CHAPTER 5 - Unexpected Allies in the Echoing Blue
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With the tide surging, Barbra is confronted in the true fissure by two locals and a third figure: Suni, the harbor caretaker who admits he sent the note and that the planted niche was a test. Unexpected help arrives when Einar, the fisherman she met at the bar, joins with rope and resolve. Trust earned by her refusal to follow the decoy, Barbra uses the copper disk’s etched ‘BLÁSÓL’ marks as rhythmic measures, not coordinates, and, with a single tone from the bone flute, unlocks a hidden slab. Inside a resonant chamber of basalt and bioluminescent water, Suni reveals the Blue Sun’s purpose as a generations-old beacon and smuggler’s blind guarded by local families. He offers her a small starburst pin as token of trust. Barbra discovers the “decoy” lens is actually part of a projector that, paired with the chamber, maps a safe path toward a second exit. As the tide rises and another group closes in, they follow the projected vein of blue to a ledge, where silhouettes demand the copper disk. The chamber hums like a living thing while Barbra weighs surrender against triggering a flood, ending on a tense cliffhanger.
The fissure gulped and exhaled as the tide shouldered in, a cold breath that salted Barbra’s lips and stung the freckles she despised. She planted her blue and white Asics on the slick basalt, jeans damp to the knee, leather jacket whispering when she turned. Two men from the skiff crowded the opening, and between them eased the harbor’s old caretaker, the one who had guarded the anchor plaque. He raised a palm in uneasy greeting, eyes reflecting the bioluminescent flecks that quivered like trapped stars.
The sea’s chant tightened into a pounding rhythm, and the choice that had pinned her in the darkness pressed forward with it. He spoke first, voice pebbled and low. “No lamp,” he said, nodding to the dim seethe beyond her shoulder, “or the wall will not speak.” Barbra slipped the salt-crusted copper disk from her pocket, its etched starburst catching a faint pulse, and saw the caretaker’s mouth twist into something like a confession. “You found the decoy,” he murmured, glancing past her to the men, who looked away like boys.
“We test strangers with it, but you walked by sound, not blue, and that is why I sent the note.”
Before she could answer, another shadow slid along the basalt like a seal. The fisherman from the bar, the one whose smile had faltered when their talk turned guarded, stepped into the cleft with a coil of rope over his shoulder. Einar, she remembered suddenly, from the way a drunk had called after him on the quay. “Couldn’t sleep,” he said, eyes flicking from her to the caretaker, to the copper disk.
“Figured if you were stubborn enough to come back, you might need a steady hand.”
Trust, for Barbra, had always been a lean muscle rather than an impulse, built by years of walking alone with only weather for company. Yet the way Suni — the caretaker finally offered his name — angled his body between her and the impatient men softened some stubborn hinge in her chest. The tide hit a lull, the cave inhaled, and she counted the beats on instinct, aligning them with the faint pips etched beside BLÁSÓL on the disk. “They’re not coordinates,” she said, lifting it to the seam of rock ahead.
“They’re measures—rests where the cave sings true.”
Einar unspooled the rope and made a belay around a knuckled spur, and together they inched forward in the darkness, three breaths riding the swell. Barbra’s calves, honed by restless miles, burned as she set her weight carefully, the rubber of her Asics squeaking in tiny protests. The seam was there, a hairline with a carved starburst worn smooth by salt, and below it a shallow notch the size of a hand. She pressed the copper disk into it, aligning the word skuggi with the grain, and felt a faint hum climb into her bones.
The cave hushed as if it were listening back. She fished the bone flute from her jacket pocket where she had shoved it despite dismissing it as part of the ruse, and rolled it between her fingers. “No light,” Suni reminded, though none of them needed it now; the blue quivered under the lip of stone like held breath. Barbra lifted the flute and released a single note, thin at first, then fuller as she found the pitch the cave offered her.
Sound stitched the dark together; the disk thrummed in the notch, and a sluice of cooler air spilled over their faces. With a soft grind, a slab withdrew, and black water below them coughed up a corona of blue. They slipped through, one hand on the rope, and the chamber beyond opened like a held breath finally released. Basalt rose in organ pipes around a pool whose skin gathered the smallest stir into rings of cobalt fire.
It wasn’t magic, Barbra knew, but it felt like memory made visible—a concentration of plankton and minerals focused by shape and copper, an old experiment turned ritual. On a shelf of rock lay a tarred-oak coffer banded in greened bronze, a bundle of oilskin-wrapped charts, and a narrow brass tube etched with the same starburst. Suni bent his head, fingers reverent, and in a whisper confessed what families had been taught never to say aloud. “The Blue Sun was a beacon,” he said, “a hush-light to guide our boats home when the fog erased the sky, and a blind to hide the boats we smuggled out.” The decoys had misled more than treasure seekers; once, decades ago, outsiders had tried to harvest the glow for spectacle, and the families had closed ranks that night.
Barbra’s throat tightened at the thought of secrets held long enough to shape lives, of grandparents who had taught her to fend for herself with quiet kindness after the accident. “Keep what you need to remember,” Suni said, nudging a small copper pin stamped with the starburst toward her palm. She pressed it against her skin and nodded, but the echo of other feet found them before gratitude could settle. Einar stiffened and killed a reflex to reach for a lamp; they could hear the newcomers splash hesitantly through the outer passage where the slab had slid.
“We move,” he whispered, eyes on the oilskin charts, then on the brass tube whose lens was clouded, a twin to the planted one she’d found. Barbra flipped the tube’s end and held it against the starburst on the wall; the chamber shifted, lines etched in soot lighting up as if inked by the blue. The so-called decoy lens wasn’t false, only incomplete; here it made sense, a projector translating sound and current into a narrow path that angled toward a second exit. “You see?” she breathed, a prickle running along her arms as she watched the route draw itself like a vein.
Water began to lap at their shins, the tide no longer slack but deciding, as tides did, that it had given enough. They followed the luminous vein to a ledge that opened toward a slit of night fretted with spray, and there shapes materialized—two silhouettes she recognized from the cliff path and a third bulkier, their shoulders squared. “Hand over the disk,” a voice ordered, made thick by echo and fear. The copper in the wall answered with a deepening hum, and Barbra felt the notch tug at the disk like a magnet hungry for its key.
She slid it free, heart hitching, and met Einar’s eye as the Blue Sun swelled—would she surrender the thing that had led her here, or would she turn it and risk flooding them all?
