by Nadia Aguiar
Bursts of Bloom were happening all around, but Penny wasn’t quick enough for the first few – fish and animals got them first, bumping into her in their haste. A sailfish shot past and nearly knocked the shell from her neck. A razor-beaked bird almost dived right on to her.
The breath she had come into the Wave with had run out, so she took another from the kelp pod. When the next turquoise cloud burst open right beside her, she was ready. Swiftly she uncorked the shell, keeping it tilted upside down so the air stayed in it. Then she turned it upright inside the patch of Bloom. With a glug-glug the air was released – silvery bubbles juddering up towards the surface – and the Bloom filled the shell.
Penny replaced the sea-sponge cork and swam away. The water behind her cleared, but the mixture inside the shell glowed with rich green light. That was it. She had it. She kicked towards the face of the Wave. Elder had said she would have just enough time to return to shore before the Wave came tumbling down. But she was eager to get out.
She neared the glassy wall. She saw the flat sand on the other side of it that ran all the way to the shore and the distant blur of the steep green hills. In just a moment she would be in the open air again.
As she watched, a whorl opened on the sand and a figure appeared out of it, stumbled, and began running, barefoot and bare-chested, towards the wall.
He wasn’t the Bloom Catcher, but he was coming to get the Bloom anyway.
Kal never stopped running. He dived cleanly through the prism of blue.
Penny watched as he opened his eyes and gazed around him in wonder. He hovered there, stunned and awed as flares of emerald Bloom continued to erupt everywhere. For several seconds nothing happened, and Penny thought that perhaps nothing would, perhaps any number of people could have come through the wall with no consequence.
But then a deep rumbling tremor travelled through the water. The wall was no longer stable. Fish quivered, looking around with alarmed eyes before shooting off in schools and disappearing into the blue. Turtles fled. An octopus beside Penny turned midnight blue, transformed its body into a long jet and zoomed away. All the creatures were escaping. Penny felt herself being tugged up through the water. She looked down to see a giant shadow spreading from the base of the Wave out across the sand. She realized the shadow was from the Wave itself – the wall of water had begun to curl. In moments it would collapse and tonnes of water would crash down and charge towards the shore. She took the last breath from the kelp pod and let it go.
The birds had ceased diving and returned to the sky. The last of the fish had left for deeper water. It was just Penny and Kal suspended there. With no creatures to eat them, the bursts of Bloom multiplied like stars exploding in an empty solar system. Penny dropped her spear and motioned frantically to Kal to swim deeper, where they would be safer until after the Wave broke, but he was fumbling with a small vial in which he was trying to capture a cloud of Bloom. But it was already too late to try to escape. The water was too powerful. Penny and Kal were being swiftly drawn up towards the gathering crest. Far below, the dark shadow of the Wave spread on the sand, creeping towards Palmos.
Seconds before it crashed, Penny opened a whorl.
It shone, a trembling mercurial hoop, like a bubble ring rising up from the deep.
As the wave lost its balance and began toppling, she seized Kal’s hand and kicked through.
She and Kal were suspended in some sort of empty, colourless cloud – not a fully realized world, just some interim, emergency space. They looked at each other, but before they could speak they were shunted out of wherever they were and back into the Wave, which had just crashed. The whorl had spared them the brunt of it, but the water was charging up the shore. Instantly they were separated in the violent tumble. There was no use trying to swim. Penny opened her eyes in her goggles once, but there was so much sand clouding the water that she couldn’t see anything. The lights of the Bloom had gone out. She felt air on her face for a split second and was able to gasp before she was pulled back down into the dark chaos.
Helix
From the amphitheatre he saw the wall of water with a single figure in it, legs kicking frog-like. He saw birds wheeling above the water and the shadowed huddles of creatures waiting in the depths. He had come to see the Great Wave, and now, of all impossible things, he was watching Penny in it. Pride and fear mixed in him, rising in his throat. When the first burst of blue-green phosphorescence erupted near her, he fought to see over the sea of bobbing heads to keep her in sight. She couldn’t hear the noise of the crowd, he knew.
Everyone was so absorbed by the spectacle of the Wave and the silent pandemonium happening within it that only a few noticed the whorl appear suddenly on the sand. Helix’s heart lurched when he saw the boy charge out of it.
By the time Kal punched through the wall of water seconds later, everyone in the amphitheatre and surrounding hills had seen him. The wall lost its gravity-defying solidity and became an elastic blue curve stretching higher before beginning to curl over on to itself.
Helix stood on his feet as the crowd did and was part of their collective gasp of horror as they watched the two figures being dragged like rag dolls towards the crest. He began to push through people, leaping over the mossy slabs of the amphitheatre, fighting to keep her in sight.
Swim, he willed her.
The water came down.
He began to run towards the sea.
CHAPTER TWO
The Bloom ✵ The Coral Basin ✵ False River ✵ Inside the Hut ✵ The Way Things Were ✵ A Final Whorl ✵ ‘Goodnight, my darling’
‘Wake up,’ said the voice.
Penny opened her eyes and felt a breeze on her face. Her nose and throat stung from the salt. The world was sideways, which after a moment she realized was because she was lying on the ground. There was a deep, ceaseless growling overhead, as if the sky was full of planes. She felt waterlogged and light-headed. Sand was in her mouth, her scalp, her ears. She blinked it off her lashes and tried to lift her head, but it felt heavy as a stone. Why was the day so dark? She sank back groggily on to the sand and closed her eyes. Everything felt confusing.
She heard the voice again, though she no longer knew if it was really a voice outside her body, or only her own weary mind.
‘Wake up,’ it repeated urgently.
‘Open your eyes,’ said the voice.
With effort, for her body was stiff and sore, Penny propped herself up on one elbow. The world righted itself. The wave had deposited her on to a broad sandbar. Water shivered in the hollows of the ripples in the sand. Kal was nowhere to be seen. Her eyelids felt heavy and she began nodding off again. What was that sound and why wouldn’t it stop? Penny felt like a very tiny creature, an ant, inside a conch, the roar of a false sea in her ears. She felt a sharp nip on her ankle, felt feathers brush her skin.
Penny opened her eyes. Seagrape perched on a weathered piece of driftwood, fanning Penny with her wings.
‘Is that you talking?’ Penny asked lazily. ‘I always thought you could but just wouldn’t.’
‘You’re running out of time,’ the parrot said urgently. ‘Look where you are.’
She nipped Penny’s ankle again, then flew up into the sky.
Penny watched her go. At once fear penetrated her fog. She scrambled upright and looked all around. She was at the bottom of some kind of vortex, a tunnel whose sides were made of whorls, spinning madly, crowding each other.
Now she was terribly awake. She spat out a mouthful of grit and struggled to sit up all the way. She grasped for the string round her neck. The shell was there. The Bloom was safe. It glowed softly, a lone, tiny beacon in the dim day. She clasped it to her chest.
Her grandmother’s goggles were gone.
At the same instant that she realized this, a tremendous boom came from the sky, as if there had been a great collision. Penny looked up. A larger whorl had swallowed a smaller one, and as she watched another collapsed into it, unable to resist its gravity. Seag
rape circled, a green scrap aloft on the cacophony of winds.
‘This way,’ she called.
She tilted her wings and dived towards a small tower of stone a short distance away. Penny got weakly to her feet and stood swaying. She still had the sensation that she was being tumbled in the wave. She staggered crookedly after Seagrape. The whorls were growing denser and darker. The light dimmed with each step and the wind rose. Penny leaned into it. As she drew closer she realized what the rocky outcrop was.
The Coral Basin.
It hadn’t been on the map because it had been buried for so long, its precise location forgotten until the force of the wave had dislodged sand and sediment to reveal it: a tiny castle of old coral, with ivory crags and turrets as high as Penny’s shoulders. Nestled between its towers was a deep, porous bowl, carved out of the stone by other hands long before even Elder had been born.
The wind through the whorls was growing louder and stronger, pushing Penny back. She had to grab on to the edge of the stone.
Seagrape flew in sharp, agitated jags back and forth, pecking at the wind with her beak.
‘The Bloom!’ she cried. ‘The Bloom!’
Penny uncorked the shell, grasping the sea sponge tightly so the wind wouldn’t pluck it out of her hands. She cupped the shell, as though she was sheltering a small flame. She tipped it, pouring all but a few drops of the Bloom into the basin. It soaked into the porous rock almost at once, leaving a fine crystal precipitate that began to multiply in long daggers that crackled like a fire coming to life. Penny felt a tremor under her feet. The day grew so dark she could barely make out the silhouette of the coral outcrop beside her.
There was a thundering metallic racket in the sky, explosion upon explosion, as if a battle was going on overhead. A blinding blaze of light gripped the air. Penny smelled sulphur and burning, felt a confusing welter of sensations wash over her. She crouched and closed her eyes and shielded her face with her arm, still clutching the shell. The violence in the sky crescendoed then – suddenly and completely – it ceased. There was silence.
When Penny could open her eyes again, at first all she could see was a misty-blue afterglow from the flash of light. Slowly the world became clear again.
She stood beneath a dazzling sky, empty except for a few woolly ivory clouds scudding along. A shaggy dark fringe of jungle stood in the distance, waving in the breeze, and in front of it ran the shiny seam of a lazy, narrow river. The Bloom had sunk deep into the ancient coral, and evaporated and expanded in the air, diffusing over Kana, dissolving the whorls. Penny caught sight of the last of them, like a faint husk of the moon left in a morning sky, before it, too, faded away. All that was left were fragile oblongs of blue-green crystals that studded the Coral Basin. A bee zigzagged out from the jungle and landed on the basin’s edge for a moment before flying off.
It was done. The whorls were gone. The mandrill was banished back to the Gorgonne. Kana was safe. The breeze stirring the trees in the distance was just that – an ordinary breeze, not a draught from some near-invisible doorway. Everything was where it should be. Penny looked down at the shell round her neck and saw that several precious drops of Bloom still glowed in it. She looked up at Seagrape, gently aloft on the light breeze. She no longer spoke, if she ever really had.
Things still seemed strangely muffled, and in the hazy, ponderous new way Penny’s brain seemed to be working she realized it was because she had water in her ears. She tilted her head to the side and shook it, but the water was stuck. She didn’t know where she was; somewhere down the coast from Palmos, she guessed. The Wave couldn’t have taken her too far. Seagrape squawked and took flight across the sandbar towards the beckoning sparkle of the river.
Penny thumped the side of her head gently to try to get the water out, then followed Seagrape in the direction of the river, which flowed indolently, the breeze tripping over its surface, making it shimmer.
As she neared the rippling water, she realized it wasn’t a real river after all, or at least not one that was usually there. The Wave had surged inland along a channel, and now it had reversed and was flowing back to the sea in the same deep gulley. It would take her to Palmos. She waded in and grabbed hold of a large, broken branch, its leaves still bright green, flapping like dozens of tiny wings. She held on, her legs trailing in the cool water, floating debris bumping gently into her. Soon enough she saw the town at the crest of the hill on her left, its limestone glaringly bright in the sun. The wave must have carried her into the neighbouring valley. When she was as close as the false river could take her, she hopped off and waded to shore. The log continued on without her, its flock of leaves fluttering silver in the breeze.
The noon light was gleaming on crystals of salt spray still hanging in the air and the shadows were shrinking under the palms as Penny climbed the hill to Palmos. At the top, she paused to catch her breath and look out. The great and magnificent wave that came only once a generation was gone and the sea was mellow and blue. Thanks to the deep trenches and high middens, even the parts of the town closest to the shore had been spared. The worst that had happened was that the wave had gobbled the sand from the bay. The middens that hadn’t been washed away shimmered in the sun, crabs tapping and clattering as they strutted over them. The air smelled of rich earth and briny sea and the newly exposed rocks of the shoreline. The world felt broken open, transformed.
Penny walked down into the town to find it unnaturally still and quiet. A lonely festival streamer flapped in the wind. Her footsteps rang hollowly against the walls. The streets were rinsed clean, but here and there a stranded fish lay dead on the cobblestones. She caught sight of the cloak that she had worn out to the Wave, washed up in a heap in a gutter, like a drowned animal, but it was sodden and, in her weak and weary state, it was too heavy to carry.
Kana was safe, but something wasn’t right. Penny turned a corner and saw part of the amphitheatre at the end of a street. It was deserted, its white limestone glaring in the sun. Where was everyone? In the distance, between buildings, she saw that the single hand of the stone dial had finally concluded its generational revolution and lay fixed in stony slumber at the base of the valley. The breeze changed direction and she heard a low, rhythmic chant coming from further inside the town.
Seagrape’s shadow fluttered silently on the street in front of her as Penny followed the sound to a hut with a broad, thatched porch where the Council of Elders was gathered, faces grave. She didn’t see Elder. Women sat outside on the hot earth around the hut or crouched beneath wrinkled shadows of palms. Someone caught sight of Penny and alerted others. The chanting ceased and people scrambled to their feet. A councilman crossed the dirt yard to meet Penny.
‘You’re safe!’ he cried in relief. ‘Sound the triton to bring everyone back,’ he told one of the women, who immediately ran off down the street. ‘Everyone’s searching the coast for you,’ he said to Penny. ‘Come this way.’ He took Penny’s arm and led her urgently to the hut.
‘What’s in there?’ she asked, but he didn’t answer.
Feeling like she was floating in a dream, Penny walked up the steps and passed through the doorway to enter the dim hush of the hut. The burlap curtains were drawn and it took several moments for her eyes to adjust. When they did, she was transfixed by the sight of the boy lying on a mat in the middle of the floor.
Kal’s skin was pale. A woman knelt beside him, pressing his hands between her own to warm them. Other women took turns waving a big palm leaf nearby to keep fresh air flowing over him. His body was wrapped in a rough blanket. One of his arms was splinted. His lips had a blue tinge that made the hairs on Penny’s neck rise, and for a moment she felt like once again the Great Wave was bowling her over and there was nothing beneath her feet: Kal was dead. But as she held her own breath she saw his chest rise and fall.
‘He was found caught at the bottom of one of the trenches,’ said Elder, who Penny saw standing nearby. ‘He hasn’t woken up.’
Penny had
buried beloved pets in the yard at Granny Pearl’s house, cradled baby birds fallen to their doom from their nests. She had watched Simon and her father neatly club struggling fish that the family would later eat for dinner. But she had never seen a person – let alone such a young person – so close to death.
In revolt against this affront to the natural order of things, it was as if the hour had stopped around them, the day come to a standstill. Through a crack in the curtains, the sun hung stationary in the sky. Not a breeze stirred the palm fronds. Pinpricks of light filtered through the mesh roof. Seagrape perched motionless on a stool near the foot of Kal’s bed. The only motion was the trickle of sweat down the faces of the people keeping vigil. The heat was oppressive, but cold emanated from Kal. He breathed shallowly, and there were long pauses between each breath. He was between worlds.
Penny had to look away. Her gaze fell on Elder’s hands clasping the top of his cane. They were as wrinkled and spotted with age as Granny Pearl’s were. Suddenly, powerfully, with every fibre of her being Penny wished she were with her grandmother. She wanted to hide in the safety of her arms, feel the hand that had smoothed her hair back from her face and checked her forehead for fevers since before she could remember. Somewhere in the distance she heard the triton sounding.
Kal murmured in his sleep and Penny turned back to him.