Still on the shore, Sylviana stood incredulous. The boy must have seen it. Had he really grabbed hold of the fin, or had she just imagined it? Her eyes detecting motion farther out, once more she beheld the impossible pairing. This time there could be no doubt. A young boy, perhaps twelve or thirteen, had resurfaced with his mount, a massive killer whale. Clutching with hand and foot both the dorsal and pectoral fins, his limbs spread spider-like against the surging torso, he rode as if he had been born to it. In fact, he had. * 'Kalus!' The girl came running to the place where he stood tacitly shaping a net, surprised he hadn't heard her shouts. He saw her but did not immediately react, half knowing what she was going to say. She was going to tell him she'd seen a water-child. He waited patiently, hoping she would understand. 'Kalus,' she repeated, closer and out of breath. 'I saw another human. . .or something that looked like one. It saw me and dashed off to sea, on the back of a killer whale!' 'Yes. I know.' 'You saw it, too?' 'No, but I have seen them before.' She looked him full in the face, perplexed. 'You knew there were other humans, and you never told me? My God, Kalus, why?' 'Because I was afraid.' 'Afraid of what?' she demanded. 'Afraid that if you knew there were others, you would have less need of me. That you would not love me as much, always wondering.....' 'Oh, Kalus, that's so unfair! How could you think so little of me?' But even as she denied his words, she knew they held a grain of truth. 'I'm sorry,' he said. Finding no other expression, he repeated. 'I'm sorry.' For a moment she had forgotten him, and the effect her resentment would have. Now she looked at him, at the weary, washed-out face of long ago, and remembered. 'OH.' She came behind and wrapped her arms around his chest and held him tightly. 'It's all right. I understand.' With little further speech the two worked on the nets until night forced them back into the cave, a small hollow bored into smooth stone twenty feet above the sand. It was neither spacious nor comfortable, but Kalus did not intend to remain there long. Both knew, as later in the dead of night he opened his heart to her, that they must leave the roots of their past and strike out to a new destination. To the Island, where Kalus had often marked the smoke of fires, and where he hoped to find some answer to the questions that unsettled him, not the least of which was the riddle of the Children of the Sea. Chapter 33