Above the East China Sea: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

dig my toes into the sand, burrowing them toward the cool damp below. Far out beyond the shallow waters ringing the cove where wading-pool waves lap at the shore, beyond the coral reef that encircles and protects the island with its underwater graveyard of antlers, fans, and brains, the big rollers crash and send plumes of mist rising high into the foggy moonlight.
    Zavie leans over and blows smoke into Jacey’s mouth. She tips toward him until they form a cozy triangle of reciprocal lust.
    Wynn starts a thumb war with Jake that quickly escalates untilthey’re both up and exploding sharp percussive blasts of exhalations as they swing roundhouse kicks at each other. Muscle-bound Wynn is a clown show, a galumphing sheepdog of clueless goodwill. Jake, on the other hand, compact and explosive, moves with the coil-and-release lethality of a leopard. He knows how to deliver—or, more important, to pull—such surgically precise strikes that it’s obvious he could destroy poor Wynn if he wanted to. I’m so distracted that for a few seconds I forget and I’m just here, on the beach, laughing with friends at a couple of guys cuffing each other around like bear cubs.
    Then a breeze whips in off the water, carrying the smell of the sea so strongly that I’m back in Hawaii that last time Codie and I were together, all happy and snorkeling and everything. To stop remembering what came after, I intercept the bottle of Cuervo and switch from swigs to chugs. Given a choice between remembering or passing out, I’ll pick passing out every time.
    But the Cuervo fails to keep me rooted in the present and I’m hurtled back to the moment when the end began.

SIX
    Mother, do you feel something?
    Yes.
    What is it? Is it the
kami?
    It must be.
    For the first time since we jumped, I feel a powerful vibration that grows stronger, then weakens, fading in and out like Father’s shortwave radio when he tried to tune in Tokyo for news about the war.
    Mother, I’m frightened. Are the
kami
about to end our existence? Will we become nothing?
    No, I will never allow that to happen.
    Then what is it?
Anmā,
I’m scared. It hurts. I want it to stop. I want to be nothing again.
    Stop! Never think that! We are being saved. The
kami
are just waking us up so we will be ready.
    For what?
    They’re sending one of the living to us.
    How? None of the living can dive all the way down here.
    The
kami
have their ways.
    I know! They will finally turn us into
fiidama
so we can dance on the waves and steal the body of the one they send to us, won’t they?
    How would I know?
    Mother, the vibrations are fading. Have the
kami
forgotten us again?
    No, but sometimes the living do not want to know what the
kami
desire of them.
    But the
kami
are more powerful than the living, aren’t they?
    Of course they are. Still, the living, they will try to drown out the
kami’
s message by dulling their senses. But they never succeed, because the
kami
have a secret weapon that the living can never escape.
    What is that,
Anmā?
    Memory.

SEVEN
    Kirby throws an old lawn chair that had washed up on the beach onto the fire. The stink of melting plastic makes everyone jump up and, cursing him for the idiot he is, move away from the toxic fumes. I move too, but not because the smoke—or much of anything else—bothers me, since I’m not even really on the beach anymore. I’m back at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, where we were stationed before transferring here. It’s a year and four months ago, and I’m enduring the last few weeks of my sophomore year, and Codie her senior year, at Pueblo Heights High. That evening, the one when everything changed, the two of us were sitting on the patio in the backyard of our base house, working our way through a four-pack of Bacardi Breezers.Mom was pulling a double shift because of a security alert on the flight line. An electrical storm sizzled through the black sky, and Codie and I were competing for who could spot the longest