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

(4) Taiki: Demigoddess

Hentea comes to find me later that evening. It's enough time to move away from the infirmary room where I treated the Qiv-Kel, and to practice the lie that will keep people from questioning my role in her sudden absence. I say I left her in the infirmary after she fell asleep, and that the last conversation we had was about avoiding Karu snails. I pretend I don't know where she went. She made it out of Roshaska without being intercepted, I learn; there's nobody here who can prove my lie. It still leaves me leaves me sick with nerves. But that's better than being the one to blow the Kel's own cover when she just wanted to look after her people.

After that, things stay quiet in Roshaska for the next few days. I find myself wandering. Pacing, really; it's hard to stay still when there's still no news about my Shalda people, and when moving keeps me more out of the way than staying in a single room. People give me odd looks when we meet each other in the unlit tunnels and rooms of the inner city. I'm the only star-squid here, so I'm sure I stand out. But either Hentea has told people I want my space, or it's considered rude to question... either way, nobody tries to talk to me.

There's a lot to find inside the city. After maybe half a day, I can't deny that there's another reason I like wandering. I've always wanted to see the inside of Roshaska. But I've never had another chance to explore. And so I use the excuse of finding my way around to peek into places I haven't seen yet, then give up trying to excuse it and just savor the exploration. I can't shake the guilt that I'm not supposed to be here. But the inside of Roshaska is also decorated, and the further I venture, the more in awe I become.

Of all the Kel peoples I know, only Karu decorate their dens. It's common in the shallow water, but proves just as common in the deep. I quickly identify where current inhabitants have their private quarters, just by the presence or absence of personalization around the doors of dens. Shells are a favorite. They are in the shallows, too. But where sun-water Karu target shells with interesting shapes and textures, the preference here is to flip flat ones upside down to expose their pearly undersides. It's so consistent with the mosaics in Roshaska's story-caves that I have to stop several times to confirm that these are more recent decorations. Even then, I'm not always sure. Some seem to be old but repaired, while others are new, and others still are just ancient. They all share the same patterns: semblances of reef Nekta. But in between them, I start to find something else.

There are no corals in Roshaska. No anchoring sea-life either, outside the cultivated mussel beds the Kels here maintain for their own sustenance, Andalua's ancient destruction cursed this place so badly, nothing grows here anymore.

That's what I thought, anyway.

I'm poking around a mosaic on the fifth day when my hand meets something soft and squishy that moves when I touch it. I whip my fingers back. When I brighten my lights to look closer, I find a tiny branch of coral—just three polyps—nestled in a crack between two chunks of mortar near the mosaic's edge. That shouldn't be here. As I inspect it, though, my lights reveal a second branching silhouette not far down the wall. A thorough search reveals one more: three tiny corals in this single stretch of tunnel, with the oldest already branched twice. Things grow so slowly down here, it could have been here for a generation already.

There's not supposed to be Nekta in Roshaska. I haven't seen this kind of life anywhere else in the city, but I also haven't been looking very closely. I change that now. By the end of an hand's length, I've confirmed that only my inattention hid the corals' presence from me before. As soon as I'm looking for them, they're everywhere.

Well, not quite everywhere. They prefer newer mosaics, or tunnels where there's been obvious repairs done to the coral-block or plaster. Even that isn't consistent, though, so I begin a systematic mapping of where they grow and where they don't, and find something I certainly was not expecting. The corals—and some tiny sponges, and even an anemone—populate a radius around what I think is this group's central cavern, where they gather twice a day. I frown down at the nearest coral. Then I creep through the city to the main cave itself. There are always Kels here, and today is no exception. I lurk in the shadows of the entrance I've approached from, and strain my eyes to pick out any hint of texture on the walls. There's plenty. If anything, this room is the most coral-inhabited of all.