The indigenous people of the island named it Ichirouganaim, The Red Land with White Teeth. It was born at the juncture of two tectonic plates, the South American and the Caribbean. When two immense forces meet, something has to give, and in this case it was the South American plate, forced to slide beneath the Caribbean. Where the two plates scraped together, an accretion formed and was forced upward until it rose above the waves. It still rises at a rate of about an inch per thousand years.
When Europeans arrived, they didn’t care for the native name and renamed the island Barbados, the Bearded Ones. It isn’t at all clear why. What is clear—or became clear as humanity began to absorb the presence of the Titans and the Hollow Earth—is that the same forces that pushed the island from the depths also created a vortex, a pathway from the surface of the world to the hollow one beneath.
The vortex isn’t unlike a mouth. Maybe the indigenous peoples knew all along what Monarch has recently “discovered”.
—Internal Monarch Memo, Initial Reports of Stable Vertices, Dr. Nathan Lind
Dr. Ilene Andrews strode through the Access Point facility, feeling harried. Apparently, that’s what came of being in charge, and as she often did, she wondered how that had happened. She loved research. She could do that all day, every day. But dealing with contractors who had yet to fully finish a facility that was supposed to be completed months ago, with a fickle public, and with politicians who didn’t know a vortex from their own… well, from a hole in the ground—that was enough to make for a bad day. And lately she’d had a lot of days like that.
She knew her assistant Wilcox was struggling to keep up with her pace through the facility and still take notes. But she couldn’t slow down for him.
“Tell the Italian military Rome would be flattened if it weren’t for Godzilla. They can threaten him all they want: just tell them to find another scapegoat.”
“Do you…” Wilcox paused, looking stricken, “…actually want me to say that?”
She frowned at him for a second. Probably not?
“Just make me sound calm,” she told him. “And reasonable.”
He nodded, looked relieved, and hurried off while she continued on to Control.
Hampton, overall director of Monarch, met her as she came in.
“Director Hampton, what’s up?”
Hampton had been with Monarch for a long time, but the two of them hadn’t met until Hampton was promoted to director. She approved of Hampton. Beneath her casual, sometimes comic demeanor the New Zealander was intensely competent. Furthermore, she knew it. She had nothing to prove. She just did her job.
“Well, Outpost One is still a nightmare,” Hampton said. “Apparently they’ve discovered a new type of beetle that eats electrical cables, so that’s fun.”
“Great.”
“And they sent this over.” She held out a sheaf of papers.
“This is from the sensory array?” Ilene asked, studying the centerpiece of the data, a frequency graph with three huge peaks.
“Yeah, they’ve been picking up some weird spikes. Could be regular interference.”
“But it keeps happening.”
“Um-huh.”
She had discovered time and time again that ignoring anything that might be “regular” in Hollow Earth was usually a mistake, if not a qualifier for a Darwin Award.
“We should prep a survey team,” she said. “Just to be safe.”
“Okay,” Hampton said.
Ilene glanced up at the monitor, where Godzilla was still lying in the Roman Colosseum.
“What about Godzilla?” she asked.
“Oh,” Hampton said. “Still sleeping. Like a big angry baby.”
“Well. Let’s hope it stays that way.”
Something burred in her pocket. Her cell phone, set to vibrate. She pulled it out to see who it was. When she saw, her heart sank.
“I have to deal with this,” she told Hampton.
Jia wanted to like school. At least, her mom wanted her to like school, and she wanted to please her mom.
But she didn’t. It was awful. That made her feel bad, because she knew she should like it. It was a better school for her than most, she’d been told.
When she was little, she hadn’t really understood how different she was. Of course, she was aware there was a sense called hearing, something she didn’t have. She saw the people in her village react to things she wasn’t aware of. She knew these things were called sounds. Eventually she came to associate some of them—the loudest ones—with the stirrings she felt through her feet or hands, sometimes her skin or eyelashes. Sounds were a sort of vibration, just a kind she wasn’t as sensitive to as others. Once she understood that, it didn’t matter that much to her that she couldn’t hear. The Iwi, after all, didn’t talk with sound, at least not very often. They had other ways of communicating—with their bodies, their faces, their hands. As long as she was looking at someone, she usually knew what they were saying. Sometimes she believed she remembered something else, whispery thoughts and words in her head that didn’t come from her. But she had been very young, and like a lot of her early life, that might have been just a dream.
Then came the storm, and the floods, and after that her people were gone. Kong saved her from the rising waters, took care of her. Kong also communicated without speech. Oh, he made sounds that she could feel—some of them rattled all the way into her bones. But that wasn’t how they talked. And they understood each other well enough.
Then Mom came to take care of her. Mom couldn’t talk to her the way her Iwi family had, or like Kong either, but she could talk with her hands. They learned to speak to each other that way, and later Kong learned to as well. And everything was fine.
But that was before she also learned that there was a very, very big world beyond the island of her birth, with many people very different from the Iwi, from Kong, even from her mother. Most of them could hear, and none of them spoke like the Iwi or Kong. Only a few of them could talk with their hands. That world—that big world—was not friendly to her. It was confusing and unforgiving, and she had been so happy when she and Mom and Kong were all together in the world beneath, with its crazy skies and animals and plants that reminded her of home. She had been really content there, and hoped they would all stay there forever.
But Mom had to leave, to come back up into the big world of people Jia couldn’t speak to or understand. And Jia had to come with her.
But Mom loved her, and Mom found her this school, where there were teachers who could talk with their hands. There were students who could, too. And at first, it all seemed great. She had been excited.
But over time, it became clear to her that the greatest difference between her and the people in the big world wasn’t that she couldn’t hear. That, it turned out, was just a bit of an inconvenience.
The largest difference was literally everything else.
How they dressed, how they thought, what they thought about, the games they played, the things they thought were funny, the food they liked—well, some of the food was okay. Weird, but okay. And she could have probably learned to accept all of that if they could accept her. But they didn’t. At best they thought she was strange, and at worst some sort of monster. Some of them believed Kong was a monster and said so. And they all knew who she was before she even met them. Who her mom was. Some avoided her, some made fun of her. She could read their posts and see their pictures.
She knew some of the things they said, and how they saw her. They thought the Iwi circlet she wore on her head was strange. Fair enough, no-one else wore one, but it marked her as Iwi, and she was willing to be thought a little odd to keep it. But they even made fun of her yellow backpack. She had chosen it because she liked the color, but no one else had a brightly colored backpack. Everyone else had either a mud-colored, black, or dark blue backpack. How could it matter that she had picked one out that made her happy? But it did. Somehow it did.
And she knew how to fix all of it. All she had to do was be like them, leave everything about her that was Iwi behind, forget Kong. Pretend. Smile. Nod. She was already forced to wear the same uniform as them. She could look like they wanted on the outside. She could take off her circlet. She just needed to change the inside.
Sometimes she wanted to. Really wished she could. She wanted to cut herself apart and put herself back together in a different way so she could live here and maybe even be happy.
But she was the last. The last Iwi. If she stopped being Iwi, her people really would be extinct. And if she cut herself apart from Kong, he would truly be alone. And there was no way she was going to do either of those things.
She had liked learning things before, with Mom, with the other scientists on Skull Island. Each new discovery had seemed like a jewel to be collected, thought about, cherished. School was different. She had to sit still for hours, watching the teacher (or more usually, a signing assistant) tell her what she was supposed to know. Not what she wanted to know, which was a lot, but what they wanted her to know, which was not at all the same thing.
She trailed her way through the buildings, trying not to make eye contact. From an Iwi point of view, that was rude; it suggested she didn’t want to interact with anyone—which was in fact the case. Of course, none of them understood that. None of them knew anything about her people.
She took her seat in Ms. Cadogan’s room, near the back, as she usually did. Samah, one of the other students, tried to catch her attention, but Jia pretended she hadn’t seen. She and Samah had been friends, sort of, or at least she thought they had been. She had even confided in the other girl. That was before she realized that Samah was using everything Jia told her to make fun of her behind her back—to amuse her real friends.
She turned her head away from Samah and instead looked over at the projects from last week, shadow boxes they had all made of prehistoric civilizations. Her assignment had been Cahokia, a city in North America built centuries before the arrival of the European colonizers. Her shadow box showed a flat-topped pyramid made from what was supposed to be dirt. She had used cardboard and glued sand to it, then made little human figures of wire and clay. It was okay, but she thought some of the others were way better.
A sheet of paper appeared on her desk. She looked up and realized Ms. Cadogan was passing them out.
Right. They had a test today. Pre-algebra. Math with letters that were supposed to be numbers. Angles, and surface area, and volumes of weird shapes. Not that hard, but not her favorite. She hadn’t managed to study for it.
Ms. Cadogan’s mouth was moving. Jia glanced to the front of the class, where Ms. Gross, the sign interpreter, was repeating whatever Ms. Cadogan was saying.
…No cheating, she was signing. Okay? Let’s make sure we circle the answers completely. Really, really try and make sure you have enough time…
Jia realized her eyes had closed. She shook herself and looked back down at the test.
If thirty-five percent of a class are boys, and twenty percent of boys play football, what percentage of the class plays football?
Ugh.
An immense vibration suddenly swept through the room, almost like when Kong roared, but it wasn’t that. It was something she had never felt before. She looked around the room, expecting to see everyone reacting, but none of them seemed to notice. That was weird, because in her experience a vibration that strong should have made a sound. A loud one.
But no one even looked up.
They didn’t look up when the feathery white stuff started drifting down either, like ashes from a huge fire or fuzzy wind-borne flower seeds. But where were they falling from? The ceiling? The air was filled with them, and everyone just kept taking their tests. Alarmed, she looked around. Ashes were falling in the shadow boxes, too, and one of them caught her attention, a diorama of the three Egyptian pyramids, right next to a shadow box with the stepped pyramid of Teotihuacan. But it seemed significant, somehow, that the Egyptian pyramids were arranged as three, the one in the middle a little bigger. And wait—there was something on the pyramid. It looked like a little model of Kong. Was that a leafwing, hanging by a thread from the top? Those hadn’t been there before. Was someone making fun of her again?
Her gaze tracked across the digital clock on the wall. As soon as she saw it, the red numerals began to blur and squiggle, re-forming into a sort of graph with three bell-shaped peaks.
Then she felt the vibration again, stronger this time, and it was like she wasn’t in the room at all—she was somewhere else. Blurry figures appeared, people, but she couldn’t see their faces. She knew they were important, though. That they were trying to tell her something. Something urgent. They needed help. Her help.
Someone shook her arm. She looked up and saw Ms. Cadogan staring down at her. At the same time, Jia realized she had her pencil, not held with her fingers for writing, but gripped in her fist, and she was scribbling furiously with it. Everyone in the class was looking at her, as if she had done something wrong.
Ms. Cadogan held up her hands and began to sign.
Jia! What did you do?
Then the teacher reached down for her test paper, and Jia understood. The test was covered with pencil scribbles, three peaks, like she had seen on the clock.
So was the desk. But she didn’t remember doing it. When had she done it? She thought she might have fallen asleep, but only for a second or two. It didn’t make sense.
But clearly she was in trouble.
* * *
Ilene met Ms. Cadogan outside Jia’s classroom. She could see Jia inside, with spray bottle and rag, cleaning a desk. The teacher had been brief on the phone, but she’d gathered that Jia had been scribbling on it, which was strange. Jia liked to draw, sure, but drawing on something that wasn’t hers? It seemed out of character. Or maybe she just liked to think so. Sometimes she thought she didn’t know her daughter anymore.
She pulled her gaze from Jia and focused on Ms. Cadogan.
“Jia’s very intelligent,” the teacher was saying. “The problem is, she’s not engaged. Her grades are slipping, she’s not interacting with any of her friends. She’s distracted. Moody. Isolated. These problems aren’t going away, Miss Andrews. If anything, they’re getting worse.”
Ms. Cadogan handed her two sheets of paper. They looked like a quiz of some sort, but they were covered in pencil scribbles of dark, narrow chevrons. Spear heads? There was something familiar about them.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Well, it’s not pre-algebra,” the teacher said. Ilene found the sarcasm irritating, but she tried to keep her cool.
“Okay, I’m sorry, it’s just… she’s just still adjusting to our world.”
“I understand that,” Cadogan said, “but we have a number of students who are culturally displaced, and they—”
“Sure, but she’s not culturally displaced,” Ilene corrected. “She is her culture. She’s the last living member of the Iwi tribe.”
That struck home, and Cadogan’s demeanor softened.
“We’re just trying to reach her.”
Ilene looked back through the window in the classroom door, where Jia was finishing her task. She sighed.
“I know,” she said. “Join the club.”
Ilene decided not to pull Jia for the day. Her daughter had already missed too much school, and there was less than an hour left, anyway. Instead she took a walk along the shore, thinking.
The problem with being good at your job in an organization like Monarch—like most organizations, actually—was that if you were too good at it, you ran the risk of being moved out of it into administration, the logic being that if you were competent at field work you would be good at running things, too. In her case, of course, there had been more at play than that. Her position as the leading authority on Kong had landed her on the national media stage, and unlike some earlier members of Monarch leadership, she didn’t seem likely to try and end the world. The public not only wasn’t terrified of her, they actually liked her.
So, yes, she was good at what she did, but there was a PR element to her selection that she both understood and accepted. Even with all of that, she could have still said no when she had been tapped for director of the Kong Observation Project. On many levels she’d wanted to. She hadn’t been sure she was cut out for it, and she still wasn’t. But her personal inclinations hadn’t been the only factor to consider. There had also been Jia.
Her daughter’s childhood had been, to say the least, highly unstable. Not just emotionally, but physically. She had been in more mortal danger by the time she was eleven than Ilene had faced in her entire life, and her life had been quite adventurous.
Hollow Earth was amazing, and it was ludicrously unsafe even with a Titan like Kong as your bodyguard. There weren’t many humans down there to start with, and no other children at all. Still, at first it had seemed to work, or she fooled herself into thinking so.
The first wart-dog attack had changed all of that. She and a team had been following Kong when they ran into the pack, and she’d made the mistake of letting Jia come along. The predators had sized up Kong and decided the little things following him were a better bet for dinner. Monarch lost two people, she lost two friends, and she and Jia were also very nearly killed. If Kong hadn’t looked back and seen what was happening, they would have died. The thought of her daughter dying was intolerable; the thought of her own death was only slightly better. If she was gone, who would take care of Jia? What would happen to her?
So she took the job as director. She put Jia in a school—a good school. She’d hoped for the best.
This wasn’t the best, but it was a damned sight better than being torn to bits by wart-dogs.
When she got back to the school, kids were streaming away from it on their bikes and on foot. Most of them lived in Monarch housing, so they didn’t have far to go. Jia would normally walk, too, but Ilene had driven here, and left instructions for Jia to meet her at the car. The girl was there, staring at the pad that streamed—via several relays—the surveillance of Kong from Hollow Earth. Jia spent a lot of time watching the Titan, which was understandable, but Ilene was beginning to fear that it was getting in the way of other things.
Jia didn’t look up when she arrived. Ilene took hold of the pad and gently but firmly pulled it from her grasp.
What’s up? she signed.
Nothing, the girl replied. I’m worried about Kong.
Ilene nodded a little, then unfolded the test papers Ms. Cadogan had given her.
Why did you draw this?
Jia took the papers, glanced at them and looked away. She shrugged in a way that meant I don’t know.
Can we go? the girl signed. She looked away and started to get in the car. Ilene put her hand on her shoulder to stop her.
Look at me! she demanded.
Jia did look at her then. I don’t belong here! she said. I don’t belong anywhere. Jia’s pain and confusion was as clear as any sign.
You belong with me, Ilene signed. And I belong with you.
Jia was still for a moment, then nodded almost imperceptibly.
“C’mon,” Ilene said, and they got in the car.
When they got back to their apartment in the Monarch crew residence, Jia went to her room. Ilene let her have her space. Everybody needed alone time, and Jia more than most. She re-emerged a little later to eat a light supper of leftover take-out. Ilene sat with her, poking at her own food.
Anything else happen today? she attempted.
Jia lifted her shoulders and dropped them.
Probably, she signed back.
How’s Wyn? she asked. Wyn was the child of one of the Monarch engineers briefly stationed on Skull Island. Wyn and their father hadn’t lived on the island—they had been at the nearby facility in Kiribati. Wyn had been over a few times.
Wyn has a sugar, Jia replied. I haven’t seen them lately.
Sugar?
Like a best friend. That they kiss.
“Oh,” Ilene said. Thirteen. Right. What about Samah?
Jia frowned. I’m finished eating. May I go to my room?
Ilene nodded and watched her leave.
She had a thousand things that called for her attention, but none of them seemed that important at the moment. She took Jia’s drawings out and looked at them again, and once more they seemed somehow familiar. She started pulling out her books and notes. Maybe it was Iwi iconography, or something else Jia’s mind had dredged up from her oldest memories. It could be the silhouette of a mountain range, or… she didn’t know. But something told her it was important.
While she went through the literature she had handy—a lot of which she had written—she put on a documentary about Skull Island. There was a fair bit of footage of Iwi life, craft, and culture. Toward the end it featured scenes of Jia when she was much younger, when Kong had been watching over her—and later, when she had come into Ilene’s care. It was only a few years ago, but it already seemed like decades. Jia was so little, and she realized that when she closed her eyes, that’s how she still saw her. But she was growing up, fast, wasn’t she? She had a friend her age who already had a “sugar”.
A faint sound caught her attention. Jia was there in the shorts and t-shirt she liked to wear to bed. She was staring at the screen, at the moving images of her and Kong.
Are you ready for bed? she signed.
Jia nodded. She switched her regard to the monitor feed, showing Kong asleep in his cave.
He’s lonely, she signed.
I know, honey. She stood up and opened her arms. She was afraid Jia would ignore it, but the girl stepped in for a hug.
Good night, Mom.
Good night.
Jia went back to her room. Ilene heard the door close. Then she nodded and went back to work.