Maelstrom Read Free

Clodagh said it was just Petaybee’s way of telling us we didn’t belong at home right then—that we were supposed to go.”
    “Hmph,” Murel said. “I wish it had just had Marmie tell us to begin with. I liked her way better.”
    Ke-ola looked from one of them to the other, raising his eyebrows in bewilderment.
    Murel explained: “Before we came to the space station, the last day we spent at home was our birthday, and there was a night chant after our birthday latchkay. Petaybee wouldn’t let us into the communion cave.”
    “It wouldn’t?” Ke-ola asked. “Why not?”
    “We thought it was mad at us because we’d got into a little trouble with some wolves the day before, when we met Sky for the first time,” Ronan answered. “I’m just glad to know now that we were wrong.”
    “But how did it keep you out?” Ke-ola asked.
    Murel found a lump rising in her throat all over again as she told him how they had been unable to follow their family and friends into the cave. The communion cave was the best part of the night chants, better than the food at the latchkay. It was where Petaybee shared its presence with its inhabitants and they opened their minds and hearts to their world.
    Ke-ola nodded. He had experienced the cave and it had welcomed him too; it had given him that sense of belonging that Murel and Ronan had taken for granted before it was denied to them.
    “We don’t know how it did it, exactly. We just couldn’t pass beyond a certain point.”
    “Like a force field?” Ke-ola asked.
    “Sort of. Yes, I guess so.”
    “Wow, that was pretty cold. You guys must have been plenty upset.”
    “We were,” Ronan said, “and when everybody else came out, Marmie and our parents told us we were supposed to go visit her on her space station to go to school. It was all part of this, but they didn’t tell us that then.”
    “Well, they did, actually,” Murel amended, trying to be fair. “But I guess maybe we were too young to understand. We didn’t believe them. We thought they were making excuses and we were being sent away because we’d been a handful. Again.”
    “But that wasn’t it at all,” Ronan explained. “It was the beginning of getting us ready for what Marmie was talking about. We’ve got a real mission, like she said. We’re essential, we are.”
    Murel smiled, glad that Ronan was pleased. For her own part, she had been looking forward to another lovely cold winter undulating her gray-brown seal’s body beneath the clouds of river ice. Even with the crisis with Da missing and the volcano erupting, she had enjoyed the chance to swim freely in seal form and explore the previously unknown sea. Still, Ro was right. Being chosen like this was an honor. She should be—was—proud, but she was also wishing it was over and they were returning with everything accomplished, waving at the grateful populace and so forth before running to the river and diving in without so much as a “last one in is a rotten fish.”
    Later, they shared dreams as they sometimes did. They swam urgently down empty corridors toward a place they absolutely had to find before they—or maybe it was the place—ran out of air. The problem was, they had no idea where the place was or what it looked like. When they tried to search, they were caught in a dizzying galactic spin of anonymous stars. Then the stars turned into the lights on an instrument panel that extended as far as they could see. If they pushed the wrong button, they would die. If they pressed the right one, they would reach the place they’d been seeking. But which one was which? How would they know?
    The thoughts they shared when they woke up were almost as confused, the dreams half forgotten, but the anxiety they’d produced remained.
    Johnny was in the lounge when they arrived that morning. Ke-ola was talking to him, and the twins knew he’d been talking about them by the way both he and Johnny looked up at them with carefully blank