Agapanthus stared at their backs for a moment. She wanted to collapse to the floor and rest her head on her knees.
Grandmother Surla coughed. Agapanthus had forgotten she was there. “I wonder what’s taking them so long?” Grandmother Surla surveyed the crowd as she spoke. She paused. Her breath expounded wispily from her chest, and she swept her shoulder-length black hair away from her face. “Agapanthus. Don’t you play with the other children? You spend so much time out by the Waters. I thought you played with them there?”
Agapanthus thought of the mushy sand wrapping over her feet as she waded into the Waters. She thought of the coarse, rich smells, the dim heat of the red sun. She thought of the arching cliffs, heavy with dust, and the row of children running down them. Down the hill, down to the shadowed sea, down to the expanses above which Aamsh and Jord billowed. She thought of the clipping noise of ripples against rock. The slimy, black water plants stretching their stalks above the waterline. The other children, screaming down the opposite edge of the shore, yelling because there might be water creatures under their feet, racing each other as they swam to the distant fishing boats. She watched them and they never glanced her way. They knew she was there, they must, but they never looked at her.
“I go there to play in the Waters.”
“By yourself?” Surla finally met Agapanthus’s eyes. “Don’t they ever ask you to play?”
“Not usually.”
“Even the others like you?”
Agapanthus shook her head. She liked to think that she was left out because she wanted to be. They had invited her once, long ago; a mixed group of exchangers and Deeyans who liked to play chase. She’d declined because she wanted to hunt for pebbles. She told them she would join them the next day, but they never asked her again. That was her one chance, and she’d lost it.
“Well you need to fix that,” Surla said. “No use being anti-social at such a young age.”
They made it to Kopri Karia, one of the servers handing out the meal. All the servers and food preparers were required to shave their heads. On most it looked strange, but it made Kopri look regal. Her highly arched eyebrows looked both sharp and kind. She didn’t smile, but she nodded at them. Agapanthus clutched the cold bowl to her chest. Inside were small, filmy chunks of red-breasted-sper meat. Its rawness made it gelatinous—clear but bloody, freshly killed that day. Surla and Agapanthus sat on the floor.
“I don’t see anyone here,” Surla said. Her lips already shined from the blood of her first bite. “No Balia, or Fetru, or Lopor. Where is everyone?” She dug her fingers into the mass of food and brought some to her mouth. As she chewed, she said, “And where are Pittick and the others? Watching that swimmer, still?”
Agapanthus clenched her teeth together as she worked through her first bite. The food tasted better than it smelled. But, still, she wanted to run out of the lukewarm air of the cafeteria. Away from the saliva noises and the fragrant blood and the scattered words of mostly-strangers. The island wasn’t very big—in fact, it was one of the smallest—but there were still a lot of people she didn’t know.
Surla and Agapanthus both ate sloppily, and loudly. Agapanthus couldn’t remember spending this much time alone with Grandmother Surla. It made her nervous. She tried to focus on her food, but her gaze was drawn to the rustling clusters of people, the stragglers still procuring their food. She watched the door, too, hoping Leera or Pittick would save her from being alone with Surla.
Finally Pittick rushed in. He bounced to his knees, his white teeth barred as he breathed through his mouth.
“The food is losing its freshness,” Grandmother Surla said. “May the Gods tell me, what took so long?”
“They didn’t make it. Lapars’s son—” Pittick said, his words rushed and clattering together. “And Lapars, he went out and—”
Static pierced the speakers near the ceiling. Then the Contact’s steady voice poured through. “All residents of rightwards Yeela. At the shore.”
Grunts overtook the room as people stood. They adjusted their dresses away from their necks or down lower toward their knees, and left their bowls—stained, half-empty—on the floor. They scurried out into the redness. Once under the blushing sun, panic hit. Agapanthus could see it in their faces. Tight, pulled; yellow eyes flickering.
“His arm!” a woman said from deeper in the crowd.
“No, that happened in the water,” a man’s voice answered her.
Pittick sighed and continued pushing his way through. He nudged shoulders and ribcages gently, with just the tips of his fingernails; a light, tapping invitation to shift over.
“There she is,” Pittick muttered, and they were once again next to Leera, Tayzaya, and Imari.
Agapanthus stepped forward, head bent, assuming Leera and Aunt Imari would greet her. Neither of them did, because there, with his thick necklace of black stones, stood the Contact. Agapanthus could barely see him over the rows of people. She could see him only from the chin up. The rest of him was muffled by skin-clad backs and thin black hair.
He was young, for a Contact. The last Contact had been one-thousand years old when he died. Agapanthus still remembered his death festival well, even though she had been very young—she remembered his pale lips slightly parted, his stomach sunken down like an empty crevasse underneath his clothes. They carried his body up to the highest cliff. All members of the Council slid their hands under his frail body and carried it above their heads. Some of them, almost as old as the Contact had been, struggled to keep their arms from shaking. But it had to be done. He had to be left there so that, within moments, he could disappear. There was a feeling of static in the air, and then a low whomp. And then he was gone. By then the new Contact had mounted the cliff. He looked down upon his subjects and said something about hearing the glimmering voices of the Gods. That was how one got to be a Contact; the voices. From then on it was his duty to listen to them—the voices of the all-watching—to tell the island of Yeela how to live. It had been that way since the Awakening, and so, they said, it would be forever.
“Look here,” the Contact bellowed. “We know this isn’t right. We know it’s forbidden to aid those who are swimming the rite of passage. If they aren’t going to make it, then it’s their time to return to the Gods. It’s not our place to help them in that journey.” The Contact swallowed roughly. His soft-looking, hefty chest rose and fell. “In this case he was bitten by a water creature; we assume it to be a Ltran, by what the fishermen are saying.”
Pittick leaned in closer to Leera. “Can’t he hurry this up? Poor Lapars’s son is just sitting there bleeding.”
Leera grunted. “And look how pale Lapars looks, himself.”
Agapanthus fell to her knees. Through a forest of legs, she saw a boy on his side, his whole arm and stomach and neck slathered with burgundy, clotted blood; an older man, lips moving, eyes shut, desperately covering the wound with his palms.
The Contact slowly faced the twin stars. All remained silent, except the Waters and the wind.
“So say the Gods: It is their destiny to drown.” The Contact’s face became thinner as he spoke. Grimmer, and harder. But in the deep yellow of his eyes, Agapanthus thought she saw suppressed tears. Certainly there was sadness there.
“But why? That doesn’t do any good,” Agapanthus whispered to Leera. “Why would they—”
“It’s what the Gods want. And if that’s what they want, we don’t question it.”
A small, leather-wrapped boat was pulled to shore. The Contact helped heave Lapars and his unconscious son into its bowl-shaped center. Two members of the Council carried in large rocks. Then they paddled out with great speed, the Contact solemnly looking down, the Waters wisping by underneath him.