And now it hit Mau, knocking him flat on the sand. His head was trying to explode. It was worse even than that time when he’d played the stone game and had hung on too long. Something was weighing down on the world like a big gray rock.

Then the pain went as fast as it had it come, with a zip, leaving him gasping and dazed. And still the birds swarmed overhead.

As Mau staggered to his feet, all he knew was that here was not a good place to be anymore, and if it was the only thing he knew, then at least he knew it with every nail and hair of his body.

Thunder rolled in the clear sky, one great hard jolt of it that rattled off the horizon. Mau staggered down to the tiny lagoon while the noise went on, and there was the canoe waiting for him in the white sand of the water’s edge. But the usually calm water was… dancing, dancing like water danced under heavy rain, although no rain was falling.

He had to get away. The canoe sloped easily into the water, and he paddled frantically for the gap in the reef that led to the open sea. Beneath him and around him, fish were doing the same thing —

The sound went on, like something solid, smashing into the air and breaking it. It filled the whole of the sky. For Mau it was like a giant slap on the ears. He tried to paddle faster, and then the thought rose in his mind: Animals flee. His father had told him so. Boys flee. A man does not flee. He turns to look at his enemy, to watch what he does and find his weakness.

Mau let the canoe slide out of the lagoon and easily rode the surf into the ocean, and then he looked around, like a man.

The horizon was one great cloud, boiling and climbing, full of fire and lightning and growling like a nightmare.

A wave crashed in the coral, and that was wrong too. Mau knew the sea, and there was also something wrong with that. The Boys’ Island was falling way behind him, because a terrible current was dragging him toward the great bag of storms. It was as if the horizon was drinking the sea.