jutted out of the water at strange angles, kicking up spray when the water hit them.
“I can breathe you.” And she walked into the waves. Once it was deep enough, she took a final breath of air, and plunged in.
CHAPTER 19
A THOUSAND GLOWING VISIONS
The underwater world was hazier than Asha remembered it being before. At first, she only inhaled tiny amounts of water at a time, until she could once again convince herself that she could indeed breathe it in without choking. The process of bringing water into her lungs and actually feeling better was one of the most disorienting feelings she had felt in a long time, and she held herself in the space just under the crashing waves until she got used to it. She studied the wavy pattern of the sand just below, until something distracted her.
Out of the cor
ner of her eye, she saw something silvery race past. And another one. Then ten more silvery creatures raced by. She squinted, but found it hard to see through the haze that was kicked up by the waves above. It was as though the entire beach were in a snowstorm, and she wondered if visibility would be better farther out. After all, she didn’t have to worry about suffocating anymore.
Farther out was a partial wall of pale, eroded rocks. When she neared the end of a row of boulders, a silver, triangular fish darted around her and past the wall. She swam around to the other side of the wall, and gasped.
Covered in layers of black sand was a vessel worn down by unknown centuries of constant oceanic bombardment. The light that filtered down from above revealed its dark grey, bulbous exterior, and bits of it jutted out of the black sand at odd angles. Asha swam up to it and felt its rough surface, yet she could find no markings of any kind. Perhaps they had been washed away by the centuries, and her mind wandered as she considered just how old the ruined ship could be. She looked for any smooth surfaces or touch pads, but couldn’t find anything. Even her wristcomm couldn’t detect any energy within it.
Now that she was on the other side of the pale rock wall, she noticed another, narrower beach up and to her right; and she swam up to it. Above her she could feel the waves pushing against her again, and found it challenging to reach the shore. She popped above the surface and swam over the waves, and soon she was walking up the beach, her maroon pants dripping onto the sand.
She found herself in the middle of a small cove, surrounded by sheer, pale walls of rock on either side of her which created a stark contrast against the black sand of the beach. Trees, thick with indigo leaves, blocked any exit from the cove, and the sun beat down upon her face and shoulders. Nearby, some of the trees had a red-orange fruit that she hadn’t seen before.
“Wish I’d brought the machete. Stupid mistake.”
The sun felt hotter now. Asha guessed that her pants would dry quickly in the direct sunlight, so she took them off and laid them out on the dry part of the beach. Now wearing only her thin shirt and shorts, she scavenged around the thick undergrowth and found a few of the red-orange fruits. She scanned them, and was surprised to see how nutritious the wristcomm reported them to be.
Asha took a bite, soon realizing that the center of the fruit was full of tiny white seeds. Only the spongey outer layer was palatable, tasting vaguely sweet.
She sat down on a shaded area of the beach and watched the waves as she ate, contemplating her next move and the group of people she’d seen the night before. Could they have been an illusion? And if not, how could they have left no trace whatsoever? Some piece of information was being left out, but what could it be? She thought of Zahn and felt a tug at the pit of her stomach.
Her mind continued to wander, and as her eyes beheld the crashing waves, she thought of Tiika. Hadn’t she said she was a cave explorer? And what about the mysterious cave creatures she had mentioned?
As she sat, the day grew hotter, making her feel sleepy, and even a bit stupid. She moved to the shade of a nearby palm and sat with her back to the forest, admiring the crystal blue sky.
“Where are you?” she whispered and closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, she felt as if only a few minutes had passed, but her surroundings asserted otherwise. The starlight was so palpable that she could easily make out the details of the trees along the edge of the beach.
Asha got up and breathed in the fresh night air. She had been right; her pants had since dried completely.
She studied the thick forest. “Could there possibly be any way to get out of here without swimming into the darkness?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” said a familiar voice from inside of the forest. She also thought she heard a chuckle.
“Hey!” Asha’s tone became cold. “Who is that? Stay back! I should warn you that I have a weapon, and I’ve had an extremely strange day.”
“Whoa, there,” said the voice within the forest. “Stay calm. It’s just me; it’s Tiika. Don’t you remember? From the dance?”
“Tiika. The cave explorer?”
“Cave hunter. Close enough. Anyway, calm down, will you? I’m going to step out from behind this tree now, so stand down!”
Asha waited a moment. “All right, just come out slowly so I can be sure you are who you sound like, okay?”
A feminine shadow edged out from behind a tree and waved.
“We good?” Tiika said.
“Sure.”
As Tiika walked toward her, Asha once again admired her handmade clothing and the sash that wrapped over her chest, lined with small white feathers.
When Tiika reached her, Asha was once again reminded how much taller Tiika was than her.
“Lovely to see you again, shmoops. You disappeared on me!”
“Don’t call me that.”
“How about Shmu?”
“Don’t call me that, either.”
“Shoompy?”
“Definitely not.”
Tiika smirked. “Well, it’s our custom to give visitors a nickname, or at least a title. What should I call you then?”
“Just Asha. Why don’t you remember? You seem to remember all of these other weird names for me quite easily.”
“That’s right! So, Asha, what are you doing on this fine night?” Tiika’s smirk turned into an apparently real smile, which helped set Asha at ease.
Asha looked back at the beach, briefly wondering if she should mention the starship ruins hidden under the water. “Not too much. Thinking about whether I should move to another island. Reflecting on—” But she stopped herself when she noticed a narrow path leading into the forest that she could have sworn wasn’t there before.
“On what? Life on other islands?” Tiika said. “Nothing compares to this one, Asha. If you’re thinking about moving here, you won’t regret it.”
“No, no. Not this island,” she said, studying the narrow path. “Did you make that path?”
“Of course not,” Tiika said, “but what were you going to say?”
Asha glanced back up to her. “Yeah. Let’s say, hypothetically, that I lived on an island and someone I cared about lived far away on another one. What would you do?”
“What’s the problem? Can’t they visit?”
Asha sighed. “What if it was on the other side of the planet? And the journey was dangerous? I’d never expect someone to make a dangerous journey that often.”
Tiika got right up into her face and squinted her eyes. “This is about a man, isn’t it?”
“Gender is irrelevant in this case, Tiika. It’s someone I care about, and this person wants me to move to be with them.”
“For what it’s worth, shmoops, I’d never move for any man, even if he were the king of the island!” Tiika let out a hearty laugh. “It sounds like you need to accept the inevitable.”
“What?”
“That it’s over. If you don’t want to live near him, then you’re only fooling yourself. I tried long distance. It doesn’t work.”
Asha’s mouth hung open, and before she could respond, Tiika continued. “But why are you hanging around down here? If you’re wrestling with your heart, you should meditate. It’s a meditative night, after all. That’s why everyone is in the Temple.”
“The Temple? What temple?”
Tiika picked at her teeth. “Hah! You mean you don’t even know about the Temple? You gotta follow me then. Everybody visiting must see the Temple. Pretty powerful stuff in there, too.” Tiika offered her hand to Asha.
“I’m not sure I should. How far is it?”
“Psh! Not far, at all.” Tiika gazed into her eyes. “A lot of interesting people are there, and you do look rather lonely on this lovely night. Come on, have I ever led you astray before?”
Asha looked down to Tiika’s offered hand. “I guess not.”
“Then we’re gone, baby!”
“Don’t ever call me—”
But before Asha co
uld finish, Tiika yanked her arm and practically pulled her through the forest, through fern-filled glades and past narrow streams, until the path became steep, and she stopped.
“Okay, Asha. We are going to do some climbing, but it shouldn’t be too difficult. Try to stay close.”
Tiika followed a steep path built of rocks which led up to a ridge. After a while, the path leveled out more, giving Asha few seconds to catch her breath before Tiika pulled her along again.
To one side, she noticed a fern-covered cliff that dropped off less than a meter away. And all around the path, Asha noticed how the ferns were curled up for the night, like perfect little springs. Above, the stars were now obscured, and she felt a light rain on her nose. Tiika pulled her faster, through a grove of ferns until they reached the front of a stone structure.
Smooth, pale stones interlocked to form a round building with a roof made up of three flat slabs of what Asha could only guess was limestone. The door, made of indigo reeds, was slightly open, and Tiika led Asha up to it.
“Here we are,” she said. “Just remove your sandals, er, whatever those things you’re wearing.”
Asha looked down and noticed that her boots were splashed in mud and indigo smudges.
“All right,” she said, and placed them beside a row of sandals that had been left beside the door.
“Now when we go in, you must be silent. There’s a meditation happening, so it’s important that you respect the silence. As long as you do that, I think you’ll enjoy your time here.”
“Wait,” Asha said, wiping some of the rainwater off her brow. “I want to apologize.”
“For what?” Tiika squinted one eye at her.
“For lying earlier. I wasn’t armed.”
Tiika tilted her head in a teasing way as she opened the door. “Whatever you say, moops.”
As they walked in, the smell of incense almost overwhelmed Asha, and her eyes were filled with a thousand glowing visions. Encircling a floating geometric shape were dozens of robed figures. They were humming together, and Asha looked over to Tiika to see what she would do. She sat down and crossed her legs behind the nearest person, and Asha sat down beside her. In the corners of the room, she also noticed large, ornately-carved nautilus shells on stands, inlaid with pinkish stone.
The Island on the Edge of Forever (The Epic of Aravinda Book 2) Page 11