“You don’t know?” Gryshen asked with a panicked edge to her signal.
“It’s just . . . it depends. The babies release more venom than their parents.” He was still flailing to no avail.
Just before darkness took hold, Gryshen saw the blurred outline of Tollo patting Gracke gently.
“Good. Now we can finally see!” she trilled.
After a few moments, the fog began to lift.
“Did you hear that?” Gracke asked, turning his large frame. They all followed and listened. A faint signal penetrated the water, figures in the distance coming their direction.
Gryshen squeezed around her spear as tightly as she could, her heart pounding
“Gryshie! It’s us.”
Jode. She let her shoulders fall and loosened her grip. Jode, Hena, Tollo, warriors from other pods, and the last of the stable beasts.
“Grysh!” Her brother darted toward her, his grin taking over his face. “Everything looked clear.”
“We trailed behind just enough. Didn’t see any Rakor following,” Hena added.
The smallest orca wouldn’t let himself stay more than inches behind his annoyed siblings as usual.
Sol and Ry seemed to make their own sibling connection with Theus and Tollo, who had not brought their own beasts. Their tribe was another that didn’t keep a regular stable, but unlike Rakor, they were more respectful of their beasts, preferring to hop on an animal when the creature seemed agreeable.
Most of the Rone animals stayed back with the pod, just in case—but they brought Jeer, despite Gryshen’s protests.
“Of course he’s obnoxious, but he’s clever. It could prove useful,” Bravis insisted when they were prepping the pack.
With her brother’s arrival, Gryshen felt another surge of strength.
“All right, I guess we can fight now.”
Jode beamed at his sister’s first attempt at cracking a joke in days.
“Yeah, thanks for waiting. Not that you had any choice.” Jode stuck out both arms, flexing his muscles and turning in a somersault.
“Ha.” Gryshen almost laughed. Hena rolled her eyes, but Gryshen couldn’t miss the fact that she kept her eyes on her brother as he played bullish warrior. She shot a knowing glance at her friend.
Hena turned a hint of rosy purple.
Bravis pulled up alongside Gryshen, and suddenly Hena’s expression mirrored Gryshen’s own accusing look.
She turned to see Bravis floating, waiting, but she couldn’t look him in the eye for long. It was too much.
Gryshen turned back to Hena with confusion, and received her friend’s second eye roll of the morning.
They collected their weapons, swimming up in pairs and groups of three to the water’s surface to replenish their oxygen before entering deeper into unknown territory.
Gryshen and Jode went up while Misra splashed nearby.
The sun bathed the whole sky in white, reflecting the brightness from the sea below. It was blank, vast, and foreign.
The air here tasted different, somehow. Grainy on her tongue.
“I think Hena was checking me out.” Jode chuckled.
“You think, brother?” Gryshen asked. Modesty was not a part of Jode’s character. With every leen who wasn’t a close relative fawning over him, humility required a bit more effort from her brother.
“But she’s not like the other ones,” Jode said as if to finish Gryshen’s thought.
“No, she certainly is not.” Hena was perhaps the one leen she would like to see arm in arm with her sibling.
Jode’s smile was replaced by a grave expression. “What is it, Gryshie?”
She had been lost in the prospect looming before them.
“It’s this. What’s waiting for us.” Gryshen squinted at the brightness, willing it to blind her thought. “Jode, some of our ilorays will die.”
“I know. But they’ll all die if they don’t fight back.”
They slowly slid down beneath the water.
Jode stared at his sister. “I’m going to kill him for you, Gryshie.”
What felt like rope twisted around Gryshen’s heart, pulling tight.
“Jode, please. This isn’t about avenging me. Don’t put yourself in more danger.”
Her brother said nothing, looking past her for a moment.
“What is it?” Gryshen turned to look. The water rippled deep greens and golds, marked by coral gardens.
“You never see her, do you?” Jode asked, distantly, still staring.
“Mom?” Gryshen asked, using her lips, the word suddenly strange on her tongue and catching a little in her throat.
Jode nodded slowly. “I can’t understand. You need her now, too. More than ever.”
Perhaps she knows about the other one watching over me . . .
“Have you seen Dad?” Her signal broke out.
Jode hesitated.
“You have.” Her tone was bitter. She couldn’t hide the hurt.
“Only in flashes. A ripple, and then he’s gone. You know how that goes. He’s busy swimming to the other side.”
Gryshen did know how this went. Apocay had warned ilorays that a ceasid could risk getting stuck, a ghost in the water, if they didn’t allow themselves to move on and flow with the current to the next place, the next season. It was one of the reasons that “too much” mourning was frowned upon.
“You don’t want to hold her back, do you?” Gryshen recalled an old leen saying to her granddaughter when she made the whole hub black with her unending well of tears.
Her sister had passed from an internal shutdown the night before.
Gryshen remembered how that had struck her, too cold even in their arctic depths.
“She’s just trying to help her move on,” her father had explained to her later.
“But she died so recently. And so suddenly.” Though the leen who died was a few seasons older and Gryshen was never good at playmates, she suddenly felt a strange kinship with her. A missing organ. Gryshen had felt like part of herself had always been misplaced. To actually have something that never came through with her insides made sense to her.
Whatever was missing, she could be certain it wasn’t her heart.
How could something that was shattered continue to break, over and over again?
“Yes, I know,” Gryshen signaled to Jode, now more numbly. It stung too much. But there was a deeper truth, and her brother revealed it to her.
“Come on, Gryshie. You know why you haven’t seen him.”
Gryshen panicked. Did Jode know what she wasn’t even sure of—that she was not made of the same stuff?
That she was unworthy?
It hurt too much to consider the idea that her father wouldn’t visit because she wasn’t enough like himself. And frankly, it didn’t seem like the lax she had known, to treat her this way. To ignore her in death, in her most desperate times.
Jode clasped his hands around her shoulders and gave her a little shake to pull her out of the whirlpool her thoughts were plunging into. “You know why, right?”
She waited for him to deliver the blow.
“He’s not invited.”
“What?”
“Grysh, you wouldn’t come with me to the bone pit unless I pushed it. And you only did it for me.”
Who did I have to visit? Gryshen asked herself. A woman who didn’t birth me—and probably resented pretending to be my mother?
She clapped her hand against her mouth at this thought that she had just permitted herself to think.
Jode gave his sister an odd look, and repeated, “He’s not invited. You don’t want to see him.”
“That’s not true!” Gryshen protested.
“No, it’s not about your love for Dad. It’s just . . .”