Above World - By Jenn Reese Page 0,12
both safe would be close to impossible.
The Elders were wrong. She wasn’t a bad fish. To her, duty meant something other than doing what you were told. To her, duty meant doing whatever you had to do for the good of the Kampii . . . regardless of the consequences. If the Elders had their way, they’d all ignore their problems until the whole colony dwindled away into nothing.
Aluna left the nest and snuck out of the city, avoiding the major currents and crossways and sticking to the shadows like an eel. Once she was free of the coral reef, she swam upward, toward the sun, and toward the shore.
HOKU WATCHED from outside the ritual dome, crammed between a Kampii woman who kept shoving him with her tail and a huge mussel farmer whose son was inside the dome with Aluna. The big Kampii kept asking what the Elders were saying, but no one answered him. No one knew.
Except Hoku. With his Extra Ears, he’d heard everything that had happened. Only he wished he hadn’t. He wished he’d never brought his stupid tech to the ceremony in the first place. He hated seeing his best friend humiliated, especially when he was powerless to help.
Well, he could do something now. He could find Aluna and distract her. They could hunt tasty starbellies or find a wreck to scavenge. They could head back to the glowfield with a plan for disrupting the jellyfish and fending off Great White. He could get himself into trouble, if necessary, so that she could come and save him. That always cheered her up. Usually, it cheered him up, too.
He pushed his way through the throngs of Kampii now gossiping about Aluna’s exit from the ceremony. He wanted to scream at them all, to tell them to be quiet, to leave her alone. He heard Kapono’s name mentioned, and Daphine’s, too. They’d be talking about Aluna and her whole family for moons.
He swam to the broken dome first, and then to their secret meeting stone. No Aluna. He checked the abandoned hull outside the city, the perimeter of the kelp forest, and her secret stash of weapons near the training dome. Nothing.
Finally, he went to the monument, the final resting place of Ali’ikai-born-Sarah Jennings. The monument was made from a smooth white stone unlike anything else in the city. Sarah Jennings’s face was carved into an oval on one side. Her hair was short and wild like Aluna’s, her eyes dark and severe. Aluna called them strong.
Aluna snuck away to the monument often, usually after a fight with her father. She didn’t want anyone to know, so Hoku pretended he didn’t. Sometimes she left offerings propped up against the structure’s base — artifacts from their scavenging runs, glittering shells, shark teeth. The sort of things he brought home to show his mother.
Aluna wasn’t at the monument, and there were no new offerings. The tight knot growing in his stomach was trying to tell him something. Something he was trying even harder to deny.
When he’d heard her get kicked out of the ceremony, a small selfish part of him had rejoiced. One more year! One more year of being best friends and doing everything together. One more year, and then they’d both be facing the ceremony together. He wouldn’t get left behind.
But he got left behind anyway.
By the end of the day — or maybe by tomorrow morning, since Aluna had a reputation for disappearing — the city would organize a search. Everyone would forget they were angry at her and band together to save one of their own. But they wouldn’t find her, because she wasn’t missing. She was gone. On purpose. To the Above World.
To save the Coral Kampii all by herself.
He flipped a starfish onto its back with his foot. She hadn’t asked him to go. He would have been useful to her in the Above World. He knew a lot more about tech than she did, and about other things, too. He’d read every book in the city at least three times, which wasn’t that impressive when you considered the city only had a few dozen books. But most Kampii knowledge passed from one generation to the next through stories and lectures — Aluna and most of the other Kampii couldn’t read at all.
She should have asked him to go. He flipped the starfish again, then headed back to his nest to settle in for a long day of worrying.
His parents were out helping