Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(17) Ande: City of the Dead

Sar doesn't stray far from me or Casin the whole three days it takes us to swim to Roshaska. We don't dive this time. Taiki finds a current of some kind and moves at an angle to it that he checks constantly. I think we're moving down. The light overhead grows dimmer with each passing day, but there's so much nothing around us that it's impossible to get my bearings otherwise. Sar and Casin both check fish trails. Yaz swims laps when she's bored, just like Sar used to. They don't do it anymore.

We're moving southward, I think. I check with Sar to confirm it, and find that Casin too has a directional sense. I try to ignore her at first. But there are so few of us to talk to, and so very much nothing to do, that by the second day, I've set aside my anger enough to talk to Yaz about our Saru member. The outcome of that is conclusive: Casin's truly on our side. I still find it hard not to be mad at her, but it helps that Sar isn't. Like, at all. I've always thought they forgive too easily, but the fact that they gravitate to her on instinct when they're nervous says a lot.

I've got no idea how close we are to the city until we reach silt, and almost immediately pass a block of stone that isn't stone at all. It's coral-block. I've found a piece like this out here before, sitting a hundred arm-spans from the actual city, and only now do I understand why. I know who destroyed Roshaska. Unless there is another deity in the ocean of equivalent size, who somehow escaped Andalua's transformation of the demigods, there's only one thing down here who can wreak such destruction. Who can decapitate a city this size, and fling pieces of it so far across the ocean bottom.

Taiki stops us when our lights reach the first wall. He moves forward alone.

Maybe I'm not as religious as I should be. Maybe I'm just bad at giving respect to entities my people always feared, and that have proven themselves worthy of that terror. But a part of me sees Taiki going to make Andalua's sign, and clenches up inside like someone's tied knots with my intestines. I don't care what his people believe. We shouldn't be praying to Andalua.

Taiki catches himself. Nobody's said anything. I'm still projecting every scrap of my internal screaming into the water between us, hoping it reaches him. It seems to. He lowers the sign and, after a long moment, begins a different prayer. This one isn't to the ocean's patron goddess. It's to the city itself, and the ancestors' spirits that live in its walls. That's the moment I realize Taiki is signing a Karu prayer in Shalda.

I recognize this. I've done it before.

He's doing the same thing I did when I danced at the grave of a Kel we never met, whose arm we found on the ocean floor. That attack was also Andalua. That dance was the first time I felt—truly felt—like I was integrating both my islander and Shalda sides. The sense of peace it gave me continues to linger whenever the question arises. I still don't feel Shalda. Especially while my people remain unsafe, I'm an islander first of all. But at least I wasn't a total stranger in the ocean anymore.

I can't see Taiki's face properly, but his head remains bowed, and he moves slowly. Casin's watching for danger, but Yaz is watching Taiki, too. There's no way she doesn't recognize what he's doing.

I want to ask her about it, but it's bad to interrupt of a prayer of this importance. I trace my scales to keep my hands distracted, and watch Taiki find his way though a translation that sometimes catches on the boundaries of language, murmuring words when there is no translation, and signing an apology for the Karu intrusion each time he does. I get the sense it will be inappropriate to communicate in anything but Shalda languages here.

At long last, Taiki lifts his head again. With a final sign I don't recognize, he turns. "We can enter now. Talk in this." He flicks his hands to indicate the language he's signing in. "And don't touch anything. It will let us in, but touching might be riskier."