Finally, the orca turned away. He flipped his enormous tail fin with enough force that the current thrust me backwards. I let out a breath, stunned and relieved and elated all at once. The orca shot away from us, faster, faster, until his black body faded to blue. I kept watching long after he disappeared.
Spio came to meet me, picking up the trailing end of the net. “That was so cool,” he breathed. “What do we do with this?”
I tore my eyes from the empty water. “Right. We can’t leave it to float around for something else to get tangled in. Let’s find the nearest shore and put it on the beach. Hopefully someone will pick it up.”
Lugging the net with us, we continued on the path Lysi was hopefully travelling—but now we also had to find a place to dump this gargantuan piece of litter.
After mere minutes, the net grew painful in my fists. My pity for the whale increased.
“What’s wrong?” said Spio.
I flexed my cramped fingers. “I see things like this, and I understand why Adaro wants humans out of the sea.”
Spio was silent for a long time. Then he said, “I could be in the wrong wake here, but I don’t think Adaro’s reason for blitzing humans is to save animals from fishing nets.”
Maybe that was true, but it still bothered me. Was Adaro right about humans? Were we—they—no better than he thought?
“You know,” said Spio, “you’re different than you let on.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your aura was all—I don’t know, sharky—when we met. It’s better now. More like what I imagined you’d be like.”
I avoided his eyes. Not for the first time, I had the feeling I’d been letting Lysi down.
“Getting that close to an injured killer whale was probably a stupid thing to do,” I said.
“You’d be surprised how often the stupid thing is the right thing,” said Spio.
Not long after, I began to wilt with exhaustion. It must have been night time. For all I knew, we’d swum until dawn, no thanks to the sun rotating around us in a slow-motion taunt.
Everything around me seemed to have a silvery glow. How long had I been awake? How long could someone stay awake before losing sanity?
“Next break in the ice,” said Spio. “Let’s take a nap. You’re about to pass out on me.”
I had no energy to argue.
We found a break in the ice, but tremors in the waves told me there was a huge something already up there. I squinted at the green underside as though to see through.
“With numbers like that, I have two guesses,” said Spio. “It’s either walruses, or a cruise ship let off and there are tourists having a fiesta on the ice.”
Deciding to place my bet on the walruses, I poked my head up.
Dozens of enormous, chocolate-brown lumps of blubber were resting atop the ice on all sides, grunting so loudly it was as if they were all shouting at each other. I’d thought walruses would be cute, but up close, that was a stretch. Odour aside, they were lumpy, wrinkled, and scabby-looking, with thick white whiskers coming out of greasy muzzles. But their collective aura was content, so I decided they weren’t bad. I began to pull myself up.
“Whoa, buddy!” said Spio, appearing beside me and grabbing my arm. “You can’t just go up to a walrus.”
I looked at the nearest one. He was so blubbery, it looked like if I slapped him on the back his fat would ripple as fluidly as if I dropped a stone in a pond. I squinted at Spio, wondering if he was joking.
“Walruses are jerks, Meela.”
“They are?”
“You think those lung-poppers are for decoration?”
I supposed their tusks were easily as long as my arm.
I slumped. “So - tired.”
