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

(12) Ande: On That Night

Yaz's eyes drop from mine. There's a long moment where she says nothing, and I cross my arms and wait. I've got time.

"I need one agreement before we talk about this," signs Yaz at last. "If Finika shows up, we pause this conversation. If she's staying, we move somewhere else. That is my one condition."

"That's fine by me."

Yaz is the main one I want to talk to anyway—both as the fighter between the two of them, and as the one who initially broke the news to me about Telu.

"Thank you," signs Yaz. "As for that night, there's only so much I'll be able to tell you, and most of it will be second-hand. I wasn't there."

"Where were you?"

"Protecting Fin. Fights are still a trigger for her, and I knew that one was going to be bad from the moment people started arriving in the water. I got Fin to the quieter island-side, and we spent the night there. I wasn't paying much attention to anything else, except to keep us both safe in case anyone came around the island. Only one new island-Kel did. He didn't find us."

"You lived with the Karu-Kels around the island, didn't you?"

"We did."

"What were they doing?"

"Fighting your people."

My blood boils. My hands are shaking—half from pure emotion, the other from keeping them from leaping up and unleashing every insult, swear, and curse I know for how smoothly she signs those words. She still shows no trace of remorse. She shows no trace of anything.

"I'm not going to justify the actions of either side," signs Yaz. "Both our people hunted each other for generations. There were years when yours hid along the shore and speared the Karu from the rocks at night when they entered the shallows to search for medicinal snails. There were years when the Karu sank your boats and drowned the people in them. There were years when yours took so much from the water, the villages on the reefs nearly starved. When your people offered one of your own on that rock in the bay, it was taken as a chance to relieve a little of that pain. Those people died before the water took them."

She takes a deep breath. "Is any of that right? No, but when you put the history together on both sides, it becomes at least understandable. Both sides have hated each other since the ocean started deteriorating, and nothing either did ever changed that. The islanders couldn't leave the island, and the Karu couldn't leave the reef. They held it mostly stably until the conflict with the open water escalated, and the Sami started arriving during their birthing season to occupy the lagoon. The Karu there were forced to the back of the island, and defended themselves until they could drive out the invaders. There was less food at the back, and those people can't cross open water. If they couldn't take back the lagoon before a few moons elapsed, they'd starve. It was a constant source of fear. When your people showed up that night with fish tails, people panicked. They thought it was an attack, instigated by the Sandsingers. They thought your people were there to drive them off and stay. They reacted accordingly."

"They couldn't see that mine were just as scared?"

"If those Karu people had begun spilling onto your beaches, developing two legs, and running panicked into the heart of your village, how would your people have responded?"

A stone weight sinks through my insides. They'd have responded the exact same way the Karu did: grabbed weapons and tried to kill as many of the invaders as they could. Simply imagining the panic is enough to set my heart to beating from nothing but my own imagination. The emotions I can imagine are so visceral, they feel real.

"Would I have participated in that if I'd been there with the rest of the village?" signs Yaz. "If I was convinced I needed to protect the people I cared about, yes, I would. I neither regret nor thank the fact that someone else I care about was the reason I wasn't there for that fighting. And I would hold nothing against you for feeling the same. Does that answer your question?"