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

(3) Ande: Hahalua's Children

I feel the approaching creatures before I see them. The current over our rock surges suddenly, rolling down my back and tickling the baby hairs that escape my braids. I follow Taiki as he creeps to the top of the rock. Something sweeps overhead, and I gasp.

We saw the children of Hahalua from the tall rocks on Telu, but that's nothing compared to up close. The evening sky vanishes behind the first giant ray's wingspan. The second is close behind. Their currents blast over me as they pass, threatening to knock me off the rock. And they're not alone.

Taiki waits for the silhouette of the third hook-mouthed head to pass, then launches from our hiding spot like he told me in our plan. I plunge after him. A recoil current sucks me upwards, and I kick for all I'm worth. If I miss this window, I'll go tumbling awry and lose Taiki in the turmoil. Before I have a chance to worry, the tail of the ray I'm targeting brushes my arm. I grab it with both hands. My arms are nearly jerked from their sockets as I lurch forwards with the creature, clinging to it like an oversized suckerfish.

I pull my head down and flex my arms, sparing my joints the strain and streamlining myself against the current. The pull only lasts a heartbeat. Then I'm moving with my ride on the flowing water, and the giddy feeling of having done this all on my own is subsumed by the realization that I can only hold onto a tail for so long before even my arms give in. I pull myself up, hand over hand, and reach the creature's backside with a complete lack of ideas on where to go next. Do I risk letting go and making a bolt for another ray? For this one's front edge? That's where Taiki is on his own ride, but from here, it seems awfully far away. The ray's black-and-white-patterned back stretches out ahead of me for over a person's length, as open, inviting, and staunchly uncrossable as the beach around Telu back when I was a child.

Then again, that never stopped me as a child.

If I swim hard, I think I can make it. I let go and lunge for the ray's head. A heartbeat later, I seize the upper edge of its mouth as I nearly overshoot. The water pushes me flat again, chastizing me for my recklessness. Am I that strong a swimmer now? I could have gone straight off the front of this thing and ended up in its mouth—Rashi knows, it's big enough to hold me—or tumbling down under it, losing my ride. I used to think shark Kels were fast, but I guess I've gotten more fit than I used to be after all the time I've spent living down here.

The ray makes for a comfier ride than whatever giant shark we were on last time Taiki decided swimming was overrated. Its skin is the bubbled texture of wave-worn rocks, both easy on the hands and deceptively hard to grip. I have to adjust my fingers every few hundred heartbeats, finding that they slip little by little without feeling like they're moving at all. I lie as flat as I can and experiment with lifting my tailfin ever so slightly, letting the current press me down harder for a more secure feel.

Night falls, bringing a different sort of unease. It will be much easier to lose Taiki in the darkness now if I'm not paying attention. He's brightened the stars on his tail as much as he can, but only our hands flash bright enough to be seen over any significant distance. He hasn't lit his yet. I suspect it's so we don't spook the rays. At least they themselves haven't expressed any intention to ditch us. They ride each other's slipstreams the way the Shalda-Kels do when traveling long distances, bearing each other along with nothing but their own currents.

The water is more clouded now than it was before. It's also nighttime, and though I strain my eyes, even my dark-sensitive vision can't make out the rocks I know we must be gliding by. I tip my head and pay attention to the current instead. Taiki has made it clear that there's far more to island identification than just shape or rocks, and I have a lifetime of land-based knowledge to overwrite with undersea equivalents.

I'm pleasantly surprised at how much longer it takes my arms to feel the burn of holding on than it did last time I played piggyback on giant Nekta. I cling to any indication of my own improvement these days. Learning to live near the bottom of an oceanic food chain has given me a different kind of humility than I remember ever feeling back on Telu, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't grieve it a little. Like it saw my thoughts, the ocean changes subtly. The water turns salty and coral-flat, bright with sunshine and sour with rotten coconut. I perk up. We're passing another island, and I know this one. When the winds change, storms blow its cargo of dropped, rancid coconut shells down the island chain to wash up all over Telu's shores.