CHAPTER 6 - Shadows Within the Blue Sun
19 
In the humming basalt chamber beneath Suðuroy, silhouettes demand Barbra’s copper disk just as the tide surges. Einar whispers that nothing is as it seems and urges her to trust Suni, who reveals the flood lever is a decoy test and the real key is sound. Using the bone flute’s BLÁSÓL rhythm, Barbra unlocks a deeper response: the copper lens projects a map of blue veins, starburst nodes, and migration routes, revealing that the Blue Sun’s smuggler legend cloaks a hidden acoustic lighthouse and sanctuary guarded by local families. The silhouettes prove to be Ragna and other guardians who stage a fake handover of a replica disk to mislead pursuers approaching through a lower tunnel. Amid spray and song, Barbra, Einar, and Suni slip through a newly opened seam, where Einar confesses a second secret—he works with a quiet research network protecting these sanctuaries. Ragna entrusts Barbra with a cod-skin scroll and bead for a cairn at Hov, while the true key hides as microgrooves in Barbra’s starburst pin. Reaching a skylight fissure, they trigger another mechanism, momentarily revealing a stone stair as a helicopter’s light sweeps the cliff. With enemies closing and allies urging opposing plans, Barbra must choose a path at the glowing threshold, ending on a cliffhanger.
The chamber’s hum pressed against my ribs like another heartbeat, a low thrumming that made the blue veins along the basalt dome pulse. The projected line Einar had coaxed from the copper lens still crawled toward a ledge, quivering whenever the waves struck the outer cave and the whole island seemed to exhale. Silhouettes filled the newly opened gap above, no faces, only slickers and hoods and the stern set of shoulders that had known too many storms. “The disk,” one said, and I felt the bone flute cold against my wrist as if reminding me of another choice entirely.
I stood with wet jeans clinging to my legs, blue and white Asics slick with luminous spray, leather jacket damp at the cuffs, hair spangled with salt that made every freckle stand out. I hate those speckles because they always betray my flush, but fear wasn’t what raised the heat under them now. Einar leaned close, rope looped across his shoulder, breath a hush at my ear: “Give them the show—nothing here is what it seems,” he whispered. Suni’s hand hovered over a stone lever notched with starbursts, but his eyes held mine with the same rough kindness he’d had at the harbor, and I realized he was asking me to trust him, not the lever.
“The flood will drown the wrong room,” Suni said softly, so only we could hear, the Faroese cadence of his voice sliding like water around rock. “We built it to frighten thieves—the real door listens, not drowns.” His fingers didn’t touch the lever; instead he tipped his chin toward the bone flute and the copper disk tucked under my jacket, where the etched BLÁSÓL marks had stopped looking like coordinates days ago. “You read the rhythm,” he added, and the pride that flared in my chest surprised me with its steadiness. I raised the flute, tasting whale oil and salt as the tip brushed my lips, remembering the pulse of the tide I’d timed along the cliffs.
BLÁSÓL—short, short, long, pause—then the rise and the two falling notes I’d heard the rock return to me in the narrower fissure. My breath threaded into the chamber, the tones bouncing and folding until the blue in the water lifted like a sigh. The dome answered with a chord that opened the stone seam behind the ledge, and the copper lens sprang to life, sketching starbursts where the ceiling held faint tool marks invisible before. Map wasn’t quite the word; it was more like a living script of currents, migration paths, and safe holds the families had sung into place for centuries.
The Blue Sun halo I’d seen at slack tide, that cerulean crown around the sea stack, wasn’t just a beacon for boats tucked beneath cliffs—it masked, and marked, a sanctuary. Lines braided through the arch above us, connecting starburst nodes like an old sailor’s net, not for fish but for memory. “We let smugglers keep the legend because it kept others from asking better questions,” Ragna said from the shadows, stepping forward and pushing her hood back. She was older than me by a decade, sea-light in her eyes, hair braided so tight it gleamed like wet coal, skin wind-burnished to bronze.
Two other women flanked her, faces I recognized from the harbor, their silence now a welcome rather than a wall. “We plant decoys so the careless think they’ve found gold and go home bored,” she said, nodding toward the false niche Barbra had dismantled the day before, “but the ones who listen are family, no blood required.” At that, Suni touched the small starburst pin he’d given me, and Einar took a pocketknife to its edge, turning it under the projected light. Microgrooves ran along the pin’s petals like a vinyl record, too fine to see until the blue licked them. Einar flicked it so it thrummed, and even I could read the phrase it sang back, a compressed echo of BLÁSÓL bound into metal.
“The disk is our masker, the pin is our key,” he said, smiling ruefully, fisherman’s hands gentle with something the sea couldn’t have made. I thought about my glass cabinet at home, the driftwood scrimshaw and the iron key from a canal lock, and felt that old ache of wanting to keep the world without bruising it. “You asked for the disk,” I said to Ragna, measuring her eyes against the echoes, measuring my own impatience against the pull I felt to be useful. “We’ll need it,” she admitted, “but not for what that lot believes,” she jerked her chin toward the lower tunnel where shouts rose, the other group clambering as the tide lifted them.
“We hand off a twin to close that story, while the real work walks out of here in your pocket with a song no one else hears.” She unrolled a bundle of cod-skin, supple as vellum and smelling faintly of smoke, revealing a curl of inked lines and a threaded stone bead the color of sea glass. “The bead goes to the cairn above Hov; the scroll to the school in Porkeri under a certain desk,” Ragna said briskly, sliding the wrapped bundle into my satchel beneath my tank top and jacket. Einar had laid a new loop of rope around my waist with quiet efficiency, checking the knot as if we were already on a cliff face a hundred meters up. Behind us the chamber sighed again, the blue veins brightening, and Suni’s hands trembled with a mix of fear and responsibility that made him look suddenly older than the basalt.
“We do this now, before the sea finds its teeth,” he said, and I realized this was the kind of urgency I had trained for without knowing: the quick decision on a narrow path. We moved like a little play through the pulse of blue, each of us taking a mark we’d never rehearsed but somehow knew by heart. Suni strode to the lever with enough theater to sell the trick; Ragna stepped into the high gap under the ledge; I walked into the open with the copper disk held like an offering. The other group’s lanterns swung into view, too bright and blinding, their beams slicing our dark like knives, and angry shouts echoed over the tide’s quick breath.
“Here,” I called, letting my voice carry—not defiant, not frightened, just certain of the script—and when I tossed the disk toward the blue column, spray leapt up like a curtain. Two men lunged, splashing, their hands closing around the spinning copper as it rang against stone and faked weight with a comforting clap. They didn’t notice the subtle difference in the edge where Ragna had shaved a hair of metal away, twin and almost twin, the superstitions of reflection working for once in our favor. The chamber roared like applause as they retreated, believing they had won, while the blue projection tightened into a spear on the far wall.
Einar shoved the copper lens into its cradle, turned it like a sextant, and a door we hadn’t seen unlatched with a sigh as clean as relief. We slipped through the seam into a narrow corridor slick with salt and glowing with the faintest constellation of bioluminescent flecks. Einar’s hand brushed mine and he leaned in, his whisper not for anyone else: “There’s one more thing,” he said, producing from his jacket a tiny transmitter carved to look like a whale tooth, the surface etched with the same starburst I had in my pin. “I send a puff on this, and a boat will drift dark into the slit by the sea stack with no more light than a seal’s eye.” Suni stiffened, jaw tightening, but Ragna waved him down; apparently not even all secrets are shared among guardians.
“You keep two cloaks over your cloak,” Suni muttered, hurt and admiration twined, and for a flash I saw the boy in the caretaker’s face, lonely and quick. I thought about my grandparents teaching me to fold a map and then fold bread, saying both are tools, both keep you alive, both return you to yourself. My freckles burned again as Einar glanced at me, the old flicker of almost-love moving in, quick and bright as a tern, and moving on just as fast because the work came first. “We can argue honor on the cliff,” Ragna said, “right now we climb.”
The corridor opened into a skylight fissure where daylight fingered down like cold honey, cutting a path through steam and salt haze.
Spray rose in a soft snow, and beyond it the Atlantic flexed a muscle that made the rock underfoot shiver, the island a living thing deciding whom to keep. Far below, the lanterns regrouped, their beams spidering across wet basalt, and someone shouted my name in a voice that scraped a memory I couldn’t place. “Friend or liar?” Einar asked under his breath, as the transmitter warmed in his palm, and my mouth went dry with the weight of choices stacked like cairns. I pressed the starburst pin into a shallow dish of copper cut into the skylight wall, and it thrummed in my bones, a low note that soothed panic better than any words.
The floor heaved and settled, water sucking back for the length of three heartbeats, revealing a stone stair slick with life and shining from centuries of hard use. Up above, a helicopter’s searchlight slashed across the maw of the fissure, bleaching the blue to bone-white for a blink, then spinning away on a gust. “Do we climb or wait for slack and the boat?” Suni hissed, while Ragna measured the wind with a palm, and Einar reached for my hand as the azure glow swelled underfoot like another dawn—one step, and would that stair carry us to safety or into the arms of the wrong kind of rescue?
