The Sea Is Ours by Jaymee Goh Page A

offer you a job.”
    The sentence seemed to jar Mixa, to the point where she almost fell over backward on the chair. She stopped herself by touching the bedside table, and stared. “But I—you’re not—what?”
    â€œYour brother’s loss is my gain.” Her body still throbbed, but she knew the pain would go away eventually. She supposed she’d come out lucky in that regard. Normally, the only way to get rid of jellyfish poison was a quick slice of the infected body part. She could have lost an arm, but thanks to Mixa’s rapport with the settlers, she didn’t. “I could use a quick study like you, and I meant what I said about Gogg wanting to know about this filtering system you have. Work with me.”
    Mixa shook her head. “I…no. My work is for the settlers.”
    â€œAnd how do you figure you can go about helping them? Did you plan to forever risk your well-being by hitchhiking to every volcanized region as soon as an explosion hits? We’d get there faster, and you have seen how quickly we can mobilize. Take the job, Prinsesa.”
    â€œMixa,” she said, low and timid, as though she’d said it for the first time. “If you’re going to be my superior, you had best call me Mixa.”
    Caliso grinned. “Welcome aboard, Mixa.”
    The two shared a smile, and the New Manila princess stood to leave. She reached the door and turned when she heard Caliso chuckle. To answer her questioning gaze, Caliso’s grin widened. “Dato is going to kick himself sore. He’s wanted to change my mind this whole time, and I told him it would be as futile as moving a mountain.”
    The young woman seemed to understand the joke, and she grinned, too. “Mountains move all the time in the Pinas. You just have to know where to look.”

Ordained
    L.L. Hill
    Between a creased and callused thumb and forefinger, Preecha held the butterfly thorax. Three times he turned the legs in a full circle, hearing the gears grind the spring taut. With palms flat, he held his arms straight out at eye level. Stretched wings and poised legs faced the verdant green clad hills across the river. With a gentle brush of a thumb on a lever, the butterfly sprang away. From the base of his tongue, a solemn mantra followed the iridescent blue and green spotted insect into the retreating bosom of dawn.
    Rapid wing flaps lifted the creature above the hills that stepped through mist above the brown slug of the Mekong. Energy run down spread wings spun in a gentle, glittering glide back to a perch on a polished ball of Pong Kham with other insects. Under the elephant head sized clear crystal sea of frozen vegetation, the black and red pits of another rock were magnified in their sealed sanctuary.
    From his lotus on a bare grey rock set in a grassy meadow on a bluff over the river, Preecha selected a dragonfly from the orb and wound it. With wings clear, brown and ochre, it climbed furiously before sweeping down over his ochre robes to alight on the crystal.
    An imperious toot preceded a small sailing paddle wheeler that thrashed the brown to white froth as it rounded a river bend. Not dropped, the sail billowed backwards in five cream waves. Pennants of yellow and blue marched in the rigging. Humid air stirred from lethargy by the impatient vigor entwined the smells of fruit orchards, forest and muddy water.
    A spread legged man stood at the bow dressed in a European black suit under a tan pith helmet. Behind him, two attendants, also in stiff thick clothes, stumbled as the boat bumped into a short wooden pier.
    Hands behind his back under short tails, the man stepped past scurrying crew onto the wharf and strode up on it. At the dark red patch in the rest trail leading up the steep embankment, he stopped and turned to his minions who scrambled off the boat and dashed past carrying a small wood bridge that they laid at their master’s feet. A colorfully-clad woman