Aqua Read online

  Chapter Two

  As I turned away from the well, and walked back towards the village centre, I felt proud of myself. Proud that I could help people, no matter how small the problem was. To me, a blocked well only took a few minutes to fix, but for them, it could have taken weeks. And in the time that would pass while they fixed it themselves, people could die because there was no clean drinking water. Some people think that big changes make big differences. And even though they do, I believe that if everyone just focused on the small things, then a lot more people in the world would be happy.

  I looked down at the pink shell that I continued to clutch onto. Zeina would love it. It would mean so much to her. I really liked Zeina, and got along with her really well. It was probably because she reminded me so much of my little sister Visola, and I loved Visola with all of my heart. We were really close.

  Just as I walked past the central pyre, which burned brightly in the midday sun, I noticed Zeina and her mother Obono walking into their house. I smiled widely, and began running towards them. As I approached their little dwelling, I put the shell behind my back so that it wouldn’t ruin the surprise.

  “Hola!” I shouted out loudly.

  Zeina turned, a wide beaming grin pulled across her face, and she ran towards me as fast as her little legs could carry her. Once she reached me, she threw her tiny arms around the top of my legs and pulled me tight.

  “Shasa!!” she screamed excitedly, “I can’t believe it!”

  Obono turned and winked at me as she entered her house, indicating for me to go inside with her.

  “I’ve got a present for you…” I told Zeina anxiously, “but I can only give it to you once we go inside…”

  Zeina, still clamped onto me, looked up at me happily.

  “Can’t I have it now?” she pleaded.

  “No!”

  “Oh okay,” she accepted, and then after squeezing me once more, let me go and bolted into her house. I followed her in.

  Zeina’s house was a small square room with corrugated iron walls and a wooden roof. Even though it was very basic, it was very clean and tidy. Obono only had very few personal possessions, but she displayed them proudly on several shelves that hung on the walls around the space. The house reminded me of the home I used to live in with my parents, before I was taken by the Aqua Cohors. My brothers and sister would scold me for saying ‘taken’, as it sounded like we had been kidnapped, which was not the truth at all. Our parents had just wanted a better life for their children, one they couldn’t possibly provide. Luckily for them, they too were given a house on the island, so we weren’t separated from them.

  “Wouldn’t you like something to eat? Or drink?” Obono enquired politely.

  “I would love some water!” I responded.

  “The well… it’s…”

  “It’s fixed,” I informed her.

  Obono’s round eyes opened even bigger.

  “Why thank you!” she praised, dropping to her knees and grabbing my leg, “Thank you Jesus for sending Shasa! Thank you Lord for blessing us with her presence!”

  I tried to back away from Obono, but she wouldn’t let me. I was incredibly embarrassed.

  “Please, Obono, please!” I reached down and picked her from the floor, “I just helped, that’s all!”

  “But no one else does, Shasa, no one else does!”

  “Please…” I deflected, “Just get me some water: that’s all I want from you, okay?”

  Obono nodded obediently, and then rushed out of the house. Zeina moved towards me as I shuffled from one foot to another in mortification.

  “What’s wrong with mummy?” Zeina asked innocently, staring up at me with her mother’s wide eyes and round face.

  “Nothing,” I told her as I crouched down, “Do you want your present now?”

  Zeina nodded eagerly.

  “Close your eyes…” She clamped them shut immediately. “And hold out your hands…” Her hands shot out instantly.

  I brought the sea shell out from its hiding place and placed it gently on top of her teensy palms. As soon as she felt the shell against her skin, her eyes pulled open. She stared at the beautiful pink treasure for a few moments in silence, before turning to me and smiling. She didn’t have all of her front teeth, as they were growing out, which made her joy seem even cuter.

  “It’s lovely, Shasa,” she said with deep sincerity, “thank you so much….!”

  She kissed me on my cheek and then continued to gawp at the present in her hands. It looked as though she was scared to touch it- that one wrong move and the whole thing would suddenly shatter into a thousand pieces.

  “It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen… I feel like a princess now, because only princesses have pretty things like this!”

  “You are a princess,” I told her, “because all little girls are.” I kissed her on the forehead tenderly, and then stood up straight.

  “I’m going to put it next to my bed,” she told me as she walked slowly across the room, “so that I will see it every night before I go to sleep.”

  Every step she took was measured and precise. She didn’t want to drop the shell. As soon as she got over to her small bed in the left hand corner of the room, she placed the sea shell carefully onto a small chest of drawers that sat next to it. Once she was sure that it wouldn’t drop and break, she ran across the room and jumped into my arms, wrapping herself around me.

  “I love you Shasa,” she whispered into my left ear. I squeezed her against my body and then put her back down on the floor.

  Just as I was about to ask Zeina where her mother had got to, I heard a loud car drive into the centre of the village. Its engine was incredibly noisy, and as it swerved past the bonfire, its tyres spat rocks from the floor. It screeched to a halt and I heard the car doors open, and large, heavy footfalls hitting the ground. Everything in the village went silent.

  “Who is that…?” I asked Zeina, but when I turned to look out the front door, Zeina clasped onto my leg like a sea urchin. I looked down at her, and she looked up at me, terrified.

  “Pretty girlies…!” A deep voice boomed through the silence of the crowd. I moved closer to the door and looked out to see a large, fat man strolling away from a Jeep and into the crowd. People moved away from him, and children ran to their parents in terror. He turned towards me, his big fat head dripping sweat from every orifice. His tongue waggled out of his mouth as his wobbling belly bounced up and down over his trousers. He wore a vest and shorts, but the vest did little to cover his stomach, which he seemed proud to display.

  I caught his gaze. His dead eyes smiled wickedly at me as they looked me up and down greedily. He licked his lips and walked towards me, then looked down and saw Zeina, who he seemed to be more interested in.

  “The girl,” he pointed, “she’s mine.”

  “No!” Obono screamed, pushing through the crowd of hushed onlookers. Zeina’s mother ran towards us, but just before she reached the fat man, she was pushed to the ground by his companion, a more physically fit but equally terrifying man who held a large gun in his lithe arms. I rushed forwards to help Obono, but the sleazy man blocked my path. His arms stretched out across the door frame, and I caught a whiff of his pungent armpits, which made me feel physically sick.

  He waggled his finger in my face, and clicked his tongue.

  “No, no, no,” he told me, leaning his face closer to mine. His warm, foul breath slapped my face like a rotting breeze, and almost made me gag. As I raised my arm to my face to cough, he seized Zeina’s arm and dragged her from my legs, holding her with a tight grip.

  “No!” Obono shouted, “Please, she’s too young…!”

  “That’s what you said last time,” the cruel man sneered, cautiously keeping my gaze. “And I let you off. I gave you a few weeks to say goodbye. So now she’s mine. She’ll make a good profit,” he informed Obono cruelly, “she looks strong. She’ll be a hard worker. And once she’s done
toiling all day, I’m sure I can think of other ways she can make me some money…”

  He licked his lips again, which puckered after he smacked them together.

  “Please…” Obono pleaded. She tried to crawl over to the man, but was stopped by a hard blow to the temple from the butt of the other man’s gun. I could feel the fury within me rising up, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to quell it. But I didn’t want to. This man was not going to take Zeina away: I wouldn’t allow it.

  “You got a problem?” He leered at me as I gritted my teeth together. He must have been able to tell that I was quietly seething.

  “You won’t take her,” I told him defiantly. “I won’t let you.”

  He smiled, but not with his eyes. His thick black lips pursed together into an evil grin.

  “And what are you going to do about it?” he asked, suddenly throwing Zeina into the clutches of the other man and slapping me across the face.

  My right cheek stung, but I didn’t attend to it. He would have to do a lot worse than that to stop me from saving Zeina. I wasn’t going to stand here and watch her be sold into slavery.

  I turned to the other man.

  “Give her back to me now, and there’ll be no trouble.” His brown eyes looked through me, as if I were invisible.

  “You talk to me, bitch!” The fat man spat as he grabbed my face tightly, squeezing my cheeks together with all his might.

  I kicked him between his legs and then punched him in the nose, breaking it. He let go of me and staggered backwards in shock. But I was now aware that his companion was aiming the rifle at my head. Zeina ran to her mother’s side, and watched in horror, as did everyone else in the village. As the fat man screamed in agony, I could see Matias inching towards the gunman. I glared at him and shook my head. He looked at me defiantly, and then realised the danger of what he was doing. He wanted to save me, but it was too dangerous for him. I had to do this on my own.

  “ARGH!” The fat man screamed out, and then began to shout expletives at me as he clutched his nose. “I think it’s broken!” He looked towards the man with the gun, and then back towards me. My heart thundered in my chest. Even though there was a water source nearby, there wasn’t much I could do to stop these men without revealing my powers to the entire village. And if I did that, word might get out that there were a group of mutants living on the Aqua Island, just off the coast. And that would cause a lot of problems that I didn’t think any of us were prepared to deal with.

  As I stared down the barrel of the rifle, I was already summoning the water from the well. I could use that water to create a diversion, but it wouldn’t necessarily get me out of this situation. I was also trying to collect the moisture from the earth underneath us to try to make some sort of quicksand that the men would fall into, but the ground wasn’t soft enough. It was ironic that, as the Primus of the Aqua Elementals, on land and without a water source, I was almost entirely helpless. Sure, I was proficient in hand to hand combat, but I would rather not get into a brawl with two large men. The only thing I could do, and had already done, was to catch water molecules floating in the air and collect a large amount of them in the barrel of the rifle. I then held them solid, turning them into a sheet of hardened water that would not be broken by the bullet. This way, if the gunman did in fact decide to shoot me, the bullet would not fire- it would be jammed by my immovable blockage. Nothing was going to leave the barrel; I had already made sure of it. But although I could prevent being shot at, I couldn’t stop them from attacking me unless I revealed who I really was and what I could really do. Or… well, the only other option was too unbearable to think about, and I wasn’t going to do it anyway. Unless I really had to.

  As the fat man staggered towards me, pinching his nose with his left digits and pointing at me with his right finger, I kept my composure. My mind was whirling at a mile a minute and my heart heaved in my chest. I was terrified. But I wasn’t going to back down. I wasn’t going to run away and leave Zeina to be sold into slavery, like so many other children in this country.

  Lord, please help me, I prayed silently, please help me and everyone else here get out of this situation alive.

  “You’ve made a big mistake!!” the fat man screamed. “I was going to let you go, but now I’m going to take you too…!” He lumbered towards me and put his slimy right hand on my waist, squeezing it tightly. I slapped it away, and the gun man cocked his rifle. The fat man sneered.

  “You’re going to work for me now. A beautiful woman like you will make me a fortune. And trust me when I say, it is a fate worse than death. I’ll beat that attitude out of you, and once I do, I’ll make you beg… I’ll make you scream… I’ll make you wish you were dead!!”

  “No!” Zeina screamed as she ran towards me. The gunman pointed down at the moving target and fired his rifle at the seven year old girl, but nothing happened. My water blockage was strong, and it couldn’t be broken. He pulled the trigger again, this time pointing the gun at me, but the bullet was once again prevented from reaching its target. The gunman pressed the trigger a third time, but nothing happened. He pointed the gun towards the floor so I allowed the water to run free, allowing the bullet to slide out and hit the ground with a soft thud.

  The gunman grumbled as Zeina leapt into my arms, but as she did so the fat man launched his entire body weight at me, pushing me to the ground. My head smacked off of the floor of Obono’s house, and I lay there, with Zeina in my arms, in a haze. The world began to spin, and everything seemed to pull away from me. My vision blurred and my hearing became murky. I tried desperately to get up, but I couldn’t. The fat man had pulled Zeina from my arms and was now lying on top of me. His thick, fat legs sat either side of my torso, and he grabbed my neck and began to throttle me. I screamed out and began grabbing at his face, tearing his flesh with my nails, but he wouldn’t stop.

  He was going to kill me.