Much later, the storm still raging, she felt a stillness in the cabin and opened her salted eyes to find herself alone, her attacker fled. A Pyrrhic victory to them both. He had not conquered, for she had in her deepest thoughts, and those only would she remember, given herself to another and not to her violator; and he had not stripped her of her purity, because she could laugh at herself that, being an American educated college graduate, a sorority party girl of an era displaced by war, she had left her virginity in the back of a ’39 Plymouth, in a muddled experiment of sweating and fumbled groping, a vague face with light whisker stubble, the proverbial one-night stand of too much jug wine. Kū could never have her as a virgin or throw her into the volcano to appease the… She suddenly focused.
Tightly wrapped in a blanket, wearing nothing underneath, Tommi stumbled along the ship’s walkway, letting the stinging rain purge away the foreign body smells, though the cool water could not take away that pain of tearing between her legs. She swore aloud her familiar wartime mantra, which she now doubted: I will survive.
Easily she found Pele at the bow of the trawler, her arms raised to the heavens, chanting. Tommi recalled Tiki Shark’s lecture on Polynesian mythology—no longer myths. Pele was, after all, the goddess of thunder and lightning.
Dropping down next to Pele’s feet, she opened her blanket and let the rain wash the blood off her skin, cool the bruises on her face and body. She didn’t care if anyone came upon her in this disarray of nakedness.
“Why did you not save me from him?” she shouted above the roar of the storm’s fierceness. “You are a woman somewhere inside your cheerleader facade; you, the Mother of Earth, Overseer of this violence of Nature, you should understand my agony, my destruction.”
Pele kept up her chanting for a few seconds more and then looked down at Tommi.
“Did he really destroy you?”
Tommi bit her lip, and spoke with force. “No, he did not.”
“You are strong for a mere woman. I presume you did not pleasure him as he might expect from a slave girl, and yet he did not kill you for your failures.”
“If he gets his jollies off ravishing a dead mackerel; no, I can say, I did not please him. In fact, I don’t remember him at all, except this lingering pain.” And she washed herself gently, feeling no shame to do so.
“Did you not see a blue light? Within that light did you find a god to help you through this torment?”
That gave her pause, remembering Hunter’s face, what he had become. “Yes, I did. His presence helped, yes. Was that blue light of your doing?”
“Sailors who worship the nailed god on wood named my fire after their blessed priest: Saint Elmo’s Fire. Depending on your need, it could be either a good omen or a bad one.”
“It was a good omen, a saving one.”
“From now on I will protect you from any of his further advances or touching. Knowing him, I am sure he will direct his anger against those he can control, namely Baran and the crew.”
“How can you protect me?”
“He sees you as unimportant in his plans, but you are important to me. Through you and Hunter I hope someday Kū will be vanquished.”
The rain still pummeled Tommi’s face and it was hard for her to speak without shouting out each word in her questioning.
“And your chanting?”
“I need this storm to go before us and hold fast on Mauna
Kea, and let the rain become snow and ice. I have summoneda favor from one of my sisters, Poliahu.” Her teenage persona returned. “I’m basically chanting, ‘Keep it snowing, sis.’”
“So you have a plan to defeat Kū?”
“Not really, no.”
“What? All this for what?”
“I had to get him back on dry land, on my home soil, where I will have equal power. But sometimes even the gods must seek out miracles and put trust in the hands of the Fates. As I told Hunter, it must be mankind, not us, who fights Kū’s allies and destroys these atomic beasts.”
“And how can you be so certain we have a chance to win?”
Pele patted the top of Tommi’s head, gently with a school girl grin of knowing a scandalous secret no one else in the class might have learned. From the pocket of her pants, she pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and handed it down to Tommi.
Unfolding it, Tommi saw it was one of Tiki Shark’s drawings.
She stared hard.
“By the grace of all you gods, how will that be possible?”
Tommi could see she held hope in her hands as the rain washed the ink from the sketching paper.