Fire Stones - By Kailin Gow Page 0,24
“We all work together,” he said. “We gods of fire. We make it possible for the earth to stay strong – to resist the waves of water. It is a careful balance – one that must be preserved at all costs. The fire and water – warring against each other – produce in their struggle the balance necessary to save life on earth. Without Vesta....” he sighed darkly. “I don't know what will happen. The earth will likely be submerged in flood.”
“I want to be Vesta,” I whispered. “I don't like the Erosion any more than anyone else does – I want to help. I want to do whatever I have to do.”
But Chance looked at me in silence.
What I had to do to be Vesta was to ask Varun for help, to go down into the depths of the ocean, to let the power of the sea wash over me once again, as it had done for Vesta millennia before. To resist the desire I felt in my heart.
Was that the price? Discover my destiny – and break Chance's heart? I couldn't even bear to think of it. I wouldn't risk it – I wouldn't! And yet, in Chance's eyes, I saw the truth: I had to try.
And then the unthinkable happened: something that made the choice for me. I came home one Friday after school to find my mother passed out upon the living room floor. Her skin was pale – waxy-white – and she was barely breathing.
“Help!” I ran out into the field, towards the hotel. “Help!”
Antonio Cutter was there in a flash, accompanied by the hotel doctor – the best, he said, on the island.
At first we thought it was low blood pressure, a dizzy spell, a one-time thing. But as the days wore on, my mother got worse, rather than better. She was too weak to get out of bed; she was losing weight at an alarming rate. Her hair grew thin and her skin jaundiced. One by one, the doctor ruled out potential problems, a series of X-rays and MRIs and biopsies that left her weaker than before. I sat alone in the living room with Antonio Cutter, waiting for the doctor to finish taking my mother's blood pressure. But by the serious look on Antonio Cutter's face, I knew that this was no normal illness.
“Can't they figure out what's wrong?” I asked. “I mean, it has to be something, right?”
Antonio shook his head. “Aeros is a strange place, Mackenzie,” he said gravely. “As I'm sure you know. The sicknesses here – they are not like the sicknesses on other islands. They do not always have the capacity to be explained by science.”
“You mean...magic?”
“I mean mystery,” said Antonio Cutter. “And I doubt science can compete with that. I will seek a cure, but there are no guarantees.” He looked at me intently. “We cannot fight mystery with science. We can only fight it with other mysteries...”
The stone? He looked at me intently, and I knew what he meant. The sapphire stone of Vesta – the stone I had dreamed about. The stone of healing! Whatever was causing my mother's sickness, only the stone of healing could help her.
I gritted my teeth. Chance or Varun – it didn't seem to matter now. My destiny as Vesta had laid a challenge in my path: get my mother well, embrace my destiny, find the stones...
...or pay the price.
Chapter 10
A week after my mother first became ill, I saw Varun walking in the gardens in front of our house. I had spent the week by my mother's bedside – leaving school in order to bring her soup for every meal and let the doctors in and out of the cottage – but she showed no signs of improvement. If anything, she was getting worse. She was skinnier than I had ever seen her; her skin had gone yellow, with a faintly green glow. Whatever was wrong with my mother, it wasn't a normal illness. And if I wanted to have any hope of treating her, I knew, Varun was my only option. I would have to swallow my pride and ask for help – but that, I knew, was only the beginning. My journey with Varun would mean risking my life. But as I saw my mother lying in bed, so weak and frail, I knew that I didn't have any other options.
Varun was sunning himself in the gardens, his shirt off. The sight of him left me