Su Yao's Dazzling Counterattack Chapter 15
The red dust of Australia's Outback clung to Su Yao's boots as she followed Jedda, an Indigenous elder, through a grove of ghost gums. The trees' pale trunks gleamed like bone in the sun, their branches twisting into shapes that looked almost human. "This is where we harvest kapi," Jedda said, her voice low and warm, as she knelt beside a clump of spiky green plants. The system's translation module had struggled with her language at first—words that wrapped around time and place, not just objects—but now it flowed smoothly: "The sap makes the best dye. My grandmother taught me, her grandmother before her. It's not just color. It's a map."
Su Yao leaned in, watching as Jedda scored the plant's stem with a stone knife, collecting the milky sap in a wooden bowl. "Map?" she asked.
Jedda nodded, smearing a finger in the sap and drawing a spiral on her palm. "This is the path the tingari ancestors took. That"—she pointed to a cluster of dots—"is where the waterhole hides. Our stories are in the patterns. You can't just copy them. You have to listen."
The "Threads Without Borders" team had set up camp near a community center in Alice Springs, where Indigenous weavers worked alongside Fiona and Maria's granddaughter, Lin. The goal was to create a fabric that merged seaweed-metal fibers with kapi dye and Aboriginal dot painting techniques, but the first attempts felt wrong—like wearing a costume instead of a story.
"Your dots are too perfect," Jedda told Lin gently one afternoon, as they sat cross-legged on a tarp spread with fabric swatches. "Ours are alive. They breathe. See?" She dipped a stick in the kapi sap and let it drip onto the fabric, the dots spreading unevenly, some merging, some standing alone. "That's the way the wind moves through the grass. Perfect is boring."
Lin laughed, crumpling up her precision-drawn design. "My grandmother always said I overthink things." She picked up a stick, letting the sap drip freely. The result was a jumble of dots that somehow made sense—like a constellation you hadn't noticed before.
Giovanni, who'd been struggling to adapt his looms to the thick kapi-treated fibers, found inspiration in the community's tjukurpa (dreamtime) stories. "They say the land is a living thing," he told Su Yao, adjusting the loom's tension. "So the fabric should be alive too. Flexible. Ready to change." He added extra bamboo rods, letting the fibers shift as they wove—creating patterns that looked different from every angle.
Tensions rose when a fashion magazine requested an exclusive photoshoot with the prototypes. "We need to showcase this to the world," the editor argued, but Jedda shook her head. "Some stories aren't for show. They're for keeping." The council debated late into the night, the campfire spitting sparks, until Su Yao suggested a compromise: the shoot would happen, but only with Indigenous models, and Jedda would narrate a film explaining the patterns' meanings, to be shown alongside the photos.
On the day of the shoot, the models—teenagers from the community—wore the fabric as cloaks, their movements stirring the fibers so the dot patterns seemed to dance. Jedda stood beside the photographer, murmuring stories: "That cluster is the emu ancestor. Those lines are the river that never dries." When the first photo appeared on the screen—a girl with a kapi-dye streak in her hair, the cloak billowing behind her—it took Su Yao's breath. It wasn't just beautiful. It was holy.
That night, the community held a corroborree—a celebration with song and dance—to honor the collaboration. Jedda placed a kapi-dyed bracelet on Su Yao's wrist, matching her own. "Now you're part of the story," she said. "Not just telling it."
As the fire died down, Su Yao sat with the team, passing around a jar of kapi sap like a treasure. "What's next?" Lin asked, her eyes bright.
Su Yao thought of the email in her inbox: a request from a Inuit community in Greenland, wanting to work with seal fur and seaweed fibers. "North," she said, smiling. "Always north."
The fabric they'd created lay folded beside them, its dots glowing faintly in the firelight. It wasn't perfect. It was better than that. It was alive—with stories, with people, with the endless, wonderful mess of coming together.