“Were you here?” Aegir asked to the open wind.When Paria fell?
“We’d just changed,” I answered. Usually, I let Selena explain. She liked to talk. I didn’t. But her eyes had locked onto the massive cave ahead, where we’d been pulled in and ordered to watch and not interfere, and I could almost scent the sour air of her fear rising through the salty wind.
A scream echoed in my head.
I forced the memory away, taking a step toward the center of the island. “Ourfirstchange. We’re human-born.”
Surprised interest flickered in Aegir’s gaze as he trailed, laced with something sad. “There aren’t enough Naiads in the world anymore for colonies to fall.”
“The young ones are still with Thaan.”
“What does he do with them?”
Selena sighed. “Everything. Sends them to the mines, the smiths, the orchards and farms, the palace as servants. Human trades that happen to be close to water. I think most of the males wind up in Calder’s army.”
Pheolix stretched his shoulders as though working out a mild itch. “This place has all the welcome of a graveyard.”
Clouds coasted overhead, leaving us under the overcast sun. Although it wasn’t raining, the percolating smell of wet rock hung thick in the air, dried salt encrusted in the sides of rough tide pools.
Selena stared ahead, eyes on the cave. “It is a graveyard.”
The rock smoothed the further we walked. I wondered if the stone had naturally formed more smoothly beyond the reach of the tide or if thousands of years of foot traffic had worn it flat. Buried under heavy clouds, the cave ahead cast no shadow. But it was dark inside.
“I don’t think the Scale of Safiro would be in the main cavern,” Selena said. “Wherever it is, it’s been there for a thousand years. If it could be easily found, it would have been.”
Aegir halted at the mouth of the cavern, peering into its depths. Wind funneled through the dark throat, cascading over us as though the island exhaled slowly. Goosebumps prickled along his arms, raising the lines ofhis whirling water tattoos. “Unless they didn’t know of its existence.” He glanced at me, and for some reason, I shifted my eyes away, my cheeks warm. “I didn’t know about the stones until you told me.”
I chewed on the idea. Selena, too, tilted her head, thinking aloud. “Sidra might have. She was born in these waters when it was the Parian Sea. The ParianDomuswould have welcomed her when the colony stood below this rock, and even after it fell, these waters became neutral. If I were her, I would have sent Naiads here to find it.”
“But that’s just the thing, isn’t it?” I pointed at the stone, heavy in lichen and moss, painted with the fine grain of ancient limestone. “Sidra can’t climb on land. Thaan can’t enter the salt. Both are required to reach the crystal. And if only a Naiad ofPrizivac Vodedescent can actually secure it, that rules out almost everyone else.”
But it went deeper than simple heritage.A child of the moon, Theia had said.
Pheolix bent to retrieve a round pebble from the rocky floor, tossing it into the dark. Its landing echoed back to us, first the sharp clang of limestone, then the unmistakable plunk of water. “Don’t do that,” Selena hissed.
Pheolix smiled impishly at her. “If Sidra might send Naiads to find it, why wouldn’t Thaan do the same?”
“Because Thaan is so deficient in trust, he’d be suspicious of his own feet if they weren’t attached to his body.” I breached the cave’s outer boundary, stepping under the hooded stone, and looked back at my sister. “Ready?”
Selena stepped forward, arms crossed, hands gripping her own shoulders.
Into the mouth of a dead colony we wandered.
The interior of the Parian cavern was a winding knot of tunnels not unlike that of an ant’s nest. Some passages dipped into pools of water and back out, liquid air pockets trapped at different levels. The rooms had been lit with bright water when I’d last walked these halls ten years before,but the dark shade of pitch was all that shone now. The bioluminescence survived in only one room along the upper levels, a small storage cave lined with jars and dusty, dried herbs. Selena’s shoulders relaxed when we found it, and she scooped up a jar of the lit water for each of us.
“Just a gentle shake if it starts to go dim,” she said, handing them out. I almost wished she hadn’t.
Naiads were lunar creatures, more nocturnal than humans. Our sense of sight was sharper in the dark. Until I held the jar, I hadn’t seen the deadaeroplants that lined the walls, shriveled like crisps of burnt paper. Though they were less haunting than the bones that lay in piles.
Bodies once stacked and abandoned.
“Best hold your breath and speak as little as possible,” Aegir murmured at the sight of the shriveled succulents. “If there’s no oxygen in here, there’s likely methane or carbon dioxide instead.”
Selena nodded. “That gives us about thirty minutes before we have to return to the surface.”
Pheolix leaned against the cavern wall. “Should we split up? Cover more ground?”
“No,” Selena quickly said.
