CHAPTER 6 - The Song Beneath the Salt
23 
With tide swelling in a hidden Socotri chamber, Barbra chooses to trust Amina and plunges through a submerged exit with a resin-stained chest. She surfaces in a moonlit grotto where the harbor singer—revealed as an ally named Salim—guides her to another passage while Amina and mute Samir circle in through a separate crawlspace. The chest proves to be a decoy that hides a palimpsest of water-guarding codes beneath false incense ledgers, confirming that the island’s true treasure is its clandestine network of cisterns and routes protected by song. Pursued by smugglers led by a man named Nabil, Barbra helps stage a misdirection, surrendering the decoy while keeping the real cipher concealed within etched shells that only the copper token’s tones can reveal. After the rivals retreat, Salim entrusts Barbra with a shell-key and asks her to carry the living code up to the Dixam Plateau. As dawn breaks, another twist snaps into place when the perfumer’s husband emerges with Barbra’s token in his palm, smiling in a way that suggests yet another layer of deception, and asks her to choose a side.
The brine curled around her thighs like a living sash, glittering with suspended resin dust as the chamber took the tide’s first hard breath. Amina’s hand pressed the chest against Barbra’s ribs, urging her toward the black ribbon of a submerged tunnel while a deeper voice threaded through the roar, saying her name with unsettling certainty. The harbor singer’s silhouette wavered near the mouth, a lantern lifting like a second moon, and behind him other lights jittered—rivals, or guardians, or both, depending on who was telling the story. Barbra slid the wet chest under one forearm, tightened her other hand around the copper token, and thought of the four-year-old who learned to move without waiting for anyone to come back and lead her, then took a breath and went under.
The water was colder than she expected, salted to a bracing metallic bite that pressed her freckles and stung the tender spots at her temples. Her blue and white Asics gripped slick stone as she pulled forward, the chest bumping her ribs in awkward sync with her kick, every beat of her heart a drum against the limestone’s drum of tide. When her lungs felt thin and papery she touched ceiling and found a gap, rising into a pocket of air where phosphorescence winked like eyes hiding in the dark. The lantern cut into the grotto and the singer’s voice arrived with it—lower, patient, the same voice that had wrapped itself around her name—“Barbra, up here,” and she saw his hand and a ledge, and climbed.
In that seam of moonlight he looked nothing like a rival: salt on his beard, knitted cap dark with spray, a smile that flickered hesitant, as if he remembered the part he had to play. “I’m Salim,” he said, as if the word itself might break something fragile, and shifted the lantern to show a steps-like notch leading into another passage. “You weren’t wrong about the sea cave,” he added, “only about what it was for,” and he touched the chest as if it might start singing again. The copper token warmed against her palm, and she smelled resin layered with lemon peel and iron—Hadibo’s perfume, worn here underground like a borrowed jacket.
A scraping sounded behind them and Amina slid into view up a separate crawl, hair slicked to her cheekbones, Samir ahead of her, small and fast, his hands already shaping silent messages in the lantern’s jittering light. Barbra’s floral denim jacket, soaked and heavy, clung to her tank top as if it might freeze there, and she tried not to shiver while Amina kissed her cheek as though they’d just pulled off a long-practiced trick. “You did it,” Amina whispered, not triumph but relief, and then her eyes shifted to Salim with a complicated tenderness. “No more performances,” she told him, though her mouth couldn’t help a smile, and the boy thumped the chest like a drum, three soft beats that echoed the knocks on Barbra’s door two nights before.
They pried the chest’s lid with a dull bronze wedge and the smell of centuries came up—old resin, old salt, ink captured in salt bloom. Ledgers lay on top, slicked with brine, the tidy columns of quantities and names blurred into a red haze that looked like a wound. “Press brine here,” Salim said, pointing to the margin, and when Barbra wetted that strip the ink dissolved to reveal faint lines underneath, a countryside of invisible rivers surfacing in the paper’s grain. “We keep secrets by veiling them with other secrets,” Amina said softly, not a confession but a lesson: a false ledger on top of a true one, trade cloaking water, incense obscuring the map of cisterns and springs upon which every life here depended.
Samir tapped the copper token and lifted his chin; Barbra caught the pitch in her throat easily, holding the three-bar chord humming in her bones while the spiral etched on the token seemed to turn. Around them, shells pinned into the wall by centuries of dripping calcite began to sing back, shimmering a counter-tone that made the hair rise on her arms. Tiny grooves inside the shells’ whorls caught the lantern light and wrote a music she could almost read, sections separated by three hairline cuts like the marks she’d found carved in resin on her windowsill. “The ledgers point to trade routes any thief can understand,” Salim murmured, “the shells and your token keep the real song for the ones who will listen to more than loot.”
Voices clattered in the lower chamber, a flashlight’s white stutter echoing up toward them as boots scraped wet stone.
Amina’s mouth made a flat line; she resealed the chest with brisk efficiency and pressed a different bundle into Barbra’s hands—a shallow shell bowl etched with the spiral and three bars, its lip cold as moonlight. “We will let them believe the chest is everything,” she said, “and you will carry the code that requires a human voice,” and for a beat Barbra tasted again that early-care loneliness before recognizing it now as a discipline rather than a wound. Salim pinched the lantern small, and for one breath they listened to the tide speak so the pursuers would not hear them listening to each other. The plan unrolled as if they’d rehearsed it since childhood: Salim went first, lantern raised, the practiced scowl of a captor stitched to his face, while Amina and Barbra stumbled behind with the chest as if they’d stolen it and run out of road.
Samir slipped into a crevice, as quick and soundless as a gecko, his big eyes tracking, ready to close a gate of sound with a single mirrored chord if he needed to. In a chamber fractured by fallen stalactites, a man with a scar at his jaw—Nabil, one of the caravan brokers who had refused to meet her eyes in daylight—stepped from behind a limestone blade with two others and a desire that made the air feel tight. “You cost me a night,” he said to Salim, and then to Barbra, “and you cost me two,” the kind of line that tries to make a story neat before the story has even agreed to be told. Barbra let the chest’s weight sag, made her breath ragged, felt the familiar steadiness of her long-walk muscles under the performance, and remembered her grandfather’s voice teaching her that sometimes the best way to stay unseen is to stand in plain sight.
She met Nabil’s gaze with a half-wince, unafraid to show the sting, because arrogance draws knives and vulnerability draws questions, and it was questions they needed. “I just wanted to see what was inside,” she said, lying like truth, “I thought it was coins,” and Amina flinched at her shoulder as if she were ashamed of this outsider who had stumbled where she shouldn’t. Nabil snatched the chest, flipped the lid, saw the ledgers gleaming with their red haze and the glint of a few strategically salted imitation coins, and the hunger in his face changed to calculation. “You don’t even know what you found,” he said, satisfied, already stepping backward into the corridor where tide and greed would push him out before he noticed what he hadn’t stolen.
Salim held his lantern in such a way that the shell-set codes on the wall remained plain stone, and Amina’s hand knocked three times against the limestone, a soft farewell that told Samir to close the path behind their enemies. The water rose enough to make Nabil curse and retreat, his men splashing, the chest bobbing indecorously like a goat in a flood. When the echoes thinned, Salim’s scowl dropped away and in the softer set of his mouth Barbra read the same integrity she’d offered when she first stepped into the perfumer’s shop and asked questions others had been too blunt to ask. They crouched in the quiet that followed, the lantern cupped between them like a small heart, and Salim lifted the shell bowl and pressed it into Barbra’s hands.
“Keep this,” he said, “it will sing your note back to you if you forget it,” and the spiral caught the light the way her glass cabinet at home caught a winter dawn—something ordinary made strange by attention. “The next stanza is up in the Dixam, where the wind writes its own measures,” Amina added, squeezing Barbra’s arm, pride and apology braided together in her expression for the deceptions they’d asked her to bear. Barbra nodded, not because she had time for belonging, because she almost never did, but because this felt less like falling in love and more like finding a road her legs already knew. They found an exit chute that let them spill into a wadi breathing toward dawn, the east brightening behind the dragon’s blood trees until every vein in their umbrellas looked drawn with ink.
Her jeans clung cold to her thighs, her tank top smelled like resin and salt, and her red hair was a wet banner down her back as her freckles prickled in the morning’s chill. For a moment she wanted nothing except a room above a shop where she could take off her soaked jacket, lay this shell in a safe corner, and file it among her quiet trophies, the life she had made out of losses and distances. Headlights swept the wadi wall before that thought could take root, and Mahmoud—the perfumer, usually gentle in manner and careful in his kindness—stepped from a truck with men Barbra had not seen before and her copper token glinting in his palm like the moon’s coin. “Barbra,” he said, smooth and deep as the voice that had first called her name from the dark, the smile in place but wrong somehow, as if the face had borrowed it from a stranger.
Amina’s breath caught sharp; Salim’s hand settled near her elbow, quiet, ready, as if the next note could still be made to resolve if they chose it wisely. Mahmoud tilted the token so it flashed the three bars at them, the little spiral burning with sunrise, and every layer of secrecy they had peeled back suddenly felt like an onion still clenched at its heart. “We kept in tune,” he said pleasantly, “but now it’s my turn to lead—so tell me, Barbra Dender, which song will you sing?”
