A Nearer Moon (13 page)

P
erdy pulled and pulled, down through the swamp water, down through the tangle of slimy weeds. She pulled the boat, though it was twenty times her size, pulled the human with it into her lair. She dragged the boat up into the bubble of trapped air and onto the rocky beach.

The human was coughing, sputtering as she clung to the sides of her boat, sludge sliding off her hair and splattering at her feet.

Perdy sank into the pile of upturned turtle shells that propped her up like a queen in her underwater court and righted the coronet on her brow.

Perdy was tired. So tired. Pain shook through her tiny body and clattered her very bones. Something about this human rattled her insides, rattled loose the oldest, sharpest hurt inside her.

“Why have you called me?” she asked, the words scraping like stones sliding past one another. “Why couldn't you just leave me alone?”

The human licked her lips and spat out the grit she found there. “It's my sister,” she croaked. “She's sick. Your curse has made her sick. Please take it away—please!” The human began to shake, skinny elbows bumping against pumping ribs.

“You can keep me.” The girl looked around her at the wet darkness. “You can keep me here forever, if you just make Willow better.”

“What would I want with a giant human stomping around the place and sucking up all the air? My curse,” Perdy muttered.
“Pffft.”

The human's chin began to wobble and water leaked out of her eyes, rolling down her cheeks and splashing against the rocks. Perdy raised a weary hand to her brow. It was all too much. “Just go,” she said. “Go and take your tears with you. Go and leave me to my misery.”

The human was blubbering now, sunk to her knees on the sharp rocks that dug into her flesh and scraped
the skin raw. Even on her knees, she towered over the little sprite. “Please,” she begged. “Please take your curse away.”

“My curse,” Perdy echoed, swatting at the air as if she could squash the idea as easily as a bug. She slid off her falling-down throne and approached the human. “A curse needs passion to feed on—love or hate, either will do. What do I have inside me? Nothing. I have nothing, no one left.”

The human eyed the water lapping at the edge of the rocky beach and the crabs skittering into the shadows. She looked at the dripping ceiling of the cave above her and at the miserable creature before her. She stood and walked to her boat half in, half out of the black swamp water. But instead of shoving off, instead of drawing a deep breath to carry her all the way to the surface, the human spoke again.

“What do I have to offer, if you won't take me?” Her voice trembled with the weariness of spent tears. “You want our hut? Take it. You want our garden? You can have it. Here, take my boat. Take it. Take whatever you want, just give me my sister back!”

Perdy stomped across the rocky beach and kicked the wooden hull. “Why would I want your stu—” The boat rocked the tiniest bit, not enough to send it back into the
water, but just enough so the charm tacked to the bow gleamed for a second as it caught the dim light bouncing off the cave ceiling.

Perdy's eyes grew wide and she crawled up the side and into the boat, scrambling over the slippery wood to the narrow bow. She reached out. Her hand trembled as she pried the charm away from the wood. Her fingers skittered over the gleaming pewter as if they knew the shape of the thing they touched. Her mouth fell open and a sigh, full of the bleak, lonely decades, left her lungs.

Perdy's eyes narrowed even as her insides wrenched with unfamiliar hope. She whipped around to face the human. “H-How did you . . . ?” she stammered. “Where did you find this?”

“It's just a good luck charm. My grandmother found it when she was a girl. That's what you want? Take it. Please.” The human crouched beside the boat and raised her clasped hands to Perdy, begging. “Please, just let my sister go.”

With each breath, Perdy felt her limbs lightening, sloughing off the terrible weight that had held her down for so very long. She looked up. The human's eyes blinked wide; a question perched on her lips.

Perdy flicked the locket open. Her eyes spilled over with black tears that ran like tar down her face, black as
a lonely, shriveled heart, black as agony, black as a curse. They ran until the black faded to gray and then to clear, salty tears. She looked with eyes bright as the day they were born into the locket, where a gauzy, white space shimmered like a trapped cloud.

Perdy spoke, her voice thin and breaking on the single word. “Gia?”

A face appeared in the clouds, and the white space reached out, wrapped around Perdy, and pulled her into itself. She looked back once to where the human crouched, staring at the locket, her eyes shiny with some great thing that Perdy suddenly felt too, a thing that she had not felt in such a very long time.

The cave echoed with the sound of two hearts beating rapidly together.

Thump
thump.

(
Thump
thump.)

Thump
thump.

(
Thump
thump.)

W
ith a bang that rattled every bone in Luna's body, the creature was sucked into the locket. The bang blew Luna backward, out of the cave and into the water. It was loud enough to rumble the bed of the swamp and strong enough to rattle the logs that held the water captive.

Luna clawed through slime and sludge and the film of bright green growth at the top of the water. She gasped a great lungful of air as she broke the surface, sputtering and choking. A current whipped up and dragged at her legs, trying to pull her toward the groaning, bending dam. Sticks and logs and entire trees rushed past as, with
a final, earth-shuddering crash, the dam burst loose.

Luna paddled and pulled, reaching for anything solid she could hang on to. But the water was too strong. With the pent-up fury of decades, it swept away everything it touched. In a last, desperate lunge, Luna stretched toward the leggy roots of a pulai tree. She kicked and she grabbed and her fingers closed around the sturdy wood. Her legs trailed in the water behind her, trying to drag her with it. But she fought back, not for Willow this time, or for Mama, not for Granny Tu or Benny or for anyone else. She fought for herself.

She had broken every one of Mama's rules. Even if it hadn't been enough to save Willow, she had done everything, tried everything she could. She still had Granny Tu, who loved her no matter what. She had Benny, the best friend anybody could ask for. Mama would come out of her grief someday. And they would figure out how to be a family again.

I did everything I could.

The thought gave her strength. She gripped the roots, wrapping her legs and arms around the tree, hugging tight as the water streamed past her, taking with it the last of her regret, the last of her guilt.

Inch by inch the water fell, inch by inch it pulled back from the flats, laying bare land where wildflowers had
once grown, where mud now gurgled and spat, tasting the air for the first time in a very long time. The village trembled on its stilts, and the people clung to the railings as they watched the water roar past. It shook itself from its swampy, gritty dregs and drained into the dry riverbed, the water, at last, set free.

L
una clung to the pulai until the river settled on a channel between trees and stayed put. She shivered, as much from the chill of drenched clothes against her skin as from all that had happened. The creature was gone. The swamp was gone. Was it too much to hope that maybe even the sickness was gone?

In the time that it took for the sun to climb to the highest point in the sky, the river had rid itself of the silt and the muck, and ran clean and clear as the headwaters that gave it life. Luna's boat was lost. Maybe Granny Tu would show her how to make a new one, skinny with high sides instead of shallow and wide,
and with paddles instead of a steering pole.

Luna looked around the bubbling mud that stretched as far as she could see. She slid down and touched her foot to the surface, pushed against it, trying to stand. With a
slurp
and a
pop
, her foot was sucked down into the muck. She yanked it back out again, and shimmied higher up the trunk.

She was stuck.

Out in the river a fish as long as her arm leaped from the water, snatching a mayfly out of the air and splashing gleefully back down. The huge Perigee moon had already risen a quarter of the way up, a pool of milk against a pale blue afternoon sky.

“Luna?”

The voice sounded far away and too high, too frantically high.

“Benny!” she shouted. “Benny, over here!”

Benny wove slowly between the pulai trees, his limbs splayed wide like a water skipper, shifting first an arm, then a leg, then another arm, and the other leg. His feet were strapped to a web of sticks that spread his weight out over the mud so they hardly sank in at all. He held two sticks like poles in his hands, with little webs at the end of those, too. Each time he moved, the web lifted out of the mud with a sound like a crab plopping into the water.

“Benny!” Luna cried. “I've never in my whole life been so happy to see you.”

Benny slurped closer. “What'd I tell you? Perigee hero. It was meant to be!”

Luna laughed and edged toward the mud as Benny sidled alongside her tree.

“You sure those things can hold us both? I don't want to sink you.”

“What, you think you're my first rescue of the day? Hop on.”

Luna lowered herself onto Benny's back, and sure enough, the webs sank a little farther into the muck, but not too far. With a grunt and a few carefully placed steps, Benny turned around and slurped back toward the village.

“Benny, have you seen Willow? Is she any better?”

“I don't know. I haven't been to your hut yet, there were so many people stranded.” He shook his head gently, so even that small movement wouldn't throw them both off balance. “Some Perigee this turned out to be, eh?”

She patted his shoulder. “I'm sure they'll still make time for the firecrackers tonight, don't you worry.”

“Luna,” Benny said in a voice that was pitched just a little too carefully. “What were you doing out there?”

Luna sighed. She didn't know if what had happened was a thing she could find words for. All her life she'd heard stories of the terrible creature below, but now she found herself wishing she could hold on to that look on its face just before it disappeared, that look of hope and love and promise.

“I met the creature, only it's not—she's not what you'd think. I watched the sickness—the curse—whatever you want to call it, I watched it roll in black tears out of her. She was . . . I don't know. It's a long story, Benny. A long, long story.”

“You know you're going to tell me everything.”

“Yeah, Benny. I know.”

Luna laid her chin on Benny's shoulder and held on tight as he brought them steadily closer to the village. The huts seemed out of place, like too-tall waterbirds airing their bare ankles. Everything looked different. The place she had spent her whole life was a place she was going to have to get to know all over again.

“Benny, you little water skipper, you!” Granny Tu called, waving an arm over her head. “You bring that girl up here where I can give her a proper hug.”

Luna laughed, but the noise caught in her throat. Mama ran out of the house and gripped the railing as she watched her daughter draw near.

Granny Tu nudged Mama with her elbow.

“You did this?” Mama asked, her eyes full of something buoyant and bright. “You drained the swamp and got rid of the creature?”

“Something like that,” Luna said, her wince softening into a grin. “I did it for Willow. Was it—Is she—”

Mama got down on her knees and reached for Luna. The rushing water had left even the ladder high and dry, and Luna had to stand on Benny's shoulders to reach the bottom rung and climb. Mama pulled her up the last bit, and held her close for several heartbeats. Granny Tu wrapped her arms around the both of them. Luna couldn't see their faces, but she could feel the ragged pull of their breath, the heavy sighs that set their worry free.