Rip Tide

by Kat Falls

  Once we were inside the garden, Revas told the troopers in the other skimmers to split off to either side, while we headed down the narrow center canal with our viewport open.

  Like Hardluck Ruins, the surfs’ garden was a flooded city, though much smaller. And unlike the skeletal wreckage of the black market, these ancient buildings had purpose. In the bright moonlight, I could make out vegetable-bearing vines winding up the exposed girders and hydroponically grown fruit dangling from balconies. Even though I was impressed by the surfs’ inventiveness, I paid no more attention to the flora around us. All my focus went into finding Ma and Pa.

  “Hadal told you that Fife’s men left your parents here?” Revas asked.

  I nodded, knowing that the trooper had given her the report over the transmitter on our way here. I guess she was checking to see if I’d left something out … which I had.

  “Hadal is dead,” I told her. “One of Fife’s crocs got him.”

  Revas stiffened but didn’t reply.

  “He contacted you right after the kidnapping, didn’t he?” I asked as I continued to search the surroundings for some sign of my parents. “Told you how he’d been forced to do it.”

  After a moment’s consideration, Revas nodded. “I went to Rip Tide to meet him face-to-face. It was the only way he would talk.”

  “That’s why you told me to go home yesterday,” I guessed. “Because Hadal was there.”

  “Yes, and by the time you finally left Rip Tide, hours later,” she said pointedly, “he’d already gone into hiding at the Ruins. Then Gabion tells me that’s where you’ve headed.” Her expression turned grim. “I was afraid that Hadal might decide that killing you was his last shot at getting Fife to release Drift.”

  Hadal had thought that and almost acted on it. He’d also considered taking vengeance on Fife. But in the end, he’d done something very different. He’d chosen to help me—a settler. “He made sure that I could get here in time to save my parents—before high tide.”

  She glanced at me. “High tide was over an hour ago.”

  “It might not have reached its peak,” I said, while refusing to look too closely at the crumbling concrete and exposed girders as we glided past them. No barnacles or limpets clung to the wreckage above the waterline. If I saw sea life growing just under the waves, then I’d have to face the truth—that the tide had risen to its highest point.

  We continued in silence for a while. As much as I wanted to block out everything but the search, my conscience kept poking me.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” I said finally, and turned on the seat to face her. “I let Shade out of jail so he could take me to Hardluck Ruins.” I’d been so desperate to save my parents, I’d willingly broken the law. But now I wondered if I could have accomplished the same thing without Shade’s help. I sure didn’t try very hard to find another way.

  Captain Revas studied me. After a moment she asked, “Did you see the shark?”

  “What? Yeah. A bull shark. It ate right through the grille.”

  “Is that why you unlocked the cell door?”

  “I would have unlocked it anyway,” I admitted. “But yeah, the shark was ten seconds from breaking through.”

  “Then you did the right thing,” she said. “No one deserves to be eaten alive by a shark. Not even an outlaw. I shouldn’t have left a prisoner in that poor excuse for a jail. As I see it, your actions were due to exigent circumstances.” She gave me a stern look. “But it can never happen again.”

  “It won’t,” I assured her.

  Suddenly an eerie tinkling noise filled the night. I glanced up to see hundreds of old glass bottles swinging overhead. Green vines sprouted from the bottles and wound over crisscrossing cables. As the wind picked up, they tinged like wind chimes, which may have sounded pretty to some, but seemed ominous to me.

  “Ahead,” Revas said sharply.

  I followed her gaze to where two ropes were tied side by side on a horizontal girder. The ends disappeared beneath the water’s surface.

  Revas maneuvered the skimmer closer, clearly intending to pull up alongside the dangling ropes, but I didn’t wait. I dove off the seat, shooting sonar the moment I hit the water. What came back to me shouldn’t have made my stomach curl up inside of me. I wasn’t seeing my worst fear—my parents’ bodies hanging from those ropes. Nothing dangled before me other than the ropes themselves. But it was the ends that freaked me out. They were frayed as if cut with a serrated knife. Or serrated teeth.

  That meant nothing, I told myself. Someone had tied a pair of fish traps here and simply cut them loose once the traps were full.

  I couldn’t hold my breath much longer, yet still I swam closer to the ropes. Catching the ends in my hand, I kicked for the surface.

  The skimmer bobbed nearby. “What did you find?” Revas called from where she stood in the pod.

  When I held up the ropes’ frayed ends, she seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. However, my heart beat faster than ever now that I knew the ropes were made of braided whale tendon. A surf had crafted these, putting in time and skill. Too valuable to leave behind after fishing. If I’d learned anything in the past two days, it was that surfs were the least wasteful people on earth, whether it meant eating every part of a seal or finding new uses for the ancient bottles that littered the ocean floor. Someone else had left these ropes here.

  What had Hadal said? That Fife planned to leave my parents at the garden, so that the blame would fall on the surfs. These ropes had been part of that frame-up, I was certain of it. But if Ma and Pa had been tied here—where were they now?

  Dropping the ropes, I inhaled Liquigen and dove. I kicked my way down to the submerged cityscape that someone had tried to turn into a kelp field. The water wasn’t cold or deep enough for kelp, so what should have been lush thirty-foot stalks were barely ten feet and had a mangy look. With my sonar all I saw were fish, darting under the drifting fronds.

  I sank until I could see the kelp’s holdfasts clinging to the rocks and in the sand. I sent out a series of clicks, not knowing what I was looking for until I saw it: A dive belt lay among the sea stars and anemones that covered the ground. I snatched it up, pushed off from the seafloor, and kicked my way to the surface.

  “Ty, stop doing that!” Revas shouted the moment I broke the waves. “Get back in the skimmer now.”

  I treaded water and lifted the dive belt to see it with my eyes in the moonlight.

  “What’s that?” Captain Revas demanded.

  My mother’s dive belt, that’s what. Unmistakably hers. My throat closed off as I studied the loops and holsters, which weren’t crammed with weapons like other settlers’ belts. Hers were filled with aquaculture tools, including a special clipper designed for her by my father. The front buckle was still fastened. The belt had been sliced open on the side—again by something with a serrated edge.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  I rode back to the Trade Station alone in the back pod of Captain Revas’s skimmer. She hadn’t questioned my choice, just let me know that she would inform the troopers, Gemma, and my neighbors of what we’d found. I was glad she’d volunteered to pass on the news. I couldn’t even begin to put it into words.

  I sat alone in the pod, staring out at the moon-streaked waves, and felt … nothing. It was as if my body didn’t believe the obvious conclusion.

  Ma and Pa were gone.

  I tried considering the situation from every angle. Maybe Fife’s men had tied my parents to that girder only to change the plan and cut them free. Not likely. No doubt what happened to Ma and Pa was exactly what Fife had intended. They’d been tied up and dropped into water up to their necks, and when the tide came in, they’d either drowned … or were devoured by sharks.

  The air inside the back pod thinned, and without warning the pressure plummeted as if a storm were brewing. But I could see outside the pod. Could have counted the stars if I wanted; the night was that clear. So why was it so hard
to breath?

  They’re gone.

  I tried to shake off the thought, only to send a prickling numb feeling down my arms and into my fingers. Nothing was definite. I hadn’t found their bodies. Leaning back, I closed my eyes.

  They’re gone!

  With every nautical mile, the air pressure seemed to increase until I felt close to shattering, all while my brain fizzled and popped with that phrase. But no matter how insistent the words, how irrefutable the logic, I couldn’t quite believe it. Not all of me anyway.

  When Captain Revas’s skimmer surfaced in the moon pool on the Access Deck, I took a moment to collect myself before sliding back the viewport of my pod. Gemma’s skimmer had arrived first, and she was waiting for me as I climbed the ladder to the wet room floor.

  I braced myself, thinking that she’d throw her arms around me or cry. Instead, she offered me her hand, which I took with a rush of gratitude. Had she done more, my composure might have cracked and I didn’t want that to happen here, even though at nearly midnight, there were only a handful people in the vehicle bay.

  As Captain Revas stepped off the rim of the moon pool, a trooper rushed to attend her. Ignoring him, she paused by me. “Ty, so much of this situation has been a setup—the kidnapping, framing Hadal as the villain—I’m not about to jump to conclusions because of a convenient piece of evidence. You shouldn’t, either.”

  I nodded. But really, if someone wanted to plant evidence, would he drop it on the seafloor where it could be swept away by the outgoing tide?

  Lars was waiting on the Access Deck as well. He’d probably come as soon as he’d gotten Captain Revas’s call. He joined us, looking solemn.

  “Does Zoe know?” I asked him.

  “No. I thought you ought to be the one to tell her.”

  He may as well have been asking me to impale her with a harpoon. How could I possibly inflict that kind of pain on my little sister? Pain she’d never get over.

  “You two always have a home with us,” Lars went on. “You know that.”

  “Thank you.” I sounded like a bad actor in a traveling stage show—but none of it felt real.

  “We’ll join our farms so the ‘wealth don’t try to claim your land because you’re underage,” Lars went on. “Not after all the work your folks put into cultivating it.”

  I looked away, retreating from his words.

  A trooper jogged across the access bay to Captain Revas. They moved off to talk.

  “Have you found Drift?” I asked, following them, because I had to know. But also because I refused to talk logically about what to do with Ma and Pa gone.

  The trooper seemed appalled by my interruption, but Captain Revas said, “Not yet. We’ve set up a grid across the trash gyre, near where you found Nomad. Starting on the north side, we’re searching mile by mile, heading south.”

  “We won’t even cover a tenth of the gyre by daybreak,” the trooper told her. “That’s how long we figure they have until the cold kills them—daybreak. Provided they have air. If they couldn’t get their backup generator running, they’re already dead.”

  I shivered. Daybreak didn’t seem so far off.

  “Leave it,” Revas ordered the trooper who’d maneuvered a clamp on to her skimmer and was about to haul it out of the moon pool. “I’m going out again. And you’re coming with me,” she told the man before her.

  “We’re joining the search?” he asked.

  “No, we’re going to arrest Mayor Fife. I can’t pin the missing townships on him. Not yet. But I can arrest him for keeping animals that led to Hadal’s death, and anything else I can think of between here and Rip Tide.”

  “Is Fife stealing part of the surfs’ rations?” Gemma asked.

  Revas shook her head. “I suspected that, too. But no, he hasn’t taken a thing. The ‘wealth really did cut the surfs’ rations by half several years ago.”

  “I want to help search,” I said.

  All of them looked at me—Captain Revas, Gemma, Lars, even the trooper.

  “Son, you should take it easy, after the shock you’ve had.” Lars put a hand on my shoulder. “Come home with me and rest up. Be there when Zoe wakes.”

  “Hadal gave his life so that I could try to save my family. The least I can do is try to save his.”

  “That’s the Seaguard’s job,” Revas corrected, though not unkindly. “Take care of yourself and your sister, Ty. No one expects any more than that.”

  She was giving me a pass—without judgment—but I didn’t want it. “I know the trash gyre better than anyone. If Drift only has till daybreak, you need my help.”

  “Our help,” Gemma put in.

  “You’re sure you’re up for it?” Lars asked me.

  “My parents would want me to,” I said. “I want to.”

  “You’re right about your parents,” he said with a sigh. “They’d want all the settlers to join the search.”

  “Well?” I turned to Captain Revas and was surprised to see a trace of a smile on her lips.

  “Think you can you drive a skimmer?” she asked.

  As a trooper readied a vehicle for us, I assured Lars that I would get over to his homestead first thing in the morning to be there when Zoe woke.

  Lars climbed into his sub. “Anchored, huh?” he said as if unable to believe it. “I’ll make some calls. See if I can rouse a few people from their beds to pitch in.”

  “That would be great.”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” he warned. “I may not get any takers.”

  “I know. But if anyone does want to help, tell them we’ll be on the south end.”

  “You do know that gyre is the size of a state, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Good luck. You’re going to need it.”

  After getting a quick lesson about skimmers from a trooper named Escabedo, we headed for the moon pool that took up more than half the access bay. Gemma stood on the submerged ledge by the skimmer, which had been dropped into the water by a mechanical clamp.

  “Do you understand what we’re supposed to be watching the screen for?” she asked as she climbed into the front pod.

  “A low frequency noise. We won’t hear it, but the reading will be repetitive. Nothing like whale song.”

  As I started to climb in after her, I heard someone call my name. Turning, I saw Escabedo coming back our way.

  “I almost forgot,” the trooper said. “Captain Revas said to give you this.” He handed me a small metal square. “It’s the title card for Nomad. It’s all yours now. We even fixed the engines.”

  “The Seaguard is done with it?”

  “We learned what we needed. Drift has the same backup generator as Nomad. It’s ancient, but if they got it to work, they have oxygen. Just no heat.”

  “Like on Nomad,” I said, remembering all the bodies curled on the floor, wrapped in blankets.

  He nodded. “That’s how we figured out how we might locate Drift. When we got Nomad running, we noticed its backup generator had a low frequency hum. Too low to hear, but the equipment picked it up.”

  “And that’s the noise that we’re supposed to watch for on the screen,” I guessed.

  “Yep.” He backed away from the moon pool. “The irony—here, we’re hoping that the surfs on Drift got their generator to work. But if they did, that hum is so low, it’s making them sick.” With a wave, he headed toward the elevator.

  “Okay,” Gemma said. “Let’s go.”

  I nodded, though my thoughts were suddenly racing along a different track. “Be right back.”

  I leapt onto the moon pool’s rim. “Sick how?” I called after Escabedo.

  He turned, though the elevator doors had opened.

  “How does the hum make people sick?” I asked.

  “It shakes up their insides without them knowing it,” he said, now impatient.

  “Including their eyes?”

  “I don’t know, kid. I’ve got to go.” He stepped into the elevator.


  When I turned to scramble down again, I found Gemma standing knee-deep in water on the submerged ledge.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “That I feel sick in the ocean because I’ve been hearing noise from those generators.”

  “Sound travels farther and faster in water than it does in air,” I said, wading over to her. “If you can hear things other people can’t on the Topside, imagine what you’re picking up subsea.”

  “What about the ghosts?” she asked. “How do you explain those?”

  “If your eyeballs are resonating in their sockets, you’d see all sorts of things. Blurry things.”

  “So you want me to undo the hypnosis? Make myself see them again?” Her voice rose sharply. “What if you’re wrong?”

  I was asking a lot of her; I knew that.

  “And even if you’re right,” she went on, “knowing that I’m sick from a sound won’t make that feeling go away.”

  “If we find Drift in time and shut off the old generator, the feeling will go away.”

  She was close to tears. “And if that’s not the cause? I’ll undo it and never be able to go in the water again. I won’t be able to live with your family….” She paused and then shook her head as if she’d realized something obvious. “Of course I’ll do it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t try.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Why do you think Fife is doing it?” Gemma asked as we sped through the ocean in a skimmer, heading for the south end of the trash gyre. “Anchoring townships?”

  “Greed,” I said. “He can’t keep selling goods to the surfs at triple cost if they start buying from us.”

  “So he terrifies the surfs by making examples of the townships that go against him,” she finished. “Nice.”

  And making examples of my parents to prevent future sales. I shook the thought away. I’d decide tomorrow whether to have hope or grieve. For now, finding Drift would be all I would concentrate on. I owed Hadal that much.

  Outside the viewport, the blades of an old wind turbine slowly cartwheeled past. I figured I’d have to be more careful about plowing through trash in a skimmer. Fortunately, the head beams were powerful and the viewport automatically tinted for ultraviolet viewing, so I could see the debris in time to avoid it.