Free Ocean: The Awakening by Brian Herbert, Jan Herbert Page B

were quite easy for her, and she moved quickly through them, without missing one.
    “Very good,” he said. “Now I’d like you to write your own mathematical equation or question. Anything you’d like, just use the signal pen and touch the screen to write with it.”
    She hesitated. The doctor was probing her mind again, trying to find out what she was thinking. When he asked her to do this previously, she arranged blue pegs in a circle, representing the ocean encircling the world, while making no effort to explain to him what the arrangement meant. Before that, she had responded to numerous other inquiries, taking care not to reveal any details of the intense thinking she’d been doing about the ocean, and instead listing a series of generic algebraic problems, or high prime numbers—anything to throw him off track.
    “I only want to help you, Gwyneth,” he assured her now. His voice was reassuring and soft, and his dark eyes were sensitive. She had been resisting most impulses to let him in, but he had such a kind face and gentle, considerate manner. So far, she was not sure how to express the important calculations to anyone in a way that would be taken seriously, or to whom she might make the attempt. The calculations, and resultant predictions, worried her a great deal, so perhaps she should reveal a little more to this nice man….
    Taking the marker, Gwyneth wrote a common formula on the screen:
    H 2 O
    “Water?” he said. “With all the complex numbers and formulas filling your mind, you have written something that simple?”
    She made a circle around the formula, again representing the ocean encircling the Earth, and again not attempting to explain anything further to him. These clues were as much as she wanted to pass on so far. Maybe she would reveal more to him in the future, but if so, only in tiny increments to see how he handled the information, and to determine if he really was a good person, and was not trying to deceive her. She had to be extremely careful, walking a fine line that did not divulge too much, while not behaving in a manner that would cause anyone to sedate her, inhibiting the mental clarity she needed.
    A higher power had provided her with the valuable information for her calculations, infusing raw data into her mind in a mysterious manner, and she needed to be careful. She was a caretaker of the information, and a refiner of it. Perhaps one day she would learn the identity of her benefactor, though she already suspected the purpose of the sacred trust.
    The ocean needed her help.
    With a pleasant smile, she put the marker down and returned to her seat by the window. The diminutive teenager saw the weather changing outside, with a strong wind bending tree branches and whipping the village shops’ signs. Dark clouds approached from the sea.
    That would give him something to think about, she thought. Perhaps next time she would give him the ingredients in common seawater, or in the amniotic fluid in the human womb—they were very similar.
    ***

Chapter 12
    From Kimo’s earliest days in the Pohaku family, after he was netted by a fisherman and brought ashore, he had known that his adoptive mother was an unusual person. He’d been two or three years old when he first saw her, with his exact birth date unknown, and only estimated by adults.
    He remembered staring wide-eyed at the large Hawaiian woman, and sensing something about her, something that went very, very deep in his consciousness, so deep that he could not retrieve it. Almost three decades later, that was still the case.
    Ealani Pohaku was of old Hawaiian blood, with more ties to earlier generations on the islands than anyone Kimo knew—more even than his adoptive father, Tiny, whose ancestors had sailed to the islands in large outrigger canoes from Tahiti. Ealani claimed that she had seven thousand cousins in the Hawaiian islands on her side of the family, and she knew many of them by name. Whenever Kimo went out in