Keanu sat in his family's small house, which had been carved out of an old government building. His father, Ka'imi, paced back and forth while his mother, Ana'ili, sat quietly in the corner.
"You must make her understand," Ka'imi said, his voice tight. "She trusts you more than anyone else here."
Keanu stared at the floor. "I won't manipulate her," he said quietly. "She's been through enough of that already."
“Manipulate? Who said anything about manipulation, Keanu? You just need to show her the truth. You lived among the nobles. You’ve just told me she killed a Chosen on the way here. She can’t be too far from fully embracing our cause!”
Ana'ili spoke up, her voice soft but firm. "The Ko'a believes Talia is the key to our salvation. With her power, we could finally reclaim our place in the world."
"By making her swear to kill everyone with noble blood?" Keanu looked up at his parents. "Including children? Including people who've never harmed us?"
"They're all complicit," Ka'imi insisted. "Every luxury they enjoy comes at the cost of our suffering. Their very existence depends on keeping us in hiding, scattered across the Deep like criminals."
Keanu thought of the months he'd spent watching over Talia, how she'd struggled with her own power, how she'd fought to protect others regardless of their status, noble or commoner.
"She won't do it," he said.
Ana'ili rose and crossed to where Keanu sat. She placed a hand on his shoulder. "My son, sometimes we must make difficult choices for the greater good. The Ko'a says—"
"The Ko'a is wrong," Keanu interrupted, then immediately regretted his outburst. Such words were practically blasphemy in Aneanui. But he continued anyway. "We can't build a better future on a foundation of blood."
"Then what do you suggest?" Ka'imi demanded. "That we continue hiding in the sky while our people dwindle? That we watch our culture and history fade away because we're too squeamish to do what needs to be done?"
Keanu stood, shrugging off his mother's hand.
“She’ll make her own choices, father,” Keanu said. “I can’t and I won’t influence her. We don’t need to kill all the nobles to make a future for ourselves. Professor Iakopo is a noble himself and, as I told you in my reports, he’s on our side.”
“For how long?” Ka’imi said begrudgingly. “For how long, Keanu, until they turn back once again, until he grows old and his children hate your children? I didn’t know you changed this much in just one year. Don’t let the Ko’a hear you.”
Keanu had known that his people would be completely opposed to anything other than total war on the Great Families, but he hadn’t imagined the Ko’a would have Talia imprisoned. The only thing that allowed him not to completely freak out was the fact that they needed Talia on their side. This was probably just a show of force to put pressure on Talia.
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Most likely, at least.
“I need to talk to the Ko’a,” Keanu said gravely. “Father, could you ask for an audience on my behalf?”
* * *
Talia sat in her cell, a cramped room carved into the ancient stone of Aneanui.
Honestly, Talia hadn’t minded some time alone. She had spent too much time caught between other people’s plans, and now she used the time in the cell to think about all the revelations she had heard from Professor Tukupa to Mo’ira. She had found out that her blood tracked back to the creation of the Kraken, that answers to her Cursed Form problems were in the Forbidden Vessel. But if she had to be honest, she still didn’t understand what her own mother had gotten out of these encounters. She, Talia, could perhaps find a way to become stronger, to conquer the Cursed Form and do something with that. But what had Yalena found? What had driven her to fight the Kraken and make Talia into what she was?
Talia touched the seashell in her pocket. One burst of Mana and Professor Iakopo would come. But then what? He would start a fight against these people, survivors that had almost been completely wiped out by the Great Families? Talia didn’t like being taken hostage, but she also didn’t want to cause a complete slaughter here.
She looked at the manacles that they had slapped onto her. A guard passed by, looking through the bars in the door and opening it after making sure that Talia wasn’t up to anything.
“Lunch,” the man said, as he put down a quite nice bowl of steaming fish soup. “The Ko’a can be quite harsh with everyone. We respect your mother and her accomplishments. I am very sorry you had to end up in a cell.”
Talia frowned at the man. She wanted to say that if they were so sorry, they could just take the damn cuffs off instead of keeping her here.
“That’s alright,” she said instead, taking the bowl of soup and starting to drink it while her mind wandered.
The guard watched her eat and took the bowl away once she was done. Talia sat with her back against the wall and thought about her next move. As she looked at the manacles, she reasoned that if even Professor Iakopo hadn’t been able to get out of them, she didn’t really have any good chance at it. Right? Mana cuffs were meant to disrupt the natural flow of Mana and make an individual much weaker.
But something in the back of her mind told her that she had so much vitality that perhaps... The guard wouldn’t come back until much later. And if Talia had her hands free, well, he would be much more sorry then.
She focused on her Blood Water and found that the manacles barely let her access any. However, as if practicing the same exercise as she had in Professor Iakopo’s class, she started injecting incredible amounts of Blood Water into the cuffs. Minutes later, as Talia’s veins felt about to tear apart, she felt for a split second that she could actually access her Mana. Immediately, she fused Blood Water and Dark Water, and runes snaked on her skin, appearing from all around her eyes. Even the manacles that had contained people much stronger than her crumbled into pieces in contact with Dark Water.
Talia took a series of deep breaths and immediately retracted the Cursed Form before it could start taking over her thoughts. She was on the floor panting, almost on the verge of emptying the contents of her stomach. But, nonetheless, she had done it. She had freed herself.
“Not bad,” she heard a voice say and immediately felt a moment of panic, thinking that the guard might have seen that. She raised her eyes, however, and found two icy irises staring back at her through the bars of the door. A large smile was on Kehai’s face as he dangled a metallic key.
“Guess who came to save you?”