Placid skies lulled the sea to glass. It was a welcome ceasefire between the two great domains, reprieve and reconciliation and a kiss called horizon.

Time was no vassal to either, not beholden to any sphere, not atmo nor hydro, not when they raged and not when they romanced. Time conducted itself rather as a neutral party or unemotional correspondent or eternally patient mediator, or all three, all the time, or variously. Whichever role was time's to play today, it, like the combatants, stood utterly still.

If it wasn't the peace and harmony which moved time to stillness, then perhaps it was a distraction.

Drexon closed his eyes and laid back on the deck. Waves in miniature lapped against his cradle, each a tiny nudge toward something adjacent to sleep. Birds squawked nearby. The sun beat down on his face, and he scooped a handful of salty water to cool it.

"Let's come out early more often," he said from his back, blinking away what stinging droplets had found the path to his eyes most convenient, "It's nice not being in a hurry."

Jenica nodded, too focused elsewhere to care whether he saw or knew. Presently she fixated on what she believed—based on the clicking and the chattering and the all-too-slight-but-definitely-there gurgling—to be a society of small crabs jousting for dominance nearby. Nearby was objectively relative, thought Jenica, and with maturity enough to sense the irony as a peripheral tingling—the rocks that served as the crabs' arena were some twenty feet away, and the combatants colonizing the crags were tiny indeed. Only the mightiest would decline a man's thumbnail for a perch or bed, citing the dimensions. To such crabs, such rocks were islands, such distances miles. Still she could hear—or so she supposed—and still she could characterize.

An old woman once remarked that Jenica was a good listener. She was a crotchety sort, that woman, indisposed to flattery in life, inattentively grieved after, and small wonder. It was an even smaller wonder that Jenica as a littler girl had taken that compliment so zealously to heart.

Now in the form of a little girl, and perhaps no longer even that, she curled a hand behind her ear and strained to hear as far as she could, only abandoning the experiment when she glimpsed by mistake a pair of males locked in claw-to-claw combat. She sighed. Listening was fun because it set her imagination to work. Actually seeing the thing validated her talent, more often than not, but it always ruined the sport.

"I hope mu makes crab," she said vaguely, the image in her head of a decidedly larger specimen, boiled soft and steaming through a crack. If she had said it vaguely, then her brother must have heard it vaguely, still smiling up at the sun as he was from the world he'd carved out for himself on the deck.

She huffed. Bored with the crabs and cove and her brother, starved for entertainment as she tended, unhappily, to be in the hours between setting nets and pulling them, Jenica sprang to her feet and clambered up the side of the boat for a game of balance. Both arms extended laterally, she hobbled up and down the starboard length of the modest boat, which itself dipped toward her concentrated weight, and then she strolled, and eventually she upped the difficulty and with it the stakes. She was balancing on the toes of one foot, the other hovering over water, by the time her brother heard her ask:

"What is that?"

Lured impolitely from his happier world, Drexon squinted up at the culprit. Both her feet had regained the edge, and then returned to the deck, and both eyes remain on the water several yards to starboard.

By the angle of her face Drexon oriented himself. Shielding his eyes with a hand and implicating a spot with a finger, his gesture and gaze intersected where the crystalline sea turned red.

"That?"

The deck sturdy underfoot, the sea sturdy below deck, Drexon sensed again that time had ceased to move. That sense had an eerie quality about it, now.

Before it might have been that time had simply forgotten to carry on; not belligerent, not even deliberate, but distracted, idled, captured by the interesting whimsy of a passing thought or butterfly, ultimately blithe to the shivering disquiet which any lapse in continuity arouses in those famously fastidious mortals.

Now, if Drexon were to characterize it, there was none of the blitheness. There was agency. Time had stopped because it noticed something. And so he repeated himself.

"Is that what you're talking about?"

"Weird, yeah?" Jenica replied, more statement of fact than question. The faint red light ebbed then to nothing, and with it faded the eeriness, and with the eeriness went Drexon's investment.

"No."

Drexon did, of course, agree with his sister—certainly he had never seen such a light in the water before—but he wouldn't give her the satisfaction of saying so. It wasn't a calloused heart to blame for his reluctance to gratify, but an unimpeachable instinct to protect. Perhaps that was a sort of callous.

Even in something so trivial, Drexon understood that each and any and every word he exchanged with his sister must be judged by its capacity to reinforce some tenet of survival. When he'd had occasion to think about it before, Drexon narrowed them down to humility, compliance, and then something in the vein of aversion to curiosity; he'd bounced between apathy and timidity but always kept an ear open for better.

Drexon acted, likewise, or endeavored to act as best he could, in accordance with those tenets. More important, though, was to place a censor between he and his sister, to actively filter what passed between them through that dreary pragmatic prism, for her sake. In this case, for instance, it would be better if she were apathetic to the phenomenon, approached the matter timidly. After all, she who lends too eager an ear to the diatribes of her own curiosity will inevitably oblige those passions at the expense of the status quo.

The status quo was explained perfectly well already. No cause at all for curiosity. If curiosity was the disease, humility seemed the antidote. Acting in concert with the status quo was to achieve homeostasis.

"Probably the sun playing tricks on you. "

That meddlesome sun was wedged high in an empty sky, and it blanketed the day in warmth and calm. These were Drexon's favorite days. From shore and back again, rowing would be smooth. From above or below or beside, fish would be unfairly easy to spot. Maybe he'd try to catch one in his teeth again today. Even the odds. His sister's thoughts were elsewhere.

"You're probably scared to look."

Jenica laughed at her own accusation, convinced that Drexon had taken it seriously.

She looked up at her older brother from her seat, validating her certainty with a glimpse of the mischief in his face, or the grudge there, more probably both with one induced by the other, blue eyes tucked away in the shadow of his brow. Seagulls bickered overhead, a fleet in waiting, chattering reminders that droppings were only ever a coincidence of time and place removed from a well sighted barrage.

Jenica giggled to herself and resolved to proceed with her teasing. Her tenets were not so well articulated as Drexon presented his to be, her conviction not so unshakable. Jenica fancied her moral panoply flexible enough, at least, to allow stoking a rise out of her brother for a little innocent excitement between net pulls.

"I bet you can't even dive that de—"

The reward for Jenica's instigating was paid in the form of a splash. She smiled and shook her head, surprised at herself for being surprised at all.

Drexon's brand of curiosity was well known in Aevum, despite the danger, and thankfully his pride was only well known at home. His hypocrisy, therefore—though it seemed to know no bounds—was known only to Jenica. Perhaps to himself, too, but he hadn't said as much.

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Drexon was curious to a fault, though that was no high threshold to overcome in Aevum, and it abounded most when it came to matters of the sea. If a dorsal fin of unusual shape or color breached the surface nearby, Drexon followed. If a peculiar plant washed ashore, Drexon tasted. If an inexplicable red light appeared briefly at the bottom of the cove, Drexon, evidently, leapt. Each of those scenarios supposed that Jenica either was not present or had gone to great lengths to goad him. In some cases Drexon seemed capable of rationalizing his behavior until it fit his tenets, in the way an octopus may rationalize its anatomy until it fits between the halves of a vacant oyster shell.

He was profoundly curious, and dogmatic as he was he seemed unable to stem the resultant impulses, and so he acted on them, and the effect was the appearance of bravery.

Maybe that's just what bravery is, mulled Jenica as her brother stole a breath and dove. Ripples formed at the spot he'd chosen, and bubbles were breadcrumbs for Jenica to follow from there. She sighed without angst and scorned Drexon without malice, tracking the forming bubbles with her eyes, tracking the bursting ones with her ears.

The bubbles slowed and then lingered. For a time they meandered about the general area where she'd first spotted the light, and gradually they tightened into a smaller and better defined space. Soon they grew in number, and then in individual size, and then they were gone, replaced by the mop of black hair she'd waited for and a word she hadn't expected.

"Come!"

Drexon winced and clutched his left hand, waging a contest for buoyancy from which his arms had been disqualified.

"I'm coming!"

Jenica snatched the split log from beneath her seat and batted wildly at the surface toward Drexon who kicked with no less vigor to stay afloat. His mouth was level with the waterline by the time Jenica was near enough to slip her arms under the crooks of his, brace her feet against the side of the boat, and heave him aboard.

The exertion took a greedy toll from them both. Brother and sister crumpled to the deck, one drenched in the salt of sweat and the other of sea. Jenica glimpsed a scarlet red burn on the palm of Drexon's hand, and it did little to stay her breathing. In the small window between two fits she managed to ask:

"What happened?"

And in the next window:

"What was it?"

Drexon scowled. He didn't need to consult his three tenets to strongly doubt whether there were an answer worth giving.

"It was—"

Drexon hesitated. Words lingered at the boundary of throat and mouth like hot stew or bitter pulp. Jenica, meanwhile, seemed the picture of impatience. She was eager in the face, fidgety in her movements, poised to extract an explanation as a swarm of mosquitoes would if it came to it, a million pokes and prods and a pestering collective buzz, and surely it would come to it, and then she got a clearer look at the injury. An empathetic jolt quieted her.

"—it glowed. Like a fire, bright red. It was, I mean it must have been some sort of—rock? Coral, maybe? Rock or coral, with fire. Fire inside."

"Have you seen it before?"

"No."

"Rocks don't grow, Drex. And coral does but not overnight. Least, no coral I've seen."

Drexon sifted as best he could through his own untidy thoughts, succeeding only in solidifying his confusion into angst. Jenica reached for a second time into the space beneath the plank of driftwood they'd taken to calling a seat for convenience, and produced a rag which had once been a shirt. She dipped it in the water, wrung it out, wrapped Drexon's hand, slow and cautious; not so cautious as to pick it clean of the dehydrated scales left of long-filleted fish. Old scales or otherwise, Drexon nodded his appreciation during and after, and evidently it had helped, because when he spoke again, she saw that he didn't grit his teeth quite so much as he had.

"I know they don't. But I've swam up and down this place a hundred times. We both have. We would have seen it."

Drexon's mulling trailed off. Jenica spent a minute politely adjusting the bandage so he'd have time to decide on a better ending.

"I swam right up to it. There was a hole at the top, the mouth, I guess. It was wider than my shoulders, definitely, maybe yours and mine together. It was as if someone sliced a head of coral across the middle and poured fire inside. You've never seen anything like it."

Jenica almost asked a question.

"The water shook," said Drexon. "Like a current or something, right there above the mouth. Wasn't a current, though. It was heat, like how a puddle looks at lunch time, how the water gets when the sun beats straight down onto it. I didn't get it right away, though. I was wondering why I hadn't been swept away when it burned me."

Now she'd zeroed in on something worth asking.

"So why would you swim up to it?"

There was expectation in her manner of asking, something else in her face. Jenica was consciously trying to appear older than she was, to speak with more gravity than she had. Appearing older was not unlike hearing further, in the sense that one was free to try.

Drexon watched her try. He heard it in her voice, identified it in her posture, saw it in her eyes which began to water for reluctance to blink. This was one outcome he hadn't considered during the months and years he'd spent tailoring the dynamic between he and his young sister for maximum effect—imitation of role.

Jenica was playing Drexon, and that left Drexon the role of Jenica, and the elder could not help but laugh at the thought, and the younger could not, in spite of herself, help but join him.

"If I didn't swim up to it, how would I know it was hot?"

"Why do you always—"

A wave of sound that might have deafened Jenica if not for the distance wrenched her attention from that thought and toward home. If she were a tiny crab, it may have been twenty feet.

The mild pressure wave that tailed it clogged her ears and dissuaded the words in her throat from her mouth. If she were a tiny crab, the result may have been the same, except that she did not know whether crabs had ears.

It was no challenge at all for the accomplished listener to track the violence to its source. Beyond the rocky protrusions that formed the borders of their cove, beyond the narrow strip of sea that fortified it from prying eyes and unwelcome guests, vertical grey clouds rose from the canopy. The smoke unfurled in grand plumes, thicker by the second, and soon it formed in its volume something like a lightning storm turned on its side, if not in size then surely in menace.

And menacing it was, this sight, for the storm and the explosion which preceded it were, after her twelve years on Aevum, engraved together into Jenica's memory, and as irrevocably into her brother's after seventeen, and lightning was hardly chief among their worries.

Drexon looked at his sister, and his sister back at him. Any hair that hadn't been singed unfurled from his flesh; that he'd entirely forgotten his ordeal underwater was the very smallest form of mercy.

This cove was secret, as far as Drexon and Jenica and their parents had reason to believe, and productive. Indeed, they relied on it for much of their family's supply of fish, which was the envy of Aevum's population for the short while before fa forbade taking nearly any of their surplus to market. Best not to be conspicuous.

Formed by a shoal protected by a large semicircular rock face, the cove enjoyed relative calmness year round. Ensconced in all directions by reef, a sort of artificial seafloor fortified even the portions of its circumference unaccounted for by rock. The effect was that only the highest tides suited the girth of a large predator come to feast, and only the fiercest weather perturbed the water, and so, by the violent standards of the sea, it was an attractive destination for life, a sanctuary.

Under normal conditions, the cove stood an hour's row from the nearest beach. That beach was, however, necessarily far from the village, further still from the explosion, and the acreage between was by and large so thickly jungled as to be inhospitable to foot traffic. Drexon had always known the risk in traveling so far, and so he needn't waste a moment's thought on whether to abandon the nets.

He took the sharpest edge of his best rock to the cordage tethering their nets to the boat, one by one, and watched them with detachment writhe and sink toward a shallow oblivion. With the nets vanished the prospect of a good meal tonight, and of good meals for several nights to come. It would be a difficult loss for his family, but a palatable one beside what might well vanish if the smoke should clear before they reached the gate.

Drexon forgot the nets as readily as he'd forgotten the burn, and with his ailing hand he plunged a dilapidated plank into the water opposite his sister. It was to be the first stroke of many that would culminate in land, and to Drexon's great apprehension, it might well be the first of too many.

Paddling dutifully through a sensation like fire ants in her arms, Jenica refused even to stop and dab the sweat from her eyes. Instead she attended the problem by rubbing her face on the filthy fabric of her sleeve which was periodically, if briefly, made available by the motion of her arm. Alternating dominant hands to preserve what strength was left in the other, she sweated profusely, and now and then she dabbed her eyes with her shoulder, and once or twice she timed it wrong and saw stars.

Drexon didn't bother alternating hands. He repeated the motion in disciplined perpetuity, eyes glued to a shoreline that grew too slowly as it was. That discipline was snapped by a second explosion. With a soft whimper, Jenica doubled her pace.

New smoke barreled eagerly skyward, galavanting with its predecessors, reinforcing the storm, bolstering the menace.

Twenty minutes passed, each its own eternity, before Drexon's heel broke the flat wet seal of Aevun sand. Jenica followed him overboard, and from their respective sides they heaved the boat a yard or two past the border of wet and dry before darting off toward the explosion. Though its roar was not, by now, even a guiding ring in their ears, the smoke in the sky was handy as a compass needle. They left footprints up its shadow.

The scant few bait traps and crab nets that had already been hauled onboard remained there, and no attempt to collect their small bounty of fish was considered. All that deserved consideration now was their race against distance, against terrain, and against time, that most persistent of opponents.

If ever they could use a distraction, it was now.