Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(15) Taiki: The Team

Part of me freezes the moment Ande mentions the prophecy. There are Kels here I don't have a good read on yet, and I know even she doesn't trust them all. Ruka knows about the prophecy, Yaz has never mentioned it but almost certainly does, but the others... if anyone here has a connection to enemies of the islanders, even telling them about the prophecy could be dangerous. We don't know how much they know.

I'm watching Ruka for a reply, but it's Finika who lifts his hands. "Eleven moons," he signs, and he may well have hit me with a boulder.

That's no time at all.

Travel to get anywhere significant in the Sami-sana—or even up and down the island chain—can take a moon or more, and that's just in one direction. Messages take moon-fractions to travel on even the fastest relay Nekta. And negotiations with any Kel peoples we may need to reason with, let alone recruit... those can take years. We don't have years.

Eleven moons.

I knew the end of the prophecy was near, but the number slams a spear through what little hope I could still maintain that we had time. Memories of time wasted flash through my mind. Me and Ande's journey to Rapal, on the days when we deemed ourselves too sore to catch a ride with Nekta. The trip to the shrine. The long, slow slog along the ocean floor.

We could have gone so much faster if I'd healed Sar sooner. If I'd asked why they were so exhausted—depth-sickness got them bad—or if they'd trusted me enough to sleep close enough for me to help with their nightmares. And all that time we wasted on a raid with the Sandsingers, when the Singer doesn't exist...

Hindsight kills.

Ande has unleashed a flurry of questions for Finika: where he got the number, how it was calculated, how his people know for sure. He winces a little at the mention of his people. He signs with a distinct accent: red signal squid, only without the flickering lights. He learned from Yaz or Yaz's people, then. They must have known each other for a long time.

For all I've spoken with Yaz, I don't know much about Finika. And I've even talked to him directly. But though Yaz mentions him all the time, she's never once given backstory, even when she tells me about her own. She just skips it. I'm only noticing now.

Hand-language is difficult for Finika. There's always interpretation involved when a person signs one-handed, and while the red signal squid-Kel dialect—like all Shalda ones—relies on broad motions that he could use the stump of his other hand to replicate, he doesn't use it. I watch it closely as he signs. There's no motion: not even a twitch where a two-handed sign would be. He learned the language after losing it, then, though maybe not long enough after that he was comfortable using the stump for things.

I know better than to ask. I know these kinds of losses are intensely personal, and I know it's rude to pry. But I don't want to. I don't even want to know, really, because when I stop and ask myself why I'm even watching, I'm not trying to learn about Finika. Well, maybe just a little. And I'm scared to ask. But what I really want, by proxy, is to learn more about Yaz. The things she hasn't told me. She asked me lots of questions when we talked, and I answered all of them, and then she asked more. She did what I've done in situations where I don't trust my own social skills, even though hers are fine. She kept me talking so she didn't have to.

I know she left her family group because she got close with Finika and had to choose one or the other, but I don't know how that closeness started, or what makes anger burn deep in Yaz's eyes sometimes when she talks about her people. Especially in relation to Finika. I don't even know where she comes from. She's given me the general area of the ocean, but there are a lot of islands in the near-chain end of this archipelago, and Karu identity is inextricably tied to the island that granted it. It's not normal that Yaz hasn't given me a name.