The Light of Others

The water is not merely water. Tonight, it is a living thing, a vast, breathing beast that has swallowed the world.

I am a speck in its throat, a piece of grit it is trying to cough up, or perhaps digest. The cold is not something that touches my skin; it is something that lives inside me now, a second skeleton made of ice, rigid and demanding. It whispers to my muscles, telling them to stop, to stiffen, to sink.

But I cannot sink.

I am wrapped in the refuse of the world, and for the first time in my life, I am grateful for the garbage. My jacket—my armor, my boat—crunches with every ragged breath I take. *Krch. Krch.* It is the sound of survival.

It is made of the things the village threw away, the things the Händler brought and the Elders discarded once their purpose was served. Plastic bottles. Clear, hollow skins that once held sweet water or the sharp-smelling detergents that the women use to scrub the stones of the holy places. I gathered them in secret, hiding them in the caves where the tide goes out, tying them together with fishing line stolen from the nets.

The Good Betvater, the Finder, the man who found me when I was nothing but a bundle of cloth on the shore, he once told me that these bottles were poison.

"They do not rot," he said, holding one up to the sun, his eyes sad behind his wire-rimmed glasses. "The earth cannot eat them. They last forever."

Forever. That is what I need tonight. I need forever. I need to be as eternal as this plastic.

I kick out with my legs. My muscles burn, a deep, acidic fire that competes with the cold. I am not swimming; I am clawing my way through the black glass of the night. The island is behind me. I do not look back. I know what is there. The smoke. The mill. The donkey I left behind, braying in the confusion. The Müller, standing in the doorway with flour on his hands, watching me go, his silence a prayer and a permission.

And Yael.

*Yael.*

The name is a stone in my throat. I swallow the salt water, and it tastes like tears. Yael is not on the island anymore. Yael is in the air, in the wind, in the screaming of the gulls. But his body... his body was given to the stones.

I close my eyes for a second, just a second, and the image is there, burned into my eyelids. The *Pfahl*. The wooden stake driven into the hard earth of the square. Yael bound to it, his white shirt torn, his eyes searching for me in the crowd. And the men. The men I grew up with. The men who bought bread from the Müller. The men who sang in the choir. Picking up the stones. The sound. That terrible, wet, final sound.

"Swim," I whisper to the darkness. The sound of my own voice startles me. It is a croak, raw and broken. "Swim for him. Swim for the fish."

The fish. My secret passenger. The child Yael planted in me before the stones took him. I feel the weight of it in my belly, a small, hard knot of life. It pulls me down, this second heart, this tiny anchor. But I will not let it drown.

I tell it stories in my head as I kick. *Kick. Glide. Crunch.*

*Listen, little fish,* I think. *There is a world where stones are only for building walls, not for killing boys. There is a world where the water is sweet and comes from a metal snake in the wall. The Finder told me.*

The Finder. He was the only father I knew. He taught me the forbidden marks. A. B. C. The ladder out of the pit. He had books hidden in the cellar, beneath the sacks of grain. Books with pictures of places that were not gray, not stone, not island. Green places. Cities that glowed like fallen constellations. And he told me about the Discs.

I stop kicking for a moment, letting the plastic jacket buoy me up. I float on my back, looking up at the sky. The clouds are heavy, obscuring the stars, but I remember the day the Disc came.

It had been summer. The air was thick with the smell of thyme and goat dung. A sound had started, low at first, like a swarm of angry bees, then growing louder, a rhythmic *thup-thup-thup* that shook the dust from the olive trees. We all ran out into the square. The women covered their heads. The men grabbed their sticks.

And then we saw it. A giant metal insect, red and shiny, hanging in the sky. It had no wings like a bird. Instead, it had a spinning disc on top of its head, a blur of motion that sliced the air. It was loud, so loud that the donkeys screamed and pulled at their ropes. The wind from it flattened the grass on the cliffs.

"A demon!" the Betvater—the bad one, the one who came after—screamed. "The Eye of the Devil!"

But the Finder, he had pulled me close, his hand trembling on my shoulder. "No, Alina," he whispered, his lips brushing my ear so no one else could hear. "Look. It is a machine. It is called a helicopter. Humans fly it. Men like us."

"Humans?" I had whispered back, staring at the red beast. "But where are the wings?"

"The rotor," he said. "The spinning disc. It pushes the air down. It is physics, Alina. Not magic. Not demons. Science."

I tried to see the humans. I squinted against the sun. And for a moment, I thought I saw a face behind the glass eye of the beast. A man wearing a helmet, looking down at us. Looking at us like we were ants. Like we were nothing.

Then the beast turned, the disc tilting, and it flew away over the sea, leaving only dust and fear behind. The village spent three days praying in the sanctuary to cleanse the island of the demon's presence. But I lay awake at night, thinking of the man in the glass eye.

If he could fly, then there was a place to fly to. A place where metal could float on the air. And if metal can float on air, then plastic can float on water.

I start to paddle again. The memory gives me strength. I am swimming towards the land of the helicopters. The land of the Discs. The land where Yael's son will not be a bastard, but a boy.