Embers in the Sea

by Jennifer M. Eaton

  Giganto-Jaws lunged at us, teeth bared and throat open. The ship vibrated, a gurgling hum radiating from the walls as we swished back and forth. Holy heck! We were trapped in its jaws!

  A spew of bubbles drifted past the window as the creature let go, and we seemed to float. Alone. In the dark. But where was Giganotosaurus Jaws?

  David turned toward the ceiling. “Edgar! Thicken the outer shell. We need to dive. Now!”

  A scaly tail the size of a caboose caught the light from our cabin just before smashing against the windows. We jolted, and I fell to the ground again. I tried to get up, but my cheek wouldn’t leave the tiles. It felt as if a million unseen hands held me, squeezing me against the floor.

  What was going on? Had we dove so deep only to be booted out of the park by Godzilla’s goldfish?

  We rattled, cascading and spinning. My sight blurred. My breakfast threatened a reappearance. I closed my eyes and prayed David and Edgar could bring us under control. The tiles rumbled beneath my cheek before we collided to a stop.

  My body left the floor before slamming back down once again.

  A deep sting sank into my cheek. The edges of the floor and wall blurred together.

  What … how?

  I blinked until I could focus, and pushed myself from the floor. A few feet from me, David dangled from the side of his seat, motionless.

  “David!” Dragging myself from the unforgiving tiles, I sat him back in his chair. His head lolled back, his mouth slightly open. “Oh, God. David, please wake up!”

  Pressing my fingers against the side of his neck and his wrists, I sought a pulse. I couldn’t find one, but relief flooded me as his chest rose and fell in a shallow breath. I glanced over each shoulder, and toward the back of the ship, looking for what, I didn’t know.

  Why hadn’t the seats come to life and protected us?

  I pulled David from the chair and into my arms. “David?” I kissed him and ran my fingers along the side of his face. “David, please … ”

  I would have felt less empty if part of my chest had broken off and floated away into the abyss. I didn’t care that we’d crash-landed again. I didn’t care that the marine floor was probably more alien than the green planet we’d been marooned on. I didn’t care that the pressure of an entire ocean weighed down on us. And I didn’t care that he’d left me alone for two years.

  He was here, now. And hurt. I fisted my hands and pushed with my mind. If he needed strength, maybe I could send it to him.

  David, I’m here. I’m sorry I was such an ass. I’m an idiot. I wiped the hair from his eyes. Please wake up. I don’t know what to do.

  But maybe I did.

  Lifting him higher, I held both palms beside his temples. I thought of warmth, home, strength, love, and friendship. Every positive thought I could come up with rolled through me and into him. It was a long shot, but if he could hear me, maybe he could feel me, too. Maybe I could strengthen him with all that was me, and all that was us.

  His lashes fluttered. His eyes opened, but didn’t seem to focus. “Jess?”

  I gulped back a sob. “Yeah. I’m here.”

  He tried to sit up, but frowned and relaxed back into my arms. “Are we okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He winced. “Edgar?”

  Oh crap. I’d nearly forgotten. “Edgar!”

  The silent, barren walls mocked my call. I waited, praying that the grassen would pop out of the wall and dance toward us.

  “Edgar!” I wiped the hair away from David’s forehead. “He’s not answering.”

  “The ship didn’t change color? No flashing on the panels?”

  “No.”

  David whispered a word in Erescopian. My imagination translated it to an English word that started with an F. He sat up on his own, rubbing his neck.

  “Give yourself a second. You’re hurt.”

  “If we lose cohesion, a sore neck isn’t going to matter all that much.”

  Good point.

  I helped him up to the console. The windows had closed, hiding the outer ocean from view.

  “Can you tell how deep we are?” I asked.

  He stared into the fading blue liquid. “About twenty-thousand feet. We’re sitting on the ocean floor, just on the edge of the drop off.”

  The Abyssal Plain? Not like it really mattered. We were pretty much at the bottom of nowhere. Unless, I guess, you peered over the edge of the trench. “And how much further do we need to go?”

  “About three more miles.”

  Crap. “Is the ship okay?”

  He slid his arms out of the console and plopped to the floor. His gaze fixed on a point in the back of the ship before he sighed and rubbed his face.

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “I might have a chance with a grassen, but unless Edgar pops out, we’re in big … ”

  A bright light shot out of the floor, glowing and pulsing like something out of a Star Trek movie. I stood, grabbing the back of David’s seat as a shrill, screeching sound cut through the room.

  A line etched through the decking. A yellow glow filled the room with a sunny glow. But there was no sun at the bottom of the ocean. Whatever had caused this couldn’t be natural.

  David stood slowly, his gaze riveted to the growing line. The chill of fear trickled through our bond before morphing into terror as a hissing sound filled the chamber.

  The glow separated, and cold, lashing water flooded the cabin.

  I grabbed my backpack, tossed it onto my chair, and zipped my camera inside. David made a sound like a screeching child and hopped onto his own chair. Callous, biting cold slashed my ankles. My toes numbed. I couldn’t blame him for crying out. These kinds of frigid temperatures could shut down his heat-hungry nervous system.

  The fissure widened, and the sea crested in like a tidal wave, seizing and yanking me from my chair. I kicked and spluttered as the torrent slammed me to the ground and rolled me across the tiles. My hands flailed, my fingers grasping at the slick flooring without finding purchase.

  “Jess!” David’s voice faded into the bubbling fury around me. White froth slapped across my face as the deluge flipped me into the air and pulled me down through the punctured floor and out of the ship.

  The frigid surge stung my lungs and I tried to cough, but icy splashes threatened to drown me. I tumbled over and over, lost in a world of bubbles and bitter cold fury pummeling me from all angles, dragging me through the sea. My fingers froze. My arms ached.

  Until I thudded onto a solid, unforgiving surface. I lifted my head and spluttered in the continuing surge from above. Crawling as far as my frozen limbs would take me, I fell, rolling onto my back. The torrent gushed from a hole in the cavernous ceiling—drilling down and splashing on the rocky surface below. Steam rose from the ground, casting a foggy haze through the room as the deluge continued to thunder.

  “David!” I squinted in the fog and blinked the water from my eyes. “David!”

  Had he escaped the cyclone? Was he still in the ship?

  “David!”

  The endless roar of the waterfall gave me my only answer.

  Catching my breath, I crawled out from under a dripping stalactite. My backpack bobbed in the swells about a yard from me. My camera! All the pictures from Columbia and the video of the octopus! I waded through the churning water and reached for my bag as a dark form fell through the hole above and thudded on the rocks.

  “David!”

  I chucked my backpack aside and scrambled toward him, dragging his unconscious form back and hauling his legs from the churning froth. Several bubbles erupted across the top of the water as my backpack succumbed to the draw of the sea. My heart sank with it. That camera had been by my side for the last four years. Old Reliable. My most valued possession.

  But not more valued than David. I pried my eyes from the place where my camera disappeared and eased us onto the wet rocks. David’s drenched fr
ame hung like a weight in my arms. My muscles screamed from the strain.

  “David?” I wiped the drenched hair from his forehead. His skin—so cold. “Please, David.”

  When we first met, he’d nearly died from a chilly forty-degree night. How much of these freezing temperatures could his body take?

  He quaked, and my heart leapt. I cuddled him to my chest, giving him what warmth I could. But how could I really warm him when I was just as wet and cold as he was?

  The raging torrent above stopped as if someone had turned off a faucet. A rounded shimmering disk hung in the ceiling, surrounded by long, striped stalagmites of different lengths. My reflection shone back at me, as if I were admiring myself in a mirror, or in a pond. But above me.

  An upside-down pond?

  The remaining water around us swept through a hole in the cave floor, emptying the chamber as quickly as it had filled. I lugged David into my lap and wrapped my legs around him, holding as tight as I could. A few feet away from me, the last of the swell swept into the hole in the floor, leaving my backpack dripping at the base of a boulder. Part of me drained away with the stream of seawater pooling beneath the stained leather.

  I took a deep breath as the insanity settled. The camera could be replaced. I needed to worry about David—and getting us out of here.

  A tidal pool nearly identical to the one above sloshed within the rocky surface, mirroring the roof of the cavern. How was any of this possible? A chamber beneath the sea, filled with air. No one would ever believe it.

  I unconsciously reached for Old Reliable’s shoulder strap, but it wasn’t there. My eyes trailed once more to my dripping pack. A photographer without a camera, in a world no one had seen before. It wasn’t fair.

  David groaned.

  Priorities, Jess. Priorities. Forget about the friggin’ camera!

  My sneakers squished as I eased David down to the hard rock and snuggled beside him. My skin tingled and my muscles ached. Keeping him warm might be the least of my worries. We were twenty-thousand feet below sea level, without a way to get home. But for now, it was all I could do.

  Steam rose around me, chasing the chill from my skin. At least I had that to be thankful for. Maybe we were inside some sort of a volcanic formation. I didn’t know, and I barely cared as exhaustion stole the last of my strength, and the walls, the fog, and the swirling pond above glided into the darkness.

  6

  Sometime later, I lifted myself from the rocks. A tiny snore puffed from David beside me, reminiscent of the night he fell asleep in my closet, eons ago. I placed my hand on his brow—boiling hot, just as it should be. Thank God for our natural steam bath.

  I rolled over and studied the stalactites above. White, sparkling glitter seemed to drip along each rocky blade—but maybe it wasn’t a sparkle. They shone, stinging my eyes as if they glowed all on their own. Natural fluorescent lighting? Mother Nature would never cease to amaze me.

  Dozens of similar formations poked out from different points in the ceiling, probably the only reason I could see. The rock surrounding them mocked me: solid across the entire chamber, except for another shiny surface on the far wall that reminded me of the giant mirror Grandma had hanging in her living room. It was like a prison. No way out, except up through the shiny disc in the ceiling, or down through the pond in the center of the room. Neither seemed a good or plausible choice.

  My shoes squished as I shifted. Ugh. How long had I been laying there soaking wet? I yanked off my sneakers and poured water out of one of them. That couldn’t be good. I wrung out my socks and left them near one of the tiny holes in the floor venting steam.

  David groaned as I slipped off his shoes and socks. He blinked several times before he smiled.

  Then he sprang to his feet, steadying himself on a stalagmite jutting up from the floor beside us. “Where are we?”

  Setting his conservative, white socks next to my pink plaid, I focused my thoughts, sending him a Jessica-induced video representation of the wave sucking us through the hole in the base of the ship and spitting us onto the rough cave floor. He spun, surveying the top and bottom mirror-like exits. “This is impossible. It’s environmentally infeasible.”

  “I know, right? But here it is.”

  He smoothed back his hair. “The pressure in here would have to be the same as outside. Why are we still alive?”

  My jaw dropped. I hadn’t thought of that. “Umm, I don’t know, but I’m not complaining.” Getting crushed to death? Definitely not on my top ten list of things to do today.

  David stood on the edge of the circular pond and examined its identical twin above. “So our ship is up there?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Unless it floated away.”

  His eyes darkened as he faced me. Not that I blamed him. No ship meant no escape. And that simply was not an option.

  I straightened, forcing the pessimist in me away. “The ship was filling with water. It would sink, right?”

  He nodded.

  “If it’s on the ocean floor, above us, there would be less chance of it drifting away.” I looked into my reflection in the pool above. “We just need to figure out how to get to it.” And pump out all the water before we drown. I grit my teeth. Optimism didn’t always work when everything was against you.

  “No,” David said. “You’re right. It has to be up there. We need to find a safe way out of this room.” He continued his inspection of the cavern. “There are more openings over here.” He walked to the far side of the chamber and touched the shimmering wall that looked like a mirror. He retracted his hand quickly, water dripping from his fingers. “Cold.” He wiped the droplets on his jeans. “If that’s the ocean, water should be flooding this room.” He shook his head. “It’s like a bubble where there shouldn’t be a bubble. It makes no sense.” He moved around the chamber, pressing against the walls. “Solid. Everywhere.”

  He said it like that was bad, but it was also kind of good. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of any of those walls caving in on us. There was a gazillion pounds of freezing-cold ocean out there.

  He walked over and slid to the rocky ground beside me, leaning against the stalagmite. “I wish you hadn’t come. You were supposed to be safe on that island. Now you’re stuck in this … ” He waved his arms in the air. “Whatever this is with me.”

  Regret coursed through our bond, swirling quickly into something else. Something warm. Inviting. He crossed his arms over his shoulders, hugging himself.

  I inched closer. “It’s okay to be glad I’m here.”

  His lips pursed. “I thought we weren’t supposed to be reading each other’s minds?”

  “It’s hard not to when you’re flinging your emotions at me.”

  He smiled. “Touché.”

  I leaned against his shoulder. Funny thing was, I felt the same way. Something about being with David made everything all right, even though everything was very, very wrong.

  My stomach grumbled. “Sorry. I haven’t eaten in a while.”

  “Neither have I.” He tugged me closer, tightening his grip. “I don’t know what to do, Jess. It’s not like either one of us can go outside and search for food.”

  “I know.” I clung to him. “We’ll find a way out of this. We always do.”

  “This isn’t like the other times. Before I knew what we were dealing with. This time I think we’re both hopelessly out of our league.”

  I closed the gap between our noses. “Maybe. But that doesn’t change the fact that … ” A mass of green lay across the rock formations near the back wall beside the mirror. It hadn’t been there when David inspected the phenomena before. “What is that?”

  David rose to his feet and walked toward the wall. I stumbled behind him on still-tired legs. He picked up what looked like dripping, soaked, mossy leaves. Water trailed from his hand into a divot in the rocks below.

  He stared at the limp plants, and then at the mirror. Sometimes I wish I could read his
mind whenever I wanted, not just when he sent me thoughts.

  Raising his hand, he nearly touched his reflection before pulling his fingers away. The leaves dropped from his grip as he staggered back, peering over both shoulders.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  His gaze centered on me. “It’s food. We’re being fed.”

  “What?”

  “We’re in a cage.”

  7

  “What do you mean we’re in a cage?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “How does us being in a cage make sense? This has got to be some sort of natural formation that just hasn’t been discovered yet.”

  “Then how do you explain the food? It shows up out of nowhere when we show signs of hunger. It’s not naturally growing in here. The walls are completely dry, and those leaves are wet. That’s a sea plant. Someone put it there.”

  “Do you know how crazy that sounds?”

  “Insane. Completely insane, but even you thought that the ocean’s depths haven’t been completely explored. Anything can be down here. An entire civilization for all we know.”

  My eyes narrowed. “If you start spewing stuff about Atlantis I swear I’m going to crack you one.”

  “Then I’m really glad I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  My stomach grumbled again. We’d fallen asleep, so I wasn’t sure how long we’d been down there, but my stomach told me long enough. My gaze trailed back to the seaweed. “Do you really think we can eat that?”

  “It would be risky. We don’t know what it is.”

  I picked up a fistful of the soggy leaves. They blurred as a feeling of light-headedness flushed over me. I grabbed the wall to keep from falling.

  Like an idiot I’d skipped breakfast yesterday to meet up with Matt. How incredibly stupid. Would ten minutes really have made a difference?

  I shook the fog from my head. I’d never gone more than twelve hours without eating, and that was sleeping all night for a blood test. I’d been ravenous the next morning.

  “Jess.” David’s eyes told me he’d read my thoughts.