by Nadia Aguiar
The circle of light from the top of the pit shrank to a small disc as they descended. They drifted beneath it as if they were parachuting under a cold sun on a windless day. The water grew swiftly colder and Penny felt very far from yesterday’s sunny green kelp forest, dappled and swaying and full of life. Soon she was deeper than she had ever been before. The darkness, thick and heavy, seemed to sink with its own weight. Relics of creatures – gill plates, bones, teeth – rested in the cubbyholes of the cliff. She saw them illuminated briefly by her sea light as she sank past them, like rows of tiny tombs, or a cabinet of curiosities scavenged by some rogue curator. Penny imagined the barren graveyard of creatures that must lie at the very bottom of the pit, sifting down piece by piece over the years. The deeper they went, the brighter the sea lights burned, and she saw that there was life here, brittle and surreptitious. Sea spiders stalked the cold tomb walls, and a pale crab scuttled out of the passing glow of the sea lights.
By the time she and Jebby saw the Molmer egg, they had almost sunk past it: a peep of light from a small, pale oval, not guttering but burning softly and steadily from inside a narrow cave in the cliff wall. They each dropped a weight from their belts to achieve stable buoyancy, and hovered parallel to the cave. This was it!
Penny looked at Jebby. He nodded. They couldn’t talk, but she could see he was excited, too. Penny smiled as she exhaled a column of bubbles that jittered towards the surface. It had all been quicker and easier than she’d expected. Minutes from now they’d have the egg and be back in the cart with Tabba. They began swimming towards the cave.
Jebby recoiled. Penny didn’t know what had happened; she just felt him seize her hand and kick away from the cave, back towards the middle of the pit. When they were a safe distance away, they stopped and waited, still holding hands, kicking gently to stay in place.
What looked like thick black fog was being pumped out of the entrance to the cave. For a second, Penny thought she glimpsed movement inside the inky cloud. She squinted through her goggles, straining to see. Something was there and now it was venturing out. The faint outer glow from the sea lights illuminated a cold shine on invertebrate flesh. A shape resolved into limbs as long as Penny’s own, and a bulbous, pulsing head, in the middle of which lodged a pinched, stony beak: an octopus, larger than any she had known existed.
The creature had not expected them and was alarmed by the intrusion, its posture defensive. It lingered, alert and suspicious, observing them. Its skin pulsed through a spectrum of patterns – speckled and piebald, striped and mottled. As she watched, Penny’s fear receded. The display of patterns was mesmerizing, and she began to swim towards the creature. Jebby tugged her hand and motioned to her to hang back. He advanced cautiously, spear pointed in front of him, attempting to nudge the octopus aside. But the creature refused to budge from the cave entrance. As the children approached, it grew agitated and began changing colours at rapid speed, cycling through a dreary colour wheel from ashen to oil-black.
Suddenly the octopus uncoiled an arm and took a wild swipe at Jebby’s spear. Jebby stopped where he was but didn’t retreat. He waited a moment then once again began swimming slowly towards it. Another arm shot out like a snapping belt. This time the spear was almost knocked out of his hands.
Penny was confused – why didn’t the octopus just swim off? The only thing in the cave was the Molmer egg. But the water enforced silence, and she and Jebby were unable to confer and figure out what to do. Penny looked back at the octopus, hovering outside the cave.
Then she understood: the creature was guarding the egg.
Jebby took a deep breath from a kelp pod and swam, no longer tentatively but purposefully towards the cave. The octopus’s head puffed up. Patterns morphed frantically across its skin. Its arms flailed. Then, in a motion almost too fast to see, a single arm lashed out. Anticipating this, Jebby gripped the spear tightly. But this time the octopus didn’t reach for the spear. Instead it wrapped round the fishing line tied to Jebby’s seapods and yanked it swiftly out of his grasp.
Without the buoyant kelp pods to counterbalance the heavy stones on his belt, Jebby plummeted. He disappeared almost instantly into the darkness. Penny looked helplessly after him, then back up to see the octopus, arms still curled round the fishing line attached to Jebby’s kelp pods, drifting silently towards the lighted surface.
She looked back down and saw her feet, pale in the sea light, dangling flimsy and helpless over the boundless dark. An internal dam broke, panic overwhelmed her. She wanted to help Jebby, but she was terrified to go after him. What could she do anyway, even if she did let her kelp pods go and follow him down? Think, she told herself. Think. Think. Think. Air, she needed air. But the straw broke against a pod when she tried to take a breath and, when she fumbled in her belt for a spare, the spare slipped from her fingers. She only had one straw left. Finally she pierced the pod and took a deep, wheezing breath of stale air.
As the air entered her lungs, a calm, lucid thought entered with it: if Jebby dropped his weight belt, he would rise. But would he be able to think clearly enough to do that in time?
She looked back down into the darkness and saw a glow coming back up from the depths, as if a bright bubble were surfacing. Jebby’s sea light. He had dropped the stones from his weight belt. Penny felt weak with relief. She had never been so happy to see anyone in her life. As he drew alongside her, she gave him one of her kelp pods and he drew a desperate breath.
He motioned to the surface. He was telling her to come with him.
Penny knew there were no more kelp pods in the cart, and they would never be able to make it back down there with the few pods that she had left. Going back up now would mean abandoning the Molmer egg for good – it would mean the Bloom would be over for them.
She shook her head. Jebby gestured again, more urgently. Again Penny refused. Jebby didn’t have enough air left to fight with her. He began to swim up out of the Pit. As he passed the cave, Penny saw him hurl his spear – a lightless thunderbolt – into the creature’s dark lair. He kicked hard for the surface.
Penny was on her own.
She checked her remaining kelp pods. Fear had made her breathe greedily, using up oxygen too fast. Only two remained. She took a breath from one of them, emptying it. The air in the final pod wouldn’t last long. She looked for the octopus and was relieved that it was nowhere to be seen. She had open access to the cave now. She could see the Molmer egg still shining there.
She swam to the cliff wall, but the egg was too far back in the cave to reach. She would have to go in. In a single scissor kick she was inside, the narrow walls and roof closing around her. She swam over a floor littered with cracked shells towards the egg. It was not glowing; the light they had seen was just the reflection of their sea lights on its pale surface. She picked it up. It had calcified and was as heavy and hard as a stone, and would be almost impossible to break. She held it tightly.
The cave was just wide enough for her to turn round, which she did, awkwardly, ready to swim out.
She stopped.
The octopus was blocking the exit.
She was trapped.
The octopus’s shifting amorphous bulk hovered there for a moment. Then it slid, sneaky, sinewy, shapeshifting, into the cave, where it effaced itself, becoming the colour of the rock, lumpy, ridged, pocked as stone. Penny couldn’t even see it any more. As she peered for the creature, she felt her spear wrenched from her hands. In the glow from her sea light, she saw the octopus snap the spear like a twig and toss it out of the cave into the void.
She took a breath from the last seapod and to her horror discovered that it was empty. She was out of air. Penny dropped the strings of the deflated pods and they sifted like dead leaves to the cave floor.
She had nothing.
No more air.
No defence.
No way out.
A jet-black cloud of ink began to seep through the cave. It was like being trapped in a room that was filli
ng with smoke, the exit, only feet away, hidden from view.
Suddenly fear made her angry. She was not going to be trapped in here like this! Not when she had the egg, not when she was so close to passing the first trial. She wanted to get out of the cave; she wanted to be out of the Blue Pit, swimming to the surface, popping up in the air and daylight where Tabba and Jebby were waiting for her in the floating cart. She wanted it so much she began to swim heedlessly towards the exit when she remembered that Jebby had tossed his spear into the cave.
He must have known she might need it.
Keeping low, Penny swam until she saw the spear on the cave floor. She dropped the weights off her belt, seized the spear and swam for all she was worth.
She almost bumped into the octopus before she saw it, the rubbery curve of an arm with its mat of pale suction cups unreeling before her, but she brandished the spear like a lance and kept kicking. The creature began to swim backwards in front of her and Penny drove it out of the cave.
As soon as she was out, Penny kicked with all her might to the surface. Her lungs burned. Darkness dropped away. She held the Molmer egg in her clenched fist, raised towards the blue lens of the surface, which was expanding, becoming sunlit. She had no idea if the octopus was coming after her. She didn’t dare look back. She saw the hull of the cart, so tiny drifting there above the darkness, and aimed for it.
Penny exploded out of the water, gasping for air. Treading water, she held the Molmer egg over her head. Tabba and Jebby shouted and paddled the last few feet to her. They helped her into the cart, where she huddled in a heap, shivering, trying to catch her breath.
Jebby sighed in relief, but he knelt, holding Tabba’s spear poised over the water in case the octopus surfaced.
‘Are you OK?’ Tabba asked, sitting down next to Penny.
Finally Penny nodded. Though she knew she was safe now, she was unable to stop shaking. The thrill of being in the shark tank at home was nothing like real-life fear. She realized she hadn’t really been angry in the cave: what she had been was frightened. Very, very frightened. Seagrape came and sat beside her, then hopped into her lap. She stroked the parrot’s feathers with numb fingers.
‘It was a Brazior octopus,’ said Jebby. ‘An egg stealer. It must have been waiting for the Molmer to hatch.’
Penny opened her hand to look at the egg. It was hard as marble, and as smooth and cold. A pale, undistinguished oval in the murk below, sunlight revealed shocks of lilac and topaz veins. She wrapped it in a cloth and tucked it safely in her backpack. She looked back down into the pit. Despite the hot sun beating down, her teeth chattered.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Let’s get away from it.’
Jebby began to row and the abyss shrank behind them until they could no longer see it. Without the weight of the stones, they went faster, skimming along the surface, the wind at their backs. They reached the shore and Jebby quickly reassembled the cart’s wheels and reattached it to the bicycle. Penny no longer wondered why the town had been left to ruin. No one could live so near such a void. She still felt cold to her core, as if now that she had been inside the pit she carried part of it permanently within herself.
The children set out, rattling past the shell-brick houses and the great lavender heaps of middens beginning to turn golden. The sun was lower in the sky than when they had arrived in Oyster Point, reminding them that only the first twenty teams to make it to Jaipa would advance to the next round. Now that it was so close, they were nervous. The ebullience of that morning was gone. Leaving behind the hollow jingle of the tide through the shells, they raced back along the peninsula towards the valley.
CHAPTER THREE
The Twentieth Team ✵ Stories Swirl Round ✵ Jaipa by Night ✵ A Narrow Escape ✵ A Bad Feeling
The children barely stopped the whole way to Jaipa, only to change riders, and even then they slowed for only a few seconds. Evening was falling as they coasted downhill into the town, the girls’ hair flying back in the wind, the chain whizzing on the bicycle. The roadsides were jammed with people waving and cheering as they sped past. The sights and sounds of so much life seemed almost unreal after the cold vacuum they had so recently escaped.
When they cycled into Jaipa’s town square, the Molmer egg was still cold. They rushed to give it to a waiting councilman, who examined it then nodded – the egg was good. Elder from Tontap was there. He looked surprised to see them at first, then Penny thought she saw a glimmer of pride in his eye. But he spoke gruffly and she couldn’t be sure.
‘Have we made it?’ she asked breathlessly.
‘By the skin of your teeth,’ said Elder. ‘You’re the twentieth team to arrive.’
Just then, two young men on antelopes cantered into the square and pulled up short in front of the councilmen. One rider swung off his mount and hurried forward with a Molmer egg.
‘Too late!’ barked one of the councilmen.
The Bloom Player sank to his knees in dismay. The other rider dismounted and stood there, catching his breath, too disappointed to speak. The antelopes were lathered in sweat and their nostrils flared. Penny stared at them, dizzied by a confusing surge of both pity and relief – just a few moments later, and she, Tabba and Jebby would have been in their place. Nearby, a woman was boiling fruit to make syrup to pour on rice for returning Bloom Players, and the cloying scent wafted over and made Penny feel ill.
Elder took the children’s limp yellow sashes, grubby as tarnished brass, and replaced them with the brilliant ruby-red ones that Players moving on to the next round would wear.
‘You’re free,’ he said. ‘The next trial won’t be announced until morning. I advise you not to linger in town. Find somewhere to camp for the night and stay out of trouble.’
He returned to the rest of the Council, and the woman at the syrup pot offered the sweetened rice in banana-leaf cones to the children. Penny had no appetite, but she took it anyway. They thanked the woman and left, wheeling the bike alongside them.
‘Well,’ said Tabba, lifting her elbow to admire the red sash. ‘We did it.’
‘But it was close,’ said Jebby.
‘Too close,’ agreed Penny.
They were quiet for a few moments.
‘But …’ said Tabba finally, ‘we made it.’
Penny took a deep breath. Tabba was right – they had made it. They were OK. Suddenly she realized she was famished. The children ate the rice and got more food from a stall. They sat down against a wall to eat and watched the swirl of people around the square. The food revived them. Slowly their fears receded and were replaced by a feeling of giddy triumph. The icy feeling inside Penny’s chest that had been there since the Blue Pit finally began to thaw. The octopus, deep in his dark lair, couldn’t reach them here.
Since the children had no idea what the second trial would be, there was nothing for them to do or to get. They could enjoy their first victory and recuperate until morning. When they finished eating, they wiped the day’s dust and grime off the bicycle and polished the cart. They found Jaipa’s message pole and Penny climbed to the top and raised one of the yellow flags over the town. That done, they decided to wander and take everything in. Warm exhalations from the surrounding jungle wafted through the streets, and the sea lights strung overhead between the eaves bobbed gently. They got food for the next day, and Penny got a packet of seeds and shook them into the cart for Seagrape.
New Players were still coming in, collapsing in the square as they learned they were out.
‘Do you think Kal made it?’ asked Tabba.
‘Probably, knowing him,’ said Jebby. ‘But I can’t wait to see his face when he sees we’ve made it. Remember him laughing at us this morning?’
He hailed a couple of boys who were passing.
‘Have you seen a Bloom Player called Kal, from Tontap?’ he asked.
‘That’s the one who made the mandrill appear,’ one of the boys whispered to the other. ‘Yeah,’ he told Jebby. ‘He was the first one back.’
‘The first one?’ asked Tabba, crestfallen.
‘By a long shot,’ said the first boy. ‘We saw him – he got here ages before the other teams started coming in.’
‘How could he have got here so far ahead of everyone else?’ asked Jebby suspiciously after the boys left.
The news of Kal’s victory dampened the children’s spirits and made Jaipa seem less welcoming. It was bigger than Tontap, and they didn’t know their way around. Unlike Tontap, it was not by the sea, and instead was hemmed in by the surrounding jungled hills. It felt like it had fallen to the bottom of the hills and been caught there, unable to pull itself back out. The streets were crooked and old, the houses that fronted them shabby, their windows dark and secretive. Sometimes the children saw parrots chained to porch railings.
Strangers, seeing their red sashes, stopped to congratulate them, but the children kept mostly to themselves, afraid to attract unwanted attention. They missed Rai, with her ear to the ground and her never-ending patter. To their frustration, over and over again they overheard people talking about how a boy from Tontap had summoned the mandrill. The story was growing – he wasn’t just scaring a few kids any more. He was becoming notorious, described in tones both fearful and reverent.
The only thing that seemed familiar in Jaipa were the other Bloom Players, who were everywhere. Of the fifty-two teams that had started that morning, twenty would go on to the next round. All were a little worse-for-wear. The sleek creatures that had left that morning had returned muddy-legged, coats stiff with sweat, and the clean, bright clothes the Players had donned proudly were darkened with grime.