Above World

SWIFT AS A SEAL.

Aluna could feel Great White behind her, mouth agape, hunting. Its glowing net formed around her once, and she darted out of it as fast as she could. She tucked her chin to her chest to minimize her drag in the water and kicked harder. Nothing could hold her. Nothing would stop her.

She swam through a school of sunstripes, trying to confuse her scent. Great White dragged its green light through the water, searching for her. She ducked under coral and around rocks. Never in all her life had she wanted to see one of her brothers so badly. She’d even be grateful to see her father. Not even Great White could scare him.

If the shark hadn’t been throwing out its net, it would have caught her in one flash of a tail. Whatever game it was playing, that game was saving her life. So far. The rest of the saving was up to her. If she could just make it to the kelp forest near the city! Great White would never be able to navigate between those thick, sticky strands.

The first tufts of seaweed were young and sparse, easy to weave between. Easy for Great White, too. It powered through the fronds as if they didn’t exist. Aluna tried to stay calm and focus on her technique. She’d never swum this hard and this long before, even when she’d secretly followed her brothers on their hunting trips. The breathing shell at her throat pulsed faster, sucking air from the water and feeding it to her lungs.

The kelp thickened. Long strands of green brushed her face and slid across her legs. She tried to keep her bearings. It was easy to get lost in a big kelp forest like this one — and dangerous. You could swim for days without finding your way out. She’d heard some Elders talking about a kelp jungle somewhere that was too treacherous to enter at all. Strange things lived there, they said. Creatures with unnatural bodies cried like babies to lure you in, then devoured you with a hundred tiny mouths.

That kelp jungle was high on her list of places to find.

Soon, she had trouble navigating between the tall, sticky stalks. She slowed and used her hands to make a path through the towers of green. Behind her, Great White slowed to a stop. Its green light bounced off the dark kelp, creating a field of dancing shadows. Aluna drifted silently, afraid to move. A few heartbeats later, the shark’s glowing net veered off, grew dimmer, and disappeared.

Great White had gone in search of easier prey.

Aluna took her first big, slow deep breath. Almost home. She’d be safely in the City of Shifting Tides before full dark, and hopefully, so would Hoku.

A tendril of kelp wrapped itself around her ankle and she kicked it off. Another wrapped around her wrist. She tried to shake it off, but it clung tight. She unsheathed her knife to cut the kelp from her arm, but it wasn’t kelp that had grabbed her. It was a hand. A girl’s hand. Aluna looked up into a pretty face and a pair of blank white eyes.

Makina.

They’d been friends until last year, when Makina had undergone the ceremony of transformation and grown her tail. Since then, they’d barely spoken.

Makina hung in the tendrils of kelp, swaying softly in the current. Her eyes glowed white and full, as if tiny moons had eclipsed her pupils. Dozens of thin braids drifted around her face. Her hand, stiff and clawed, had somehow grabbed Aluna’s wrist.

“Makina,” Aluna whispered, blinking away sudden tears. Her gaze fell to her friend’s throat, to the little shell pressed hard into Makina’s flesh. No pulsing glow. She wasn’t breathing.

Makina was dead.

Aluna stared at her, remembering her face in life, remembering how proud Makina had been of that silly long hair and all those braids. How she always wanted to come over when Aluna’s three brothers were home. Aluna wore tight sealskins in order to swim faster, but Makina cared more about her looks. Her delicate fish-scale blouse perfectly complemented the silvery shimmer of her new tail and the pale, gauzy skirt she wore over it.

Gently, Aluna pulled her free of the kelp. The sticky fronds had wrapped around the girl’s legs and torso, but not tightly. Makina could have freed herself easily. The seaweed must have attached itself after she had died, not before.

But there was no blood. Makina hadn’t been bitten or punctured. Aluna stared at the breathing shell attached to Makina’s neck, suddenly suspicious. She reached out a finger to trace the seahorse design. As soon as she touched it, the shell dislodged and drifted toward the ocean floor. Aluna caught it in her hand.

Aluna saw two small, dark holes in Makina’s throat where the shell had been attached. Empty holes. The breathing shell’s two slender tubes should have been burrowed there. Those tails held the shell in place as it filtered air from the water and delivered it to the lungs.

Without air, Makina had drowned.

Aluna opened her hand and stared at the broken shell nestled in her palm. A name was carved on its back in tiny, perfect letters. The Elders had spoken the name a dozen times before, always in hushed voices, always when they thought no one could hear them. She couldn’t read, but Hoku could, and he’d written the letters for her to see.

HydroTek.

Makina wasn’t the first to die like this, and Aluna knew that she wouldn’t be the last. The City of Shifting Tides was fading, one Kampii at a time, and the Elders weren’t doing a thing to stop it.

Aluna squeezed the necklace in her fist. Makina was dead. Suddenly, it didn’t matter that Great White had almost caught her. It didn’t matter that her legs ached and her eyes burned and her head was starting to pound.

She wanted answers.





“I WISH they hadn’t taken the necklace,” Hoku said. “If I could examine one, maybe I could figure out why they’re breaking. They must need power to operate, but where is it coming from? Elder Peleke won’t tell me. I wonder if he even knows.” He looked at his hands, wishing he had his tools. Wishing he had something to focus on besides Makina’s death and Aluna’s anger.

“Of course they took the necklace,” Aluna stormed. “They’re going to act as if none of this ever happened, same as always. One death might be an accident, but Makina was the fifth. How can they ignore five?”

She was swimming circles around her nest, her eyes red rimmed and wild. They’d spent the last hour remembering everything they could about Makina. Now he just wanted to eat some fish and go to sleep. Predictably, Aluna’s mood had gone in the other direction.

“They had no right to hide her away like that!” she said.

“Not everyone wants to see . . .” The body, he thought. When had Makina stopped being a person and become just another object? “She had a lot of friends, and her parents weren’t even in the crossway when you brought her in. Maybe —”

“And they wouldn’t even answer my questions about the necklace! Now the Elders are off ‘conferring.’” She snorted. “That’s all they ever do. Talk, talk, talk. They never actually do anything.”

“But your father . . .”

Aluna waved her hand. “He’s the worst.”

Aluna and her father were like a pair of fighting eels — always going for each other’s throats. Elder Kapono intimidated the entire city, and scared the ink out of Hoku, but Aluna was never cowed. She seemed to think it was her duty to defy him.

“The Elders are probably talking at the council dome,” she continued. “Eating clams and sucking coralfruit juice and gossiping like younglings. If only we could hear through the sound shield!”

“Well, maybe . . .”

Aluna stopped her swishing and swam over to him, her eyes intense.

“Well, what?”

Oh, crabs and krill. Why did he always have to open his mouth? He shrugged, suddenly embarrassed. “I’ve been working on this device, this new artifact. You put it over your ear and it increases the distance you can hear. I thought if I made it strong enough, we could talk at night when we’re both in our nests.” He’d intended to give her the artifact as a gift when she got her tail, as a way for them to stay in touch even when she was off with all her new friends. So much for the surprise.

“And you think it will work through the sound shield?”

“It might. I couldn’t find a way to make us talk louder, so I found a way to make the artifacts in our ears pick up sound better.”

“Brilliant!” Aluna said.

“Well, I, uh — it’s not —”

“We can try it out right now. Let’s go!”

Aluna bolted for the room’s hatch and darted into the passageway. Hoku smiled and followed her back to his family’s nest.

Tomorrow was the ceremony of transformation, when he’d watch Aluna trade her legs for a tail. Tonight was all he had left before everything changed, before she became a full Kampii and left him behind. One last night of trouble and danger to get him through the months of loneliness that would surely follow.


Hoku’s family lived in the sand-side part of the city, where the nests were small and carved right next to each other at the bottom of the coral reef. Few rays of sun penetrated the water sand-side, and the current was nowhere near as strong and refreshing as it was in the city’s main channels. Overall, the sand-side was dark, dingy, and depressing.

His mother always talked about moving to a moon-side nest, but he and his dad knew that would never happen. The old moon-side Kampii families passed their homes to their children, and the Elders had long since forbidden the carving of any new ones in the “good” areas. Something about the structural integrity of the coral, Elder Peleke had said. Hoku had a feeling there was more to it than that, but he never questioned the social injustice of it all out loud. Who would listen to a lowly sand-sider, anyway?

Aluna would, if he ever found the courage to talk to her. She never said anything about his family’s nest or status, or her own. Fresh, clean currents flowed through her family nest. Glow-in-the-dark spirals and starfish and seashells decorated every surface. Even their resting sticks bore the hand-carved Shifting Tides seahorse emblem. But despite everything Aluna had and everything he didn’t have, not even the tiniest hint of disgust or pity ever showed on her face. She was just Aluna, same as ever.

When they got to his nest, both his parents were out on work assignments and his grandma Nani was napping. Good. He didn’t want to answer any questions about what they were doing.

They swam through the cramped tunnel to his room. There was nothing he loved more than his workshop, except getting the chance to show it off. He immediately darted to his desk, hooked his knees around his worn resting stick, and tapped on the lantern to wake up the lightning fish inside. The fish darted back and forth, faster and faster, their bodies glowing brighter and brighter.

“You’ve been busy!” Aluna said, nodding to the new jars of artifacts hooked to the ceiling and secured to his desk.

He shrugged. “Elder Peleke still won’t take me on as an apprentice, so I have to learn everything myself. Which means lots of failed experiments,” he said. “I haven’t gotten anything to work in weeks, except for the Extra Ears.”

“Extra Ears? Is that what you’re calling the hearing artifact you made?”

“You like it?” he asked. “I like coming up with names for the artifacts almost as much as I like making them.” “Extra Ears” was a vast improvement over his first two naming attempts, “Hearing Helpers” and “Ears x 10.”

He reached for his “in progress” jar, carefully removed the Extra Ears artifacts, and placed them on the sticky plate attached to his desk. He loved his sticky plate; it had been in his family for generations. The flat square of metal grabbed other metal things and clung to them. Magic, his mother called it, but his grandma pronounced it “magnet.”

“How do they work?” Aluna reached for one of the Ears, but Hoku batted her hand away.

“No touching! They’re very delicate. I think we both remember what happened the last time you tried to help.” He looked up at the jar labeled SHARK DETECTOR and the mangled metal bits inside. Such a waste.

“I forgot what a snoot you are with your bits of metal,” she said, but she didn’t reach for the artifacts again.

“I have to be careful,” he said. “If I do something wrong, I might break the artifacts already in our ears. And then we won’t be hearing anything besides whales and waves.”

The Extra Ears on his sticky plate looked like tiny plugs attached to bent pieces of coated wire. He plucked one gently from the plate and tightened two tiny screws. It didn’t matter what they looked like; it only mattered that they worked. And they did. He’d tested one the night before and overheard the neighbors fighting three nests away. Once he perfected the design and showed it to the Elders, Elder Peleke would have to take him on as an apprentice, even though he was a lowly sand-side kid and not the son of someone important.

“Ready!” Hoku said.

Aluna drifted over and held her short hair out of the way. Hoku pressed the artifact against the inside of her ear, then wrapped the wire around the outside to secure it in place.

“By the tides!” Aluna said.

“What? What do you hear?”

“A mumble-jumble mostly, but I can hear that little squid Jessia gossiping to someone about the boy she likes — oh!” Aluna looked at him and giggled.

“What? Who is she talking about? Tell me!” he begged. Jessia had smiled at him that very morning. She had nice teeth. He grabbed the other hearing artifact and scrambled to affix it to his ear with none of the delicacy he’d used with the first one.

“Oh, she’s moved off. I can’t hear her anymore. Too bad!” Aluna said. “Are freckles really that cute? I hadn’t noticed. But now that old fish Moke is going on and on about what he wants for dinner.”

“Shhh!” Hoku said, but she was right. All he could hear was Moke talking about fish. He couldn’t hear Jessia at all. Had Aluna made the whole thing up? This wouldn’t be the first time she’d teased him about one of his crushes. He put a hand to his cheek. He had a lot of freckles.

“Hoku, these Extra Ears are amazing. You’re a genius,” Aluna said, and he instantly forgave her.

“Let’s get to the council dome,” he said. And see how much trouble we can find.