TE PŪTAKE

For a week, I refused to touch anything that glowed.

This was difficult on Te Waka Tōhorā.

Almost everything glowed eventually.

Te Rākau Kura.

Lantern paths.

Water channels.

Kiki.

Hemi's hands when he got annoyed.

I avoided the balancing chamber.

I avoided Reweti's oldest beams.

I even avoided the fountain near the market because it once flashed gold when I sneezed.

Hemi said I was being ridiculous.

Moemoeā told him to stop helping.

He tried again.

“You nearly burned out. That doesn't mean you never use it again.”

I stared at him.

He realised the irony.

“Okay. Coming from me, that sounded bad.”

“Very.”

My voice had become stronger since the Lower Relay mission.

The mesh still tightened under stress, but ordinary speech came easily now.

That should have felt like victory.

Instead I kept remembering the gold lines flooding through me.

How good it had felt for a few seconds.

How certain.

How dangerous.

Reweti did not force me back into training.

He gave me ordinary carving work.

Straight cuts.

Small repairs.

No Mīharo.

One afternoon I asked, “What if I do it again?”

He did not pretend not to understand.

“Then your people stop you again.”

“What if they can't?”

“Then we build better ways to make sure they can.”

That answer surprised me.

Mum crossed over for one night after hearing what happened. She did not lecture me. That was worse.

She sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the dried blood on the sleeve I had forgotten to change.

“Do you know what scared me most?” she asked.

I expected her to say that I nearly died.

“That you thought helping meant nobody was allowed to stop you.”

I looked down.

“Dave does that,” she said quietly. “He decides his reason is important enough that everyone else loses the right to say no.”

I hated the comparison. I also needed it. Good intentions did not automatically make my choices different from his.

Not trust yourself more.

Not be stronger.

Build systems around the risk.

World-Shaping was becoming less like being special and more like being responsible.

I was starting to prefer that.

The prophecy came up again because somebody painted it on a wall.

Not the whole thing.

Just BALANCE-BRINGER in gold letters near the school entrance.

I hated it.

Moemoeā hated the spelling.

Hemi thought it looked impressive.

Piripi fetched a bucket.

We painted over it.

Reweti helped.

That was how I learned he hated the prophecy too.

“Why didn't you say that earlier?” I asked.

“You were busy discovering you hated it yourself.”

He explained that old words had been repeated so many times nobody knew the original context.

A child from Ru's line.

Two worlds.

Balance.

Saving.

Maybe those words once described a warning.

Maybe a hope.

Maybe something else entirely.

“People like prophecies because they make uncertainty feel organised,” Reweti said.

“Am I a World-Shaper or not?”

“Yes.”

“That's annoyingly clear.”

He laughed.

“Ability is not destiny.”

That sentence stayed with me.

I could shape living systems.

That did not mean I was supposed to solve every problem.

Hemi could shape fire.

That did not mean he was supposed to burn every enemy.

We searched the archives for the prophecy after painting over the wall. The oldest fragment was damaged and the wording people repeated most often came from a copy made generations later.

One translation said bring balance. Another said hold the crossing. A third could mean stand where worlds meet.

None said save everyone by yourself.

Grog looked extremely pleased by that discovery.

“I have been saying this for years.”

“You also told Mum I was in a prophecy.”

He looked less pleased.

Stories changed when people repeated the parts they liked. The chosen-one version was exciting. The older version sounded more like responsibility at a difficult boundary. I trusted that more.

Moemoeā could read emotional shifts in Mīharo better than almost anyone our age.

That did not mean she was responsible for everybody's feelings.

Piripi could navigate water paths.

That did not mean every river belonged to him.

Maybe the most important thing about power was knowing what it did not give you.

The Earth Sanctuary had to move one of its outer gates.

Dave had not found the valley.

Not exactly.

But Rangi Energy survey teams had begun working too close to one of the hidden approach roads.

Mum's message arrived urgent and short.

We're safe.

Do not come back yet.

Grog is helping us shift.

Love you.

I read it five times.

Hemi stood beside me.

“Still think we should leave Earth alone?”

I looked at him.

He did not mean it cruelly.

That almost made it worse.

“I think Dave needs to be stopped.”

“Same thing.”

“No.”

Hemi's jaw tightened.

“He keeps coming. They keep taking. We keep hiding.”

“Who is they?”

He looked away.

“You know.”

“No. Say it.”

He did not.

Moemoeā had come up behind us.

She looked at Hemi with a kind of sadness.

“Dave is Dave,” she said. “He is not every person without Mīharo.”

Hemi said, “Easy to believe when they didn't spend your whole childhood deciding where you sleep.”

Moemoeā flinched.

Hemi regretted it immediately.

“I didn't mean—”

“You did.”

She walked away.

Hemi closed his eyes.

I wanted to comfort him.

I also wanted him to feel the consequence.

Both were true.

“Go after her,” I said.

The Earth Sanctuary did not pack into trucks and disappear. Moving a gate meant changing who could find the valley, which approach roads connected and where protective Mīharo folded around the forest.

Krish helped with ordinary logistics. Rose organised families. Hui carried records and complained that everyone packed badly. Grog and the Earth kaitiaki shifted the hidden path.

Their message showed me something I kept forgetting: my family had become part of this world too. They were not waiting offstage while I had adventures.

Dave's choices had changed all of us, but so had our response. We were learning how to protect one another without making Aroha-the-World-Shaper the answer to every problem.

He did.

I stayed with Mum's message.

Dave had pushed closer to my family again.

I was done waiting for the Deep Current to fail piece by piece.

We needed a real solution.

The idea came from Koro's box.

Not directly.

From everything inside it.

Carving marks.

Woven pattern.

A photograph of Te Rākau Kura.

A family line that had once known how to build strong things without making them rigid.

I spread Reweti's structural maps beside Whaea Rina's woven pathways.

Hard supports.

Flexible routes.

The problem with the Deep Current was that too much pressure travelled through too few fixed channels.

Dave's array pulled from Earth.

Old repairs created shortcuts.

Closed pathways forced the current into narrow routes.

What if the waka could reroute automatically?

Not one new channel.

Many small ones.

A lattice.

Reweti stared at my drawing for a long time.

Whaea Rina traced the crossing lines.

“It would have to move.”

“Yes.”

“And change with pressure.”

“Yes.”

Grog asked, “Can the waka grow it?”

I looked at the gold lines in the floor.

“If we give it the pattern.”

Hemi, Moemoeā and Piripi joined us.

Hemi looked over the design.

“Why not just open all the old paths?”

“Because we don't know what every old path connects to.”

“We could find out.”

“While the current is collapsing?”

He frowned.

Moemoeā said, “The lattice gives us time.”

Piripi added, “And if one path fails, water and Mīharo move around it.”

Hemi still wanted something bigger.

I could see it.

But he nodded.

“Fine. We build your net.”

I stared at him.

We built a small model first. Reweti carved flexible channels into living practice wood. Whaea Rina wove removable links across them. Piripi ran water through the system. Hemi added controlled heat to simulate pressure changes.

My first design failed in under a minute.

Water rushed into one side and tore three woven links free.

Nobody died because it was a model. That was the point.

We changed the angles. Added slower gates. Created more than one route around the same pressure point. The fifth model held.

Design was much less magical than people imagined. Most of it was being wrong safely enough to try again.

He realised what he had said.

“Bad word?”

“Very.”

“Lattice.”

“Better.”

Building the lattice took everyone.

Carvers prepared living grooves.

Weavers laid flexible guides.

Engineers adjusted water pressure.

Kaitiaki opened and closed routes in sequence.

Students carried tools and messages.

My job was to help the living material recognise the pattern.

Not power it.

That distinction mattered.

Hemi's job was heat.

Gentle heat softened certain old joints so they could move without cracking.

He was brilliant at it.

Then one section refused to open.

“More heat,” Hemi said.

Reweti shook his head.

“No.”

“It's stuck.”

“Because pressure is coming from the other side.”

Hemi looked at me.

“We could push through.”

I felt the temptation.

If we opened the stubborn route, the lattice would connect two hours earlier.

The Deep Current was weakening by the minute.

“No,” I said.

Hemi's jaw tightened.

“You always say no when the answer is more power.”

“Because more power isn't an answer by itself.”

“Sometimes it is.”

Orange light ran up his arms.

Moemoeā stepped between us.

“Hemi.”

He looked at her.

The light dimmed.

“I'm trying to help.”

“I know.”

She touched his wrist.

“Help the plan we all agreed to.”

For one second he looked like the boy in the forest again.

Cold.

Angry.

Terrified that somebody else was deciding what happened.

Then he stepped back.

“Fine.”

We found another route.

It took longer.

The system stayed intact.

After the argument, I found Hemi alone near the heat channels.

“You think I'm becoming him,” he said.

He meant Dave.

“No.”

“You looked at me like it.”

I sat beside him. “I think you hate being controlled so much that sometimes you treat any limit like control.”

He did not answer.

“That's not the same as Dave.”

“Yet?”

I wished he had not said it.

“I don't know.”

Hemi stared at the flame moving through the channel. “At least you're honest.”

It was not a fight we solved. It was a crack we both noticed.

That night Hemi apologised.

But I remembered how close he had come to forcing the path.

Not because he wanted to hurt anyone.

Because he believed power should not have to wait for permission.

That idea frightened me more than the orange light.

The Deep Current broke before the lattice was finished.

A storm hit the outer layers of Te Waka Tōhorā at the same time Dave's array surged on Earth.

Two pressures.

One weak system.

The balancing chamber lights went white.

Then black.

Water dropped from suspended rivers.

Root bridges locked in place.

The western harbour tilted three degrees.

Three degrees was enough to send boats sliding against their moorings.

Emergency bells rang across the waka.

Grog shouted orders.

Reweti and Whaea Rina ran for the central chamber.

Piripi went to the water gates.

Moemoeā organised students moving toward safe zones.

Hemi looked at me.

“What do you need?”

That question mattered.

Not what can I do.

What do you need.

“Heat teams at the lower joins. No forcing.”

He nodded.

No argument.

I ran to the balancing chamber.

The spiral platform was dark.

For a second I remembered collapsing there.

I wanted to turn around.

Kiki landed on my shoulder.

Rere's call echoed through the lower water system.

Mum's voice lived in my memory.

Come back to me.

I put one hand on the platform.

Not two.

Gold lines appeared.

Weak.

Broken.

I did not try to fill them.

I searched for the lattice.

All the pieces people had built together.

Carved grooves.

Woven routes.

Water gates.

Heat joints.

One unfinished gap.

“Reweti!”

He understood.

“The stubborn route?”

I nodded.

Pressure had shifted.

Now it could open safely.

Hemi's team was already there.

All across the waka, other people were making decisions at the same time. Market workers secured stalls. Teachers moved children. Water keepers opened emergency channels. Healers prepared rooms. Families checked neighbours.

I could feel some of those actions through the gold lines, but I could not direct them. They did not need me to.

That was strangely calming.

The crisis was bigger than me, and the response was bigger than me too.

When the final lattice section connected, I was not the centre of the system. I was one point among hundreds, doing the job only I could do while everyone else did theirs.

I sent the signal.

Gentle heat.

The joint moved.

The final section connected.

The lattice came alive.

The lattice worked.

Then it almost failed.

The new routes opened too quickly.

Mīharo rushed through them like water into dry ground.

The balancing chamber shook.

Reweti shouted, “Slow it!”

I could not slow the whole system by force.

That was exactly what I had promised not to do.

I listened.

The current had rhythm.

Not music exactly.

Pulse.

Pause.

Pulse.

The same pattern I had heard in Rere's calls.

The same pattern hidden in Koro's waiata.

I began to hum.

The mesh tightened.

I kept going.

One note.

Then another.

My voice cracked.

Kiki's wings flashed.

The hei tiki warmed.

I sang the line I had sung in the backyard on my eighth birthday.

Not loudly.

Not perfectly.

Enough.

The lattice responded to the rhythm.

Gold light slowed.

Routes opened in sequence instead of all at once.

Water steadied.

The harbour level corrected.

Roots brightened.

Across the chamber, Reweti was crying.

I nearly stopped.

“Keep going,” he said.

So I did.

The song was not a spell.

That mattered.

It did not command the waka.

It gave me a rhythm for listening.

The waka did the healing.

We helped.

When the last gold line stabilised, my voice faded to a whisper.

But it did not disappear.

The mesh inside me had split in several more places.

Mere would later say it was no longer controlling the pathway.

The words of the waiata carried memories with them: Ru's voice at home, Hui joining on the second line, my own eight-year-old self singing beside harakeke before I knew Mīharo was real.

For years I had thought getting my voice back would mean returning to who I was before Dave.

It did not.

My voice had changed. I had changed. I signed as naturally as I spoke now. Writing was still part of how I thought. Silence was no longer only something done to me; sometimes I chose it.

Reclaiming my voice did not mean erasing what happened. It meant Dave no longer got to decide what any of those ways of communicating meant.

It was scar tissue now.

Still there.

No longer in charge.

I pressed my forehead to the platform.

For the first time since I was eight, I knew my voice belonged entirely to me.

The repairs took weeks.

The celebration took one night.

Nobody called it Aroha's victory.

I would have refused if they tried.

The lattice belonged to carvers, weavers, engineers, kaitiaki, students, Rere, Te Rākau Kura and the living waka itself.

That was the point.

At the gathering, Reweti handed me the first ugly piece of timber I had carved at the beginning of the year.

The line still wandered sideways.

“Evidence,” he said.

“Of bad carving?”

“Of improvement.”

Whaea Rina gave me a copy of the woven lattice pattern.

Grog gave me nothing.

“You already have too many objects.”

I told him he was cheap.

Hemi laughed.

Moemoeā was standing close enough to him that their shoulders touched.

Neither moved away.

Piripi noticed me noticing.

We both looked elsewhere.

Later, I went alone to the ridge above the harbour.

The gold lines of the repaired system glowed softly through the valley.

World-Shaper.

The title no longer felt like a prophecy.

It felt like a skill I had to keep earning.

I was ten.

I could speak.

I could sing a little.

Dave was still on Earth.

The Rangi Array still existed.

Hemi was still angry about hiding.

Nothing was finished.

But the Deep Current was stable.

Then the sky tore open.

A sharp blue-white line appeared beyond the eastern ridge.

Something fell through it.

Not a whale.

Not a Te Waka Tōhorā craft.

A dark object covered in unfamiliar carved symbols spun through the air trailing smoke.

Emergency bells began ringing again.

The object crashed beyond the forest.

For one second, silence covered the ridge.

Then Hemi's voice came from behind me.

The next morning I visited the repaired market garden from my first shape. New shoots had grown along the wetter edge. The gardener had changed what she planted there instead of trying to force the soil back to exactly how it had been.

“Better now?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Different. Ask me after harvest.”

I loved that answer.

World-Shaping was not making a perfect ending. It was creating enough possibility for living things to continue.

So when the strange rune-marked craft fell through the sky that evening, I did not think prophecy.

I thought: new problem.

Then I saw smoke rising beyond the forest and started running.

“Please tell me that's not another prophecy.”

I stared at the smoke.

“I don't think so.”

Far below, Grog was already running.

We followed.