The Gods of Lava Cove by Karsten Knight

Author:Karsten Knight [Knight, Karsten]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-22T22:00:00+00:00

16

I started to panic almost as soon as I entered the tunnel.

It was barely wide enough to fit my body. I had taken enough swimming lessons to know I could hold my breath for a full minute. But would that be enough? Even with the plankton lighting the way, I still couldn’t tell exactly how long the tunnel stretched ahead of me.

With my breath held, I swam through the fissure. When it started to get too narrow to swim, I used the rocky sides to pull myself forward, one handhold at a time.

My lungs burned. Just when I thought I couldn’t last another minute without oxygen, I squeezed through one last skinny passage—

And into a wide open space. I kicked off the bottom toward the light above.

As I surfaced, I sucked in a lungful of air. I promised I would never take breathing for granted again.

Leilani was hovering next to the spot where I’d emerged. She crossed her arms. “Took you long enough,” she said. “Did you stop to ask the algae for directions?”

I groaned. Even halfway into the afterlife, my cousin could be a huge pain in my butt.

I squinted through the dim light, trying to use Leilani’s glow to see my surroundings. We were in a circular cavern, flooded with water like the last. In the center, a small island rose above the surface. A dark object rested on it, but I couldn’t immediately figure out what it was.

I swam toward the island and pulled myself up onto the rocks. Leilani drifted closer, and her aura illuminated the object at its center:

A giant oyster. I’d seen the creatures before during a visit to the aquarium, but this one was enormous. Its gray, bumpy shell was twice my size.

The two halves of its jaw-like shell were open, revealing the oyster’s soft insides. The slimy creature looked like a gray tongue. It pulsated softly, reminding me that it was still alive.

A single, enormous pearl lay in the center of its quivering organs. The white sphere was almost the size of my skull.

This was it, I realized. We’d found the first fragment:

Tagalo’s bones.

“When Kanaloa stole the trickster’s bones, he must have transformed them into a pearl to hide them better,” I told Leilani.

My cousin wrinkled her nose. ‘The pearl is pretty, but the inside of that oyster is revolting,” she said. She held up her transparent hands. “Glad I’m not the one who’s going to have to put my hands in there.”

I stepped closer to the oyster. The pearl was deep enough that I had to lean inside the shell. I wrapped my fingers around the pearl and tried to pull it out.

The pearl was stuck to the creature. As I tugged harder, I felt the slimy oyster tense beneath my hands. The shell around me quivered.

That’s when I remembered something else I’d learned during my visit to the aquarium:

Oysters closed their shells when they felt threatened.

I glanced up at the shell. How had I not noticed how razor sharp the edges were?

“Um, Kalon?” Leilani said, concerned.

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