Child of a Hidden Sea Read Online Free PDF

Sophie guessed. As she and Dega appeared, their already sober conversations stopped. Silent anger raked at her.
    â€œRalo!” Dega summoned a stringy teenaged boy with a leg splint and crutches. “This is Kir Sophie Feliachild of the Verdanii.”
    â€œActually, I’m not sure—”
    â€œShe’s to help you today. San can go out with the boat.”
    â€œZophie,” the boy said. Sophie noted, with a thread of amazement, that he sounded to her ears as though he had an accent. Did she speak better Fleetspeak than he did?
    â€œGo with Ralo, Sophie. He’s in charge, nuh?”
    â€œI understand.”
    â€œI’ll fetch you when your aunt wakes.” With that, Dega toiled away.
    This is me, pitching in. Sophie gave the boy a bright smile. “So—Ralo. What are we doing? Coordinating the rescue boats? Signalling for assistance? Breaking out the emergency supplies?”
    â€œOver here,” Ralo said. He led her down the beach, over the wrecked remains of driftwood houses and the storm-thrown flotsam on the sand. Gulls—mining for edible bounty—swirled and scolded as they passed.
    They reached an open hut that was as ragged as all the rest. The seaweed weave of its roof had been shredded by the wind. In the shade of the one relatively intact corner, a young woman rocked a bundled infant. A quartet of heartbreakingly thin little kids, maybe three or four years old, ran up and down the beach under her supervision. The children were scavenging, competing with the seagulls for whatever protein had washed up on shore.
    â€œSan,” Ralo called. He gabbled incomprehensible words.
    Was the Fleetspeak spell wearing off? Did that happen? No, she decided; this must be a local dialect. The language Bastien had taught her must be a trading language … something sailors and merchants might use?
    She hoped that was a good conclusion, and not merely wishful thinking.
    The woman handed Sophie the baby, then stalked back to the wharf. The child immediately began to scream.
    â€œWe’re babysitting?” she said. Its mother didn’t turn back.
    â€œYou, me, we watch littles,” Ralo agreed. He started gathering the broken pieces of the shelter roof.
    This is what I get for saying I’d do anything, she thought glumly. “I don’t think this kid likes me.”
    â€œWalk with him,” he said. “Bounce.”
    She did as he suggested, snuggling the tiny body against the shoulder that didn’t hurt. “You don’t scare me,” she whispered. “I’ve done dives in sharky water.”
    Baby notched up the wails. Sophie put more boing in her step, pacing the beach, making what observations she could, if only to stop her inner monologue from running where am I, where am I where the hell am I? in an endless, anxiety-cranking loop.
    The kids first: They were tanned, and their hair ran the gamut from nearly blond to strawberry roan. No blue eyes; she’d characterize their skin as olive.
    She’d seen children elsewhere in the developing world, in places as poor as this one seemed to be. They’d been clad in T-shirts provided by aid workers, their little bodies serving as billboards for donor NGOs or Coca-Cola or, lately, trendy cartoon characters. But these kids wore hempy-looking tunics, clothes hand-woven from unbleached, undyed fabric, same as the sandpapery blanket the baby was wrapped in.
    The baby who was, finally, quieting.
    If someone out in the wider world was giving aid to these islanders, there was no obvious sign of it, Sophie thought.
    She bounced her way to a tidal pool. It held two familiar-looking hermit crabs and a proliferating anemone. She could identify one broken piece of coral— large polyp stony coral , she thought.
    There was a second anemone species she didn’t recognize, but that might not mean anything. She’d dived a lot of reefs, but that didn’t make her a search