While she was thinking all of this over, Sorka, her new seal friend, called to her, We were right! At the underwater fire mountain in Perfect Fjord there is a different thing with living creatures in it.
How did you get there so fast? Murel asked.
We did not go there. Our relatives called to us, frightened by a great whirlpool.
They wanted to know if we knew what it was, if our fire mountain made a whirlpool too. We said yes and told them it was made by a giant bubble that was home to a herd of otter creatures and that you had lost it with your brother inside. They looked, and though they did not see your brother, they saw the bubble.
Thanks, cousins! she replied. I'll go right now.
Even knowing they would be too busy to go with her, she was about to tell her parents where she was going so they wouldn't worry, and then the copter returned.
Hovering overhead, it lowered a rope ladder. Responding to Mum's gestures,
Aunty Sinead carefully stood and prepared to climb up. The noise and waves generated by the wind of the copter's rotors made it hard for Murel to hear herself think, much less contact Da. She couldn't see him for all of the boats and whales.
The echolocation used by the whales also interfered with her own sonar.
She thought the copter would load and take off again but Johnny climbed down the ladder and shouted something at Mum, though Murel could make out none of the conversation.
She didn't know which way Perfect Fjord was, and if she waited to ask Mum and Da, she was nervous that they might insist she return to Kilcoole with the copter while they waited for it to finish evacuating people before they got around to fetching Ronan. Meanwhile, the aliens might decide to take off and take Ronan with them for good. Adults could be so poky, and time was of the essence! She decided on a compromise. First she asked the closest whale how to get to the fjord.
You've got a lot of tail asking anything else after you tricked us into fetching and carrying for you all day, the whale replied, blowing a fountain of water through his blowhole in a decidedly derisive manner. But he added, Swim north along the coast. You can't miss it.
Then she found the smallest Honu, the little one she and Ro thought of as their personal friend, and told him where she was going and why. She asked him to tell
Ke-ola so he could tell Mum and Da when they asked. Tell them to come too, maybe with the copter, though it should land on the fjord's shore and wait a reasonable amount of time for us to surface before trying to find us, she said. I don't think the aliens will let Ro go because I say so, but they might if they think the adults will find them if they don't. They want to avoid contact as much as possible.
Then, with the copter still hovering and her Mum and Johnny still shouting at each other, she and Sky struck out, veering north and paralleling the shoreline as the orca had directed. They rapidly left behind the rescue boats. She hoped that with both her and Ro gone again, Mum and Da would decide their children needed rounding up before anything else happened.
FINALLY THE WORLD stopped spinning and whooshing as the city settled over a new vent. Outside the city's shield the deep sea waters teemed with fish. Beneath the pathways winding among the buildings, the deep geothermal rift glowed a bright cherry red. Ronan guessed it was closer to the surface than the last vent had been. So they'd moved, but they seemed to still be on Petaybee, maybe not too far from where they'd been before.
Ronan supposed he should probably be afraid, but he was sure his family would find and fetch him before long, even if he didn't exactly know how they'd go about it.
With Tikka mad at him, he had no one to talk to. He was wary of Kushtaka. Even though she might not be mean, she was grieving over losing her son and therefore not in a very good mood. But there were a lot of the other alien otters swimming around, and he decided to try to find someone else to talk to. There was still so much he was curious about. Even if they wiped his mind later, he'd be satisfied now, and it would pass the time until his family came to take him home.
But the first thing to do was find Sky. Tikka said the little otter was okay so he must be around somewhere. If she had showed him where to slide, being an otter, he might be sliding still. Lucky for him that these aliens enjoyed sliding too.
Probably because they'd taken otter form, some of the otters' other characteristics had rubbed off on them. Ronan hoped Sky hadn't been sliding when the city started whirling or he could have had a wilder ride than even otters liked.
Since the walls of the room where Ronan was incarcerated did not reappear even after Tikka departed and the city settled, he simply swam out of it. Looking up and down the streets, he tried to get his bearings. He remembered Tikka gesturing toward a tall spiraling tower, but now that he had time to look around, there were more of them than he'd thought.
Who could he ask? There was that beam thing they used to gather food. His relationship with Kushtaka had been fairly friendly when they last visited, so maybe those aliens didn't realize he'd been demoted in status from guest to prisoner.
He found the right hole again after poking his head in a few others first.
None of the places he investigated initially were residences. One of them seemed to be some sort of power plant, and its floor opened directly onto the cherry colored vent below. Oddly, the room wasn't hot, but Ronan guessed this was where the city's lights came from. More tubes of spinning water drew fire from the vent, and at intervals big otters added some sort of rocks to it that caused it to turn colors.
There were valves over openings in the walls where the water tubes disappeared.
Ronan tried to ask the big otters coloring the water about the slide, but the collective sound of the water tubes might have made it hard for them to hear. Or maybe they just didn't want to talk to him.
In the next room shells were stacked and racked by kind and color, but there were no giant otters stacking or racking them.
He saw some odd-looking equipment in the next two rooms and alien otters very intent on images hovering in front of them, but none of them responded to him either. He thought they might be monitoring the surveillance cameras, possibly focusing them on different areas surrounding the city's new location.
He didn't recognize the room with the "hunting" beam until he happened upon it, and even then he wouldn't have recognized it without the baskets of neatly sorted fish and shellfish that filled the room. Two of the aliens were tossing more fish and shells back and forth, catching them in baskets with a playfulness that reminded him of Sky.
I'm hungry, he told them. Where could I get a couple of fish?
Catch! the nearest one said, and flung a fish back to him. Ronan ducked under it, caught it on his nose, and after it hung there for a moment, opened his mouth and ate it.
Good trick! one of the aliens said. Mraka, he balanced that fish on his olfactory organ! Do it again so she can see!
I'll be needing another fish, then, Ronan replied. A nice fat one like the last.
Mraka was so impressed she threw him another so she could see the trick again.
Then she asked, Can you show us how to do that?
I think it's a seal sort of thing, he replied, but he coached them nevertheless on how to duck under the fish so it landed just so, and how to hold your head so that even if your whole body moved, your nose kept the fish aloft until it just smelled so overwhelmingly good you had to eat it. I can hold a regular ball for a lot longer, he told them. But you have to eat the fish. It's mean not to when they can't breathe. Huh. He paused as it occurred to him that there was something a bit- well, fishy-about the state of these fish.