The new colour bubbled up through the sea at dusk on a Sunday. It was like the aurora, if all the tints and tinges were mixed together. Of all known colours, it was closest to deep, opalescent purple—yet nothing like purple. It was a bit like the ocean, but completely different from blue or green.
It spread across the quiet bay, drifting northwards with the current. As the sky darkened, the colour lapped against the rocks. It washed onto the sand at the high-tide line, seeping back into the core of the earth. The vast west-stretching ocean twinkled with lights from a handful of fishing boats.
On land, the mountain slid skywards into darkness. Even at night the peak cast a dense shadow, a heavy blanket thrown over the surrounding farmland. The people living in towns along the coast settled into sleep.
The new colour went unseen into the night.
When Kati woke on Monday, the sky was wide and clear above her tiny home; a shade so blue it defined itself. She looked out her window, down the flank of the mountain and towards the sea, scanning as she did every morning for a rolling swell. The water was laid out flat, a mirror to the world above. On days when there was no surf, Kati would ground herself on the yoga mat, in the garden, or with a book. These were the ways she’d learned to ease her anxiety. A cup of tea, a bath scented with oil, a walk up the maunga. The counsellor had warned her not to let list-making become an obsession; instead she visualised shelves hovering in the air around her. The feel of the sheepskin draped over the armchair, the knowledge that she grew stronger every day, the smell of a basil plant after being watered. Each day Kati plucked items from the shelves, packing a picnic of good, safe things: a basketful of ways to still the aftershocks of the attack that, months later, could still shake her day and wrack her body.
For the first hours of daylight, the garden was bathed in the deep-sea shade of the mountain. The cool air brought a sense of quiet, but as Kati dug her fingers into the damp soil, she imagined the chewing, churning, tumbling of bugs across leaves, the zing and flutter of microscopic wings cutting air. The sun rose higher and the Earth turned. The light and shade ebbed and flowed through Kati as it moved across the hillside. She sliced a few ruby-red stalks of rhubarb for the crumble she’d make that afternoon, pausing to imagine the slide of butter and flour between her fingertips, the slow-spell movement of her hands above the mixing bowl.
Eventually she pushed herself from kneeling to standing—stretching her back, her arms, her legs—and turned to cast her eyes across the sea and sky. The swell had picked up, lifting the bay into long lines of surf. The shadow tip of the mountain directed Kati to the ocean.
She drove down the hillside, along the coast, and over the rumpety-bump of the boulder-strewn paddocks to the southern end of the bay. She stood for a moment, deeply inhaling and exhaling the sea air. Her doctor said she could return to work and her psychologist had advised her not to put it off. She scanned the empty expanse of beach and water. She wasn’t ready. She couldn’t give up this wide-open weekday ocean, not for days among strangers and dark walks home through shaded parks. Maybe one day soon, but not yet.
She paddled out beyond the breakers, body loosening in the repeating dip and pull of her arms through water. She sat up, taking in the bay from the sea, the grey stone beach rising up to the singular, snow-capped mountain. The swell lifted her board, and she turned back to the horizon to watch the surf form and build.
When Kati saw it, it was like the flicker of a fish jumping out of water, glimpsed in the corner of her eye. By the time she turned, there was only the lull of the sea between sighs. She held her breath. As the ocean rolled under her, a slick of water washed across her board. The colour swept across the fibreglass like the shades that swim across the back of your eyelids when you close your eyes. It beaded and condensed at the edges of the wax.
Kati exhaled—slowly, as though the colour was a living thing that might startle if she made a sudden move. It looked like it came from outer space, an alien lifeform dropped to Earth. Yet there was a calmness about it, as though it belonged in this world as much as the water did. Kati leant in, as if by getting closer she could see deeper into it, and if she looked deeply enough it would become something recognisable. Her blood rushed through her, but her breath was as slow as the tides.
A shiver ran through Kati and she jerked her head up. She’d worked so hard to get back to who she was before the attack, fighting against jagged memories and jolting pain. The doctors had reiterated why she needed all the pills. They filled brown plastic pottles with research and reasons, handing them to her with firm, dry hands. Kati had taken the containers, had read her name on the labels wrapped around the sides, but had resisted opening them. For days, they sat on the windowsill between the basil and mint. But when the nightmares and the waking horror persisted, she unscrewed the caps and told herself that each pill was a seed that would sprout into something wonderful. And it seemed to work; as the weeks passed, she felt a tangle of vines grow inside her, a gradual strengthening into something she could use to climb up out of the pain. Then the prescriptions stopped and the doctors hadn’t uttered a word of advice about what came next. Two days ago, Kati had swallowed the last powdery tablet.
From her surfboard, Kati looked up into the sky, hoping the endless blue would reset her vision—her entire sense of the world. After a moment, she shifted her gaze to rest on the peak of the maunga, before travelling down its slope, over the dark bush and bright farmland. She drew her focus to the black boulder border of the beach and the smooth-worn stones leading down to the water; she let her eyes skip across the surface of the sea to the nose of her surfboard.
It reminded her of purple if purple tasted like a lemon dusted in burnt cinnamon. It might have been green-blue, if green was the sound of a harp played on a windy day and blue the lightest touch of sandpaper over skin. It was the ocean and the polar sky. It was the sensation of something lost long ago that you can never get back, but just knowing you had it once brings comfort over and over again. Kati closed her eyes and leaned forward, her hands braced against the sides of her surfboard. The memory of her mother’s hug in the night enveloped her. It was the safest she’d felt in months.
When she opened her eyes, the colour was on her hands and feet. It looked too real to be a hallucination; it felt too right—unfamiliar, but somehow completely known to her skin and all the cells beneath it. She held the palm of her hand over her nose, trying to detect a smell. There was nothing more than the scent of the afternoon sky. She licked her knuckles and tasted only the salt of the sea. She felt everything, as though all the world were in orbit around her body.
She paddled further out, following the liquid aurora. Exhilaration built in Kati, a buzzing like when she was a child with emotions too big to handle. Feelings that needed a physical release: the joy of dropping from a rope swing into a river; of rolling over and over from the top of a grassy hill to the bottom; someone’s arms wrapped tight to help her remember her own shape and space when the noise of the world became too much. She turned and paddled vigorously as a wave pulled and lifted her. The wind and the water and the arc of the Earth carried her inwards, flying across the bay. The wave transported her to the northern end of the beach where the colour was brightest, glittering in the whitewater.
As she got close to shore, Kati noticed a figure running down the track into the southern curve of the bay. Arms held out from his lean body for balance, he leapt from rock to rock all the way down onto the sand. He turned north. Kati jumped from her board before the waves broke on the rocks. Bobbing in the water, she watched the man sprint along the beach in her direction, a quick cadence that reverberated through her veins even while her body froze.
Suddenly he stopped. He glanced around, then started to walk along the high-tide line, head down, as though searching for his keys amongst the clatter of driftwood and tangle of seaweed. He turned and paced to where the foaming water washed against the gritty mountain sand. He crouched, scooped up a handful of wet stones in the same way that Kati might grab a handful of soil to test its moisture, peered at it, then suddenly flung it back towards the sea. He pulled his hand in and wiped it on his shorts. After a moment, he reached out, dragged a finger through the sand then straightened up and looked out to sea.
Kati sunk lower until just her eyes and the top of her head were above water. Without looking away from the ocean, the man pulled his phone from a pocket. His gaze locked on Kati. He raised his free hand in her direction. The man’s gesture commanded Kati to get out of the water; she understood the expectation in his firm stance and the repeated sweep of his arm. She pushed herself back onto her board. As soon as he looked down to tap at his screen, she pivoted around to face the sea-sky horizon. His words chased her as she paddled away from the beach.
Kati caught wave after wave. She still felt the racing wind and the spray of the sea, the exhilaration of the colour lifting her up, but now half her attention was on the shore. The man paced along the beach, his lanky frame bent forward, gaze flicking between the sand at his feet and Kati in the water. She peeled off each wave just before the boulder bank. The man clambered along the wet rocks. He braced himself and threw words at her. Waves broke against the volcanic stone and the colour was absorbed into their darkness. Kati imagined it seeping through her wetsuit, dyeing her skin and running into her veins. She let the man’s words sink to the seafloor. A drone buzzed overhead.
In between sets, Kati sat in the calm water beyond the break. Her focus switched between the gently undulating horizon and the erratic pulse of activity on shore. Two police officers strode down the beach. The man jogged towards them. As Kati paddled for the cresting wave of new colour, the crackle of a loudspeaker snapped into the air. Amplified words chopped through the hum of the hovering drone. She glanced toward the southern end of the bay to see a ute towing a boat turn into the carpark. In the distance, another police car drove down the rocky track. Kati imagined the bay awash with vessels and officials coming to hook her out of the sea. She looked briefly back towards the open ocean, then rode a last wave into the shallows.
Kati tucked her board under her arm and glanced up at the mountain. A tumble of grey clouds had gathered behind the peak. The two officers directed her out of the water. Keeping their distance, they guided her onto a plastic pathway laid over the slope of the beach. Kati moved as though she was still wading through water, body and mind in slow motion while the world rushed in around her. She let herself be shunted into a square tent where she was sprayed from all angles; told to turn, to lift her arms, to expose the soles of her feet to them. The stinging decontaminant, sea water, and tears ran in streams as her wetsuit was peeled off her shoulders and down her body. With a tug that sent her off-balance, it was pulled free from her heels.
Kati stood in her bikini, untethered as though her shadow had been snipped from the soles of her feet. Against her near-nakedness, three people faced her clad in hazmat suits, masked and gloved. One of them handed her a towel. She was instructed to strip off her togs, then was given a suit of her own. She zipped it up and lost herself amongst their anonymity. Someone lifted her wetsuit from the ground and carried it away.
They talked at her, shaking a piece of paper in her face—a jumble of black ink that she wasn’t given the chance to read but understood to be the authority under which they could shepherd her into a white van. Her breath caught as a body bag was loaded into another vehicle, the hard slab of her surfboard sealed within it.
In the hospital-laboratory they took samples of her hair, her blood, saliva and urine. They wrapped a cuff around her arm, and with every squeeze and puff her lungs constricted. She bit her cuticles. In a windowless room, they monitored her brain and her reflexes; her heart picked up the frenetic rhythm of the machines beeping to the side of her. People moved in a swarm around Kati. So many voices; not a glimpse of sky, sea, or mountain. Kati pressed her fingernails into her inner elbow and willed herself not to scrape them down the soft insides of her forearms to her wrists.
She breathed and imagined rubbing her hands through the soil where the rhubarb grew—a sifting, rolling motion like the crumbling of butter and flour and the graininess of sugar on her fingertips. She kept her mind determinedly in the process, seeing the slow bake of raw ingredients turn golden. Memories of the last time she was in hospital—and all that had led up to it—flickered at the edges of her mind like a school of fish. She refused to let her thoughts turn in their direction. Imagined slicing lengthwise through the crisp top of the rhubarb crumble. Did not think about the blade held to her throat as she walked home through the dark park. Visualised drawing the knife across the other way, sweet steam wisping upwards. Would not think about her knees pushed apart—roughly in the park, gently in the hospital. Envisioned spooning a warm scoop of rhubarb crumble from the baking dish. Could not remember if she cried more then, or then, or now. Angled the large spoon so that the serving of dessert slid onto the waiting plate, the golden top layer covering the baked fruit and sugar; watched a sauce of the new colour spread across the plate, pictured floating on it as it spread across the ocean. The beeping of the machines slowed. Kati let the pads of her fingertips slide down her arms to rest on her lap.
She was kept in the hospital for days, electrodes stuck to her like limpets. Doctors gathered together to discuss her brain activity—spiking anxiety when she woke up, ebbing to calm, then surging again as the day wore on. Eyes on their notepads, they asked her what she was feeling. She told them that she craved the ocean. They held their pens still and asked what she was feeling physically. She told them that she yearned to stand amongst the green sea of spinach and lettuce growing in her hillside garden, the mountain watching over her. They checked their watches and asked if she was dizzy, if she had pins and needles. She shook her head and didn’t tell them how the scraping and piercing of her skin reminded her of that other time she wore a hospital gown. She meditated on the new colour, was held in space by the awe of it.
Crescents of Kati’s fingernails, a rain-shower of hair clippings, and flakes of her skin were sealed into brown plastic pottles and sent for testing. Wax chipped from her board and squares of neoprene cut from her wetsuit were put under microscopes. Panels of international experts were commissioned to discuss the disembodied pieces of Kati and her shadow.
In the bay, divers descended through the watery shade of the mountain to peel starfish from the seafloor. They cut seaweed from rocks and scooped flapping fish into buckets. The life of the bay was transported around the globe. A group of specialists wrote a report; a committee was convened to peer-review it.
While the world studied the bay through a microscope, a yellow plastic tape stretched between metal stakes kept locals from the beach. People walked their dogs up to it, surfers clambered on the rocks looking for a way around. On an overcast day when all sound seemed to be sucked from the air, a runner descended down the dirt track into the bay. He picked up momentum as he went downhill, barely slowing as he passed through the rocky belt. He hurdled over the tape and sprinted towards the ocean’s edge. Two security guards stationed along the tape tackled him, their burly bodies covering his lean frame as they slammed him into the stony ground. Arms twisted up behind his back, they forced him to his feet and marched him towards the carpark. After that, another tape was stretched several metres in front of the first, a double line patrolled by guards and dogs. Only drones made it to the sea.
The images flooded the internet. People in other coastal settlements around the country took out boats and kayaks, rowing and paddling and peering into their own patches of sea. In the bay, a chain link fence replaced the yellow tape. Military helicopters chased the drones out of the sky. A submersible robot that the government bought on credit resurfaced with more samples and a slick of alien colour dripping from its sides.
As days passed, the memory of the colour faded from Kati’s mind into the beige-white of the ward. She could only remember something about cinnamon and lemon, but couldn’t comprehend the two tastes together. Her skin tingled and it made her think of harp strings trembling in the wind, but that didn’t make sense and she didn’t want to be given more antibiotics, antidepressants, antipsychotics. She stayed silent. She reverted to her old breathing exercises, visualising herself floating on turquoise water. She wore long sleeves and picked skin from underneath her fingernails. The doctors found nothing wrong with Kati; eventually she was released from the hospital.
In labs around the world, scientists crushed Kati’s fingernails to powder and distilled vials of bay water. They huddled around computer screens. ‘It’s just water?’ they said, a hypothesis passed between them to test and verify.
By the time they fronted up at the media conference, it was a certainty: ‘It’s just water,’ they announced.
‘Coloured water.’
‘A new colour.’
It came from the stars, the philosophers said, remnants of cosmic dust from the big bang.
It’s the colour of the universe, the poets said.
‘It comes from a type of mollusc—a miniscule snail,’ the scientists explained. ‘The skeletons of fingernail-sized dinosaurs.’
They called it spilt-star.
Tents and marquees piled up along the bay like debris after a storm. Scientists and environmentalists camped in the shadow of the maunga. Preachers and congregants walked the length of the fence. Entrepreneurs and influencers, media and politicians, prospectors and protestors all came to the coast.
Kati went to join the activists but turned away when she heard the crash of voices, helicopters, and patrol boats. She retreated to her house on the hill. When her skin pulsed with a restless itch, she took refuge in the garden. The soil crumbled between her fingers; dirt gathered in the raw scrapes down her forearms. She pulled limp lettuces from the earth and plucked pale orange tomatoes from wilting vines. She added salt to taste the food, to remember the ocean.
The world grew impatient to see the new colour for themselves, clamouring like a crowd pushing up against a fence at a stadium. Microscopic specimens were sold to other governments. Scientists around the globe began work to create a synthetic version. First attempts generated a muddy, muted green. Subsequent batches were the colour of a rotting plum. It was unstable when mixed with oxygen.
People pre-ordered spilt-star paint for their bedrooms and living rooms. Unmade t-shirts sold out in minutes. Factories adjusted their machinery in anticipation of the demand.
In one lab, a night guard stationed in the hall was found on a cold morning, his body bent as though he’d fallen sideways from a chair. At the autopsy, a noxious smell puffed into the air when they cut through his skin; his lungs were dark and wrinkled like prunes.
Still the world pushed for the new colour, voices rising up like a stampede.
In the island nation that stretched north and south from the bay, the government fast-tracked legislation to allow exploratory drilling. A last-minute amendment authorised security guards to carry tasers. Drilling started in the bay, travelled to the top of the country, then turned down along the curves and straights of the east coast. The drills plunged into the seafloor, up and down; a needle piercing the land. A robot followed behind, scraping and scooping and sifting the sand, breaking coral and smoothing the ocean bed.
After an initial sweep of the country, spilt-star was only found on the west coast, in the bay in front of the town that sat on the flanks of the mountain. The government ordered bigger drills from overseas, ones that could mine deeper into the seabed. While they waited for the new equipment to arrive, officials started mapping the trench that ran across the seafloor in the bay.
A geo-robotics team widened the underwater seam as they tracked from the open sea towards the ancient cone. ‘Aeons ago,’ the scientists explained, ‘an earthquake in the subduction zone cracked open the base of the mountain.’ They described how fossilised molluscs had spilled out into the newly formed trench and how subsequent movement of the plates ground the molluscs together, gradually turning them into a powder. As a hairline crack opened up along the seafloor and water seeped below the crust, the powder became a dye. A process that took millennia was summed up in soundbites on the internet.
The first rig was built halfway along the fissure at the rippling tip of the mountain’s shadow. Kati watched sparks firing as the sections were welded together. Some days construction paused as waves smashed against the tower. But the structure grew ever taller, and the ocean became a churning mush until it flattened to a listless nothing.
Kati delayed her return to work and spent more time in the garden. The mountain-shade moved across the hillside like a shallow tide, a diluted version of itself. As drilling reached deeper into the root of the maunga, the beets began to shrivel in the soil and the kale curled further in on itself. Kati’s hair fell in strands onto the earth.
One morning as Kati tended to her plants, a geyser of spilt-star erupted from the top of the rig. Even from the distance, she could hear the whoosh and splatter. Then came the vibration, rumbling up through her feet. She turned in time to see a bluff shear away from the mountain, a great loss of rock down the slope into the bush. The Prime Minister was on the lunchtime news, beaming at the day’s success.
A regiment of rigs was set up just beyond the surf break. Licences were sold to the highest bidders, a contingent of international companies and government agencies occupying pylon islands. From the hillside, the tips raked through the sea like the teeth of a combine harvester. Whenever Kati turned her back on them, it felt like they were moving towards her, a giant army marching closer. She became grateful for the pulsing port and starboard lights from the ships at night. Even though they broke the once-black horizon, they let her know that the towers hadn’t moved closer.
By day she remembered that the bellies of those ships were filled with ancient mollusc fossils, tiny dinosaurs crushed to dust. When it got too much, she turned towards the mountain, walking through the forest, past the treeline to the summit. With each outing, the canopy grew sparser, patches of white sky showing through like bald spots. The snow disappeared into a slip of dust and scree.
On one hike, a clatter of rocks came tumbling down beside Kati as she made her way uphill. She looked up to see a rolling crumble of mountain, a fast-flowing river of rocks coming towards her. And then: a man, running with the rockfall.
Kati pressed herself against an outcrop. Even as she willed herself to become invisible, she kept her eyes fixed on the man. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to outrun the flow or if it was him that sent it cascading down the slope. He flew down the mountain with great strides, sliding as the gravel rolled under his feet. He slipped and landed heavily on his side, the shingle grating his leg and upper arm. He pushed himself upright and kept running downhill. He fell again as he got near to Kati; again he got up and kept moving.
When he was closer, Kati could see that his body was cross-hatched with grazes, his skin smeared with fresh and dried blood. Her muscles tensed and a deep chill overtook her body. She tried to visualise a turquoise calm spreading through her.
The man glanced her way, a quick turn of his head as though to see where a discarded apple core had landed. Then his head snapped back and his eyes met Kati’s. He stopped. The momentum sent him tumbling and he landed below her on the slope.
A flash of mutual recognition passed between them.
‘You,’ Kati said, and it came out more of an accusation than she intended.
On his hands and knees, the man looked up at Kati, his pupils dilated dark matter. She pictured him crouched by the water’s edge, dragging a finger through the sand; she saw him pulling his phone from his pocket, pointing it at the foam that separated sand and sea. His skin was mottled with old bruises underneath new—the imprint of stone and the scrape of sand. His shoulder hung lopsided. When he spoke, his words were cracks opening up across parched land. ‘I wish I hadn’t.’
A molten rage surged through Kati. Shadows gathered at the periphery of her vision. She put her hand against the mountain to steady herself and found purchase on a loose rock. Before her thoughts caught up to her movements, she took a step forward, hand clenched beside her.
The man crawled towards Kati, bloodied knees pressing into the dust. As he inched nearer, energy coursed down her arm and concentrated in her fist. She gripped the rock tighter. When he was at her feet, the man put his forehead to the earth in supplication. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said into the mountain.
A salty breeze swept across the mountainside. The man sat back on his heels. The taste of toasted cinnamon and the scent of grated lemon rind vibrated in the air between them. She took in the grazes on his face and limbs. The hand he raised towards her trembled. A calm like low-tide sand settled into Kati. She braced her legs against the slope, rooting herself to the maunga. She looked into the man’s eyes.
‘Help me,’ he said.
Kati drew her arm away from her body, fingers tight around the rock.
‘Please.’
Her skin tingled with the lightest touch of sandpaper. She turned away from him to look at the pylons stretched across the bay. Light and shade rippled across the ocean until they settled into a pointed shadow. Kati breathed with the quiet power and determination of the tides.
She dropped the rock. She reached her hand out to him.
Kati and the man stood shoulder-to-shoulder facing the line of rigs. She leaned forward into the bright edges of the world where the mountain and sea air mingled. She inhaled. The sensation of something lost long ago flooded her body. She exhaled. The maunga hummed under her feet and the Earth turned. She looked to where the mountain’s shadow tip pierced the base of the tallest rig. A twist of roots and vines grew inside her. She was stronger than she had ever been. Strong enough for what came next.