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

(2) Taiki: Devir

"Surface," signs Sar. "Get to the surface."

The surface isn't safety. That's always been my people's stance, beaten into every child by experience and generations of stories. But everything has changed, and the deep may not be safe either anymore. I jet after Sar and Ande. We pull up two arm-spans from the waves. Ande catches Sar, who is breathing too fast. She pulls them behind her with a quiet sign. I shift as well, blocking them from the view of anyone hiding in the water below.

Over the faint, gurgling swoosh of the waves, a sob snatches my attention. I can't tear my attention from the deep, but my chest clenches. It's Sar. Of course it's Sar. This is what nearly dying does to a person, when their own people are out to get them, and nowhere in the ocean is safe. Ande pulls them onto her back. They cling to her and put their head down. Their hair and hers help hide their face. Sar has had a chance to groom theirs properly over the last few days, and it's curly—dark ringlets just stiff enough to hold their shape against the water's beating. I don't know why I didn't notice before.

This is safer. Ande still has her hands free to fight, and Sar can break off if we need to escape. In the meantime, anyone lurking below us won't see their face, most of their too-thin figure, or the scar on their stomach where Arcas stabbed them. In the dark water, they're hard to identify. I shift closer again. The water below us remains empty.

Until it isn't. There, at the farthest edge of my night-eyes' range, a light blips into view, then out again, flickering almost too fast for the eye to see.

"Signal squid Kels," I sign, hand-lights dimmed to the barest glow.

"Kels?" returns Ande.

"Their Risi won't have reached the surface yet."

These are Devir's people. For all the times I've interacted with Devir while visiting the Sandsingers, I don't actually know where red signal squid Kels stand in the war. At least I can communicate with them. Their language is a dialect of my people's; the two are mutually intelligible. Ande might be able to understand it, but if it comes down to negotiation, nuance can easily be lost in dialectical differences. Which means any introductions are up to me.

"What do you recommend?" signs Ande, for only me to see.

"It might be worth it to talk first."

"Sounds like a plan."

I move forward where my lights won't illuminate her and Sar. It takes a lot of concentration to achieve the flickering that will make my signs recognizable to the people below; a lot of nuance in their dialect comes from sign speed, which is more easily determined when a person's hand-lights flash. When I've got the flicker right, I brighten my hands and flash a short message into the darkness. "We want to talk."

Nothing moves. Against our immediate surroundings, those depths are inky, though that's as much from the time of day as any objective light level. The ocean's surface shimmers with the barest residual of light. This is hunting time for many of the ocean's predators. Dusk, sundown, last-light, nightwake; I know a half-dozen words for it, but the one that comes to mind is Karu, from the language I learned and lived back on Lix'i. Breakeye, they called it. The time when the sun drops below the horizon, and everyone goes half-blind for a time before their night-eyes adjust to the darkened water.

I don't know how many Kels are down there; signal squid and their like-Kels rarely come alone, but their groups can range from a handful to hundreds. Hundreds is rare among the Kels, at least. They've suffered disappearances just like the rest of the Shalda, and I've heard they've fractured further since the war began. I don't know why.

The water remains empty and silent save for the distant crackle-pop of shrimp. Those shrimp shouldn't be here. There's a chance that's just the ocean changing, but there's an equally high chance whatever group we're facing has a Nekta-singer among them who knows the shrimp's song. This might be a trap. Anyone traveling this way without a directional sense could be fooled into thinking they're going a different way, especially around breakeye when the light in these upper waters gets disorienting. Even we stopped when we figured out something was wrong. That might be all the opening this group needs.