TE PŪTAKE

I turned ten with a voice that worked most of the time.

Most of the time was a huge improvement.

I could talk at breakfast.

I could argue with Ahi.

I could tell Wai to stop touching my things and hear myself sound exactly like Mum.

I could say Koro's name aloud.

That one still hurt.

Singing was harder.

Long sentences were tiring when I was nervous.

And if I pushed too much Mīharo through my throat, the old silver mesh tightened like a fist.

Mere said the mesh had become partly woven into my own healing tissue.

“So we do not rip it out,” she told me.

“We teach your body not to obey it.”

I did not love having technology inside me.

I did love proving Dave had not won.

My tenth birthday happened at Te Waka Tōhorā.

Mum, Dad, Hui, Ahi and Wai crossed over from the Earth Sanctuary for the weekend.

Ahi was furious that his first trip inside Rere had happened without laser eyes.

“Your drawing lied,” I told him.

“Rere could get laser eyes.”

“Please don't give Hemi ideas.”

Too late.

Hemi, now eleven, was already asking Piripi whether a whale could safely focus light through water.

Moemoeā told both of them no.

Nobody had asked her, but this rarely stopped Moemoeā.

Te Rākau Kura gave me a present too.

At least, everyone called it a present.

When I placed my hand on the trunk, gold lines spread beneath the bark again.

They did not stop at the roots this time.

I felt them travel through bridges, waterways, growing platforms and deep structures below the school.

For three seconds I was aware of too much.

A fountain changing pressure three valleys away.

A cracked board near the western harbour.

A tree drinking from a suspended river.

Rere sleeping in warm water.

Then the connection vanished.

I nearly fell over.

Reweti caught my elbow.

“And that's why you don't touch everything just because it lights up for you.”

I pulled my hand back.

“Helpful.”

My voice rasped on the second syllable.

Reweti grinned.

“Ten years old and already sarcastic. Ru would be proud.”

I smiled despite myself.

Across the hall, Hemi was staring at the fading gold lines.

Not frightened.

Later that day, Mum and I walked the lower market together. At eight I had needed her to believe me. At nine I had needed her to let me go. At ten, something had changed again. She still worried, but she no longer treated every unknown thing as a reason to pull me home.

“You look taller,” she said.

“I am taller.”

“I meant in here.” She tapped lightly over my heart.

I rolled my eyes because mothers were legally required to say embarrassing things on birthdays. But I understood. I was not the same child who had whispered a song in the backyard and accidentally awakened a cicada. I still felt like her sometimes. I also knew more about how dangerous being heard could be.

Interested.

“Imagine what you could do with that,” he said.

Reweti's smile disappeared.

“Exactly the question she should not answer yet.”

By Monday everyone at school knew.

Not because I told them.

Te Rākau Kura was terrible at keeping secrets.

A living tree with hundreds of students was basically one enormous gossip.

World-Shaper.

The name followed me through corridors.

Some students whispered it.

One little kid asked if I could make him taller.

I said no.

He looked disappointed.

Another asked whether I could move mountains.

I said I hoped not.

Hemi thought the attention was funny until somebody called him World-Shaper's Friend.

Then he hated it too.

Moemoeā solved the problem by telling everyone I could shape them into frogs.

This was completely untrue.

It was also extremely effective.

Whaea Anahera called me into a learning room high in the trunk.

Reweti was already there.

So was Grog.

Three adults in one room was never good.

“Am I in trouble?” I asked.

Grog said, “Not yet.”

Reweti said, “Probably soon.”

Whaea Anahera ignored them.

She laid three objects on the table.

A carved piece of wood.

A woven strip of muka.

A bowl of water.

“Which one is shaping?” she asked.

“The carving.”

Reweti raised an eyebrow.

“The weaving?”

Whaea Anahera waited.

I looked at the water.

“All of them?”

“Better.”

She explained that World-Shaper was an old description, not a royal title and not a promise that I could control reality.

Some people could sense how living systems connected.

A rare few could influence those connections strongly enough to change how a place grew, flowed or healed.

“Your line has carried versions of that ability before,” Reweti said.

“Ru?”

He shook his head.

“Ru could hear the lines. He was never trained far enough to shape them.”

That hurt more than I expected.

Koro had known just enough to know what he had forgotten.

“And me?”

Reweti pushed the carved wood toward me.

“You start by learning grain.”

I stared at him.

“That's it?”

Grog showed me the oldest version of the title in an archive panel. The translation was not exact. One phrase meant something like person-who-helps-a-place-become-what-it-needs-to-be. World-Shaper was shorter and much more dramatic.

“So somebody made it sound cooler?” I asked.

“Probably a teenager.”

That helped. Titles stopped feeling sacred when you imagined generations of people arguing about what sounded best.

Whaea Anahera also warned me that different communities had different words for similar abilities. Nobody owned the idea of shaping living systems. Te Waka Tōhorā's language came from its own history and whakapapa.

“You wanted mountain moving?”

“No.”

“Good. Pick up the wood.”

World-Shaper training began with a splinter.

Reweti did not let me use Mīharo for the first week.

This felt unfair.

“If you cannot see what the wood is doing without magic, you have no business pushing magic into it.”

He gave me practice timber and a blunt chisel.

I learned to look at grain.

Where it changed direction.

Where a knot made the wood stronger.

Where forcing the blade would split it.

My first carved line wandered sideways.

My second was too deep.

My third looked like Ahi had made it with his teeth.

Reweti kept every piece.

“Why?”

“Evidence.”

“Of what?”

“Improvement.”

I liked that answer.

During breaks he told me about Ru.

Not secrets.

Small things.

Ru had hated getting up early.

He once fell asleep during a navigation lesson and woke because a bird stole his lunch.

He was better at repairing tools than carving faces.

He sang loudly when he thought nobody could hear him.

“That sounds like Koro,” I said.

“He was always Ru before he was your koro.”

I had never thought about that properly.

Adults had whole lives before children arrived.

Reweti showed me an old beam from the waka's inner frame.

The carver's marks underneath matched the symbol from Koro's box.

“Your line,” he said.

“Reweti's?”

“Mine is connected to it. But the oldest work predates me.”

Good.

One less impossible ancestor standing in front of me.

He traced the pattern.

“Carvers did not simply decorate the waka. They read stress. Weight. Growth. Movement. They shaped living timber so it could move without breaking.”

I touched the beam.

Gold light appeared beneath my fingertip.

Reweti slapped my hand away.

“What did I say?”

“No magic.”

“And?”

“Listen first.”

“Good.”

Reweti made me sharpen tools too. I thought that was punishment until he showed me what a blunt edge did to beautiful timber. It crushed fibres before cutting them, leaving damage you could not always see from the surface.

“Tools change the thing they touch,” he said. “So does power. If you do not care for the tool, you make the material pay for your laziness.”

I wrote that sentence in my notebook because it sounded like it belonged to more than carving.

At the end of the week he finally let me use a tiny amount of Mīharo. I did not push gold light into the wood. I listened for resistance, then made one cut along the grain. It was not impressive. It was the cleanest line I had ever made.

I rubbed my hand.

“You could say it without hitting me.”

“You remembered, didn't you?”

Annoyingly, yes.

The next part of World-Shaper training had nothing to do with carving.

Whaea Rina taught weaving.

She was small, fast and terrifying.

“Your fingers are lazy,” she told Hemi within thirty seconds.

Hemi had only come to watch.

He left.

I stayed.

Whaea Rina showed me a narrow woven strip patterned with dark and light lines.

“What do you see?”

“A pattern.”

“Useless answer.”

I tried again.

The dark lines crossed, separated and rejoined.

Some repeated.

One changed direction near the edge.

“A path?”

“Better.”

She placed the weaving over a map of Te Waka Tōhorā.

The lines matched old waterways.

My skin prickled.

“This is a map?”

“It can be.”

Weaving had been used to hold knowledge when maps were dangerous to carry.

Routes.

Seasonal changes.

Safe crossings.

Relationships between places.

Whaea Rina showed me another fragment preserved from Aroha's family line.

The name of the weaver was damaged, but the pattern remained.

“One of your tūpuna wahine,” she said. “A master.”

I wanted a name.

A proper one.

Whaea Rina understood.

“We do not fill missing names with guesses just because silence makes us uncomfortable.”

That was hard.

It also felt right.

We had already lost enough truth.

I traced the pattern.

Carving shaped strong lines.

Weaving connected flexible ones.

Both were maps.

Both were structures.

Both changed when tension changed.

That evening I drew the pattern in my notebook beside the gold lines I had seen inside Te Rākau Kura.

They matched.

Not exactly.

Enough.

Kiki crawled across the page and stopped at one crossing.

The hei tiki warmed.

A cold tremor moved through the floor.

Whaea Rina would not let me copy the old pattern immediately. First I had to weave a simple strip until my fingers understood tension. Pull too hard and the whole piece narrowed. Too loose and the structure sagged.

“Balance,” I muttered.

“Do not say that word like you have solved it,” she replied.

I had to laugh.

The lesson also changed how I looked at the mesh inside my throat. Dave had woven technology around a living pathway. He had designed tension in one direction: take, pull, convert. No flexibility. No consent. No way for the system to change with me.

Maybe that was why my healing had damaged his control. I was changing. His design was not.

Very faint.

I looked up.

Nobody else noticed.

Something deep inside Te Waka Tōhorā had shifted.

At ten, I felt much older than I had at nine.

This was probably ridiculous.

Hemi, at eleven, agreed with me.

“We're basically adults.”

Moemoeā said, “You got your sleeve stuck in a door this morning.”

“Adults do that.”

Piripi said, “Not usually.”

Our Outsiders Club still met beneath the same root.

Only now we had homework.

More homework.

Apparently magical education believed in suffering too.

Hemi had become excellent at controlled heat when he wanted to be.

The when was important.

He could warm a room evenly now.

He could guide flame along a metal channel without burning the table.

He could also still make a candle explode if someone annoyed him.

Moemoeā was the only person who could tell him to stop without starting an argument.

Usually.

They were closer now.

Not boyfriend-girlfriend close.

Not yet.

But Hemi saved her a seat without thinking.

Moemoeā always knew when he was pretending not to care.

Piripi and I noticed everything.

We said nothing.

Mostly because we valued our lives.

My own voice had strengthened.

I could talk for whole conversations if I stayed calm.

When the mesh tightened, I switched to NZSL or writing.

Nobody at Te Rākau Kura treated that as failure.

That mattered more than I realised.

One afternoon Hemi asked, “Do you think you'll ever get rid of it?”

He meant the mesh.

“I hope so.”

“I'd rip it out.”

“You'd bleed everywhere.”

“Fine. Bad plan.”

He looked across the valley.

“I just hate that he still gets to be inside something that's yours.”

I knew what he meant.

“He won't forever.”

Hemi nodded.

Then the ground gave one slow shudder beneath us.

A flock of birds rose from the valley.

Our friendship had become less about being new and more about knowing one another too well. Piripi could tell when I was pretending my voice did not hurt. Moemoeā knew when Hemi's jokes meant he was angry. Hemi knew I was about to ignore advice whenever I got very quiet.

That kind of knowing was useful and annoying.

We also started spending time apart. Moemoeā joined advanced path-reading. Piripi trained with water navigators. Hemi spent more hours in heat practice. I worked with Reweti and Whaea Rina.

Growing closer did not mean doing everything together. It meant knowing the others would still be there when you came back.

The giant tree creaked.

Moemoeā looked up.

“That wasn't normal.”

This time everybody noticed.

The fracture appeared near the western terraces.

A living walkway had split down the centre.

No one was hurt.

That was luck.

The strange part was not the crack.

Living timber cracked sometimes.

The strange part was the colour.

Grey spread from the break like frost.

Reweti arrived with three builders and told everybody to stay back.

I stayed back for almost two minutes.

Then he sighed.

“Fine. Come here.”

I crouched beside him.

“Touch nothing.”

I nodded.

The fracture felt wrong even without contact.

Cold.

Empty.

Like the mesh.

“Dave?” Hemi asked from behind us.

Reweti looked at Grog.

Grog said, “We don't know.”

Hemi muttered, “Adults say that when they know.”

He was not completely wrong.

Reweti cut a thin sliver from the damaged edge.

Inside, the wood was healthy for a few centimetres.

Then a white line ran through it.

My throat tightened.

The mesh responded.

I stepped back.

Grog saw.

“Same signal?”

“Similar.”

Not identical.

That bothered me more.

If Dave's white thread was reaching the waka again, why did it feel different?

Whaea Rina arrived carrying one of the old woven maps.

She laid it beside the fracture.

The damaged line matched an ancient channel beneath the walkway.

Not a road.

Not water.

A Mīharo pathway.

Reweti frowned.

“This is not surface damage.”

The gold lines beneath the nearby bark flickered.

One went dark.

Then another.

The builders marked a wide safety circle around the crack. Students gathered outside it anyway. Some looked frightened. Others whispered that the World-Shaper would fix it.

I wanted to disappear.

Reweti heard them too. “You are not a repair service,” he said quietly.

“Could have fooled them.”

He tapped the grey edge with a tool. “Good kaitiaki do not make one child responsible for a system built by generations.”

That sentence steadied me more than praise would have.

When a second faint fracture appeared several metres away, the builders stopped treating the first as an isolated fault. The question changed from how do we patch this to what is putting pressure on the whole structure. I liked the second question better, even though the answer was more frightening.

Far away, a bell began ringing from Te Rākau Kura.

Emergency signal.

The fracture was only the first place we could see the problem.

Something deeper was failing.

School moved into investigation mode.

This was much more exciting than ordinary lessons.

Also much scarier.

Whaea Anahera split older students into teams.

We were not allowed near dangerous zones.

Hemi complained.

Moemoeā told him dangerous zones were dangerous.

He said the name was dramatic.

She said that was because danger was dramatic.

Our team mapped small failures.

A lamp-path that dimmed every third hour.

A stream that had lost pressure.

A root bridge that healed too slowly.

Individually, none seemed huge.

Together, they made a pattern.

I drew them over Whaea Rina's woven map.

The failures curved toward the centre of the waka.

Not Te Rākau Kura.

Deeper.

Below the roots.

Reweti called it the Deep Current.

“What is it?” I asked.

He hesitated.

“The closest Earth word would be circulation.”

Te Waka Tōhorā moved water, heat, nutrients and Mīharo through connected living systems.

The Deep Current linked them.

If it slowed in one place, another part compensated.

If too many pathways failed, the whole waka would become unstable.

“Can I feel it?”

Reweti looked unhappy.

“Probably.”

“Can I?”

“That is a different question.”

He took me to the oldest root chamber under the school.

I placed both hands on the floor.

At first I felt nothing.

Then the world opened.

Thousands of lines.

Water.

Wood.

Roots.

Roads.

People.

Rere.

Heat.

Mīharo.

Connections layered over connections.

Some bright.

Some weak.

Some cut.

I gasped and pulled away.

Blood rushed in my ears.

Reweti caught me.

“Too much?”

I nodded.

“Good.”

I glared at him.

“Knowing something is too much is useful information.”

He helped me stand.

After I pulled away from the Deep Current, Reweti made me describe exactly what I had sensed without interpreting it. Bright line. Weak line. Fast water. Cold space. White flicker. He stopped me every time I said damaged, dangerous or wrong.

“Observation first,” he said. “Meaning second.”

It felt like science class, which was probably the point.

We drew my observations beside actual measurements from engineers and water keepers. Some things matched. Some did not. My Mīharo was useful evidence, not perfect truth.

That was important. Feeling a system deeply did not make me automatically correct about it. I could still misunderstand what I felt.

“World-Shapers get dangerous when they think feeling everything means they understand everything.”

I looked at the floor.

The Deep Current was hurt.

But I still did not know why.

I wanted to fix the Deep Current.

Obviously.

That was the problem.

Reweti knew it.

Whaea Anahera knew it.

Grog knew it.

Even Hemi knew it, although his solution was “fix it harder.”

The adults banned me from shaping anything below the roots.

I was furious.

“You called me a World-Shaper.”

Reweti said, “And now you think that means every damaged thing is yours to touch.”

“It's failing.”

“Yes.”

“People could get hurt.”

“Yes.”

“Then why are we waiting?”

Reweti placed two pieces of timber on the table.

One had a crack.

“Repair it.”

I reached for the damaged one.

He stopped me.

“Why is it cracked?”

I looked.

A knot sat near the split.

The grain twisted around it.

“Pressure?”

“From where?”

I did not know.

He turned the wood over.

The underside had been cut too thin.

“If you fill the visible crack without understanding the pressure, what happens?”

“It cracks somewhere else.”

“Exactly.”

He pushed the wood toward me.

“Your job is not to be the fastest person in the room with power.”

I hated how often adults made sense after annoying me.

That night, I sat beneath the school with Hemi, Moemoeā and Piripi.

The floor pulsed faintly.

Hemi said, “I'd still fix it.”

Moemoeā leaned against him.

“And that's why you're not the World-Shaper.”

“Rude.”

I smiled.

That evening I sent Mum a message about being banned from fixing the waka. Her reply came back almost immediately.

GOOD, she had written in enormous letters.

Then underneath: I love you. Please continue not saving civilisation without adult supervision.

Dad added: Your mother has discovered sarcasm. We are all suffering.

I laughed hard enough that my voice rasped.

The message reminded me that there was a life outside the crisis. Ahi had a school project. Wai had learned to climb somewhere he should not. Dad had burned dinner. Nan was complaining about sanctuary tea.

Te Waka Tōhorā mattered enormously. It was not the only thing I belonged to. Maybe that was another protection against trying to carry the whole world.

Then a gold line under the floor went dark.

Somewhere far below, something answered with a white flash.

The problem was getting worse.

And for the first time in my life, the hardest thing I could do was nothing.