“I bet.”
“Not like that. They stare like I belong in a floating sideshow.” Kind of like the look she was giving me now.
After a moment, she said, “You know, you’re right. Except for your shine, you’re not distinctive at all.” A smile hovered on her lips. “And if a girl stares at you, pay no attention to her.”
I relaxed. “I’m not that thin-skinned.”
“No, really. Ignore her completely.” Gemma was pleased as could be about something, but who knew what. Her words were like silt, clouding the water.
Looking back to her brother’s photo, she made a fist and then pressed it to her chest.
“What was that?”
“Just something we used to do across the air shaft,” she replied. “Richard would stand at the window in the boys’ dorm before lights-out and wait for me.” She held up her fist. “This meant ‘stay tough’ and this” — she touched her fist to her heart—“meant he loved me.”
I turned back to the control console and checked our position to avoid talking in case my voice came out choked. No wonder being tough was so important to her. Did Zoe care so much about what I thought of her? I seriously doubted it. But then, I wasn’t her only living relative.
“What are you looking at?” Gemma asked.
Happy to change the subject, I told her. “Everything around and below us.” I ran my finger over the continuously shifting graphic of the ocean floor, then straightened with realization. “You know what? We’re near the building that Doc said was Seablite Prison.”
“Really? Let’s go—What’s that?” She leaned across me to tap a corner of the screen.
The metallic fabric of my diveskin kept me from feeling the warmth of her arm stretched across my chest, but I imagined I could.
“There it is.” She pointed out the window.
I followed her gesture and saw something huge and dark off to the right. Suddenly it dropped back. I cursed under my breath. I’d let myself get so distracted by her, I hadn’t paid attention to the monitor. I zoomed the minisub upward and a shape popped onto the sonar screen. My mouth grew dry.
“Is it a whale?” she asked, leaning into me for a better look at the monitor.
As quickly as it appeared, the thing shot up and off the screen again. I looked up through the cockpit’s glass cover. “Whales don’t avoid sonar readings.” I tried to stay calm.
“You think it’s staying off our monitor on purpose?”
“Yeah.” I needed a plan, quick. Even if I sent out a distress signal, no one would be able to get to us in time.
“Is it a sub?”
Only one submarine had that shape. I took a breath. “It’s the Specter. Shade must have followed us from the Trade Station.”
“Speed up!”
“We can’t outrun —” The beating of a hundred pebbles hitting the roof cut off my words.
“What was that?”
“A net.” I nodded at the viewport, which was covered with titanium mesh. Impossible to cut through. I shoved the joystick forward, causing the Slicky’s nose to dip, trying to duck under the net’s weighted edge. But it had already drawn closed around us. We were caught like halibut. All that was left to do was haul us in.
Looking up through the hatch, I saw the Specter high above us in the blue water. A circle of light appeared on the bottom of the outlaws’ sub as the cover of the port slid back. A tough layer of clear plastic covered the opening, with an X sliced into its center. The outlaws would draw up their catch, positioning the Slicky right under the opening, until the hatch pushed through the center slit. I clamped the hatch lock, even though I knew that would only slow them down, not stop them from prying open the Slicky’s cockpit like a clamshell.
“But Shade said he was giving you one chance,” Gemma said.
I wrestled with the joystick, putting the sub into a hard reverse. The engine screamed in reaction.
“Can you believe it?” I said. “Shade lied.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic.”
“Sorry. I’m not used to being hunted by an outlaw.”
The Specter sped forward, dragging us along. I banged the control panel. The Slicky’s engine was no match against the Specter‘s. Giving up, I cut the motor. Instantly the minisub jerked upward. “No way am I letting Shade haul us in.”
“Ty, he is hauling us in.”
“No, he’s taking up the sub.” I switched on the Slicky’s heartbeat—a low mechanical pulse that would lead me to her later. “But we won’t be inside. We’re going to jump ship.”
Her mouth spilled open.
“At this speed, by the time they get the Slicky into position and crack the hatch, they’ll have crossed a mile at least. Shade won’t know where to start looking for us.”
“There could be sharks out there!”
“You’d rather be kidnapped by outlaws?” I thrust her helmet into her hands.
“Versus being eaten alive? Hmm, hard choice.”
“Now who’s being sarcastic?”
She glared at me like it was my fault that we were caught in a net. I was tempted to point out that she was the one who’d insisted on going into the Saloon. “We’ll swim to the Peaveys’.”
“I’m not leaving this sub.”
“A lot of the settlers are there.”
“I can’t swim.”
I paused, taken aback. “You came subsea and you don’t know how to swim?”
“Don’t make a big deal of it.”
“Okay, listen,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “You don’t have to swim. We’re going to fall. You can fall, can’t you?”
“A shark doesn’t care if you’re swimming or —”
“If there are any sharks around, I’ll draw my shock-prod. I promise. We’ve got to go now.”
She didn’t budge. “No way. You can’t see a shark this deep until it’s already bitten off your head.”
“If a predator is coming our way, I’ll know.”
“How?”
There was no other way. I had to tell her. I had to trust her. “I have a Dark Gift,” I said, though I didn’t look at her. I focused on snapping my helmet into place.
I have a Dark Gift. Did I really just admit it out loud?
“You said there’s no such thing,” she accused.
“I lied. Because I’m not always ‘so good.’ Put your helmet on.”
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Gemma froze with surprise or maybe disbelief; I couldn’t tell. Plucking her helmet from her hands, I dropped it over her head. “I can see with sound,” I explained, sealing her helmet. “It’s called biosonar.”
“You’re Akai!”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “That’s the name the doctors put on my file. It means ‘sea born.’ Can we go now?” I pulled a lever on the side of my seat so that the back flipped down.
“How far does it work?”
I pulled the lever on her seat and sent her sprawling as her chair flattened. “A mile at least.” I crawled to the exit port and shoved my feet through the ring. Luckily the net didn’t wrap all the way across the Slicky’s underside. “I’m going to hang on to the edge outside. Suck in Liquigen, then follow me as fast as you can.”
“Wait!”
I didn’t know if it was because she had more questions about my Dark Gift or because she was still afraid to jump, but I didn’t stop to find out. I filled my lungs with Liquigen and pushed through the rubber ring, catching hold of the edge of the port as I dropped out. My body whipped against the bottom of the Slicky, thrown by the Specter’s speed. Thankfully, Gemma’s feet emerged instantly. As she slipped out, I hooked an arm around her waist and then let go of the ring’s edge. Together, we dropped through the midnight-hued water.
Gemma turned in my arms to face me, slipped her hands around my waist, and hugged me so tightly our helmets banged together. Behind the acrylic glass, her eyes were scrunched closed.
High above us, the Specter zoomed past, s
till dragging the minisub. Good. The outlaws hadn’t seen us exit. We’d be fine and so would the Slicky, I told myself. Most likely the outlaws would cut her loose when they found her cockpit empty. Then I’d hunt her down later.
Gemma opened her eyes as the sea darkened around us. We floated down through a cyclone of mackerel, flashing silver in the dim sunlight. As a sailfish cut past us, electric blue stripes appeared on its sides to confuse the mackerel. I felt Gemma’s arms tighten around me. I met her eyes, expecting to see fear in her expression. But surprisingly, she was smiling as she took in the beauty of the wildlife swimming past.
She flipped on her crown lights. I did the same but the light only gave us about twenty feet of visibility. I cast out a web of sound to see what was below. The clicks I made in the back of my throat were too high pitched for Gemma to hear. I’d perfected them over the years, finding the sound that bounced back the quickest and was the easiest to interpret. Then my mind created an image out of the echoes I heard—like the sonar screen in the sub, with the peaks and valleys of the ocean floor sketched out in 3-D.
Using sign language, I told her to press the button that made fins slide out of the tips of her boots. Seeing her confusion, I chalked it up to another difference between growing up Topside versus subsea. Down here, we learned to sign before learning to talk. But then, we had to communicate with Liquigen-filled lungs. I pushed the control on her wrist screen for her, though even with fins, she didn’t seem to get that she had to move her legs to stay level.
The computers in our diveskins automatically tinted our helmets for ultraviolet viewing, and the landscape beneath us jumped into sharp relief. We touched down in the middle of an enormous cloud of pink jellyfish. A thousand at least. All no bigger than my fist. Gently, I brushed them aside, cutting a path.
A siphonophore spun toward us, looking like twenty feet of glowing fishing net hung with silver bells. Gemma recoiled into me. Guessing that she’d never seen one before, I caught her hand and led her closer to the siphonophore. Then I tapped it to make it curl and undulate, knowing my dive glove would protect me from its stinging tentacles. With a quick stroke, I broke off a part. It wasn’t one animal but hundreds all strung together. I bounced the broken-off part on my palm and then sent the shimmering piece over to Gemma. Her eyes were wide with wonder. As she cupped her hands around it, its soft yellow light made her skin glow.
I tipped my head to indicate that we should move on, but she couldn’t take her eyes from the creature. If a siphonophore rocked her world, wait till she spent some real time down here. Suddenly I wanted to show her all the amazing places I’d found. And creatures. I wanted to see her face light up like that again.
Finally we began our trek toward the Peaveys’ homestead. I’d driven over this area many times in a sub, but never trudged along the seafloor. Every moment or so, I clicked rapidly and waited for the echoes to bounce back to me. No large predators moved in the distance. I saw only dolphins, at least a hundred, swimming, leaping, and feeding near the ocean’s surface. I could also feel their clicks and long drawn-out echoes falling around us, though I knew that most of their chirps were too high for Gemma’s ear.
When I caught the signature whistle of a large male diving deeper than the rest, I called to him, beckoning him to come down. I didn’t invite the whole pod, figuring that a hundred dolphins descending upon us might startle Gemma. A wise choice, considering that she jerked as if electrocuted when just one ten-foot-long, thousand-pound bottlenose plunged toward us. He turned aside at the very last second to show us his pale belly as he whizzed past. By the time he circled back, Gemma had seen enough of him to realize what he was. This time, when he brushed by, she stood rigidly, arms clamped to her sides as if to give him room to pass, and yet her expression was the most incredible mix of emotions I’d ever seen—petrified, elated, and awestruck all at once. Maybe I should have called down the whole pod.
The dolphin left us just as we reached a steep embankment. Gemma didn’t seem to mind the limited visibility so much now since she bounded her way to the top of the hill without waiting for me. Once there, she stopped short.
I swam up beside her and saw why. The landscape below was filled with giant bones carelessly flung about by scavengers that had devoured a whale carcass — weeks ago, by the look of it. Cartilage floated through the water in ghostly wisps. I gave Gemma’s fingers a squeeze and led the way to the edge of the embankment. Gripping her hand even tighter, I leapt off the rocky pinnacle.
We floated down the side of an enormous rock face, narrowly avoiding the massive sandstone peaks that jutted up from below. When our dive boots touched the seafloor, the silt erupted with life. Hagfish squirmed out of the muck and over our boots like a thousand snakes. The ooze under our feet was the last of the decomposing whale flesh, only now it was putrefied, so that only the hagfish could suck it up. Gemma kicked her way upward, away from them. That’s when her lack of swimming skills became obvious. Instead of continuing to kick her feet or use her hands to stay afloat, she stopped moving and sank toward the seafloor again. I couldn’t help but grin at her efforts. And once she’d caught my silent laughter, she resigned herself to walking.
As we passed under the giant skeleton, I started clicking again. Sensing something square and hard-walled off to our left, I decided to make a quick detour before heading for the Peaveys’.
Still holding Gemma’s hand, I led her toward the ugly two-story building. I could see Seablite Prison with my eyes now, dark and abandoned. The first time I’d piloted over it years ago, I’d thought it was a Topside relic from the early twenty-first century because of all its angles and corners. One that had somehow survived the subsea landslide that swept most of the flooded buildings into Coldsleep Canyon. Now, facing Seablite head-on, I saw that it was an odd hybrid of Topside and subsea architecture. Hovering over the seafloor, balanced on tall pylons, clearly it had been constructed down here. Its small windows were round and made of acrylic glass, just like those on old submarines. An air lock shaft dropped from the bottom floor to the seabed.
Above the rusted-open door glowed the “unsound structure” symbol. On the Topside, nearly all the buildings along the coast displayed a yellow circle with a black lightning bolt shooting down its middle, though that didn’t stop fierce tribes of squatters from living inside the half-submerged skyscrapers.
As we neared, Gemma pointed at the yellow circle. I shrugged and continued forward. The ‘wealth had lied about it being a science lab. I was pretty sure the “structurally unsound” part was a lie, too. The building looked stable enough. When Gemma pointed again, I realized that she was looking above the neon symbol at letters etched into the metal wall, which read: SEABLITE.
My parents would forbid me to go poking around inside; I knew that. But maybe I’d find some information or a clue to help the settlers catch the outlaws. Making up my mind, I motioned to Gemma to wait by the lift lock. Before I got two steps, I was yanked back by the belt. When I turned I could barely see her face, only the shake of her head. I’d forgotten—there was no way she was going to just sit back and wait.
The elevator inside the lift lock wasn’t working. However, there was an open hatch in the elevator’s ceiling. Swimming upward, I slipped through it. Gemma tried to follow. She gave a valiant effort, but despite all her kicking, she couldn’t get herself off the ground for more than a moment. I considered leaving her at the bottom of the lift lock for her own good. What if I was wrong about the building’s stability? Still, she’d chosen to come…. On her next hop, I caught her by the hand and hoisted her into the elevator shaft.
Luckily, she wouldn’t have to swim up the shaft; a ladder was mounted to the inside wall. We climbed to the first level, where a set of elevator doors stood open. The entire floor was flooded. I sent clicks upward and saw in my mind that the water ended halfway up another set of open elevator doors. I motioned to Gemma that we should continue up the ladder.
As I pulled myself up to balance on th
e last rung, I broke the water’s surface and stepped out of the shaft. The sea had flooded the second story of the building but only up to my waist. Gemma emerged right behind me. As my helmet light illuminated the darkness, I rapped my knuckles against the nearest wall. There was no bounce, no give to the old-fashioned solid metal, which seemed sound enough.
The screen on my wrist flashed NORMAL for oxygen level, so I unsealed my dive helmet. Gemma did the same and I freed my flashlight from my belt. I swept the light over the rivets and iron girders as dribbling water echoed through the chamber.
“Can I hold the flashlight?” Gemma asked through chattering teeth.
I passed it to her and together we took in the strange scene around us. The walls were dark and wet. The ocean leaked in, drip by drip, through seams in the ceiling. In the waist-deep water, old diveskins and Liquigen packs floated past as if they’d been dropped just yesterday. Gemma directed the flashlight at the door across the room with bars on its window and then illuminated a wall where several pairs of corroded handcuffs hung from pegs.
I sloshed over for a closer look. “Why are these so long?” The chain between the cuffs was at least two feet in length.
“So the inmates can work,” she replied. “There’s a penitentiary in the tower block that faces mine. Every day, guards hustle men into the outside elevators and take them down to the dark alleyways.” She touched one of the long chains. “The convicts wear handcuffs like these, so they can clean up garbage.”
“These prisoners weren’t cleaning up anything.” I plucked a floating sieve out of the water and ran my fingers across its wide-spaced holes. “They were panning for black pearls.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Would you want to hunker in the ooze all day, straining mud?”
“Well, if you put it that way …”
“It’s backbreaking work.”
“I’ll bet the outlaws got sick of it and that’s why they escaped,” she said, sounding excited by the idea.
“Or they got sick of the noise.” The creaking and scratching had bothered me since we’d entered. Every shift of the surrounding water and underlying muck made the metal hull twist and compress. Maybe the architecture was part of the prisoners’ punishment. Who wanted to live in squared-off rooms with hard walls? It was unnatural.