Shattered by the Sea Lord - Starla Night Page 0,84
noise sometimes,” Meg said. “Maybe it’s clogged. Or the ringer’s under the water.”
“We’ve looked before,” Bex said.
“But that’s when we were looking for cocks and balls,” Meg reminded her. “We haven’t looked for baby squid-ringers.”
“Ringers?” Angie glanced at her highly educated daughter. “Is that the official term?”
“Clappers.” Dannika waded into the lake again. “My first husband repaired church organs. I got to know the terms for some of the other instruments.”
They descended, shifting again. Dannika forced the water back into her beleaguered lungs and rotated to tease her fingers along the wavering surface. Shifting wasn’t great, but floating as if the rippling surface was her floor and the seafloor was her ceiling? Redefining her world like that was amazing.
They clustered around the base.
“We discovered this statue when a tropical storm struck for, like, three weeks,” Meg said. “We hid in the lagoon. And then we lost baby Luk. Mom doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“I have never lost a child before or since.” Angie’s arch declaration faded into quiet sadness as she, and then they, all realized that she had lost Nuno, although she hadn’t even been in the water so it wasn’t her fault.
Meg broke the uncomfortable silence. “That was a crazy storm. Lieutenant Figuara was so worried about us he brought in a fifty-pound snapper, in secret, and made his patrol think he’d eaten the whole thing himself.”
Bex smiled.
“He was a nice man. It’s really too bad about his replacement.” Angie peered into the bell. “I wonder how it works.”
Meg trailed her fingers along the base of the bell structure. “Look at this dust. The maid will never work in this town again.”
“Isn’t the maid us?” Angie scooped out a handful of silt.
“We’ll never work in this town again,” Dannika joked, and even Bex smiled.
They cleaned off the statue, tossing out vines that had fallen in and rotted, and scraping away to bare rock.
“Lieutenant Figuara was a gentleman.” Angie reached up to her elbow into the base of the statue and forced out centuries’ worth of muck. “But that Lieutenant Orike sounds like a confused little boy. No mother, no father. No grandparents.”
“What do you mean, Mom?”
“Aren’t the Luscan warriors stolen? The younger generation, I mean. Not Itime and Prince Ankena’s generation. They knew their fathers. But that Lieutenant Orike and the others in his patrol, I’m sure I heard none of them had parents, and how can they be raised right? But warriors have to fight.” She blew out a long stream of water, making her dark hair flutter over her forehead. “They need a stern talk, not death. And now poor Lukiyo is caught up in it. He was such a sweet child. I could never use any ‘queen’ power against him.”
Wait.
Wait, wait, wait.
“That’s it,” Dannika said.
“Hmm?” Angie flicked muck off her fingers and it drifted down in the cloudy water. “What is it?”
“Your powers.” Dannika floated back, and everyone turned to look at her. “You’re afraid to use your powers.”
Angie pooh-poohed her elegantly despite being elbow-deep in the mud. “What powers?”
“You’re afraid to find out, but you can use your powers for good. To give that stern talk and stop those warriors from hurting each other.”
“I don’t see how.” Angie flexed her fingers. “I know healing isn’t my forte. And I refuse to make all the mess like a certain engineer who knocked down our coral and exposed the reef.”
Bex twisted her lips to the side.
“Then don’t. Use your power to hold back the people who would try to fight each other. Stop their attacks. Shield your sons and their enemies so they can all sit down and talk out their differences.”
Angie leveled a skeptical eye at her. “I know I’m asking a lot, but I’m not entirely delusional. These are warriors, you know. They solve things by fighting it out.”
“And you’re not a warrior. Which means that you can show them another way. A way of peaceful disagreement.”
“That’s an oxymoron.”
“But it doesn’t have to be. You can have amazing power, Angie. You just have to believe.”
And yes, Dannika knew exactly how hypocritical she sounded urging Angie to believe in herself when all of Dannika’s problems stemmed from being unable to focus.
“Just think about it,” Dannika said.
“Shield.” The tips of Angie’s fingers glowed. She studied them thoughtfully. “I suppose I could stop fights. That would be ideal, really.”
Bex made a noise. “Ah.”
Everyone clustered around her.
“Ah?” Meg repeated. “What did you find?”
She rapped a long pipe with her knuckle. “The ringer.”