Free A Nearer Moon by Melanie Crowder Page A

sometimes, to watch the frantic scramble as the humans battled to keep their homes above the rising water, as they tried to pry the logs loose and cut out enough of the dam to make the river flow again. None of it worked, and after a time, they gave up trying. Perdy thought the presence of other creatures might comfort her, but it did not.
    It only made her feel more alone.
    If Gia were there, Perdy would have tromped through the thickening weeds and the water that spilled over meadows and swallowed logs. If Gia were there, Perdy would have greeted every new winged thing that buzzed over the waveless water. But Gia was not there.
    The creatures tried to cheer her, tried to nudge her into their games as they had before. But after a time, they stopped trying. When the first snake slid into the swamp, Perdy hardly lifted an eye. When chains of moss grew together, she barely paused to run her fingers over the velvety links. She only dangled her feet in the water and sat, watching the space where the door had been. She sat still so long she might have grown a thatch of moss herself.
    The wet months came and the swamp grew swollen, stretching wider and wider, until it didn’t flow at all, until the riverbed grew thick with weeds reaching toward the sunlight and mud clogging every crevice. All around her, buds blossomed out of new green growth, gasping for first breath in the moist air of the trapped river. All around her, new life burst forth, and it only made the ache of all she had lost even worse.
    The dry months swept in on hot winds, and still Perdy was alone. The heat drained the reeds and drove the fanged frogs down into their months of mud-burrowed slumber.
    Each season that spiraled by pained Perdy.
    A year passed, and sorrow drove her down to the water, where at least the coolness soothed her skin and she could see the jungle and the space where the door had been.
    By the second year, the trees where the door had hung groaned and leaned, their roots failing to stick in the wallowing mud, and they toppled one after the other into the swamp.
    Perdy sank just below the water where the sun still sparkled and warmed and winked, where she could slip into the shadows if she didn’t want to be seen. Where she could float right below the surface, watching the clouds shuttle by, watching the world, altered and refracted through the ripples above her head.
    Perdy stopped wandering upriver, stopped listening to the wavelets splashing against the rocks. She no longer raced the water skippers and danced the pondering underwater dance of swimming turtles and sprightly frogs.
    Nothing sparkled; nothing shone.
    Not without Gia.

18
Luna
    I t was the second of Mama’s rules never to be broken: Don’t go below the dam.
    The rule wasn’t there for nothing. Luna knew that. The layers of logs and muck that made up the dam were all haphazard, flung together and held there by a wall of water. If anything shifted, those logs could come tumbling over into the dry riverbed below and crush anyone foolish enough to be caught beneath them. And if someone was trying to shake things loose? Well.
    Benny whistled as he wound through the reeds that rimmed the swamp. He wielded a stick in his hands likea sword, stabbing anthills and swatting at the tasseled tips of tall grasses.
    â€œHey, Benny.”
    â€œHey, Luna. You ready?”
    Luna swallowed. “Yep.”
    She kept watch to make sure they weren’t spotted, while Benny hopped down into the dry riverbed, hands on hips, studying the dam that stretched high over his head. It was mostly mud, to look at it, with a few rocks and sticks poking out of the dirt.
    â€œI think the mud’s thicker at the sides, and at the bottom,” Benny said, swinging his arm in a circle at the heart of the dam. “So we should stick the comets here, right in the middle.”
    â€œYou’re the firecrackers expert.”
    Benny dug divots into the mud with the end of his stick and