Ice Phoenix Read Free Page B

be a marine biologist, saving the ocean, and I need to be in the sea looking at sea stuff but nooooo — instead I'm doomed by my mother to scrape coconuts. Where is the love?"
    She received only a raised eyebrow in response. "I'm gonna have coconut hands like you, and men will think that I work in the kitchen." That didn't work either. Her mother just shook her head and walked back to the kitchen. Terrana scowled and glared at her brother, whose turn it was to snigger.
    " Still, it beats spending my weekends in church playing the piano just to impress some stupid girl."
    She succeeded again. Archie was just too easy.
    "Akanisi is not stupid! She's tall, smart and beautiful and she can dance too! Not like you, flapping like a dying fish on the sand."
    "Fine then. I'll scrape the coconuts and you'll play the piano every weekend — in church. Did I mention that Akanisi is leaving for Suva next week and will be away for the rest of the holidays?"
    Her brother 's face twitched.
    " Guess not," she said, smiling sweetly before walking away. A few seconds later Archie followed, screaming.
    " Don't you dare touch those coconuts!"

3
The dream that started it all
     
     
    That night, Terrana went to bed early. As she lay there fiddling with the pearl around her neck, she wondered whether she would have the same dream again. She hoped so! Like a giant TV in her head, she would get to see strange people in weird worlds doing different things.
    The pearl gleamed in the candle light, distracting Terrana from her thoughts. A memory came to her. Black pearls were pretty common on her part of the island, and the women from the nearby village would gather and sell them at the market every week. They weren't very expensive because most of these pearls were tarnished in some way or another, marked by a ridge, hole, or bump.
    Terrana didn 't particularly care for them either, but the one around her neck was special. Puddy had given it to her. It was quite large, covering her thumbnail easily. The dolphin had dropped it into her hand one day and, without knowing why, she had asked her father to make a clasp for it. She liked the way it had formed into a teardrop and no matter which way she turned it, it always caught the light. Because it was from Puddy, it was especially sentimental.
    Even as she admired the pearl in the candlelight, she was already falling asleep. Eventually, her head fell to one side and drool trickled down the corner of her mouth and onto her pillow.
    I mages flashed by, one after the other. A beautiful, alien woman sitting astride a strange, winged animal. A city where colourful and outrageously designed buildings reached the clouds. There were trains that were sleek and white, running on different levels above the ground. Footpaths moved on their own so people didn't have to walk, and tiny islands floated in the sky.
    Terrana studied the people with something akin to awe; never in her life could she have imagined such a melting pot of alien races. She was looking at large insects wearing helmets, dodging air traffic. A frog twice her height whirred by, a jetpack strapped to its shoulders. She could have also sworn she saw a jellyfish drive by in a car without wheels on the road below her.
    A strange feeling dogged her — s omething didn't feel right about the dream on this occasion. She didn't feel like an outsider as she usually did, looking in from another world. This time she felt included in the dream, and as she dangled high above the city watching everything go by, she experienced another strange sensation. She could feel the wind. She could feel the exhaust coming from the flying cars. Her heart clenched. Suddenly, she didn't feel very safe.
    "It's just a dream, you won' t really fall," she told herself. She inhaled deeply to quell her rising panic. A sound, unlike any she had heard before, almost withered her insides to jelly.
    "Get off the tracks you moron!"
    Terrana nearly dropped to the ground then. Wobbling