Episode 1 — The House Over the Hole
The first thing Anna learned about Orahau was that the ground wasn’t solid. “Ora” meant water, “hau” meant hole — water going through a hole — and half the hill behind their new house was secretly hollow, like a thousand-hundred rivers had been knitting tunnels under the grass for millions of years.
She stood at the kitchen window on moving day, watching rain strap itself against the glass, and tried very hard not to miss Pearl Island.
“Very quiet here,” she muttered.
“That’s the point, sweetheart,” said Dad, who had taken the vet job in the Fern Valley region because it was “the most beautiful patch of green on Earth,” and because it paid enough to buy Mum her dream kitchen.
Mum was already unpacking the rice cooker like it was a family heirloom. “Anna. Give it a month. The neighbour’s kid — Ruby, I think — she already asked when you’re coming to school.”
I’m not ‘coming to school.’ I’m being exiled to school, Anna wanted to say. But she didn’t, because Eddy was watching.
Eddy was nine and believed everything was an adventure. He had his face pressed to the window, breath fogging a circle, and he was staring at the back paddock like it was the gate to another world. “Anna. Anna. There’s a hole in the ground. A proper hole. Can we go and look at it?”
“The tomo?” Mum said, stirring tea. “Mah, don’t you dare. The farmer down the road says kids fall in tomos. You stay away from it, you hear me? Both of you.”
Eddy nodded so solemnly he looked like a little spy.
Anna knew that nod. She’d seen it a thousand times: the nod that meant I am definitely going to look at that hole.
The cottage was a crooked old weatherboard thing with a tin roof that sang in the rain and a veranda that smelled of woodsmoke and wet fern. Dad had rented it off a dairy farmer named Bryce, a man with gumboots older than Anna and an accent so thick it took her three tries to understand “she’s a good shed, righto.” The farm rolled down to a creek lined with flax, and beyond that the hills went on forever, folded green like cooling custard, dotted with pines and sheep and the occasional limestone outcrop standing up out of the grass like a pale tooth.
It was beautiful, Anna admitted to no one. It was also the loneliest place she had ever stood in.
Back home there had been the mamak stall on the corner, where Uncle Raj fried roti canai at midnight and the whole street smelled of curry and haze. There had been Amelia, her best friend since they were five, who could finish her sentences and steal her fries and know exactly when she needed a hug. There had been noise — buses, scooters, the high chime of the ice-cream van, the muezzin call she didn’t really hear anymore, her grandmother Ah Ma’s radio playing old dialect songs from the kitchen.
Here, at four in the afternoon, the loudest thing in the world was the rain on the tin roof and Eddy whispering counts of the sheep: “Forty-two… forty-three…”
That night, after everyone was asleep, Anna lay awake and listened to the house settle. Something in the walls ticked like a heartbeat. And somewhere out in the dark, from the direction of the tomo, she could swear she saw a tiny green light, pulsing slow, like a star that had fallen to earth and decided to stay.
Probably a tractor light, she told herself. But she watched it for a long time before she slept.
Episode 2 — The Glowies
Silver Fern Academy had eighty-three students, which Anna pointed out to Eddy was smaller than their old building’s carpark. It had one basketball hoop, a playground built out of timber, and a flag that snapped in the wind beside a pole carved with curling patterns.
“That’s the karakia pole,” said a voice behind her.
Anna turned. A girl about her age stood there in jandals and a hoodie, freckles scattered like cinnamon, grinning like she’d known Anna for years. “I’m Ruby. Your neighbour. Mum said you guys moved into Bryce’s cottage.”
“Hi. I’m—”
“Anna, yeah, I know. Everyone knows. Small school, eh — you’re famous already. Come on, I’ll show you the secret spot.”
Ruby was the loudest friendly person Anna had ever met. By morning tea she had introduced Anna to about forty kids, including Theo, who carried a torch collection in his bag “in case of emergency,” and Jonty, a farm boy built like a fence post who said “chur” to everything and wore gumboots even in summer. They all talked nonstop, all of them, and half the words were ones Anna had to decode.
“Sweet as” — good. “Yeah nah” — no. “Na yeah” — yes. “Mean as, bro” — awesome.
By lunch, Anna’s head was spinning. Ruby laughed at her. “You’ll get it, eh. It’s easier than it looks. Anyway — tomorrow there’s a cave talk. Aunty Kiri’s coming in. She’s the famous guide. You’re gonna love it.”
Anna raised an eyebrow. “Famous guide?”
“Orahau, Anna. You’re living on top of some of the best caves in the world and you don’t know?” Ruby spread her arms at the hills. “Underneath all this green? It’s hollow. Full of glow worms. Millions of them.”
Anna thought about the green light outside her window and said nothing.
The next day Aunty Kiri came to the hall. She was a broad, warm woman with a silver ponytail and a voice that could hold a room. She switched off the lights, and the ceiling of the hall filled with a photograph, and Anna forgot to breathe.
It looked like the night sky. No — like the night sky turned upside down underneath the earth. Thousands of pinpricks of blue-green light, scattered like a galaxy across a stone ceiling, dripping down in silvery threads.
“Those are our titiwai,” said Aunty Kiri softly. “The glow worms. And here’s the first secret: they’re not worms at all.”
Eddy’s hand shot up. “They’re not?!”
“They’re baby flies. Larvae of a little gnat that lives in these subterranean caves,” She clicked to a close-up. “Each one spins a silk line from the ceiling — a fishing line — and hangs down like a tiny angler. Then it turns on its own little lamp. See those beads of glue on the line?”
The kids leaned in.
“That’s what a glow worm’s fishing line is made of. Sticky droplets, and the light is the bait. A midge flies toward the pretty blue light, bloop, it gets stuck on the line, and dinner is served.”
Eddy made a face of pure delight. “They catch their food with glue lines.”
“They glow brighter when they’re hungry,” Aunty Kiri added. “The emptier the belly, the brighter the light. And the old story — the one my gran told me — is that the caves were carved long ago by a great guardian who sleeps under the limestone still. Legend says the guardians of the tunnels can hear you. They know if you’re kind. And if you are, the light shows you the way home.”
Some of the kids giggled. Anna wrote the word titiwai in her notebook and underlined it twice, telling herself it was just because it was a cool word, not because the picture had made her chest feel strange and wide, like standing at the top of a tall building back home and watching the whole city glow.
On the bus home, Eddy was vibrating. “Anna. Anna. Did you see? They’re not worms, they’re fishing-liner-uppers with torches.”
“I saw.” She couldn’t help smiling. “Very clever, lah, these glowies.”
“So clever,” Eddy agreed, and then he went quiet, the way he did when he was planning something. “Hey, Anna. Are there glowies in our hole?”
Anna went cold. “Eddy. Mum said no. The tomo is off-limits. Promise me.”
“Promise,” Eddy said, crossing his heart with his little finger, which was his sacred oath.
And because he crossed his little finger, she believed him.
Episode 3 — The Night the Rain Came
The storm came three weeks later, and it came like it had a grudge.
The weather warnings had been muttering about it all day — “heavy rain at times, thunderstorm possible, mainly inland” — and by dusk the sky had turned the colour of a fresh bruise. The wind bent the pines double. The sheep huddled under the hedge, and the creek began to shout.
Dad was called out before tea. “Bryce’s cows are calving and there’s one in trouble. Could be a long night. You two be good for Mum, right?”
“Right, Dad.” Eddy gave a crisp salute.
“Watch him,” Dad said to Anna, half-smiling, and she nodded, and she did not know yet that she would be replaying that nod for years.
Mum made curry puff for dinner — crispy, golden, exactly like Ah Ma’s — and for a while the three of them sat at the table, warm and safe, while the rain machine-gunned the tin roof. Eddy asked about the mamak stall. He asked about Ah Ma. His voice got small. “Do you think Ah Ma misses us?”
“Every day, baby,” said Mum. “She says the house is too quiet now. Forty years of grandchildren shouting, then suddenly — nothing.” Mum dabbed her eyes and laughed. “Eat your curry puff. You want me to fold the dough the way—?”
That was when the power went out.
The blackout swallowed the house whole. Eddy squeaked. Mum laughed her nervous laugh and lit candles, and they sat in the flickering yellow like old-time people, playing a card game by torchlight. By nine, the storm was roaring. By ten, Eddy was asleep on the couch with his torch still clutched in one fist. Anna tucked him in and went to her room, but she couldn’t sleep. The wind kept hooting down the chimney. The house ticked louder than ever.
At some point — maybe midnight, maybe later — she heard a small, careful sound from the back porch.
Click.
Anna lay very still. The sound came again: the back door latch, opening.
She was out of bed before her brain caught up, padding to the window in her bare feet. Rain hammered. And there, half-shrouded in the dark, a tiny figure in pyjama shorts and gumboots — gumboots, where had he— — trotting across the wet paddock with his torch beam bouncing, heading straight for the tomo.
“Eddy!”
But the storm ate her voice.
Anna pulled on her jacket and her own boots, grabbed her torch, and ran. The grass dragged at her ankles. Rain stung her face like gravel. By the time she reached the fence line of the back paddock, she couldn’t see the torch beam anymore.
“Eddy! EDDY!”
Nothing. Just rain, wind, and the deep oily gurgle of the creek in flood.
Anna reached the tomo. It was a dark gash in the earth, bigger than she remembered, ringed by muddy stone and a rope of tree roots. An old plank bridge had stretched across it — Bryce had used it to check the fence line. Now the planks lay splintered in the mud, washed out.
And there, caught on a root at the very edge, was a single small gumboot, floating, turning slowly in the water that streamed into the hole.
“Eddy.”
The hole swallowed the world. Anna screamed his name into it, and the hole gave her back only rain.
Then — impossibly, beautifully — from somewhere far below, a soft green light blinked. Once. Twice. Three times.
The glowies, something whispered in her head. He’s down there with the glowies.
And Anna, fourteen years old, standing in a storm on a farm in a country she didn’t belong to, did the only thing she could think of: she ran, screaming and crying, for Ruby’s house and the phone.
Episode 4 — The Search Party
Ruby’s farmhouse was a hundred metres through the trees, and Anna arrived soaked through, her heart beating out of her chest. Ruby’s dad — Mr. Ford, a man who treated emergencies like cups of tea — listened for exactly eight seconds, then grabbed his radio while Ruby’s mum phoned the neighbours, the police, and “Aunty Kiri, because if anyone knows that cave system, it’s Kiri.”
By the time Anna had changed into dry clothes, Theo and Jonty were at the door, Jonty carrying a coil of rope over one shoulder like a cowboy, Theo holding a canvas bag that clinked with torches.
“You mad?!” Theo said, but he was already shoving spare batteries into his pockets. “We’re coming.”
“Your mum’s gonna kill us,” said Jonty happily.
“My mum’s gonna thank you,” said Mr. Ford. “Now listen. The tomo on Bryce’s boundary — it opens into a corridor that runs toward the main streamway. In a storm like this, that streamway will be rising. Fast. You’ve got maybe an hour before it’s impassable. Kiri and the search-and-rescue are coming in from the tour side with rope gear, but they’ve got a forty-minute drive up a flooded road. So if you’re going, you’re going now, and you’re staying together, and you are not — I mean not — going anywhere without the rope tied to something solid. Understood?”
“Understood,” said three voices, and Anna’s.
The tomo looked even worse by torchlight. Water poured over its lip in a silver curtain. Theo tied the rope to a post and dropped the end over the edge, and Jonty tested it with his whole body weight, like he’d been born doing this.
“I’ll go first. I’m the heaviest.” Jonty grinned his chur-grin. “If the rope holds me, it holds everything.”
Down they went, one by one, into the wet black mouth of the earth.
The shaft was about four metres — Anna counted her heartbeats — and it ended not in water but in a soft fan of silt and leaves, the flood’s leftovers. A passage opened sideways out of the shaft, low and sloped, and the air down here was warm and thick and smelled of wet stone. The roar of the storm faded to a murmur.
“Eddy!” Anna called, and her voice bounced weirdly off the rock. “EDDY!”
No answer. But overhead, something extraordinary happened.
The ceiling of the passage lit up. Not all at once, but in ripples, like a wave of little lamps switching on one by one, a stream of blue-green stars flowing deeper into the hill.
“Oh, sweet as,” breathed Theo. “That’s not natural. That is not natural.”
Jonty just pointed his torch down the passage. “They’re pointing somewhere.”
“You guys…” Anna’s voice cracked. “You know this is crazy, right? We’re kids. We’re going into a cave in a flood because of glow worms pointing somewhere.”
“Do you have a better plan?” Ruby asked gently.
Anna looked at the little green trail, glowing and waiting, absolutely impossible, absolutely real.
“No,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Episode 5 — Into the Glow
The passage sloped down and then opened into a low chamber about the size of a bus. And there, at the far end, sitting on a shelf of dry rock with his arms around his knees and his face absolutely filthy, was Eddy.
He lifted his head when he saw their torches. His eyes were huge and white in the dark. “Anna?!”
“EDDY!” She was across the chamber in seconds, on her knees beside him, checking his arms, his legs, his head. “Are you okay? Are you hurt? What were you thinking?!”
“I couldn’t sleep,” said Eddy, in the voice of a boy who had already decided he was in trouble. “The glowies were so bright tonight. So I thought I’d just… look. And then the bridge went sploosh and I slid down here and I landed on a soft bit and then I couldn’t climb back up, and, Anna —” he grabbed her sleeve — “Anna, when I fell, the light went nuts. Like the sky. They all came on at once. I named them. That one’s Alpha, that one’s the Waka, that one’s the Star Boat—”
“Eddy, stop talking, are you hurt?!”
“…my ankle. It’s a bit sore.”
Rookie moves, all of it, and yet — as Anna stood and shone her torch around the chamber — she saw what Eddy had seen. The ceiling was carpeted in glow worms. Thousands of them. Each one trailing its shining fishing line, swaying gently, looking for all the world like tiny tethered stars. The whole chamber hummed with a soft blue-green light, and the sound of dripping water was like music.
“They’re beautiful,” said Ruby quietly, and for once she wasn’t being loud.
“Yeah, they’re gorgeous,” said Jonty, “and I love that for us, but we need to move. Listen.”
Everyone listened. Under the sound of dripping, there was a new sound: a low growling rush, growing.
“The stream’s coming up,” said Theo. “When the creek floods, it pours into the tomo system. We need to get to higher ground, now.”
“Which way?” Anna’s voice was sharp. “We came down a shaft. We can’t climb back up a waterfall.”
“There’s gotta be a way through,” said Jonty. “Old Bryce’s maps — he had a map of the farm, and he said the tomo connects to the tourist caves through the streamway. If we go with the water, downstream, we should come out where the tour boats run. Maybe.”
“And if we go downstream and the water gets too high?”
“Then we drown,” said Jonty cheerfully, and Ruby smacked him.
“Jonty.”
“Sorry. Then we find a ledge. But we don’t stay here.”
Anna looked at Eddy. His ankle was swelling. His eyes were tired. He trusted her completely, the way little brothers do, and it was the heaviest thing in the world.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s the plan. We go with the water, but we keep to the high side. Jonty, you and me take Eddy between us — one arm each. Theo, you light the way. Ruby, you keep the rear and watch for the water. And I don’t care what happens, we stay together. Yeah?”
“Sweet as,” said Theo.
“Chur,” said Jonty.
“Together,” said Ruby.
And Eddy, blinking up at the glowing ceiling, said: “The glowies will show us. They always show you the way home if you’re kind.” His little finger was still crossed, Anna noticed — that sacred oath, still binding.
She almost laughed. Then she took Eddy’s arm, Jonty took the other, and they moved off into the dark, following the river of stars.
Episode 6 — The Rising Water
The streamway was a cathedral of wet rock and thunder.
Water poured through it now in earnest, brown and angry, leaping over boulders, filling the passage from wall to wall in places. They waded with the rope run between them, Eddy hopping on his good ankle, Anna and Jonty half-carrying him. The cold bit through their clothes like teeth. The glow worms lined the ceiling above the water, thousands and thousands, lighting the way like runway lights.
“Almost there,” Theo shouted over the roar, “there’s a chamber up ahead — the big one — the old fellas call it the Star Room!”
Then Eddy’s foot slipped.
It happened in a heartbeat. The current took him like a toy, ripped him out of Anna’s hands, and swept him toward a dark slot in the cliff where the water disappeared with a wet gulping sound.
“EDDY!”
Anna didn’t think. She dove.
The water was freezing and furious. It turned her over twice, slammed her into rock, then suddenly there was Eddy’s jacket in her fist and she had him, clinging, kicking, screaming words she couldn’t hear. The current dragged them both toward the slot—
A rope snapped taut around Anna’s waist. Ruby, braced against a boulder, the rope around her own middle, screaming something Anna couldn’t hear. Theo lunged and caught Eddy’s arm. Jonty threw himself flat on the bank and hauled.
The water fought them. The dark slot gulped at their feet. And then—
The ceiling blazed.
Every glow worm in the Star Room came on at once, brighter than Anna had ever seen, brighter than seemed possible, a galaxy of blue-green light flooding the chamber. It lit the gravel bank. It lit the handholds. It lit the route to safety like a road of stars.
“Now!” yelled Theo. “NOW!”
Later, Anna would never be able to explain the next ten seconds. She only remembered Eddy’s hand in hers, and the light, and the feeling that the earth itself was watching them, breathing them on. The current pushed, but the light showed the way — a shallow gravel bank, a ledge, a cracked shelf — and then they were out, gasping on wet stones, half in the water, half out, all five of them tangled in the same rope like a knot of survivors.
Eddy was crying. Anna was crying. Ruby was laughing and crying. Jonty was lying on the gravel like a starfish, and Theo was checking the batteries in his torch with shaking hands.
“Everyone here?” Anna’s voice was hoarse. “Count off!”
“Ruby — here.” “Theo — here.” “Jonty — chur.” “Eddy —” Eddy sniffled enormously — “here, Anna.”
She hugged him so hard he squeaked. “Don’t you ever —”
“I won’t, I won’t!”
“‘I won’t’ — you crossed your finger, Eddy!”
His face crumpled. “I know. I broke my oath. I’m sorry.”
And then, from the far side of the chamber, echoing through the rock, came the most beautiful sound in the world: a voice, calling.
“Hello? Can anyone hear me? Anna? Eddy?”
Aunty Kiri.
The search-and-rescue team had come through the tour cave, as Mr. Ford predicted — and as it turned out, the Star Room opened directly onto the edge of the tourist grotto, the famous boat route, the place where the ceiling became the night sky.
“Over here!” Anna screamed. “WE’RE OVER HERE!”
Episode 7 — The Light Below
They carried Eddy out on a stretcher, wrapped in silver foil blankets like a baked potato. Anna walked beside him holding his hand the whole way, through passages and over dry boardwalks and down one long limestone staircase that smelled of dust and old water.
And then they stepped into the grotto.
Anna stopped. Everyone stopped.
The boat landing sat at the edge of a vast dark chamber, and above it — above all of them — stretched the most famous ceiling in the region: a dome of rock draped in the silk threads of ten thousand glow worms, each one burning its little blue-green lamp, so dense they looked like a slow river of stars suspended in the dark.
It took her breath and didn’t give it back.
“First trip?” asked one of the rescue volunteers, an old man with a quiet smile.
“First cave ever,” Anna said, and her voice came out weird and small.
“Huh.” He nodded at the ceiling. “Imagine growing up across the ocean, in the city, in a flat — and then one day you’re standing under this. You must be feeling something, eh.”
Anna thought about the mamak stall. The noise. Amelia. Ah Ma in her kitchen. She thought about the girl who had stood at a window four weeks ago, watching a strange green light in the distance, telling herself it was nothing.
“I don’t know what I’m feeling,” she said honestly. “I don’t have a word for it. It’s like — like the sky came down to visit me.”
“Titiwai,” said Aunty Kiri, appearing at her elbow. “That’s one of the names. The lights on the water. And down here, underground, they’re the stars that keep you safe.” She smiled. “They kept you safe tonight, eh.”
By the time they reached the entrance, the storm had blown itself out. The sky outside was finally clearing, stars showing through the torn clouds — real stars now, in their proper place. And there was Mum, standing in the wet carpark with her hand over her mouth, and Dad behind her in his muddy farm clothes, running.
Mum cried. Then she scolded. Then she cried again. Then she hugged both her children so hard Anna’s ribs creaked.
“Aiyo! My heart! My heart, you bad boy!” — to Eddy — “and you, Anna, you went down a hole in the middle of a flood, you terror!”
“Sorry, Mama.”
“You are NOT sorry, you are grounded, both of you, grounded for life —” she burst into tears again — “grounded for life, but so, so glad you’re alive.”
Eddy, wrapped in his silver blanket, looked up at the real stars and then at the hole he’d fallen into, and said, in his smallest voice: “Mum. The glowies saved us. They turned their lights on and showed us the way. Like the story said. If you’re kind, they show you home.”
And the strange thing was — nobody laughed.
Aunty Kiri crouched beside him. “You know I’ve been a guide for thirty years, eh. And I’ve never seen them light up like that. Not once. Not for anyone.” She looked at the five muddy kids, the stretcher, the coil of rope, the starry ceiling of the grotto behind them. “Maybe I got the story right all along.”
Episode 8 — The Glow from Below
Three weeks later, the school hall smelled of paint and glue and roasted kumara, and Anna’s art project hung in the place of honour at the front.
It was a watercolour of the Star Room, painted from memory: the low dark ceiling, the galaxy of blue-green lights, and in the centre, five small figures holding a rope — one of them carrying a small boy on his back. Underneath, in careful lettering, she had written the title: THE GLOW FROM BELOW.
“Sweet as, eh,” said Ruby, arms crossed, grinning.
“Mean as,” said Jonty, and for once Anna understood exactly what he meant.
The project had grown into something bigger than a painting. Mrs. Boyd had asked “the cave kids” to talk to the juniors about safety — never go near a tomo alone, always tell an adult, the whole “stay together” thing — and Eddy, officially crowned the class Glowworm Ambassador, had stood on a crate and explained the fishing lines and the sticky droplets and the hungry-brighter rule to three rapt classes of little kids. He’d even made a poster, with Alpha the glow worm drawn wearing a tiny cape.
“He’s always been like this,” Anna told Aunty Kiri, who had come to see the exhibition. “Ever since we moved. He decided this place was a fairy tale and he’s been trying to get to the good part ever since.”
“And you?” Aunty Kiri asked.
Anna looked at the painting. At the inexpert stars. At the lumpy kids. “I was trying to get to the good part too,” she admitted. “I just thought the good part was back home across the sea.”
“Is it?”
Anna thought about it. Really thought. About Amelia’s letters — come back for the school holidays, we’ll go to the mamak stall — and about how the thought made her warm, not sad. About Mum, who had started cooking twice a week at the local café, and whose Friday special was already famous from Silver Fern to the main road. About Dad, who came home smelling of cows and contentment, teaching Eddy the names of every star. About Ruby and Theo and Jonty. About the glow worms, sleeping under all that green, brightening when hungry, patient as anything.
“Nah,” she said, in a voice that sounded almost local. “The good part’s just… everywhere. You just have to follow the light.”
Aunty Kiri smiled. “Told you so, eh.”
That evening, Anna took Eddy to the back paddock — with Mum’s permission this time, and proper boots, and a rope, and a grown-up standing a safe distance away at the fence. They sat at the edge of the tomo, not too close, and watched dusk come down over the green hills. The creek murmured. The first real stars came out.
And then, from below, the glow came up to meet them.
Soft. Steady. Blue-green. A tide of light rising out of the earth, thousands of tiny lamps waking for the night, because the hole in the ground was just a window, and underneath the whole farm was a sky.
“See, Anna?” Eddy whispered. “The stars grow up here too.”
“Yeah.” She put her arm around him, and he leaned into it, and the light below pulsed on, patient and bright. “Yeah, they do.”
And Anna Lim, who had come from a city of a million lights to a farm with one hole in the ground, sat in the grass with her little brother and watched the glow from below — and understood, at last, that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
Sweet as.
The End…
