“Of course I see why. How could I not see why? But I don’t think I want to do this anymore.”
She can’t change her mind now, especially if she’s hearing conversations. Did I overlook something while I was in her brain? It’s possible, but what if there’s only the one chip?
“Let me go back in, Harmony. There might be something I can do without removing the chip.”
“No!” Nick protests. “It’s too dangerous! You saw what she can do. You shouldn’t get anywhere near her.” He positions himself between the two of us, and I instinctively reach out and pull him farther away from her. If her hands become swords again, she’ll cut him.
“Silence, boy!” Kumugwe’s voice booms through the water. “She will go back in and stop this horror.”
“Hey!” he shouts back at Kumugwe and I’m terrified the water god will take away Nick’s ability to breathe here. He doesn’t, though. Instead, he looks amused. “You don’t make decisions for her, understand? She’ll decide for herself!” Nick looks at me, his dazzling eyes blazing, and I want to kiss him.
But this isn’t the place or time for that.
“Maybe there’s another way. I’ll try it from here,” I tell them. Several slippery-looking eels swim through the space between Harmony and me. They look scary, but they’re harmless. I hand my spear to Nick and he takes it from me hesitantly. Kumugwe crosses his arms and watches us, his expression somber.
“You don’t have to do this,” Nick whispers. “You don’t have to rescue everyone.”
“But look at her! She’s petrified. If I can help her, I have to. It won’t take long to find out if I can.”
With his free hand he brushes back my drifting hair, rests his hand on the back of my neck and draws me close to him. He touches his forehead to mine. “You’re a better person than me,” he says.
“No, I’m not,” I whisper, strengthened by his warmth. I press my cheek against his before turning toward Harmony.
“Keep your eyes open, Harmony, and look at me until I tell you to blink, okay?”
“Okay. But I don’t want to hurt you, so be careful.”
If I were careful, I wouldn’t be here.
I stare into her eyes over a distance of salty water until the tingling begins. I feel my glow and know I’m dissolving. I allow myself to be drawn into and through her eyes. I see the chip again, and it still looks too dangerous to touch.
Spreading out farther, I notice tiny reflective specks scattered throughout the muscles in her arms and legs. I don’t know whether these are due to her ability to transform and camouflage herself or if they’re the mechanisms the scientists are using to control her. I wrap particles of myself around all of the specks in her right arm and I communicate with Harmony.
Do you feel anything different in this arm?
Yes. What’s happening? I don’t want to hurt you.
You can’t hurt me in here. I sure hope this is true. Try to camouflage your right arm. Tell me if you can.
I wait.
Yes. I can change its color. What does it mean?
It means I’ve found the culprits, the things turning your body into weapons.
Can you make them go away?
This is a task I’ve never performed. I’ve absorbed water from Nick’s brain while staying in my own body, and I’ve rehydrated Kumugwe’s cells while in my dissolved state. Can I absorb all of these flickering foreign objects in Harmony’s muscles and take them with me without injuring myself, or her? It’s a risk I have to take if I want to keep the others safe when they’re around her.
Yes. I’ll need a little more time to locate them all. Be patient, and keep your eyes open.
I spread myself throughout her body, wrapping each speck I find in multiple particles of myself. It makes me feel itchy. I don’t like it. There are so many, and I’m wrapped around them all. Time to take them with me.
Okay, I’m leaving now, I tell Harmony.
It hurts, Celeste! Why does it hurt?
It hurts me too, but I’m almost out. Ready? Blink.
She blinks, and I don’t know if the cry of pain is from her or from me. I feel as if I’ve been stabbed all over by tiny blades.
“You’re bleeding!” Nick tells me, rushing to my side.
I look down to see tiny rivulets of purple blood seep from my pores and dissipate into a passing sea current. I feel an overwhelming urge to cough, but I’m afraid to. When I can’t suppress it any longer, pain rips through me, I clutch my stomach, my body spasms, and from my mouth pours all of the tiny metal pieces I’ve absorbed. The bleeding stops, and soon the pain stops too.
Nick returns my spear and waves his hands in the water, pushing the pieces away from us. “Celeste! Are you okay? You shouldn’t do that again—disappearing and going inside people—it’s not safe!” He wraps his arms around me and then whispers, “When you were in there, Harmony’s whole body glowed. And she started to look like you.”
He doesn’t want to lose me again. We cling to one another and I think about what he said. Something feels wrong, though.
“I’m okay, really,” I say before letting him go. “Harmony? You’re safe now. The master chip is still in there, but you won’t be throwing swords anymore. Maybe you’ll just be able to share what you hear now. Harmony?”
She turns her head toward me and I gasp. “I can’t see,” she whispers.
~ 23 ~
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” Kumugwe booms. He doesn’t hesitate this time, but swims to Harmony and cradles her in his arms again. “Look at me, child! Let me see your eyes.”
Nick tries to hold me back. Instead, I pull him with me, and I’m horrified to see what Kumugwe sees. Harmony’s eyes appear to have been . . . shredded.
“The pieces of metal,” I blurt, “those things,” I point to the flickering objects floating in the water around us, “they were all throughout her body. I had to get them out! Harmony, I’m sorry! I’m so, so sorry!”
Kumugwe brushes me away with the back of his hand, and Nick and I tumble through the water. The current created by his brush-off sends us careening far from them.
I guess he’s forgotten I just saved his life, but I’ve known all along how little he cares for topsiders—other than for Harmony.
“This is crazy,” Nick says when we stop spinning. “We have to get out of here. They’re both dangerous.”
He’s right, but I can’t leave things like this.
“Celeste!” Harmony calls to me, her head scanning right and left though she sees nothing. “It’ll be okay. Father has eyes he’ll give me—isn’t that right, father?—and you’ll repair my vision. I’m not afraid.”
Nick and I swim back toward them, and Kumugwe holds Harmony protectively.
“This is true,” he says, looking at me with caution. “You have seen them, have you not?”
I nod. How could I ever forget his gigantic vat of eyeballs? I wish Nick and I were back in the village again making our friends laugh and squirm with eyeball stories. Now they don’t seem as funny.
“We will select the finest eyes and you will see again. And how is my daughter feeling otherwise?” He lifts each of her arms gently, one at a time, but keeps her hands pointed away from him.
“I feel . . . safe. I heard murmurs of bedtime from the voices far away—the poor boy is still whimpering—so perhaps I won’t know until the topsiders wake if my body is my own again. Celeste? Are you there?”
“I’m here,” I say, and Kumugwe allows me to touch her hand.
“I think you’ve stopped them from making me move. I didn’t know about the other parts they added to their beasts, I worried only about the chip. What did you do with the pieces of metal? Maybe we can figure out how they work.”
I feel foolish I didn’t think of holding on to some of them, and when I turn around, Nick is already swimming after a few of the tiny pieces sinking in the deep water below us.
When I think of all he’s done for me, all the times he’s put himself in dange
r for me, I’m filled with guilt over this latest predicament. It’s time to get out of here.
“Nick has them in a pocket,” I tell her. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” I say again, and she shakes her head slowly.
“Don’t be sorry. Now we know more, and we’ll stop them from hurting others. Are we almost home, father?”
“Very near. Let us make haste and end this most troubling journey.” Kumugwe turns on his tail and, carrying Harmony in his arms, swims away.
I hold my spear in my right hand, Nick takes my other, and we follow them. Kumugwe is right, we’re closer than I thought, and soon the castle rises from the ocean floor before us. I’m shocked to find it’s not a wreck of collapsed rocks.
“Whoa,” Nick whispers as we approach the main door, “this is unbelievable.”
I agree, and I feel a sinking in my stomach when I anticipate what we’re about to find inside the castle.
Kumugwe waves a hand and the door opens. We follow him inside, and much to my surprise, everything is exactly as I remember it, including the vat of eyeballs near the door.
“You have done well, caretakers of my castle.” Kumugwe addresses the pillars of sea lions holding up the ceilings and they bark softly. He turns to me. “You look surprised, girl. Did you think my creatures would leave my castle in ruins while I’ve been away?”
I don’t know how to answer, so I say nothing, but I’m sure he can read the amazement in my expression.
“They have rebuilt our home countless times after myriad shifts in the planet have caused it to crumble. They are masters of their craft. To my infuriating brother!” He sets Harmony upon a seashell seat and strokes her long pink hair before traveling to the room at the end of the hall.
I hold my breath and squeeze Nick’s hand while Kumugwe fiddles with a lock, and then I hear him.
“Celeste? Is that you? Have you returned to me at last?”
Coming from an old god who sounds like he’s gasping his final breaths, his words make me sad. I release Nick’s hand, wrap his fingers around my spear, and dash down the hall just as Kumugwe opens the door. I push my way around him and am the first one to look into Odin’s eyes.
I do my best to hide my astonishment at his condition, but I don’t fool him.
“Not a pretty sight, eh?” he says.
As shriveled and dehydrated as Kumugwe was when we found him on the dry island, Odin appears to have swallowed a small sea. His distended flesh undulates around him, nearly filling the room in which he’s been imprisoned.
I cannot imagine—don’t want to imagine—what it will take to bring him back to his normal size and shape. I don’t even know how we’ll get him out of the room.
And then he laughs, and when he laughs, I bob up and down in the waves he creates, and his laughter is contagious, even though I really want to cry.
I can’t help it. I giggle at the ridiculous sight before me—the bloated, laughing blob of a god and the predicament he’s in—and then I can’t stop. I laugh and laugh and then Kumugwe joins in, and I see Nick peering over Kumugwe’s shoulder and the expression on his face makes me laugh even harder, and Nick’s horrified expression changes to laughter—a panicky kind of laughter but laughter nonetheless—and then I hear Harmony giggling in her seashell seat in the main room and it’s all just too much for me and I have to leave, I have to leave this horrible room, this oppressive castle, this place where both of these gods tried to keep me from leaving, tried to keep me for their own selfish purposes without asking what I might want, what I might need in order to be happy, and I feel like I might burst apart, like I might explode and tear the castle apart again, but I can’t hurt Nick and so I squeeze my eyes closed really hard and try not to see the insanity of everything around me—try not to see the vat of eyeballs I’m supposed to repair Harmony’s eyesight with—but I still see it, I see it all, and the visions are ghastly and I want to go home, I want to go home to where my father waits for me with fear I’ll never return, and he might be right but NO!
“STOP IT! STOP IT EVERYONE! SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!” I push my way through the prison door past Kumugwe and Nick out the main door and I scream and scream and scream into the boundless sea.
~ 24 ~
MY SCREAMS ATTRACT the attention of crustaceans I recall from a dream long ago. Several shiny black hermit crab-like creatures scuttle up to me and stop, their eye stocks wriggling about, their antennae reaching out to touch my legs. They tickle.
Should I be frightened? In my dream, their large claws opened to swallow people from a shoreline. But these little guys look harmless, and they stop me from screaming. Pretty sure they delivered my father to the beach near our village too.
It’s strange, but I feel like they’re waiting for something. I reach down to touch them, but they retreat into their shells in a snap, like tightly drawn window shades being released.
I turn back to take Nick away from the disaster in the castle—how could I have left him in there?—and I swim right into him. He has my spear in one hand and Harmony’s hand in his other. He returns the spear to me.
“We need to go. Now.” His voice is subdued, but adamant. Laughter continues inside, though not as uproarious as before.
“Yes, let’s go, Celeste.” Harmony holds her free hand in front of her, for protection maybe, or in search of me. “We should leave before he changes his mind.”
“Before who changes his mind?”
“My father. I told him I’m bound to help you. I want to help you.”
“I’m ready,” I say, taking her outstretched hand and trying not to look into the vacant pits where her eyes once were. This was my fault. I should have considered what all those metal objects might do when I removed them from her body.
“I told him I’ll return when I know those people won’t be able to crack open the planet again.”
“What?” Nick looks at Harmony and then turns away abruptly. We’re both having a hard time looking at her face without eyes. “Your parents were the ones who caused all the destruction? Did they make the ooze too? And how? How’d they do it?”
I scrunch my eyebrows at him. It sounds like he’s accusing Harmony too.
“They’re not my parents.” Harmony pouts and pulls her hand away from Nick. But I hold on, and in a startling flash, I experience her parents’ betrayal.
I cling, I whimper, my tiny arms and legs flail spasmodically when I’m tossed through the air, and when I hit the water, its coldness catches my breath away. A man groans and a woman cackles. I sink, still holding my breath, eyes stinging with the salt water, until I’m pulled by something unseen below me.
I’m cradled in gigantic arms by a creature who looks at me quizzically and reminds me to breathe.
But it’s not me. It’s Harmony.
“Oh!” I gasp, and pull her to me.
“It’s okay,” she tells me. “Sorry, Nick. Your questions just make me remember, and it hurts.”
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that. It wasn’t your fault.”
Her shared vision gives me an idea. “Harmony, could you make him see—make me see too—what you witnessed in the submarine?”
“I think so,” she says, searching for Nick’s hand.
As soon as we’re all linked, Nick and I are in Harmony’s mind, inside the submarine. Switches, dials, and long, metal probes line the walls. Diagrams and charts litter the countertops and hang from walls, but we can’t make sense of them.
We see Blanche and a young Sharon discuss the charts, talking about things like lasers and changing ionic composition, and there’s an unpleasantly lingering stale, sterile odor.
Harmony releases us from her memory. “Their experiments shook the planet till it cracked open—I know that—and the ooze came out of one of the openings near Zoya.”
Nick’s eyes question mine, and I explain what little I know about the tortured octopus through my brief interactions with her in my dreams and when I found her in the ooze.
> “Then, why didn’t Kumugwe stop them?” Nick’s question plagues me. “He’s the god down here. Wouldn’t he have known about what they were doing to his waters and with the octopus?”
“Her name was Zoya,” Harmony says. Her defenses are up again. “And you said you were ready to go. I guess I should just stay here and let you figure out how to save your own land topside. Maybe my father’s right, and I shouldn’t be helping—”
“Please, Harmony!” I cut her off. “Please keep your word to me!”
The laughter has stopped in the castle, and a feeling of doom shivers my blood when I can’t think of a way we all might escape if Kumugwe changes his mind about us. Even if we were able to swim fast enough to get to the surface, Odin’s ravens are sure to be circling, waiting for me to bring their god back to his domain.
And we need Harmony.
“If you can hear those people through the chip they planted in you, then you can be a part of stopping them. You can finally get your revenge against them for what they did to you.” I have no idea what her revenge would look like. “And it’s not just topside they’re threatening. Any damage they do to our land will affect the seas too. You know this.”
Her pout remains. “Yes. I know this. I’ll keep my word. I’ll come with you, and we’ll stop them.”
Nick’s questions haunt me again, though. The caretakers at the children’s home taught us the gods were all-powerful and omniscient in their realms. If that were true, then why couldn’t Kumugwe have found them, stopped them, and protected Zoya—one of his gentlest creatures?
“Nick, the seas are enormous. There’s no way Kumugwe can know about every creature in every cave and underwater tunnel around the planet.”
But the damage to the planet had shaken everything, including the sea, and poisoned most of its surface with the vile ooze. How could he not have known?
“I guess you’re right. I just thought . . . you know.”
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