The Cloud Roost (Jekua Book 5), page 16
Wasaaru shot Balt a look and asked, “Why is the idea of us doing manual labor so funny to everyone?”
Eventually, they reached the area where Mr. Jonwo thought they would yield the best results. It was a sprawling mudflat, the sand glistening with moisture. Scant rocks littered the stretch of beach, but Mr. Jonwo advised them to leave those alone if they could, so as to not disturb the natural ecosystem. There might be crabs or other little critters living under them or even stuck to the bottom, he said.
The trio walked across the mudflat, leaving behind shallow imprints of their footsteps. Even more than getting sand between his toes, Balt hated the feeling of walking on wet sand. He hated his feet slightly sinking in, the way the sand oh so subtly jiggled. It was gross. It made him feel unstable, like he might be abruptly sucked into the earth. Probably it stemmed from too many adventure cartoons and video games involving quicksand in his youth.
He had to hand it to Mr. Jonwo, though. It was indeed a gorgeous day, and breathing in the salty ocean air puffed him up. He suddenly found himself missing hanging out on Tonos Beach, back in Tanepke. Grabbing some fresh kolé from Remmy’s and enjoying it seaside.
Sunlight gleamed across the damp expanse of sand, looking almost like a glare in a mirror. They stomped through the mudflat, their shoes creating a wet, sucking shlorp! sound with every footstep, until finally Mr. Jonwo came to a halt.
“Here’s as good a spot as any,” he declared, setting his bucket down. It receded a few centimeters into the sand. He pulled his hand rake out of the bag on his shoulder before setting it too down in the sand, dirtying its bottom.
He then demonstrated how to dig for clams, which was as easy as it sounded. All they had to do was scrape their rakes across the sand, sifting through it, until they found a clam (or didn’t). He explained that if any clams were there, they’d be easy to spot, and that eight inches was probably the deepest they wanted to go before moving on.
Mr. Jonwo was on his knees, digging through the sand with his rake as he spoke. Now Balt understood why he’d suggested they wear shorts, because muddy sand was sticking to his legs as he searched. Already he knew that sensation was going to drive him crazy.
“We’re looking for ones that’re at least an inch and a half across,” Mr. Jonwo told them, though the place he’d searched had come up empty. “That’s the absolute minimum. If you find smaller ones, just put them back and cover them up.”
“How will we know?” Wasaaru asked. “We don’t have rulers.”
That garnered a laugh from his grandfather. “If you can’t guesstimate an inch and a half, well…we might have bigger problems on our hands.” He scooted over a couple feet and commenced digging again, this time striking gold after only a handful of seconds. “Aha!” he cheered.
Balt and Wasaaru grew closer, taking a look at the clam he held in his palm. The light tan, striped shell was covered in sand that Mr. Jonwo mostly rubbed away.
“This is the perfect size,” he said, bringing it closer to them. “Take a good look. Once you find one, just place it in your bucket. You don’t have to be super careful with them, they aren’t delicate little teacups or nothin’, but don’t be chuckin’ them either.”
The cousins looked at each other, then at Mr. Jonwo.
“Is that it?” Wasaaru asked, disbelieving.
“That’s it.”
It really was pretty simple. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad way to spend the morning after all.
Mr. Jonwo said, “Spread out and get to huntin’!”
They had the whole area to themselves, so there was plenty of space for the three of them to search for clams. As they walked away from Mr. Jonwo, who was already whistling a bouncy tune as he dug, Wasaaru gently elbowed Balt.
“Let’s make this a little more fun,” he said.
“How?”
“The person who finds the most clams is the winner.”
Of course. Wasaaru always had to make everything into a competition. If he wasn’t the best at something, it wasn’t a thing worth doing, in his eyes.
That being said, Balt always took the bait. He never wanted to give his cousin the satisfaction of him backing down from a challenge. Even if he lost, Wasaaru would at least respect him for not chickening out in the first place. “Alright,” Balt said. “What does the winner get?”
Wasaaru already had an answer locked and loaded. “Something from the Blitz Trio. You heard of it?”
Balt had, back in the Summer, when Aeiko had told them about it. At the time, the modchips hadn’t yet been released, but apparently that had changed. “Yeah,” he said, unable to stop himself from wondering just how expensive one of those mods might be. From how Aeiko described them, they sounded like extremely powerful attacks.
“If you win, I’ll get you a Growth Blitz for your Puffolin. If I win, you get me the Thermal Blitz for my Eclipse Werewolf. Deal?”
The potentially high price worried Balt, but it wasn’t enough to deter him. He didn’t want his cousin’s ridicule. Plus, if he won, installing the Growth Blitz on Dipper would be a boon.
So he just had to win.
“Deal,” he said, and they shook on it.
The two separated, and Balt prayed to any god that would listen that the spot he chose would contain a veritable minefield of clams. He dropped to his knees, grimacing as they sunk into the wet earth. Damp sand clung to his skin, sending a chill down his spine that made his whole body shiver. Shrugging it off as best he could, he grabbed the hand rake out of his bucket and got to work.
In the first spot he searched, he found two decently-sized clams fairly close together. Oh, hell yeah, he thought. This is a good sign. He wiped them off a little then tossed them into the bucket by his side. Their shells clunked against the plastic and each other as they hit the bottom of the bucket.
Behind him, Wasaaru called out, “Got one!”
Balt could hear the smug expression on his cousin’s face. He had no choice but to yell, “I’ve got two,” but he tried to casually throw the comment away, like it didn’t even matter to him.
Two more thunks, then Wasaaru said, “Three!”
“Alright, boys, you’re welcome to not keep doing that,” Mr. Jonwo chimed in.
The next couple minutes were not so fruitful. Balt discovered some baby clams in the second spot he dug up, tiny little brown ovals no bigger than his fingertips. It was kind of amazing, holding something that was alive yet so small. He carefully returned them to the hole he’d dug up and packed the sand back in.
He found a few more clams, but even more that were not up to Mr. Jonwo’s standards as far as size. Balt didn’t know whether that was some real clam harvesting regulation or merely the old man’s preference, but either way he returned them and kept looking.
Across the empty, silent beach, he could hear the telltale thunk of Wasaaru dropping clams into his bucket. If Balt was counting correctly, Wasaaru was beating him by a large margin already.
He couldn’t let him win. He did not want to buy that damn modchip. Doing so after getting himself covered in mud would be adding insult to injury.
After finding three more clams, followed by searching through three more spots with nothing, an idea came to him. A way to expand his reach, deepen his mana reserves, and practice a technique.
What he intended to do was summon Dipper and use her roots to dig through the sand, seeking out clams. He knew how to sprout new branching roots off of each other, so he could cover a lot of ground in a short period of time.
Balt glanced over at Wasaaru, seeing that both his arms were bare. Everyone mocked him, but sometimes the fact that he always wore his kayet came in handy.
Using a Jekua couldn’t be considered cheating. Wasaaru never specified how they found the clams. Neither did Mr. Jonwo. The win would still be valid.
That was going to be his defense, anyway, because there was no way in hell that Wasaaru wasn’t going challenge him on that.
While his cousin’s back was turned to him, Balt channeled mana into his kayet. He obviously wouldn’t be able to hide Dipper from Wasaaru for long, since they were the only people out here and there was absolutely nothing anywhere to obscure their views of each other, but he wanted to delay that for as long as possible.
He shifted into Dipper’s perspective and took a few steps forward, feeling the wet sand on her bare feet. He loathed it. But then he extended the magical roots from her feet, creeping them through the sand, seeking out any waiting clams. The tips of the roots reached out, grazing across what he assumed were shells. His sense of touch wasn’t especially fine-tuned in the roots, so he couldn’t be positive, but whatever he was feeling was rounded and smooth. It was either clams or rocks, he had to assume.
Every time he found a (presumed) clam, he wrapped the root around its circumference and extended a new root out from it, grasping for more. It was a good way to practice both his control of the roots in general as well as his ability to extend them, which he would need to do to fill all the cracks they hoped to create in the crystal Jekuas.
Only two or three minutes later, he was holding on to what he prayed were roughly twenty clams. He could feel his grasp on the Rooting ability slipping, so he deemed that good enough for now.
With concerted effort, he curved the roots upward and pulled all twenty clams up out of the sand at once. It was more difficult than he anticipated, trudging through the dampened sand. He didn’t know how to bulk up his Puffolin’s roots, though, so he had to live with it. It might’ve been easier if he wasn’t trying to extract so many clams at the same time.
Jumping back into his own perspective, he almost laughed seeing the collection of clams protruding from the beach, held by Dipper’s muddy brown roots. He gave them a quick once-over, and let go of four that were just rocks. The rest he moved into a pile, then retracted Dipper’s roots to give himself and his mana a brief reprieve, although going so far as to withdraw the Jekua wasn’t necessary.
Balt hastily inspected the clams he’d uncovered, and he was delighted to find that only two of them didn’t meet the proper size requirements. He used the hand rake to dig a hole and put them back in, then put the rest into his bucket.
He and Dipper walked together to a new spot, then he shifted back into her perspective to do it all over again. He grated at the sound of Wasaaru adding clams to his own bucket, which honestly was ruining the pleasant song that Mr. Jonwo was still whistling.
Dipper’s roots stretched through the earth, enwrapping eleven or twelve clams. Balt didn’t want to push himself too hard, given how he’d struggled lifting twenty out of the ground before. Hopefully none of these were rocks. He did try to suss out the sizing of them so that he didn’t waste his time or effort on small ones, but it was impossible to discern.
The new set of clams broached the surface, and Balt grinned gleefully when he saw that they were all worthy of the sacred bucket.
“Hey!” came Wasaaru’s angry shout.
Balt cast a glance over his shoulder. Wasaaru stood indignantly over by his bucket, knees and hands caked in mud. He gripped his hand rake tightly and wore a deep scowl. In contrast, Balt was standing innocently beside his Puffolin, who was holding eleven clams up in the air with her magical root powers.
“What’s up?” Balt asked him, feigning ignorance.
At this point, Mr. Jonwo looked up from what he was doing to see what all the commotion was. Upon sighting Dipper, he let out a low chuckle. “You’re an innovative one, aren’t you?” he called out. “Too good for a hand rake, huh? Don’t want to get your hands dirty?”
He didn’t, but that was beside the point. He was doing it so he could win.
“You can’t do that!” Wasaaru said, pointing his rake at Balt. “That’s cheating!”
“No it isn’t,” said Balt.
“How is it not?”
“We never set any rule about not using Jekuas.”
“Of course we didn’t! Why the hell would we? We have tools to use for this!”
Balt shrugged, pouting his lips like he didn’t know what to tell his poor cousin. “Well, you didn’t say it couldn’t be done.”
“But I don’t even have my kayet,” said Wasaaru.
“That sucks.”
Wasaaru’s brow furrowed even more, which Balt didn’t think was possible. “That’s a rule, then. You can’t use Jekuas.”
“Nah, you can’t change the parameters halfway through the contest,” Balt retorted. “What’s your count up to, by the way?”
He knew Wasaaru had been keeping count the entire time, and he was proven right when he didn’t even so much as glance at his bucket before answering. “Fifteen,” he said.
Balt laughed, which further pissed off his cousin.
“How many do you have, then?”
“More than fifteen,” said Balt, knowing full well the vagueness would exacerbate Wasaaru’s irritation.
“Ugh,” Wasaaru growled. “You can’t use Jekuas! Pour your clams out, start over!”
“Do not do that,” Mr. Jonwo interjected.
Balt ignored his cousin’s protests and gathered up his clams, then added them to the rest. Wasaaru grumbled something under his breath while Balt resumed searching with his Puffolin’s roots.
By the end of their few hours out on the beach, Balt had nearly completely filled his bucket, much to Mr. Jonwo’s surprise. Wasaaru, meanwhile, had only filled his up about halfway. They didn’t even need to count them to know that Balt had beaten him handily. The best part was that Balt gained finer control of his Jekua’s ability, and he hadn’t even expended half of his mana in all that time.
Naturally, Wasaaru complained some more about Balt’s methods, but Mr. Jonwo was too pleased with how many clams Balt had dug up to sympathize with his grandson. When Wasaaru asked him to be the arbiter of the contest, Mr. Jonwo heartily sided with Balt.
Balt was excited to work with the Growth Blitz. He said to Wasaaru, “Let’s go get cleaned up, then we can head to the store. Sound good?”
All Wasaaru said was, “This is bullshit.”
“What’s that?” asked Mr. Jonwo.
“Nothing, Grandpa,” Wasaaru said hurriedly. The three of them lifted their buckets and headed back toward the house.
The one downside to his plan was that Balt’s bucket was quite heavy. Still, he grinned like an idiot all the way back.
17
Playing Dress-Up
The Facet had constructed Garden three years prior. It was the second hideout built, with the group having a presence on every island in the archipelago. Except for Yuluhu, now. The Lakahlo lab in which Makénu had spent so much of his time was the first place the Facet had set up shop, not expanding outward until years later.
But now that it was gone, Garden was the new primary base of operations.
Rudimentary stairs had been carved into the mountain on the lefthand side of the settlement, leading up to a flat outcropping of rock that acted as a platform overlooking the rest of Garden. It also offered a fantastic view of the beach a short way away; it truly was the best vantage point in their makeshift village. Still having nothing to do, Makénu had added a spot of daily meditation on this platform to his morning routine. He would start his day off by taking a quick dip in the ocean, just like he did back home in Goa Tonak, and then he would dry off naturally by walking back into town and climbing the steps, coming to rest on the rocky platform. For a while he would sit in silence, watching Garden slowly stir to life, while the sun’s rays bled out over the horizon.
Today, however, he returned to the platform around mid-morning to accompany Tano on his training.
Four days earlier, the technicians had finally completed Tano’s summoning suit and mask. The official name for the set was a kaylackt, a word which had roots in ancient Volukhan. Kay, meaning soul, and lackt, meaning face. Translated literally, it sounded goofy, but what it essentially meant was producing the soul from the face, much like how kayet meant producing the soul from the wrist. Makénu wasn’t sure anyone else here knew that, since Volukhan wasn’t typically taught anymore, although he supposed someone in the organization must have had at least passing knowledge of the language, if they had come up with the name in the first place.
While Tano possessed a natural inclination toward the kaylackt, it still required a few days for his body and soulclay to acclimate to the outfit. Today would be his first day actually attempting to summon whatever Artificial Jekua had been imbued in the mask. The person who would be chaperoning Tano’s training was San, the woman who’d tested his natural abilities in the first place and suggested him for the summoning program.
“So, what are the chances he’ll be able to summon anything today?” Makénu asked San as they trudged up the steps to the platform. Their crew included himself, Tano, San, and San’s twin sister, Marissa.
“He should be able to summon it just fine, I imagine,” San replied, her voice naturally raspy and possessing a heavy northeast Hurrathsan accent. Both sisters were born and raised in the Volukho Isles, but their father was from Hurrathsa, and apparently they’d picked up the accent from him. She added, “The real question is how long he’ll be able to keep it summoned, ehh? Sometimes it’s hard for a person to regulate their mana the first couple times they summon somethin’. Usually, they expend it a bit faster than what they eventually settle into. But we’ll see, we’ll see.”
Once they reached the platform, San unfolded Tano’s kaylackt and handed him the studded mask. It glittered prettily in the harsh sunlight, eliciting an excited giggle from the boy.
Makénu tried to muster up some enthusiasm for his son, who stared with wide-eyed wonder at the mask. “Pretty neat, huh?” said Makénu.
“Yeah!”
“You know what you’re summoning already?”
Tano nodded eagerly, smiling behind the plastic respirator covering his nose and mouth. Without saying another word, he placed the mask on the ground and started tugging the white, black-streaked suit onto his small frame.
