by Kat Falls
“Can we just look at the pretty water without explaining it?”
I nodded, realizing that it would have been a good moment to tell her how much I missed her…. Except that now I didn’t want to talk, not when I knew for sure that I’d end up saying something stupid.
I was almost grateful when Pa called me over then to help secure the township.
When we finally got Nomad tied off, my parents headed home in one sub, while I was to return in the cruiser. But I couldn’t leave without saying good-bye to Gemma. I found her by the door to the lounge, which wasn’t much of a lounge; really, it was just an empty locker room inside the Surface Deck.
She’d been out in the sub with me for a good portion of the day and hadn’t seemed nervous at all. Okay, subs weren’t the problem. Diving was. But still, I had hope. “Want to come back with me tonight?” I asked, trying to sound like it would be no big deal.
The question flustered her. “I do. Really. But it’s better if I stay here.”
“Why?” I asked. “Because you don’t want to swim in the ocean anymore? That doesn’t mean you have to stop living with us.”
“Your home is in the ocean. Makes it kind of hard.”
“And bunking under the promenade is easy?” I made no effort to hide my skepticism. “On a bench.”
“Come here.” She pulled me into the lounge. “I haven’t slept on a bench in weeks.” She lifted a chain from around her neck—one I hadn’t even noticed that she was wearing. A key dangled from it, which she used to unlock a door in the back of the lounge that I’d never noticed, either. “Remember Mel, the bartender in the Saloon? She kept trying to get me to use one of the empty rooms on the Quarters Deck, where the staff lives. But that’s in the lower station and, well, I’d rather stay up here. So she found me a bed and gave me the key to this….” She pulled open the door as if unveiling a prize.
A storage closet. She was excited about a closet with a cot wedged inside, which took up most of the space. Her duffel bag ate up the rest.
I did remember Mel, the bartender with a shaved head. As tough as her exterior was, she’d certainly come to my defense when I’d gotten in over my head with the Seablite Gang. Of course she was looking out for Gemma now.
“I didn’t show you before,” she explained, “because I didn’t know if I was going to stay.”
“And now you know,” I managed to say, though my mouth had gone dry.
“Mel said no one uses this closet. That I can consider it my space.”
It didn’t surprise me that Gemma seemed to relish that phrase: “my space.” As an orphan, she’d grown up on the mainland as a ward of the Commonwealth in a boarding home. She’d moved constantly into whatever dormitory happened to have an empty bed, whether the other girls were her age or not. She’d never been allotted so much as a corner to call her own, never mind a whole closet.
She pointed to a small porthole that looked onto the docking-ring. “It’s even got a window.”
All along she’d told me that living at the Trade Station wasn’t so bad. That she enjoyed working in the fish market on weekdays. Running errands for the merchants. I thought she’d been putting a good spin on it so that my parents wouldn’t worry. Now I realized that I’d read her wrong. Utterly and completely wrong. She liked living in a storage closet. Liked working for the fish vendors in the scalding sun. Probably even liked being surrounded by the hordes of shoppers. Crowds didn’t bother her. Not even when they were haggling and yelling and stank like hot, dead fish. She was never coming back to live with us. Not even if she completely conquered her fear of swimming in the ocean.
She watched me, surely catching every thought that passed through my head. That was another thing about her. She could read people with uncanny accuracy. A gift I didn’t possess.
“Guess you have everything you need,” I said.
“Not everything.”
She paused, but I said nothing. What was there to say?
“I miss being a part of your family,” she finished.
I nodded, not trusting my voice. She hadn’t said she missed being with me. “You’re always part of our family,” I finally managed to mumble. “No matter where you bunk.”
She flashed me a smile, wide and warm, but it just made me feel worse.
“Okay.” I headed for the door. “I should get going.”
“Ty, wait,” she called after me.
But I’d already stepped out. I saw that the ocean had lost its glow, which seemed fitting. She joined me on the docking-ring.
At that moment, Jibby clambered down a ladder from the promenade. “Oh, good,” he said, spotting Gemma. “I thought you’d left with John and Carolyn.”
“No,” she said, but didn’t mention that she was living here full-time now.
“I just wondered …” He shot me a guilty look.
“Ask her whatever you want,” I told him. “Has nothing to do with me.”
Relief swept over his features, though hers seemed to tighten.
“You want to see your brother?” Jibby asked her.
Of all the things I expected him to say—including proposing marriage again—that was not one of them. Gemma looked as surprised as I felt.
“I got two tickets to the bare-knuckle boxing match at Rip Tide tomorrow night.” He held up a synthetic paper flyer. “Won them in a poker game. Then I saw who was fighting.”
“Richard?” she asked in amazement.
“Yeah, well, Shade,” Jibby said. Which was the name her brother went by ever since he’d become an outlaw and the leader of the notorious Seablite Gang.
“How do you know it’s the same Shade?” I asked.
He waved us under one of the lights that circled the edge of the promenade. “There can’t be two that look like that,” he said, handing her the flyer.
Standing in the pool of light, Gemma studied the flyer and smiled. Then she showed me the drawing of the two boxers. One of the men pictured was her brother, no question. The dark-skinned, tattooed version of him anyway. What the flyer didn’t mention was that Shade had a Dark Gift that let him change the color of his skin at whim like a squid.
“What’s Rip Tide?” Gemma asked as she read the flyer.
“An off-coast city south of here,” Jibby said. “Kinda like our Trade Station but for surfs.”
“Sounds great,” she said absently, her eyes on Shade’s picture. “Can I keep this?”
Her apparent longing for her brother had me worried. She hadn’t heard from him at all in the past four months. Not since he took off with his gang after locking a group of us—her included—in the lower station when it disengaged from the Surface Deck and sank. To be fair, Shade hadn’t known the lower station had sprung a leak. But still, trapping us subsea without vehicles or Liquigen was just another item on a long list of his dangerous activities, which included deflating our neighbors’ house. Reckless, menacing, and vengeful—why would anyone miss him? But clearly, she did.
“Sure, keep it,” Jibby said. “So, does that mean you want to go?” When she didn’t answer him right off, he added, “We can get a note to Shade. Tell him that you’re ringside.”
Since she’d lit up at the mention of her brother, I didn’t understand her hesitation. Then I noticed her gaze had drifted to me. Did she think I’d judge her for wanting to see Shade? Just because I didn’t like him or his gang didn’t mean—
“I’d love to, Jibby,” she said abruptly. “I do want to see Richard. Shade,” she corrected.
I headed for the cruiser, desperate to submerge and let the ocean close over me. As I unhitched the tether line, they made their plans. A minute later Jibby strode toward his sub, and I couldn’t help but notice the extra bounce in his step.
Gemma joined me by the hitching post. It was time to say good night, but the thought of leaving her here all alone stung like a cut rinsed in salt water. “Are you sure you don’t want to come back with me for the night? Zoe misses you more than you can imagine.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
“Lots of people have bad diving experiences,” I said as we zoomed toward the shimmering bubble fence that surrounded my family’s ocean-floor homestead. “But then they try again and—”
“I did try again,” Gemma said. “And again. Anyway, it’s not about one bad experience.”
The cruiser hit the dense stream of bubbles and burst into the pale golden light on the other side. The boundary lamps around our property had begun to dim to simulate nightfall.
“Then what is it?” I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something she wasn’t telling me. I steered the cruiser toward my house, which floated like an enormous jellyfish over our fields of seaweed and kelp.
“I just …” She lifted a hand and dropped it as if words were useless—as if I’d never understand. “The ocean is filled with terrifying things,” she said finally.
“Like red devil squid.”
If I’d just stayed in the sub today, she wouldn’t have seen them and wouldn’t have had another “terrifying thing” to add to her list. And to tell her the ocean was safe would be like asking her to believe in mermaids. The ocean was a wilderness filled with beasts that viewed man as prey and plenty of creatures that could kill a human with a single bite, prick, or sting.
“Squid qualify,” she agreed with a shiver. “But they’re not the worst.”
I nodded, knowing that she was afraid of being eaten by a shark, even though I’d assured her that it didn’t happen very often. She’d said that my response was “less than comforting.”
“But all of this …” she said, gazing at the acres of green and the schooling fish, whirling like jewel-colored cyclones or gliding in coordinated precision. “I miss being here.”
Good, I thought.
As pleased as I was that Gemma had agreed to come home with me for the night, it wasn’t like I got much out of the deal. We spent the evening playing cards with my parents and my nine-year-old sister, Zoe. I figured that was more than enough time spent in our “quality-time room,” as Gemma loved to call the living room. But then Gemma had to help Zoe feed her pets, which took awhile because my sister’s room was crammed with dozens of aquariums filled to the rims with sea life. When Ma started braiding Gemma’s hair in some intricate style as Pa read aloud to Zoe, I gave up hope of getting any time alone with her.
I retreated to my bedroom, wishing my parents would disappear for a while. Take a trip to the Topside. Something. But Gemma popped in my room soon enough.
“Polishing your treasure, Captain Bluebeard?”
Embarrassed, I put the cutlass I had been restoring back on its shelf alongside the other artifacts that I’d dug out of the seafloor. Dirks and china, chalices and jewelry. All stored neatly on shelves that lined my room.
“I can’t stop thinking about that township,” she said while pausing by a stone deity that I used as a stand for whatever necklace or medallion I had yet to research and tag. She lifted a rope of pearls from the statue’s neck and draped it around hers. “I think the ’wealth did it.”
“Killed off a whole township? Why?”
“Why force boys to live in a reformatory on the seafloor?” she replied, referring to the reform home her brother had once been sent to—Seablite.
I couldn’t argue with her. From the little I’d heard, the experience would have scarred any kid—emotionally and physically. The doctor who’d been in charge of Seablite Reformatory, Doc Kunze, had discovered that the incarcerated boys were gaining new abilities on account of living subsea. He’d made it his mission to find out why … only he’d gone about his investigation with a scalpel.
“Know how Representative Tupper explains what happened in Seablite?” I asked her as I settled back on my bed. “Lack of oversight.”
She stopped poking through the stuff on my shelves long enough to shoot me a look. “Oh, really?”
“According to him, the Commonwealth is not an evil government—just overextended, and sometimes things fall through the cracks. Lack of oversight is what let Doc get away with experimenting on the boys in Seablite.”
Gemma frowned. “A lot more than lack of oversight anchored that township and left those people to die.”
“I’ll say.”
When she took a seat at the foot of my bed like she used to—facing me, tucking up her legs—a thousand sea anemones bloomed inside me, tentacles fluttering and firing. As thrilled as I was to have her to myself, suddenly I could think of nothing to say.
After a moment she asked, “Are you nervous about tomorrow?”
“Selling crops to Drift? No.” Which was true, even though Drift’s sachem was straight out of a nightmare, with his face and scalp erupting with skin cancer. “What can go wrong? They need our greens. We want to sell them. Simple deal.”
“What about the rations the ’wealth sends them? That was part of the Surf Treaty, right? If people agreed to move on to the townships, the government would supply anything they couldn’t grow or make.”
“Drift’s sachem said the ’wealth is sending them half of what they got five years ago.”
“Must be a lack of oversight,” Gemma said dryly.
Even when piqued, she was pretty. With her sun-streaked braids pinned up like a crown and her sea green caftan tucked around her legs, she could pass for a mermaid. Though I’d never seen one pictured with freckles….
“You know it’s cruel to lead Jibby on,” I said, broaching the subject that kept hijacking my thoughts. “Unless you’ve changed your mind about him.”
She smiled. “Nope. Still not ready to get married.”
“Then why’d you say yes to the boxing match? To see Shade?”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “That’s why.”
I’d suspected as much. He was her brother and it made sense that she’d want to see him. But I couldn’t forget that living with Shade on the Specter, his gang’s submarine, had been her first choice four months ago. She’d only agreed to live with us after he’d refused her.
“Your parents are going to say it’s getting too late for talking any minute now.”
“Probably,” I agreed. “We’re rendezvousing with Drift at dawn, and I have to fetch the wagon before that. You want to come?”
“Sure,” she said, sounding deliberately casual.
“You don’t have to get out of the sub.”
“It’s not that.” She paused. “Well, it is that. But I was just thinking, I don’t want to find another township in the trash gyre. Though I suppose now you’ll be able to stake a claim down here with your half of the money.”
“Yeah. When I’m of age.” There was no doubt that finding Nomad had gotten me a lot closer to realizing my dream, which had seemed unattainable ever since the ‘wealth stopped subsidizing new homesteads. Because of the terrible thing done to the surfs on Nomad—the cold-blooded murder of an entire town—I hadn’t let myself take any pleasure in finding such a valuable salvage. But now, without the derelict township bobbing nearby, dark and silent, a giddy warmth spread through me. My own land. One hundred acres of subsea frontier—gorgeous and teeming with wildlife.
“Must be nice to know exactly what you want,” she mused.
“Need,” I corrected. “I wouldn’t survive living Topside, crammed into a stack-city with a million other people and no nature.”
“And no monsters trying to eat you. You’re right, you’d die of boredom.” As she got to her feet, her smile turned rueful. “I’ll go with you tomorrow, though I’ll probably regret it.” Leaning in, she gave me a quick hug.
“’Night,” I said, purposely casual, so she wouldn’t know that her touch had sent my pulse into overdrive.
“Oh, and by the way,” she called over her shou
lder as she headed for Zoe’s room, “you’re glowing.”
The fog surrounded us, giving the surface of the ocean a ghostly feel. Until the sun rose and burned it off, I didn’t dare drive the cruiser any faster for fear of scraping the rim of the submerged atoll. Even the shipwreck posed a threat in vapor this dense—we had to be almost on top of it.
Popping the hatch, I stood on the pilot seat to get a better vantage. “Drift looks like a giant Portuguese man-of-war with a blue-and-purple flexiglass dome,” I told Gemma, who amazingly enough was wearing her diveskin for the second time in two days.
“I can’t see anything in this fog,” she said.
I sent a series of clicks into the haze—pitched too high for Gemma to hear—then considered the picture that the echoes formed in my brain. I could make out the grounded transport ship ahead, creaking with each wave, but no township, which was strange. We weren’t late. I’d chosen to hide the wagon in the trash vortex in part because it was close to the rendezvous point.
“Maybe it’s submerged.” Gemma joined me in the open hatch.
“Doubtful.” I knew that the surfs aboard Drift were fishermen and seal hunters. The township could travel subsea, but mostly it kept to the ocean’s surface while dragging electrified nets below.
“Maybe your parents changed the meeting place because of the fog.”
“No, I’ll bet they’re inside the wreck, still waiting for Drift to show.” Dropping back into the pilot seat, I steered the cruiser alongside the wreck and turned on the autopilot. “I’m going in to see what Pa wants to do with the wagon.” I hoisted myself out of the cruiser. “Grab a speargun from the back.”
“You’ve got one in your holster.”
“I mean for you. A precaution in case surfs show up and try to take the crop without paying.” Catching her look of alarm, I asked, “Remember how to load it?” When she nodded, I slid onto the cruiser’s narrow side deck. “Give a shout if you see anything.”
I eyed the shadowy outline of the shipwreck within the fog. The bow and stern towers rose over the waves but the flat deck in the middle was under the waterline. At one time this ship had been a luxury transport vessel that took people up and down the East Coast on a regular schedule. But a storm had pushed the ship off course, and a rogue wave had dumped it on top of a submerged atoll. Since then, it had been stripped of its velvet seats and leather paneling, but the Seaguard left the hull in place to keep other ships from running aground as well.