My heart pushed against my ribs, begging for air, and the slight numbness woke in my fingertips.
I could feel West stop behind me as I thought. If we went any farther, we wouldn’t make it back to the surface in time to get air. But if we weren’t far from the opening … I squinted, studying the darkness. And then I saw it. The faintest glow.
I pushed off the wall and swam. Green light swelled in the black, and as we got closer, it came down in a slice, like a wall of crystal in the water. I was dragging myself along the wall now, searching for holds to pull myself forward to reach it. When my hands caught the edge, I hauled myself forward and broke the surface with a gasp that brought both air and water into my lungs.
I coughed, clinging to the ledge as West came up behind me. The sound of his ragged breath filled the empty silence. I could hardly see. Only the reflection on his blond hair was visible, and I reached out, feeling for him until his hands found me.
“All right?” he panted.
I answered between breaths. “All right.”
Above us, a thin vein of moonlight was drawn in a narrow opening at the top of the cave. The space was only twelve feet wide at most, and the walls tapered as they rose to what looked like a tiny sliver thirty or forty feet above us.
I swung one leg up out of the water onto the smooth stone. My heart was a sprinting, angry thud in my chest, my throat burning all the way down to my stomach. West came up beside me, lifting himself from the water. As my eyes adjusted, the shape of him formed in the dark.
“You’re bleeding.” West’s hand reached up, and he touched my forehead gently, tilting my chin so that the light fell on my face.
I felt the slick skin where it was throbbing. When I looked at my fingers, they were covered in blood. “It’s nothing.”
The call of seabirds sounded above us, and I looked up to the slice of sky, where their shadows flitted over the opening in the earth.
I got to my feet. The cave was silent except for the sound of water dripping from my fingertips and hitting the stone and I froze when a glint of something blinked in the darkness. I waited, staring into the emptiness until I saw it again. A flash. Like the sweep of a lighthouse. I took a step toward it, reaching out before me.
My hands drifted through the diffused moonlight until I found the wall and I felt up its face until my fingertips caught the sharp, glassy points of something hidden in the shadows.
The vibration of the gemstone coursed through me.
Midnight.
West looked up, turning in a circle, where the facets of the stone winked in the shifting light above us. It was everywhere.
“This is where she found it,” I whispered, pulling the chisel from my belt.
I felt the rock before I fit the edge beneath a crease and took a hold of the mallet. It came away in a clean piece with three strikes, falling heavily into my hand. I held it in the beam of moonlight between us.
The violet inclusions danced beneath the surface, and I froze when their reflections lit the cave walls like a sky of purple stars.
The feel of my mother was close. Lurking all around us. And maybe she was. She could have dropped the stone into the sea, but she didn’t. She’d kept it even though she never came back to the skerry. And I couldn’t help but think that she’d kept it, maybe for me. That maybe she’d given me my name so that one day, I’d find it.
West took the stone from my hand, turning it so it glittered. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“No one has,” I whispered.
He looked up at me then, a question in his eyes. “What do you want to do?”
Midnight was like the dawn of a new world. It would change everything. I didn’t know if the Narrows was ready for that. I didn’t know if I was ready for that. A rueful smile broke on my lips as he set the stone back into my hand. “What if we do nothing?”
“What?”
Midnight had called my mother to it. At the right time, it had called me too. “What if we leave it here? Like she did.”