by Tracy Korn
"They're letter As," I say, "all the way down the tunnel."
"It's him. Azeris. That's the signature we decided on in the Boundaries room after he helped us launch the automators…just before he closed his port-call. That would be how he'd let me know he'd successfully mapped the neural path my brothers and your dad used to deliver the messages we were getting from the marlin." Liddick says. "Do you know what this means, Rip? He traced the path back to them…he knows where they are—exactly where they are."
"So he can guide us," I add.
"Then you're our compass—whoa…" Arco says, then abruptly calls everyone to a stop.
"What is that!?" Myra shrieks, jerking our attention forward.
"Stay here," Joss's voice rises above everyone's gasps as his shoulder lamp clicks up two levels to flood the tunnel, illuminating a smooth, black mass that sits in the center of the light, contrasting passageway about 25 yards in the distance. Arco and Jax take several long strides toward it, and as we all get closer, a chill runs down my spine.
"Jax, wait!" I shout, suddenly overcome with fear just as Liddick darts in front of Jax and holds up a hand.
"You don't want to go over there," he says, apparently feeling the same sense of foreboding I do.
"Why not? Look out," Jax answers as Tieg pushes forward now too.
"Spaulding, stop!" Liddick shouts.
"Tieg, listen to him!" I echo, but it's no use.
"Why? What's the pr—" Tieg's words seize in his throat as he approaches the mass.
"That's a Nav kit! Why is there a Nav kit with that thing? Pitt?" Dez's voice quivers as she breaks away from the group and follows Tieg.
"Dez, no!" I call to her as she rushes up to the gear, then covers her mouth and the scream that would have otherwise come out.
"It's dead," Joss says, levering his boot to lift one side of the scarred surface of the creature, which looks like black dolphin skin, then leaps back. "Crite! Those are mouths! You saw all those mouths? Help me turn it," he says to Ellis, and they both deploy their gloves and grab the edge of the creature.
"It's that shadow thing from the cave and the air bell…it's the same thing that was in my dream," I say quietly, noticing the puncture wound in between its eyes and the shallow pool of red blood underneath it as Joss and Ellis try to flip it over. My breath stops in my chest. "It was real….I saw Vox kill this."
"She couldn't kill something this big by herself. You saw it take Pitt," Tieg says without looking at me as he jumps in to help Joss, Jax, and Ellis fold the thick, black mass over, and I can feel his anger and fear starting to boil again at the thought of his brother. I have to make him see.
"Because it wanted her to do it," I say, and everyone looks from the beast that must be 15 feet in diameter to me. "It was suffering."
"Suffering…pfff," Tieg huffs out a breath, then moves in more closely, shouldering Liddick out of his way again. Panic squeezes my lungs as he also grips the side of the creature.
"No!" I call to him, but it's too late. His effort is the last needed to fold back the wing-like body nearly in half, which reveals Pitt's arm buried underneath.
"Pitt!" Tieg yells, then begins pulling again in earnest to completely flip over the blanketing black mass covering the arm. "Help me flip it!"
"Is he alive?! Dez!" Myra shouts, and Dez rushes forward.
Flipping the creature to its back reveals hundreds of small mouths of varying sizes, some with teeth, some without on the soot colored underbelly with a foot-long gash running down the center of it, and at the bottom, the beginnings of what seem to be human feet at the end of two elongated sections of its body.
"It's a ray…" Ellis says. "It's just a giant manta ray."
"Look at his face and neck," Jax says as Pitt is uncovered. "It's like he was never infected."
"Jax, get back!" I yell, and Dez darts in front of him with her medi-wand to kneel beside Pitt. It flashes black, and after several minutes of examination, she turns back to us shaking her head, her eyes glassy.
"He's gone, but there's no trace of the spore infection. He has the antibodies instead…he was almost cured before he—" she says in a broken, small voice that collapses on the last word. Liddick moves in quickly and pulls her in close to him.
"He's holding a cord knife…with blood on it," Avis notices, pointing to Pitt's good hand. "He must have fought the ray."
"Look at this," Ellis says in a low voice, deploying his glove to examine the mouths of the overturned ray just before he pulls out Pitt's little finger. I look again at Pitt's hand, which is only missing one finger.
"You said there were two—" I say to Jax, then turn to Tieg. "You had to sever two?" I ask carefully.
Tieg nods, his face blanching when he meets my eyes. "Back at the Stingray dock…" he says in a distant voice. Dez takes Pitt's hand in hers and examines it, then looks up at us with icy blue eyes that are almost electric with overflowing tears.
"It had almost finished healing before he…" she starts, then chokes on a sob again, "before he died."
"So that thing didn't kill him…it was trying to help him," Joss says, wrapping his arm around Myra, who covers her mouth as steady streams of tears run down her cheeks now too.
"He didn't know," Avis says widening his dark, narrow eyes as he gestures to the cord knife still held tightly in Pitt's other hand.
"He couldn't have known. Especially not when it looked like this," Ellis angles his head toward the underbelly of the manta ray. "What happened to it?" he asks, his tanned face contorted in a mix of sympathy and repulsion. "All those mouths…"
"Vox has to know—she was angry about having to kill it when she was pounding on the walls in my dream," I say. "We need to find her."
Arco nods at my side, then crosses to Jax and Joss.
"Help me bury him," he says to them.
"And the ray," Tieg adds after a second more, nodding solemnly before he follows the others.
CHAPTER 7
Seeing in the Dark
We spend the next hour gathering as many stones as we can, carrying them over to the enormous manta ray and Pitt, then stacking them up until each are appropriately covered. I'm not sure if everyone is just too exhausted to say anything when we are finished, or if it's just too hard, so we all stand still, eventually sit, and look at the enormous pile of white rocks sloping down the wall toward us like the bottom of an avalanche we've all barely escaped. Even with this feeling pressing on us, for what must be nearly another hour, none of us can bring ourselves to leave.
Yellow and white lights dot the shadowy walls and ceiling of the tunnel around us in the stillness, and just as soon as the question enters my head, Avis answers it.
"They're worms," he says in surprised realization, breaking the silence as he walks over to the wall nearest to him. "They're just like the clear ones from the other tunnel, but these aren't attached like those," he adds. I stand, then take two large steps away from the wall behind me. Avis holds one of the worms between his gloved fingers, and from where I am, it looks like he's just pulled a tiny star out of the early night sky. He puts the worm back on the wall as Arco steps forward.
"We should get moving again," he says with an edge in his voice. "According to the sweep map, we have at least 16 more miles before we get to the source of the messages. That's a lot of ground to cover, and our supplies will only last so long. Everyone with a Nav system should download the sweep map before we go any farther, though. We should have done that before we came through the squeeze." Arco holds out his hand for Avis's Nav system as he crosses to him, then enters a sequence into it. In another few seconds, one after another, each of the other systems lights up. "If you get separated, just follow the trajectory grid," he adds, taking my forearm and sliding on the silver Nav system he retrieved before we buried Pitt.
"And if we don't have one?" Jax speaks up, narrowing his eyes at Arco as he gestures to Dez and Myra, who don't have one either.
"Stay close to someone who does," Tie
g answers, then nods to Jax as he puts his hand on Dez's shoulder. "Come with us."
I start to protest, but Arco replies before I can get the words out. "We're all staying together," he says, definitively. "I said just in case anyone gets separated." He looks directly at Tieg, and both of them standing off like this reminds me of two dogs with their hackles up.
"It'll be easier like this," Dez starts before her brother can protest, then turns to face him. "And Pitt would have wanted us to stay with the group."
Tieg exhales as he checks his Nav system. "So this overview says we're heading straight down at the end of the stretch we're on now. What kind of gear do we have for that, exactly? Some cords, some carabiners, but we don't have any rappelling kits, do we? What if it's too steep to descend?" Tieg stares down the sharp line of his nose at Arco.
"We can anchor each other and use slide knots if we have to. We'll figure it out."
"And for the last anchor? Then what?"
"I said we'll figure it out," Arco repeats, sharpening each word this time.
The air between them thickens with tension again, and I step into the space to break it up.
"Let's just get there first, all right? We can't do that standing here growling at each other."
It takes several more seconds for each of them to break eye contact, but Tieg eventually nods to me in acknowledgment, then smiles just a little before leaning in.
"See how easy getting everything you want can be?" he adds under his breath, leveling eyes with Arco just before crossing to Jax, and a chill runs down my spine at his surreal calm considering we've just buried his brother. Liddick is right, something is happening to him. "Shall we?" Tieg asks, clapping a hand on Jax's shoulder and throwing his other arm around Dez. I sigh when Jax looks back at me and shrugs, dismissing Tieg's drama. Arco's jaw is locked in place, and I feel a wall of ice between us when he meets my eyes.
"Oh, seriously? If you think I would—"
"I don't," Arco says, cutting me off as he turns to walk on with the others.
"Arco…" I say to his back, and he stops impatiently. I try to think of something to calm him down as we start moving again, but then hear Liddick in my head.
Don't even bother, Rip…he has to burn that off. Trust me, he says through a chuckle as he walks backward next to Dez and Ellis a few yards ahead of us, then faces forward.
They're both acting like idiots—what's happening? Is everyone coming apart down here? I think.
Not everyone, Liddick replies with a smirk over his shoulder to me. I roll my eyes and try to keep from getting caught up in his levity.
Liddick, this is serious, I think. Something is wrong with Tieg and Arco.
They're wrong with each other, Rip, Liddick adds. But Spaulding is definitely the one on offense because—
"I'll be right back," Arco says cooly, interrupting Liddick's thoughts in my head. He takes off the Nav system he borrowed as he jogs up to Avis, who immediately holds out his hands to shield his face from Arco's shoulder lamp.
"Crite, why? Why is this hard?" Avis says abruptly, then mumbles a long string of words in Chinese. "I am the only considerate person here. That is stretchless. That is gospel," he rants, throwing his hands into the air. After a second, he shields his eyes again and gapes at Arco, who now towers at his side. "Really? Are you confused? Do you think you're a lighthouse? Is this the problem?"
"Wh..what?" Arco asks, on the edge of a laugh.
"Kill the lamp! This is like, the eighteenth time one of you chutzes has tried to blind me. In fact, chutzes, can we all just kill the lamps? It's bright enough in here with the worms," Avis adds with an indignant huff as he snatches his Nav system from Arco, who finally gives in to a chuckle when Avis absently shoves him.
"Stop calling them worms," Myra says.
"That's what they are!" Avis's voice goes up an octave as he throws up his arms again, then turns around to mumble something else in Chinese.
"I know, I'm just trying to forget," she almost giggles as her face flushes, which opens the floodgate for everyone to release their stifled laughter, grateful for the break in mounting tension since we buried Pitt. In the dimming light as we turn off our shoulder lamps, I see Joss put his arm around Myra.
She's going to be all right, I think toward Liddick, who's walking on the other side of Dez a few steps in front of me. He turns to look at me over his shoulder again and nods.
We're all going to be all right, he replies, still chuckling.
I smile at him, and his eyes linger on mine a second more before he turns away. Just then, I believe him, and I forget about everything stacked against us. I forget about the four, or is it now five miles of water over our heads, which is only getting deeper the more we descend into this tunnel. I forget that we only have the supplies in our dive suits and in the bags that Avis and Ellis were able to snag from the Stingray vessels we used to escape the imploding Leviathan, and most of all, I forget that something terrible has been happening to the people we love…that it might be happening to Vox and Fraya now too.
I remember all of this when a cold burn starts in my stomach as Arco crosses back to me after returning Avis's Nav system, his brief smile fading with the lines of muscle now locked in place under his cheekbones all over again.
***
We walk in silence for what must be another 30 minutes before I just can't take the tension any more, and start to slow my pace.
"Arco, what else is wrong?" I ask, but he just shrugs and shakes his head. Liddick looks over his shoulder to meet my eyes again, then angles his head at Tieg and Jax.
Like I said, it's Spaulding…you see how he's trying to sidecar you and Jax, right? He's upping his game with Hart. Liddick thinks. I outwardly start to shake my head, but catch myself.
He's been jockeying for position with Arco since they met at Gaia, I answer.
Not like this. I thought the fear I was picking up just outside the squeeze was yours because he was all over you, but you were tweaking about your air and the cold too much to be that afraid of him, Liddick adds. Some of the anxiety was Spaulding's—he's trying to outrun his guilt about Pitt.
But what does Arco have to do with any of that? He was just the pilot when we took the Leviathan—Jax and I are more responsible for getting the Spauldings involved in this mess than Arco is, I say, remembering that the only reason Pitt helped us escape Gaia was because he wanted to help Jax, and Tieg only persuaded Dez to come along because I asked him to.
Only one king on the mountain, Riptide, and power heals most wounds, at least in the short term. If Spaulding can take you and Jax away from Hart, he's two steps closer to that crown.
I clench my jaw and remind myself that if Tieg is trying to sabotage Arco, he's doing it because he's in pain, but it doesn't really make me feel any better.
Well, he has to know there's no chance of that with me, and Arco and Jax have been best friends their entire lives. Tieg won't be able to get between them, I finally answer.
He doesn't have to. He just has to make it look like he is, and he's doing that pretty well. You saw how friendly he got with you in front of Hart back there.
But Arco's not jealous like that…I add, and in the soft yellow glow or the tunnel, Liddick nearly laughs out loud before he catches himself.
Rip, were you not in the cave this morning when he was ready to take my head off for making sure you weren't becoming a tuna? he asks, trying to hide a cocky smile. He's been wound tight ever since the port-festival.
"Are you talking to him right now? In your head again?" Arco asks impatiently, and it's like a window shattering right next to me. I jump, then look up at him. His hazel eyes are narrowed and his brows are drawn together as he looks quickly from me to Liddick.
I rest my case, Liddick thinks, the back of his head shaking from side to side before I answer Arco.
"Yes. We're both worried about you," I say, but the corner of his mouth just tacks into a hard smirk as his brows crash in even more.
&n
bsp; "Yeah. All right, Jazz you know what, I can't—"
"That's what we were talking about, Arco—I'm not stretching. What's bothering you so much? Is it them?" I ask, gesturing to Tieg and Jax, who seem to be riveted in discussion now about the glowing walls they keep pointing to. Arco glances at them, then exhales and lets his eyes skim the ground. "You don't have anything to worry about," I say, sliding my hand into his. "I know my brother, and so do you. He's not going to turn on you."
Arco wraps his other hand around the back of his neck, then sighs and looks over at me, more softly this time. "Maybe it's just the pressure making me paranoid…I feel like even my skin is too tight."
"No matter what it is, you don't have to carry everything by yourself, you know? We're all good at different things for a reason…and you can talk to me about anything," I say, squeezing his hand.
He turns and looks at me for a long time, then slips his arm around my shoulders and kisses the top of my head, pulling me against him as he takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. We walk like this for another several minutes before he leans down and whispers next to my ear.
"I love you," he says. "You know that?" I wrap my arm around his waist and rest my head against his chest as heat rushes up my throat and hits my cheeks, making it almost impossible to reply even if I did know what to say. We walk on like this in the dim, yellow light without saying anything else, but after a few minutes, some of that cold, knotted feeling I had returns. He's nervous again, afraid like he was in the cave just before we all left and he wasn't sure how I felt about him. But he can't feel like that now, can he? Aren't I standing right here next to him with my arm wrapped around him? Didn't I just tell him he could talk to me about anything? How can he not be sure about my feelings?
Because you're not even sure about your feelings, Rip, Liddick replies, and I curse at him under my breath for his eavesdropping.
"What did you say?" Arco asks, stifling a surprised laugh.
"Nothing," I answer, "I just…"
Stepped wrong…Liddick offers.