back to her: sharks in the sky. Her brothers had spoken about the Aviars often, usually speculating about who would win in a fight. Even underwater, the bird-people’s warrior skills and tactics were renowned.
The net surged upward and the landscape changed. The trees dotting the mountainside were replaced by row after row of black squares tilted toward the sky. Hundreds of them hugged the ground, obscuring the natural contours of the rock. They sparkled like waves in the sunlight.
“What are they?” came Hoku’s voice in her ear. She tried to whisper back, but her throat refused to function. She tried again, and a third time, until it obeyed.
“Hoku,” she said. “Are . . . ?” She swallowed, closed her eyes, tried again. “Are you okay?”
“Aluna!” came his voice. She wished she could see his face. “I’m fine,” he whispered. “The Aviars captured us —”
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Yes! They came with a net — oh. Ha ha.”
She smiled. Above them, the Aviars’ wings whooshed as they continued to rise. She felt pressure building in the back of her head and the dull throb of an oncoming headache.
“You know what you did,” Hoku said in his serious voice. “You can’t go back to the ocean now.”
“I know.”
“Then . . . why did you do it?” Hoku asked.
She could hear his real question, unspoken but loud as waves crashing in her mind: Why did you leave me?
Staring into that Deepfell’s eyes, those glossy black bubbles, it had felt so right. Deepfell came from the same ancestors as the Kampii. They changed their bodies more drastically, but they still had the same capacity to love and hate, the same right to live. Most Kampii called them demons, forgetting that three generations ago, it was a group of Kampii hunters that initiated the first raid. Daphine knew. As the city’s Voice, she had urged tolerance and tried to negotiate a peace treaty. No one ever listened. Not the Kampii, not the Deepfell, and not even Aluna.
But seeing that Deepfell’s pain and fear, his helplessness . . . she imagined she was seeing Makina’s last minutes. Would her friend’s panic have been any different? Aluna couldn’t bear the thought of letting a Deepfell, a person, die when she had the chance to save him.
“I had to,” she said. That was all the answer she had. “I’ll find another necklace, or some other way to go back. HydroTek will have the answers. This is just one more reason to find it.” She wished she felt as brave and confident as she sounded. “Besides, we have other things to worry about right now, like the Aviars.”
“They’re going to question us,” he said. “And I think eating us is under consideration, too.”
She answered brightly, trying to ignore the growing pain in her skull. “See? That’s definitely a more immediate problem.”
One of the Aviars shifted, and the net spun slightly. Their captors were headed for a small tunnel carved into the mountain. She didn’t think they’d all fit — two winged women carrying a couple of Kampii in a net took up a lot of space. But the opening seemed to get bigger and bigger the closer they came. By the time they arrived at the passage, Aluna was convinced that Big Blue himself could have swum right through.
The tunnel curved up and down and around. They left the warmth of the sun, and Aluna’s eyes instantly adjusted to the dark. Glow stripes had been painted along the tunnel’s stone walls, no doubt to help the Aviars navigate if they came home at night. Maybe they’d been so excited to give themselves wings, that they’d forgotten to give themselves dark sight. The Aviars swooped down and up one last time, and then they plunged back into the sun.
Aluna gasped. It looked as if someone had scooped a huge bowl out of the mountaintop. They emerged halfway up the side. Aluna could see tunnels and caves carved into the walls, making it look as pockmarked and pitted as the coral in the City of Shifting Tides. She imagined a network of passages and family nests and secret meeting rooms, like the ones the Kampii had back home.
In the center of the bowl, a huge tower jutted hundreds of meters into the air. Aviars flew in and out of the spire’s countless windows and perched on the resting sticks integrated into the architecture.
The City of Shifting Tides was probably as big, but you could never see all of it at once through