by Tracy Korn
Joss's strong shoulders compress almost immediately, and his eyes scan the ground like they're trying to find what just hit him, his confident presence deflating like a balloon with a slow, undetected leak. Color washes his cheeks and flushes his throat as he shoves a hand through his blond hair, then shakes his head. Tieg starts to laugh, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose.
"Well, that's just great, then, isn't it," he chuckles. "Nowhere to go but forward, so it's time to rally, right? You have a soapbox speech for that queued up next?"
Liddick tries to give him a tolerant stare, but his eyes narrow, and I feel an ember of anger heat up in my chest again.
"It's what Pitt would have wanted," Dez says, her voice trailing off as she comes through the fissure with Ellis and Myra. They stop in their tracks to stare at the expanse before us. "He would have wanted to see that…" Dez adds absently, and we all turn to face the spread of strange, rolling clouds, rock pillars that interrupt the patches of tan and green, and the dark mountain that sits at the far edge of it all.
CHAPTER 23
The Path
Myra glances over the edge at the cloud blanket, which is torn in places to reveal pockets of green, tan, and black below.
"What's down there?" she finally asks in a small voice, and I narrow my eyes to make out more details.
"Everything," Dell says, gazing out at the mountain in the distance. "And sometimes, nothing."
Arco pulls in a breath, then forces back an impatient sigh as he pulls up our sweep map. The blue 3-D projection hovering at eye level in front of him shows each section of the cave system we are in just like it did when Liddick pulled it up earlier, but now I can also see the adjoining corridors of the volcano next to us, including the wide tunnel down the center of it that runs off the bottom of the map.
"That goes three more miles down?" I ask, looking up at everyone. "Are all volcanoes that deep?"
"At least one more is," Cal says with a nod at the mountain in the distance. "They're sisters. She has a drop like that too."
"What's past this grain field?" Arco asks, waving his other hand over the projection. "Are these…trees?"
Zoe looks over her shoulder at us and takes a step back from the ledge, then answers when it's apparent that Cal is still transfixed on the mountain.
"It's a rainforest—the first of the seven biomes. We can hear the storms sometimes," she says, nodding to Arco's sweep projection. "All seven biomes are listed on the Origin Wall. It says they're the sources for the climates on the surface…like templates."
Tieg starts laughing, then wraps his hand around the back of his neck and raises his eyebrows. "A rainforest, what, five, six miles underwater? Sure," he scowls, pressing his lips into a line and nodding. "Dezzie, do you have something in that medical bag to test for delusion?" he asks, moving to sit next to her underneath the dark overhang, and I notice him gripping the edge so hard his knuckles are turning white. Suddenly my heart begins pounding, and I feel a little lightheaded. He's overcompensating…he's terrified, I think, and I suppose I don't blame him.
"I wouldn't have thought a grain field could grow in these conditions either, but there it is," Avis says, standing with his hands on his narrow hips as he looks down on the Bale about a hundred feet below us and shakes his head. "Climate is just a mix of the right gasses and pressures. Add in wind, humidity, temperature, I mean, all the factors are here…somehow," he adds with a shrug.
"There is a rainforest," Cal finally addresses Tieg's comment as he turns away from the rock ledge. "We both came through it," he says, nodding to Dell at his side.
"What's after that?" Ellis asks, taking a step toward Arco's projected sweep map and leaning in.
"The Bog," Zoe replies without hesitation. "That leads into the Tanglebush, which turns into the fourth biome. I forget which it is, but we can go back to the wall to see."
"The Sand is next," Dell says without looking away from the mountain. "Then the Freeze, and the Cliffs after that."
I exchange glances with Liddick in the silence that follows, and a knot forms in my stomach. There's something they're not telling us.
"And the last one?" Arco asks after a beat as he closes the sweep map.
"The Woods," Cal finally responds, thumbing the jagged tooth he's wearing around his neck. He looks sideways at Dell before trading glances with Veece and Zoe, then lets the tooth necklace drop to his chest as he hooks his thumbs in his waistband.
"It looks just like the trees and brush on the surface—they surround the mountain—but that biome is shifty…creeps into your head and uses whatever it finds in there against you if you take it as it is," Dell says.
"Nothing is what it seems out there," Cal adds with deadpan calm, then turns back to our group. "That's the first lesson you have to learn."
"The first of more you'll give us?" Liddick asks, raising his chin and kicking his foot up on the wall behind him. Cal gives him a sideways glance, then sighs. Before he can say no, I scramble to ask another question.
"Where is Vox going exactly?" I say, remembering the sweep map of the long hollow stretch inside the volcano next to us. "Cal said this mountain and that one were sisters…" I trail off when Dell meets my eyes.
"To the labs at the bottom—that's where they brought me," he says, pushing his shaggy brown hair from his eyes as he leans back against the smooth black wall behind him and crosses his arms over his chest again. Cal rolls his eyes and lets out an exasperated sigh.
"There's nothing down there—" he starts, but Dell cuts him off.
"You didn't get all the way down, though, did you? You didn't go to the bottom."
"I didn't have to," Cal drags his words out like saying them is the most exhausting thing he could possibly do right now. "How many retellings do you need to believe there was nothing but a lake of magma down there? But I hope you're happy because thanks to your story, that's where Vox is going!" Cal throws out his hand to the mountain in the distance as he presses his lips into a line that pulls down at the corners, his dimples stretching into vertical lines that emphasize his set jaw.
"Stop," I say over them both, then turn to Dell as his face flushes and a wave of violence pushes through my chest. We're never going to find Vox if he doesn't agree to show us, and there's no way he's going to do that if he feels like we believe the Vishan council's story about the labs being a coping device to help him get over being lost in the Rush.
"Can you prove you were really there…that you escaped from those labs?" Liddick asks, evidently on the same wavelength as me…again.
As soon as the words are out, the corners of Dell's thick, dark brows draw together over his hazel eyes. He lowers his chin, and his next words are soft and clear as he pulls his tight worn-white shirt up to his collarbones and angles his body to the side, then meets my eyes as everyone gasps.
"Vox said to show you this," he answers, reluctantly tracing his finger down the long, arcing scar he showed Cal earlier. Up close like this, it looks just like the line I saw on my own ribs in the dream I had that first night in the cave. "It grew shut without their follow-up injections, and I escaped before they could put in the other one," Dell adds, then looks away.
My mouth goes dry, and I try to swallow. I walk toward him, then draw in a breath and move my fingers along the edge of the scar like he did.
"It's…a gill, isn't it?" I ask in the quietest voice I can, and his eyes widen a little as he turns back to me. An echo of the fear I had in my dream attaches like a tether to my sternum, pulling everything down until he blinks again and lowers the hem of his shirt, then looks back out at the mountain.
Cal's sigh deteriorates into a chuckle, which notches a dimple on each side of his mouth. "Plenty out there with teeth and talons enough to have given you that scar," he says, then seems to think better of it. "Look, nobody blames you for not wanting to remember what happened to you in the Rush, but they have to know what's really out there—that there's just another mountain at the end."
You have to tell him, I hear in my mind, then turn to him and nod.
"Vox showed me the gills in a dream the first night we surfaced in the air bell. She made me feel the fear of waking up and finding them carved into my sides, and it had to be so that I would know Dell was telling the truth right now," I say, pulling out Vox's pick knife and putting it in Cal's hand. "I didn't understand then but she knew we would need to be convinced, just like she left me her pick knife because she knew we would be just as afraid to go out there…to make a new path."
Dell shifts his stance and faces Cal, hooking his thumbs in the loops of his pants. Cal studies the knife in his hand and traces the vine-like handle carvings with his fingertip.
"Then why wouldn't she just wait for the rest of you before she left?" he asks.
"I don't know. Maybe she wanted to try to forge a path for us. Maybe that's what these messages she's sending me are all about," I answer as everything inside me starts to hum like the slab of glass-rock from earlier, and I know without a doubt that I'm right. Cal closes his eyes and folds his hand carefully around the small knife, then exhales and looks at Dell, who nods.
"If I take you—" Cal starts, but Dell interrupts.
"If we take you…"
"If we take you, you have to be treated," Cal adds. "I tried to explain to Vox that those suits won't be enough…not against the elements and organisms in the Rush. Without our DNA fortification, you won't make it through the biomes "
Arco immediately starts shaking his head. "That's not an option," he says, and Tieg gets to his feet.
"We can never go back to the surface if we agree to that!" he adds, but doesn't move away from the wall.
"We can never go back anyway. Gaia and the State won't just let us go home—at least not until we have enough evidence against them to take back with us," I say. "But at least if we do get the treatments and continue what we started by following the sweep map, at least we can go forward."
Arco shakes his head adamantly, then pushes his hands through his light brown hair, which catches the yellow light behind him before he looks at the ground.
"Liam is a Biodesigner, he has to be able to undo the DNA bond," Liddick says. "And I know he's in that mountain."
"And my dad is an Omnicoder like Jax…" I say. "He will be able to help too. We have to go forward, Arco. We've already come all this way…"
He looks up at me and then closes his eyes in a long blink, then takes in a deep breath before responding.
"And if Cal is right that there's nothing in the mountain, despite this sweep map? If we're stuck down here for the rest of our lives…and that's if we can even make our way back through the Rush?"
"Would it be so bad?" Myra asks so quietly I wonder if her question is just a thought in my head. She threads her arm around Joss's, and then speaks again. "We're safe here. It's not what we planned, but at least it's a future. We wouldn't have one for long if we stayed topside—the atmosphere will support four more generations; wasn't that the last report from The Seam?"
"The Seam…" Tieg chuffs a laugh. "Those people are paranoid fear mongers—the port-cloud isn't doing anything to the topside environment. It can't trap radiation without absorbing it too, and the State would be reporting integrity issues if that were happening," he says with an arrogant nod on the last word, and I feel an explosion of anger in my chest.
"Yeah, because the State was so up front about Gaia, right?" Liddick's eyes flash, then narrow. "I don't remember reading anything about them gene-jacking people in all the promotional material, do you?" he asks, but it's clear he's not looking for an answer as he presses his lips into a tight line. Tieg starts to get to his feet with a reply anyway, but Dez grips his forearm and speaks up first.
"I think Myra is right. We don't even have to debate who's telling us the truth or not any more if we stay here. Securing a future for ourselves, regardless of what we believed that meant, was the whole reason we wanted to get into Gaia in the first place," she says, mainly to Tieg, then nods to Zoe and Cal. "Can't we guarantee we'll have that future by staying here with them…by staying with each other?" she asks, smiling and letting her eyes fall on Liddick. My teeth clench in response until I force myself to look away—until I can stop feeling this ridiculous, unwarranted, unwanted jealousy.
"What's wrong?" Arco asks, startling me as he slips his arm over my shoulder. I shake my head too abruptly, then try to swallow the sudden tension that has to be radiating from my chest.
"Nothing, because…" I start, but trail off as the concept of actually staying in these tunnels starts to register. The idea is so palpable for a second I can almost touch it, and am amazed that I haven't even considered where we are now in my constant focus on where we're going.
Would it be so bad to stay here if Cal is right and there really is nothing in that mountain? It's too late to go back home, and going forward on our same path of relocating to the seafloor after graduating from Gaia was never really an option in the first place. At least not for us.
"Jazz? Nothing is wrong because…what?" Arco asks just as I look up and see Liddick studying me, the strange, golden light from the Rush lighting his eyes, and the words are out before I realize it.
"Because at least we would be here together."
CHAPTER 24
The Test
"The Vishan treatment doesn't sound like a long process," Dez says. "We were talking to Jove about it."
"It's similar to how we layered our nanites to third year classification so we could access the Leviathan dock, only the Vishan's way is a bit more…sophisticated," Ellis grins, evidently remembering their trial and error bloodletting to keep the nanites viable as they layered them. The image of their indignant faces and their bandaged forearms makes me smile until my chest starts to ache with the memory that Pitt was part of that group too.
"Has everyone completely disconnected from reality? Do you understand that you're talking about staying down here? Six miles into the earth?" Tieg's surreal blue eyes narrow to slits as he holds out a hand to everyone. "We can go home right now—topside. The Vishan said there are tunnels that lead back to the surface. We can even get help going after Vox and your family…it won't be hard to prove what we're talking about with the sweep map."
"You can't go back," Veece speaks up from just outside the fissure we all came through, and I jump, having forgotten he was still here. "No one from the surface can know that we're in these tunnels…it's too dangerous for our people, not to mention for yours with the tunnel sharks."
Tieg laughs. "You can't force us to stay down here."
"We won't have to. We just won't help you make your way back, and without us, it would just be a matter of time before the Sharks found you, or the worm."
Veece doesn't move as he talks. His voice doesn't even register any anger or threat of any kind. He just speaks like he's repeating facts.
"We haven't come this far just to sit here wondering for the rest of our lives if our friends and family are still alive out there somewhere. We have to try," Liddick says but Tieg and Arco both just shake their heads.
"There has to be another way," Arco says, crossing his arms over his chest, and there is a long pause before Avis breaks the silence.
"Why won't our suits be enough in the Rush?" he asks, flipping his blue-edged hair from his eyes. "They regulate for heat and cold fluctuations, right? They have desalinators for water, protein stores for food, oxygen stores, and they negotiate pressure."
"Those suits won't stay in tact across the seven biomes," Cal says. "Didn't you see Dell's scars? It's not a matter of if your suits will be damaged, it's how soon."
"These are made of carboderm," Ellis says, turning his long arm out to show Cal his dark, shimmering sleeve. "They build Leviathan hulls out of this material."
"Did you forget what happened to the hull of our Leviathan?" Liddick asks, and Tieg jumps to reply.
"Because it imploded? Do we have to worry about imploding out there?" he laughs, incredulously raising an eyebrow at Cal, who starts walking casually toward him. Cal slowly lifts the jagged tooth necklace he's wearing over his head and shows it to Tieg, then suddenly slashes Tieg's shoulder with it. It cuts clean through his dive suit and his jumpsuit underneath to reveal a thin line of blood pushing through the surface of his skin. He stands in shock for a second until he realizes what has happened, then grabs Cal by his shirt and lifts him in the air like he's going to throw him against the wall.
"Tieg! Stop!" Dez yells, and both Arco and Joss move to pull him off, but they only get a few steps before Cal weaves his arm through Tieg's, then clasps his hands and pushes up on Tieg's elbow from underneath. The momentum knocks Tieg sideways several feet into the stone wall, and when he turns around, his lip is bleeding.
"Whoa…" Avis says, and all our mouths fall open.
"Your suits aren't enough. And neither are your meat paws," Cal adds, slipping his tooth necklace back over his head and looking down at his palm, which is also bleeding. He hands me Vox's pick knife and winks. "Suppose I should have put that down first."
I smile at him, a bloom of warmth spreading through me. He really is going to help us.
"What is that? A tooth?" Arco asks as Tieg surveys the rip in his suit and the scratch on his shoulder.
"It's from a tunnel shark," Cal answers, putting the necklace back on.
We're not ready to go out there…not even close, I think as Arco speaks up again.