PoraBora

Chapter Ten

No warmth came in when the door was opened. It scratched the floor. It creaked. Somebody—a man—said something. There was cold light and the smell of oil pulsed into the room. Copper hit steel. They were things Pora didn't know. His island did not have those sounds, nor had his village. There, things were made of grass or wood or tree fibers. Here, everything was cold and grating and smelled like blood.

But he understood what they meant. They had trapped him, like seals chasing a fish into the cove. They'd tied his wrists, covered his eyes, and stuffed rope into his mouth until he could taste the salt of his own saliva on the fibers.

Had they done the same to Tota? Pora hadn't seen him since they'd flung him onto the sand the evening before. Pora hurt to think it, but maybe they had eaten him already.

Morning brought no answers. Only questions.

"Huhuooyo pela?"

There had been no undoing his bonds. Pora had tried all night, thinking even fish sometimes escaped from the seal's mouth. It had been meant to give him courage. It only gave him nightmares.

Pora tried again now. The thinrock rope—he had to make his own names for the things that trapped him—held tightly.

"'O mumuli," said a Doorwatcher.

"'O mia anuha." There were two.

Their boots echoed into the chamber. Pora was dragged from his floor and in a moment he felt sunshine. Salt and oil became more pronounced and the catch of the morning wafted up with it. They freed his legs and made him walk. Pora wished he could peer down to the beach to see if Tota was alright.

The doorwatchers guided him up, pushing him like orcas with a seal. All around him, Pora could hear a breeze whistling through hanging coral, bouncing them against each other and the thinrock walls of their homes.

He must have bristled, as one of the doorwatchers growled and grabbed his shoulder.

They prodded him onwards.

This was what people were, outside his village, Pora told himself. His people had known there were others on the sea. His elders had told stories of men with ink in their skin and holes in their chests, of boys with flesh burned away and found adrift by canoes. But they had not found them alive. They had not run into their ships with their oil propellers and burning buckets. They had not known what they were doing to their reefs.

Then Pora's feet met dirt and grass and fallen leaves. Something alive. He played it into his toes and even thought he could smell the fading of the leaves, the blooming flowers, and low-hanging fruits through the oil.

They hadn't destroyed everything, Pora thought. Maybe...maybe their island could even be restored.

They grabbed Pora's head and he felt his gag go loose. He spat it out. "Tota," he managed, coughing through his first words, "Where did you put Tota?"

And then light sharpened his eyes. He shut them back into a veil as the blindfold landed on his feet.

Shapes imprinted into the darkness became defined, taking on color and texture. Wide-leaf ferns grew beneath the plated trunks of palm trees. Heart-shaped rosewood leaves hid bright, half-opened yellow flowers and seed pods hunched like tired birds. Forked ferns grew their leaves out like soft coral, though they were satisfied with the sun they found by climbing taller trunks.

Pora looked back toward the town, but the doorwatchers held him in place so he couldn't look for Tota.

They pushed him towards a trail that guided the eye through the rainforest, following the island ridge and winding between the rising cliffs.