PoraBora

Chapter Seven

Pora couldn't believe what he saw.

Before they came anywhere near the pier, the first evidence presented itself. The reef was damaged. It still had colors and fish (many in common with those he knew from his own reefs), but there were pieces missing. Staghorn antlers ended abruptly, natural symmetry knocked away, too deep to be a boat hull's mistake. Some corals had been crushed down to their legs, almost unidentifiable as lace or finger. Asteopora were chipped as if nobody cared where their feet landed or where they kicked off. Cauliflower coral had chunks taken off like a bite of fish.

Pora couldn't believe it. For all the hundreds of people who seemed charged to protect the reef, none succeeded.

There were no sea turtles in the entire bay.

On the pier, the people were dressed in strange clothes. Even those in the water had forgone grasses for a material Pora didn't know, sheets like what Pe had on her ship. The men had dark shapes on their skin, at their waist, and the women wore flowers in their hair and around their ankles.

"Pora!" he heard the girl shout behind him. He looked back to where she was just beyond the shadows of the surrounding cliffs, their shape made like jagged shark teeth by the cast buildings. "'O pipiki!"

This was her island. This was her charge.

The beach was pushed back to the ocean, as buildings cold and hard as the girl's cups fought for position almost perfectly aligned to the tide line. Crabs seemed lost at the end of their home, and there was certainly no room for turtles to beach. Along the cliffs was nothing but metal, buildings piled together until there was no place for the gulls to nest. They did their best, where they could, signs of them every so often, but the people climbed across the roofs and crags too regularly for the birds to succeed.

"'O bo'i bo nu'u," said the island boy, still wet. His hurried steps to Pora's side were loud enough they surely frightened any fish below the water.

Pora kept going, Tota in his arms. He prodded the bird gently. The bird moved less and less with each day. "Tota. Look at what they have done."

"Tatalululu bo aha?" said the island boy.

Up the cliff, smoke pooled out of rooftops, dark and thick. He could smell it. He could smell it all around him, just like Pe's ship. He tasted it in the back of his throat. Felt it spray into his lungs. He choked, every breath heavy and dry and oppressive.

This was what was making Tota so sick. This was what was destroying his tiny body.

It was on the ground, too. Little spills sat iridescent in the sun, black in the shade, with amorphous shapes except where they puddled into cracks and containers. Pora felt something on his bare toes and held his foot up to look.

It was a patch of black, thick tar stuck to his skin. Pora tried to rub it off with his hand. He tried to scrape it off on the walkway, but nothing helped, nothing could take it off, and now his fingers were smeared with brown, and--

"Bo noo'ono'o," said the boy.

Pora needed—he needed something familiar, something he knew, something that wasn't horrible.

But instead he saw what had happened to the reef.

Hanging by the doors and windows of the homes were chunks of coral. Polyps choked white and dead, inner algae burned from their tissue by the sun, were still as bone. Behind them, copper sheets shed light like fire. Pora saw his island, here. Saw what happened when there was no one to tend to it, to protect it. It was made into this. This unnatural desert of life.

This place of death.

"Weweha wayo?"

Pora snapped. He ran up the copper planks screaming, yanking the coral down from their graves. The islander shouted behind him. Cord held fast. The coral did not. The sun had made them fragile and they shattered under his hands. He gawked, horrified, at the pieces.

Strong arms grabbed Pora from behind, but he squirmed like an octopus from the jaws of a shark, shoving his hands into the boy's face until he was free.

"Pe!" shouted the boy. "Pe!"

Pora had to get out. He had to get Tota out. He couldn't breathe. He could feel it everywhere. Inside. Outside. The oil, the tar, he felt the wave crash over him, felt it slurp him up. He had to be clean. He had to get to the sea. He had to be able to breathe.

Pora ran back to the sand. It wasn't enough. He couldn't feel it soft under his toes. He felt tar.

"We'll get out of here, Tota!"

"Pora!" Pe ran down the dock towards him.

Pora didn't take the dock. He dove into the ocean, holding Tota up as cold water billowed over his face and down his body. He kicked further, following the broken reef outwards. How? How could they have done this? Didn't they see how much their island suffered? How much their reef suffered?

His eyes stung in the water for the first time. It was even here, the oil, burned into the bay by the boats. The taste, the smell....

It was like his island.

The thought hit him as hard as anything he had seen here. He had done worse. He had failed his island incomparably. Theirs was dying. His was dead.

It was his fault. His one job, his one passion in life was to protect his island. He had only assumed, naively, that that meant only enjoying perennial sun, guiding his turtles, cleaning his shark, and tending his reef. He had taken it so easy. He had lived a life of pleasure, thinking he only had to worry about a parasite or two when all the while a storm had been brewing.

Three men grabbed him from the water and dragged him to the shore. Each one wore cloth wraps and headdresses of feathers and carried spears, tipped by glinting steel. They yanked Tota from his hands and tossed him to the sand.

Pora screamed as they took him away, up the beach, up the steel walkway, and into the corner of a dark, cold building far above the sea. There he was bound, he was gagged, and he was blindfolded.