Olympic Cove 2-Breaker Zone

by Nicola Cameron

  Wide brown eyes stared into his for a long moment. Finally, Col nodded. “Commander, we’re going to escort the councilor here to Olympic Beach,” he said firmly.

  Kasos snorted. “And on whose authority are you acting, mer?”

  “My own.” Col turned to face the triton, planting his trident firmly in the sand. Liam realized just how large his friend was, almost his own height and much broader in the chest and shoulders. The triton commander was tall, but they both topped him by a good two inches. “I’m asking you to do the sensible thing and help Liam find this Nereid. If you won’t, then you’ll have to go through me to stop him.”

  Kasos laughed harshly. “I’m a ten-year veteran of the Triton Corps, mer. I’m no stranger to a fight. You’re a council scribe. Do you seriously think you can beat me?”

  “Possibly not.” Col flexed his muscles. “But I’m betting I can hold you long enough for Liam to get to Olympic Beach. Do you want to put me to the test?”

  Kasos’s face darkened even more, but Liam caught a flicker of indecision in those dark eyes. The triton gave the tall, burly mer a long, evaluating look, then surprised Liam by shaking his head. “If I put you to the test, scribe, it will not be on dry land,” he said cryptically. “Fine. The councilor goes to the human town. And we go with him.”

  “Agreed.” Col looked to Liam, and he nodded.

  They returned to the water, Liam leading them out and north up the coastline. Soon they could smell the garbage and chemicals that indicated a human settlement. Cutting inwards towards land, he led them to the overgrown spot that held the mer cache.

  “We need to find the main road of the town,” Liam said as they got dressed. Kasos had scowled at the shorts and t-shirt he was handed, but donned them. “The Nereid’s shop should be about half a mile from the beach.”

  “Should be?” Kasos asked.

  “I’m not that good at calculating distance on land. I’ll know it when I see it.”

  The three put their tridents in the cache and pushed it under the murky water, although Kasos insisted on keeping his two sheathed knives. Liam showed him how to hide them down either side of his shorts before the three of them cut through the underbrush towards town.

  He glanced at the sky as they walked, trying to gauge the time. The eastern horizon was already tinged with purple, and the tall metal posts with their harsh, bright lights were on. He suddenly wondered when the Nereid closed her shop. Please, Gaia, let her be there.

  He hurried his pace, annoyed that Col and Kasos kept slowing to stare at some human construction or oddity. The buildings in particular seemed to fascinate Col, and the mer actually jerked to a stop once to stare at a gaily colored two-story building. It took Liam’s hand on his arm to get him moving again.

  “I never thought the humans had any sense of beauty,” Col said excitedly, “but that structure was so bright. Are there more like that here?”

  Liam searched his memory. “I think so. Nick said that’s a Painted Lady Victorian.”

  Col looked back, craning his neck at the structure. “What a bizarre name. It doesn’t look like a female at all.”

  “Humans are all bizarre,” Kasos grunted, stopping and glaring at the objects on his feet. “What in Tartarus are these things, anyway?”

  “Flip-flops. I don’t think they’re meant for long distances, sorry.” Up ahead, he spotted a cross street with a fairly dense crowd. “These humans have very little sense of personal space when they go out in groups, so don’t get offended if they bump into you accidentally. Just stick with me and we should be all right.”

  A growl from Kasos and a quickly hidden grin from Col were his responses. Bracing himself, he led them onto Olympic Beach’s main street.

  It was even more crowded than he’d remembered, with groups of families pushing brightly colored contraptions loaded with fry, along with adolescents on the hunt for an evening’s merriment. The sight of so many half-clothed young (and not so young) humans was startling. He felt Kasos tense, and tried to remember how far The Lady’s Touch was from the beach. Do I turn right? No, left, definitely left.

  “This is amazing,” Col muttered in his ear. “There’s just so many of them, like lemmings. Where do they all live?”

  “Some of them are local-born, and there are places all along the shore where they can rent rooms or even small houses,” Liam said, trying to avoid the chattering humans as he searched for the silvery building with its blooming window boxes. “This isn’t even as bad as it gets. When it’s truly warm—”

  “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

  They stopped, turning back. Kasos stood in front of a white building with huge windows that were brightly lit against the oncoming dusk. Overhead was a black sign with slender silver lettering. Liam mentally sounded out the English words Huffington Gallery.

  The triton’s hands clenched in fists as he stared into the gallery. “It’s monstrous,” he snarled.

  “What’s wrong?” Liam said, hurrying back to the triton. He glanced inside the building, then did a double take. “Oh. Er.”

  “What?” Col joined them. His jaw dropped open. “Oh. That’s … unexpected.”

  Kasos was already at the door, yanking it open and striding inside. Cursing in Gaelic, Liam rushed after him, Col following.

  Immediately inside the building, stretched across a thirty foot length of floor, was a sculpture of a creature that looked like a cross between a merman and a triton. While the upper half was beautifully detailed and realistic, if painted corpse-grey, the creature’s porpoise-smooth tail was sinuously overextended to an astounding length, ending in an up-flip tipped with an iridescent green mer fluke.

  Kasos circled the sprawling sculpture, glaring at it. “How in Gaia’s name would the poor bastard have been able to move with a tail that long?” he growled. “And why doesn’t he have a proper triton fluke?”

  “I have no idea.” Liam moved to the upper half, crouching down for a closer look. “It’s well enough done for what it is. At least they got the pouch right, although it’s awfully low on his tail.” He glanced at the sculpture’s face and blinked. “Looks kind of like you, Col.”

  Col crouched next to him, studying it. “My hair’s not that short.”

  “Gentlemen?”

  Liam stood as a curvaceous human woman with dark blonde hair and large dark eyes walked into the room, high heels clicking on the floor. “Ah, that’s our featured exhibition this week,” she said with a pleased smile. “It was the sculptor’s MFA degree piece, you know. He has quite a spectacular future ahead of him.”

  “It’s wrong,” Kasos declared.

  The woman arched a slender eyebrow at him. “Oh, really?” she drawled, some of the warmth draining from her expression.

  “He doesn’t get out much,” Liam said quickly, grabbing Kasos’s arm with one hand and Col’s with the other. “We should be going, sorry to bother you, good luck with selling this … object.”

  He forcibly steered the males back out onto the street as the manager stared at them. “And you thought I was going to get into trouble,” he muttered.

  Kasos shrugged out of his grip. “If that’s how humans see us, I’ll stay in the water from now on,” he said, grimacing. “And where in Tartarus is this damned shop?”

  With a sense of relief, Liam recognized the silvery clapboard siding of The Lady’s Touch up ahead. “There is it. Come on.”

  He jogged to the shop’s front door, pulling on the handle. It didn’t move. A sign in the door read CLOSED. “Dammit!”

  Col and Kasos joined him. “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re too late. The shop is closed.” He stepped back, looking up at the second floor of the shop. There were lace curtains in the windows, and a brindle cat sat peacefully in one. “Maybe she lives over it.”

  A grim Kasos got in front of him. “Councilor, I’ve indulged you enough,” the triton said. “If the Nereid isn’t here, I can’t let you go knocking on random doors in the hopes of fin
ding her.”

  “He has a point, though,” Col said. “Most shopkeepers I know live over or under their shops. And it does look like someone lives up there.”

  “I’ll just knock and ask if they know where Heather is,” Liam promised. The entrance to the second floor was probably out back. He ducked into a narrow gangway next to the building, intent on finding a door.

  Just as he reached a tiny greenspace walled in by a tall wooden fence, there was a loud crackling noise and gasps of pain behind him. He turned and saw Kasos and Col writhing on the ground, slender wires embedded in their chests. The wires led to small devices held by the two humans Nick’s ex-lover had hired. One of them grinned at him, revealing a snaggled set of teeth.

  “Mr. Whitfield wants to talk to you,” he said in a thick accent.

  Enraged, Liam pulled his knife and dropped into a defensive crouch. Before he could lunge, however, the other human pulled out another device and pointed it at him. Silver glints shot through the air, puncturing his chest and shoulder. Agony exploded through him. He fell to the ground, knife tumbling from his nerveless fingers.

  “Excellent.”

  Dazed with pain, he looked up and saw Barnard Whitfield. The human smiled, crouching at his side. “Leave the others. Bring him to the yacht,” he ordered, pulling a slender tube out of his jacket and touching it to the mer’s neck.

  There was a sting; then black clouds rolled in from the edges of Liam’s vision and he was gone.

  ****

  Head ringing like a struck buoy, Kasos forced himself onto his hands. He looked down at the silvery darts with their wire tails sticking out of his chest and tore them loose with a growl.

  Col was still on his back, groaning. “What was that?”

  “A weapon,” Kasos said shortly, levering himself onto one hip. “Fucking humans.” With an effort of will, he pushed himself to his feet. He remembered the humans (three, there were three of them, the two in dark clothing and a third in something pale) dragging a limp Liam past them and out of the narrow passageway while they lay there stunned.

  Grimacing, he leaned down and hauled Col to a sitting position. “They took Liam.”

  “Li?” The mer shook his head. “Why?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. One of them said something about a yacht.” Kasos yanked Col to a standing position. “Do you know if this place has a marina?”

  “I—yes. I saw one south of the beach.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Moving stiffly, they jogged back out onto the street and headed for the ocean. By the time they reached the network of floating piers that serviced a variety of human ships, the last orange of the setting sun was just fading from the western sky. Kasos swore as he spotted a largish ship moving out from its dock, heading for open water. The stern of the ship bore the English words My Pet.

  It had to be the ship belonging to the humans who had kidnapped Liam. And our tridents are locked in a cache, chaos take it all.

  No help for it. He exchanged a silent look with Col. The mer nodded grimly. In unison, they stepped to the edge of the pier and dove into the water.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Nick blinked hard, trying to ignore the tension headache that was knotting his scalp muscles and sending darts of pain across his temples. Between his ability to scan Claire’s body and her divine power, they’d been able to force some of the venom up and out of her wound. He’d rooted around in the room, finally finding an old ceramic container. He used it to scoop up the venom as best he could, trying to keep it from floating free in the water and possibly infecting one of the mermaids.

  Or me. He wasn’t sure if Poseidon’s other gift could overcome the Nereid’s poison, especially as it had almost turned Bythos into Thetis’s creature. And there was still too much of it remaining in Claire’s body.

  On the other side of the bars, the sea goddess sagged in exhaustion. Her skin color was shading to grey, and her shoulder had swollen alarmingly around the deep bite. More worryingly, the whites of her eyes were beginning to darken. “I feel so strange,” she said, her voice slurred. “So hot.”

  Nick felt a creeping sense of dread. Without an immune system, she shouldn’t have the ability to run a fever. “Mind if I check?”

  She shrugged, and he reached through the bars, laying a hand over her forehead. It was burning. “You aren’t normally this hot?”

  “No. And I’m getting hungry.”

  He pulled his hand back quickly. If the venom was mutating her cells as he suspected, that could cause the internal temperature rise and the hunger. Pythia?

  Yes?

  I want to see her shoulder again at high magnification.

  The image bloomed in his mind. He could see the path the venom had carved through healthy tissue, turning it grey-green and mottled. Suddenly a pinpoint flash of light appeared, dying away almost instantly. What the hell?

  I’ve never seen anything like that before.

  Neither have I. Bump up the magnification ten times.

  The image expanded. More flashes of light burst across his eyes, flickering like microscopic lightning bugs. Shutting out all external stimuli, he shrank his awareness, concentrating it on smaller and smaller increments of the dark stuff. Slabs of infected tissue. A lunar landscape of flesh covered with gouges and ridges. A single cell, strained and darkened. Things crawling inside the cell—

  Wait. Nick stilled, zooming in on one of the crawling things. It looked like a cross between a crab and a very elaborate hexbug. What the hell are those?

  I have no idea, Pythia admitted. It’s far too small to be a microbe, and I sense no organs.

  Nick focused closer, extenuating his senses until just the finest, most delicate tendril brushed across the crawling monster and sank in.

  And then hundreds of glowing spheres danced in his mind, each one held in place by shimmering shells of energy whirling around each sphere. He focused on a single sphere and found six tiny sparks spinning around it on different levels. With a shock, he realized he had gone down to the atomic level.

  He was looking at an individual carbon atom.

  Oh, my God. I think this is nanotech.

  Nanotech?

  Nanotechnology, creating molecule-sized structures and machines out of atoms. Research on it is still in the early stages, but supposedly it can be used to build really tiny computers or create electronics that can’t exist on a macro scale.

  The snake absorbed that. This nanotech, it would be very useful in medicine, yes?

  Nick remembered papers by researchers who wanted to build tiny robotic systems that would live inside the human body, killing foreign cells and repairing damage as it happened. It would be like having your own personal doctor in your bloodstream.

  Or personal poisoner, Pythia said grimly. If this is what infecting Claire, we need to stop them.

  Yeah, working on that. From what he’d read, electrical or magnetic pulses had no real effect on carbon-based nanotech. Chemical destruction was a possibility, but even if they had time to figure out what would work he had no access to the necessary materials.

  He pulled back, long enough to view the nanite. It was surprisingly elegant for something so simple, a teardrop-shaped body and six ridged legs crawling deftly through the cell’s interior soup. It attached itself to a ropy strand, moving along it like a zipper pull.

  Holy shit. I think it’s editing her DNA.

  Her cellular code? That would explain how Thetis can force her victims into those horrible new shapes.

  Yeah, but how the hell did a Greek sea goddess learn how to use nanotech?

  I suggest you ask her the next time you speak, Pythia said tartly. Do you know how to disable the creatures?

  Not with what I have here. He had a bad feeling it would take a research lab with a dedicated programming team to figure out how to shut down the things. She needs to keep forcing out as much of the venom as she can.

  He pulled back his focus, opening his eyes
. The goddess gazed sadly at him through the bars. “You can’t stop it, can you?” she asked softly.

  “I—” He pressed his lips together, hating the sense of powerlessness. “This is something I’ve never dealt with before. I don’t think I can stop it.”

  Claire’s head dropped forward, and she took a shuddering breath. “So be it. Then kill me.”

  Nick recoiled. “What?”

  “Kill me.” Her head came back up, and her eyes were huge in the dim cabin. “Don’t let Thetis turn me into one of her creatures. Be merciful and put me beyond her reach.”

  You can’t do that, Nick.

  Goddamn it, Pythia, I wasn’t planning on it.

  No, that’s not what I meant. Claire is a goddess—a minor one, true, but fully divine. And as such, immortal. Even if you ran her through, she would heal. Cut off her head, and the pieces would rejoin. You cannot kill a goddess.

  He shook his head, horrified at the snake’s words.

  “Why not?” Misunderstanding his gesture, Claire’s expression changed, becoming a mix of pleading and anger. “I’m asking you to do this. To leave me to Thetis’s mercy would be far crueler than killing me.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I can’t kill you. You’re immortal.”

  Her grip on the bar tightened. “There must be something you can do,” she said. “For Gaia’s sake, human, don’t leave me like this!”

  Nick, there is nothing you can do. But there is something she can do. Sadness permeated Pythia’s words. It is ... difficult. But I believe it is the only thing that will save her from Thetis’s predation.

  Death was something every doctor fought as long as possible. But Nick had seen too many patients turned into vegetables, dependent on life support, to believe that extreme measures always had to be employed. And Claire genuinely was looking at a fate worse than death. What is it?

  The snake made a small, grieved noise. She can give up her essence and return to Gaia.