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She felt her body giving in to him long before her mind agreed. Then, as if drowning, she found herself gasping for air, trying to come up to breathe.
“Kai...wait...the rules,” Jun panted as she pushed on Kai’s chest.
“To hell with the rules.” He pulled away from her, his brown eyes dilated with want, his face flushed above hers, salt water dripping off his chin.
“You need to get better. You need to train. For the competition...”
Kai frowned. “Is that what this is? You don’t want me now that you know I’m broken?”
Before she could respond, she heard a voice calling.
“Kai!” the name came over the ocean breeze. Jun recognized it as Aunt Kaimana. They both glanced up to see the older woman frantically waving her arms.
Jun realized something was wrong. Po! Jun scrambled out from beneath Kai, and she took off running. She heard Kai coming after her.
“It’s Po,” Aunt Kaimana said, out of breath, to Jun. “Come quick.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FEARING THE WORST, Kai sprinted inside his house after Jun, not caring about the sand he carried on his bare feet as he ran toward the sound, blood pumping in his temples, panic in his throat. Something was wrong.
“He was just taking a nap...” Aunt Kaimana said. “But now he’s screaming and...he won’t wake up.” Kai saw the boy thrashing wildly, his eyes open but not seeing. Jun desperately tried to corral him, but he ran from her, shouting in absolute terror. This was the water incident times a million, except now there was no water.
Kai leaped into the room, scooping the boy up. He screamed more and fought him, but Kai was too strong, and he held the boy still in his arms. Aunt Kaimana was right. It was as if the boy was in some kind of strange trance. He wouldn’t wake up.
“Call 911,” Kai told his aunt.
* * *
KAI FOLLOWED THE ambulance that held Jun and Po, with his aunt in the passenger seat as she explained how out of the blue it had been. The boy had been yawning, so she’d laid him down for a nap. Fifteen minutes later, he was screaming and running around the room, bumping into things and nearly bringing down a dresser on top of himself.
“It was like he was possessed,” Auntie said, shaking her head. “More than just a nightmare.”
Kai pulled into the hospital parking lot and flew out of the car, his aunt not too far behind him. He felt his stomach shrink as he looked at the familiar white building—where he’d been rushed after the tsunami last year.
He’d sliced an artery in his leg. The doctors thought it was a miracle he’d lasted as long as he had in the water without bleeding out.
He still remembered dog-paddling and looking for floating debris Po could safely sit on. Then, not too long after that, darkness had come, and so had the first shark, attracted by the blood in the water. He’d been lucky not to have been eaten. Lucky that Dallas, who’d been looking for him in the aftermath, hadn’t given up the search, or Kai would’ve died in that floodwater.
Kai took a deep breath as he swept through the automatic doors of the hospital, anxious to find Jun and Po. “I’ll wait here,” Aunt Kaimana said, sitting in the front of the waiting room. “Too many bodies back there will just make the doctors crazy.”
Kai nodded and rushed back to the treatment rooms, just gurneys separated by curtains, where doctors examined a now-sleeping Po.
A resident in green scrubs, a stethoscope hung around her neck, asked Jun questions while the young mother glanced at her boy anxiously.
“Is this the first episode like this?” the resident asked, holding a clipboard where she scribbled notes.
Jun shook her head. “No, last week was the first.”
“This happened before?” Kai asked, his voice louder than he’d intended. Jun glanced at him guiltily and then away.
“It wasn’t this bad,” Jun said. “The first time, he eventually went back to bed. I just thought he was having a nightmare.”
The resident in green scrubs nodded and pushed up her wire-frame glasses on her nose. She put down her clipboard and resumed her examination of the boy, listening to his heart and lungs and looking in his eyes.
A nurse walked in wearing scrubs showing surfing bears in Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses. Kai’s hands twitched. Something was wrong with Po and he was terrified to find out what it was. Autism? Brain tumor? Worse? Po lay still, seeming as if he was sleeping soundly on the gurney. Had they given him something? He looked at Jun, saw her tense mouth and wondered how she managed to keep it together.
