Free Above the East China Sea: A Novel by Sarah Bird

thinking about what needs to be done and how to do it. I rush ahead back into the dark. The kerosene lamp is still out, but the flashlight throws a smear of illumination onto the entrance to the chamber.
    “She’s back in there. She has a baby.”
    Jake nods, as if this is what he expected to hear.
    I step aside and let him go in first. I can’t make myself face my nightmare, of Codie wounded, suffering. Not with a full light. I wait at the entrance to the chamber. The tide rises higher against my ankles.
    “Jake, hurry. We have to get them out of here.”
    I wait to hear Jake speaking to the girl in Japanese. But no sound emerges until he says, “Luz?”
    I take a deep breath to steady myself and notice that the stench has disappeared. The cave now smells like stone washed by clean seawater. The only way I can make myself go back into the chamber is by keeping my eyes trained on Jake’s face. He’s calm in a way I’ll never be able to fake in a million years. My skin prickles from feeling the girl, lost in the black shadows at our feet, watching me, waiting for me to save her and her baby. The tide pulls away, back out of the cave, as Jake directs the flashlight down to the girl at our feet.
    “Luz?” There’s a tenderness in his voice I’ve never heard before. “Is this what you mean?” I brace myself to see the girl revealed in its glare. Images flash through my mind of prisoners in dungeons, lepers in caves, shrinking from a harsh glare. But the light falls on nothing except bones. Bones so white and bleached they’re pieces of art made of ivory. There’s not even anything definably human about them.
    Jake touches my shoulder. His hand, warm and steady, makes me aware that I’m shivering. “We have to leave.” Seawater splashes in, rising this time to our shins. “Now. Before the tide completely floods us in.”
    Jake takes my hand and pulls me away. At the last second, something makes me turn back. I grab at the space where the sea urchin was, snatch up what I find there, stuff it into a pocket that I zipper shut, and Jake and I haul ass as fast as we can back down the tunnel.
    The opening is lost in the foaming roil of water rushing in through the chink in the cliff that is our only way to escape. The waves surge in, pushing against our legs.
    “The tide is in!” Jake yells. “We can’t get out!”
    “No!” I scream back over the roar of the waves. My death is one thing, but Jake is absolutely not going to die too just for being kind. This time I’m the one who channels my mom, and when we catch each other’s gazes in the sputtering beam from the dying flashlight, we both know what we have to do. We brace ourselves against the battering power of the water, and Jake, using his surfer’s wisdom, calculates. At the exact moment that the flow reverses, he orders, “Dive!” The flashlight dies. I plunge forward into the torrent and am sucked into the wet darkness.

TWELVE
    Anmā,
she’s leaving; the stranger is leaving. You can’t let her leave. She was the one the
kami
sent to us.
    Don’t fret; she will be sent again.
    You should have killed her. She was ready. Why didn’t you kill her?
    The
kami
stopped me.
    But why? Why did they bring us up from the bottom of the sea here to this place to meet her if they didn’t wish us to claim her?
    The
kami
knew we weren’t ready.
    They made a mistake.
    The
kami
never make a mistake. It is only we who make mistakes when interpreting their will.
    No,
Anmā,
they made a mistake. They sent a demon who speaks demon language. And a girl besides. Why would they send a demon girl?
    Because our fate is bound up with hers.
    How do you know this? You’ve never even encountered a demon before.
    I block the terrible memory that tries to twist into my mind.
    Listen, my son: We knew long before the war came to our shores that the Americans were demons.
    Because that is what you were taught in school?
    No, Hatsuko and I didn’t need our Japanese rulers to teach