Summertime burns in all their bones those island days. It's all light and heat, even down by the water where the breeze blows warm, off in the distance the sea and the sky blending together, unbarred by land.

There's not the faintest trace of anything out there. No signs of land, at best the occasional cloud, drifting like globby jellyfish through that endless sky. The sea shushes the land, the trees shush the breezes. Sora wades with Riku and Kairi in the shallowest parts before he strikes out, all of them slinging warm water at each other, darkening in the sun. Salt water dries itchy on the skin.

"Do you still think about what's out there?" he asks them, later, when the sun is high enough that they've all given up and retreated to the shade. It hurts to look at the sand. The sea barely seems alive; nothing seems alive, under that sun. Together they float in a morass of heat.

They thought about taking a raft out there together, once. Sora thinks about that, them out there in something like this, on the flat water.

"We know, don't we?" Riku rests his elbows on his knees and glances over. His eyes are like the only green things in the world. Kairi pulls at the straps of her tank top and sighs. She's darkened in the sun and pale lines cross her shoulders.

Home, summer home. It's too hot to breathe, it's too hot to do anything. Somewhere out there there's a cold deep dark where creatures still move, but all they have right now is this burning river of sun and time. They all know other worlds maybe better than they know their own.

"We know some of it." Sora stares out at the skyline, that denial that blue would ever be a cool color.

"Knowledge begins with the self," Kairi says.

He still looks up, thinking of that raft, that postage stamp of rickety wood and sail, skimming just barely over the depthless waters.