Skip to content

50 welcome credits for a limited time

They are yours when you join. Use them within 7 days.

Join free

Plastic Sea — What's Left, Page 17

By Inkroost · Published

Log in to see this page

Page 17 of What's Left is for signed-in readers. Logging in brings you straight back here — and an account is free if you do not have one.

Transcript

Panel 1: Roka bursts up through the surface, clinging to the orange float, screaming. A small piece of the island drifts away in the distance. Roka: 'BAMYA!' 'GRANNY!' Panel 2: Silence. Roka floats alone on a calm open sea. A string of flattened bottle caps, Biber's necklace, drifts past him, and Bamya's small yellow toy duck bobs toward him.

Image description

Roka surfaces screaming for Bamya and Granny; then, alone in the calm sea, he watches a string of bottle caps and a yellow duck float toward him.

About this chapter

In the dark at the bottom of the sea, something is counting. On Candyreef, a candy-coloured island of floating trash, Roka wakes to a water bag in the face from his street crew, lifts breakfast from the old woman who would have fed him anyway, and tells the kid who follows him that he doesn't owe anybody. Then the gulls lift all at once, and a Maw eats half the island. A day and a night alone at sea later, the Garden Ship fishes him out and orders him to walk its treadwheels for fish heads. Roka is nobody's slave, so he goes looking for something to steal instead, and breaks into a barnacled case dredged from the seabed. The silver dust inside climbs into his arm and says hello. It is polite. It is curious. It wants every human dead. And it has just started counting again.