Submerge (The Bound Ones Book 2)

by Tricia Barr

  Phoenyx looked down at herself, expecting to see bleeding cuts from where the vines had broken the skin, but she realized that she was completely naked. When she made her body ignite, of course it would burn off her clothes if it was hot enough to incinerate those vines. Her sense of shame had never really developed, and it wasn’t like Ayanna and Sebastian had never seen her naked, but she graciously accepted the pair of pants from Sebastian and the shoes from Skylar.

  After she pulled them on and had finished zipping the jacket, with Ayanna’s hands constantly on her to help in any way they could, Sebastian pulled her into his arms and held her tightly, and she didn’t even mind that the pressure against her cuts was making them sting.

  “I was so worried about you,” he said. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”

  She almost melted in his arms, the relief of being safely out of harm’s way catching up to her and making her momentarily weak. “I’ll try not to,” she said tenderly, then she kissed him all too briefly.

  He held her in his arms as they stood watching the fire, waiting for everything to finish burning and for the fire to die out. When it did finally extinguish itself, the cavern was empty, the entire surface covered in a haunting layer of soot. Smoke filled the cavern and dried their throats, but a strong gust came out of nowhere and pushed the smoke away. She gave Skylar a nod of thanks as she coughed for good measure.

  Phoenyx knelt down to pick up the torch that she had dropped, every movement brushing fabric against her fresh cuts and making her painfully aware of them. They mixed in so well with the cuts from the mermaids’ claws that she couldn’t tell which sting was from which incident. She made the mental decision to tune them out so that she could focus on the task at hand.

  “Shall we?” she asked rhetorically, pressing forward.

  Sebastian laced his hand through her free one and held on tight as they walked. As she was still shaken, she appreciated the comfort it gave her.

  They quickly exited the empty, cindered cavern and went into the tunnel on the opposite side. There were still a few vines hidden along the tunnel walls here and there, but Phoenyx was on guard enough to eliminate them before they became a problem. As they walked, she tried to remember what the other obstacles were that she and Lily had set up so long ago. There were several more forks in the passageway that she navigated through easily, and she remembered that at the very end there were a series of false land bridges, but what was the main obstacle in between?

  When they entered another cavern with a very tall vaulted ceiling, she remembered.

  “Wait, stop,” she said, holding her arms out to keep them from going any further.

  “What’s next?” Ayanna asked.

  “Quicksand,” Phoenyx replied. “There are pools of it hidden all through this cavern. You have to step in exactly the right spots or you’ll sink.”

  She held out the torch as far as she could to spread the light and scanned the surface of the cavern floor. At first glance it all appeared to be the same smooth sandstone, but if you looked carefully, and knew what to look for, you could see areas of the ground that had hair-thin cracks in it, suggesting that there was a thin crust covering softer, more giving earth.

  She mentally marked the spaces that she could see the crust and laid out a path to follow.

  “Step only where I step,” she cautioned.

  She took her first tentative step into the cavern, and when the ground didn’t give she put her full weight on it and took another step. The path between the hidden sand pools was narrow, about the width of two of her feet, so she had to be absolutely sure of her footing; there was almost no room for error.

  Only a few steps in, Phoenyx heard Ayanna behind her gasp and shuffle her feet. Terrified that the quicksand had hold of her, Phoenyx shot her head around, ready to grab her. Ayanna was standing with one foot in the air, looking down at the spot where her footing had crumbled the thin sandstone crust and revealed the sticky sand beneath. Luckily, she hadn’t put enough weight on that foot for her to fall into the pool. Phoenyx sighed in relief, then took a moment to catch her breath before proceeding.

  As she got to the end, she leapt to the sure ground of the tunnel on the other side, planting her feet firmly on the secure surface, grateful to be past another obstacle. She could only breathe easy again once everyone else had made it into the tunnel.

  They all shared a glance for a moment as they stood in the tunnel entrance, bracing themselves for whatever might come next.

  “We’re almost done, guys,” Phoenyx assured them. “There’s only one obstacle left before we can get to the stone, and it’s an easy one.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Skylar said.

  “Trust me, we’re almost in the clear,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  They passed two more forks in the passage and then emerged into a final cavern, much larger than the other two before it. The ground dropped a few feet after the entrance to the cavern, and in the light of the torch held over the edge, she could see tall, sharp stalagmites rising from the floor far below, making the floor look like it had a hundred fangs ready to pierce them if they fell.

  In the middle of the cavern, rising to the ground level of the tunnel they had emerged from was a sort of platform. In the middle of that platform stood a pedestal, and in the dim light of the torch that reached it, the final stone fragment glinted at them atop it. Between them and the platform, arching over the stalagmites, were four mud-formed bridges. She knew that all but one of them were false, ready to give way as soon as someone chose to step on them. But something wasn’t quite right. She counted the bridges again. One, two, three, four…Four. There should be another one…

  One of the bridges must have already crumbled. Had someone already been here and triggered one of the bridges, or had the ravages of time simply taken it to a toothy grave?

  She carefully inspected the bridges that were still standing, and she couldn’t see any indication of where the fifth bridge had been. She knew it was one of the end bridges, but was it the right or the left? The true bridge should be the one on the far right, so that should still be the same no matter which of the false bridges had fallen.

  “This should be the correct bridge,” she said, pointing to the one on the right.

  In his eagerness, Sebastian walked ahead of them to the bridge and took a careful step on it. When it didn’t give, he took another step, and the rest of them followed behind him. As soon as his weight shifted into the next step, the arch quickly cracked and crumbled like a soft cookie beneath him, gravity hungrily pulling him down toward the stalagmite fangs below.

  “Sebastian!” Phoenyx screamed, and without thinking she lunged forward to grab his outstretched hand, clasping onto it upside-down as she continued to fall forward after him. Her forward motion came to a sudden stop and she realized Ayanna’s hands had grabbed hold of her leg.

  It took a moment for what just happened to register—if she hadn’t jumped in after Sebastian, she would have lost him, and if Ayanna hadn’t caught her foot, she and Sebastian would have both died.

  Before Ayanna could struggle to pull them up, an invisible force lifted Phoenyx and Sebastian up and placed their feet on the ground next to Ayanna and Skylar.

  “Sorry I didn’t react sooner,” Skylar said. “Your fall was a real surprise.”

  Sebastian took a deep breath as he put his hand on Skylar’s shoulder. “Better late than never. It’s good to know you always have my back.”

  “And Phoenyx, you know that saying about jumping off a bridge just because your friends do?” Skylar said. “You’re not supposed to take that literally.”

  It took her a moment to realize he was teasing her, the shock of her near death experience leaving her in a daze.

  “So what happened?” Ayanna asked. “You said that bridge should have been the stable one. Did you forget?”

  Phoenyx thought for a moment, shaking herself out of her daze. She was absolutely certain that the secu
re bridge had been all the way to the right. But then why did it crumble? The only thing she could figure was that the missing fifth bridge had been the true bridge, and that the ravages of time had somehow caused it to collapse. Although, why time hadn’t also taken down the other bridges, she couldn’t fathom.

  “There were five bridges,” she explained. “The true bridge must have collapsed before we got here. I guess we didn’t do a good enough job making it stable.”

  “And the rest of these bridges are definitely false?” Sebastian asked. Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed a large rock from against the wall of the cavern and hurled it at the closest bridge, which immediately quaked and toppled to a rocky grave, smashing over the stalagmites below.

  “How are we going to get across?” Ayanna asked, looking all over the cavern for another solution.

  Skylar scoffed to himself and shook his head. “It’s so obvious, I feel like an idiot for not thinking of it before.”

  He crossed his arms, looking irritated, and the rest of them looked at him in confusion, not understanding what he was talking about until, out of the corner of her eye, Phoenyx saw something sparkly headed her way. She turned her head in that direction to find that the rainbow-colored stone that had been sitting on the pedestal in the middle of the cavern was levitating through the air toward them. Of course, Skylar was using his telekinesis to bring the stone to them! How obvious and yet brilliant!

  With his nose in the air, Skylar held his hand out and let the stone land in his open palm. When it had settled there safely, he looked at it and the self-irritation melted away, his face awash with a look of pure reprieve, like the beauty of the stone was enough to erase all the ugly in the world.

  They had it. The final stone fragment was finally theirs. We’re saved.

  As they stood staring at the stone in Skylar’s hand, a piercingly loud siren sound erupted throughout the cavern, stabbing their ears so violently that they all doubled over and crushed their hands against their ears to try to block the noise. Skylar dropped the stone, and before any of them could realize what was happening, a man darted out from the tunnel behind them, snatched the stone, and then darted back into the tunnel.

  Phoenyx struggled to look up despite the painful screeching in her head in just enough time to see the face of the man running away with their only hope of survival—Ralph. The siren echoed through the cavern, rattling her brain and making it hard to think. She knew she had to get up and go after him.

  As she made the decision to suffer the pain of the full blast of the siren to chase him down, there was a small explosion further inside the tunnel that instantly hushed the siren, its boom considerably less audibly offensive. After the initial boom, she heard an avalanche of rocks through the ringing in her ears. She pushed herself up to her feet and sprinted into the tunnel, already knowing what she would find. Only a few paces into the tunnel, a haphazard wall of rocks brought her to a stop.

  Phoenyx stood there, head darting from one part of the rock wall to the other for any peephole she could open up and crawl through. Fury and desperation building, she began tugging at the rocks, tossing the lighter ones behind her. Soon there were no more small rocks to move and the larger rocks would not budge, so she couldn’t make any more progress to dismantle the wall. Her anger boiled over, too much to contain, and her hands ignited as she smashed them into the rocks, yelling in rage despite the pain of her splitting knuckles.

  A pair of hands gripped her shoulders and pulled her away. “Phoenyx, stop!” Sebastian said. He spun her around with no concern that her flaming hands might burn him.

  “He’s getting away!” she protested.

  “I know, but you won’t get through that wall like that,” Sebastian reasoned. “All you will do is hurt yourself unnecessarily.”

  “But…the stone,” she pleaded, her rage turning into panic and deep despair. She dropped her hands, which were now extinguished, and began to cry.

  Sebastian pulled her into an embrace and held her while she wept. This was three thousand years of pent up hope and anticipation and frustration and struggle finally released. After all that searching, over hundreds of lifetimes, hundreds of failures and victories, not to mention hundreds of heartaches, they had finally, for the briefest moment, possessed all three pieces of the stone. And just like that, it and any chance of saving Lily and themselves had been ripped away from them. They were trapped in here with no way out while their only hope was being whisked further and further away.

  Phoenyx heard the running footsteps of Skylar and Ayanna stop behind them, so she pulled herself away from Sebastian and wiped her eyes, trying to collect herself.

  “What happened?” Ayanna said.

  “Ralph betrayed us!” Phoenyx said, anger quickly returning.

  “Ralph?” Ayanna asked. “My pilot? I don’t understand.”

  “He followed us here,” Skylar said. “I saw it all in his mind as he hopped over me to take the stone before he ran away. He’d been suspicious of us since the plane crash. He knew that whatever we were searching for must have high value if we were going all around the world to find it. He made the decision to follow us after we parted ways at the Miami Harbor.”

  “I…I can’t believe that Ralph would do this to me,” Ayanna said, looking frustrated and a little hurt. “Why would he feel he had to sentence us to death just to take what we were after?”

  “From what I could gauge in his mind, he’s terrified of us,” Skylar informed. “Not just the three of us, but you as well, Ayanna. He’s noticed that you haven’t aged in the time he’s worked for you. I think he’s been plotting to rob you blind for some time now.”

  Ayanna shook her head, looking very much the disappointed parent.

  “Wait, if he followed us here, how did we miss him?” Sebastian asked. “You didn’t hear his thoughts as he was following us?”

  Skylar shook his head, forehead wrinkling in failure. “Ever since Ayanna opened my memories, I’ve been working on closing off my mind. I was tuning everything out on our way through the tunnel. Here I was thinking that I was making progress, and in turn I allowed a snake to sneak up on us. I’m sorry. If I hadn’t been so selfish, we wouldn’t be stuck down here.”

  Sebastian frowned. “It’s not your fault. Ralph tricked all of us.” Sebastian paced blindly back and forth. “I just don’t get how he could have followed us here. He would have had to take the same flight as us to get here when we did. How did he get past us seeing him on the plane?”

  “He happened to be old friends with the pilot and some of the crew on that plane,” Skylar said. “He rode in the cabin and got off before any of the passengers. Then he hung back and waited for us to get off, keeping a safe distance the whole way up to this cave.

  “Since we went in first and got around all the obstacles before him, we made it easy for him to get through the cave. He waited and watched us retrieve the stone before he decided to trap us in here. That sound was a police siren he still had from his days as a bounty hunter, and that boom was a well-placed gunshot to the roof of the tunnel.”

  “Why wasn’t he as crippled by the siren as we were?” Phoenyx said. “Even our voices are loud in this cavern, that siren should have nearly deafened him, too.”

  “He was wearing earplugs,” Skylar said.

  “Yeah, he has trouble sleeping, and as a pilot he’s always on the move, so he keeps a pair on him at all times,” Ayanna reasoned. “I can’t believe he would do this.” She shook her head. “I knew he was a little crooked, but that’s why I hired him, so he wouldn’t ask questions about my suspicious lifestyle.”

  “What does he plan to do with the stone?” Phoenyx asked Skylar.

  “He’s not sure what its value is, but he’s determined to find out and sell it for as much as he can get.”

  Phoenyx hung her head in destitution. She felt completely hopeless.

  “Is there another way out of here?” Ayanna asked.

  Phoenyx shook her head dis
mally without looking up at her. “We made sure there was only one entrance into this cave. With this tunnel blocked, we’re completely trapped in here.”

  Ayanna looked around pensively, calculatingly. Then she said with determination, “We will just have to make our own way out.”

  “What about pulling away all these rocks to reopen the tunnel?” Sebastian suggested.

  Ayanna shook her head. “Obviously, the structural integrity of the tunnel’s roof right here is weak. If we attempt to move the rocks, we may have a full on cave in on our hands.”

  Sebastian frowned and looked off thoughtfully.

  “Well, if time caused that secure land bridge to fall, there may have been other things that changed in this cave as well,” said Skylar. “There could be hidden animal burrows or a crack somewhere that could lead to an exit.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Ayanna said. “Three hundred years is plenty of time for a cave to have evolved. I’m sure we can find some flaw that we can manipulate.”

  At that, the four of them began investigating the walls of the cavern. Phoenyx considered the topography of the ground above the cave, trying to remember if there were any nearby natural resources they could somehow utilize, or where there might be some kind of outlet they could connect to. What was on the other side of these cavern walls? How deep into the mountain were they? As hard as she racked her brain, she just couldn’t remember what the world directly surrounding this cave looked like. She never thought she would need to pay attention. Why hadn’t she and Lily considered this happening to them? They should have incorporated an emergency exit.

  “Before we all waste our time searching blindly, let me try something,” Skylar said. “I’m going to increase the air pressure in here and see if I can sense a vent or anywhere that the air leaks through. Just be mindful of your ears, this may hurt a little.”

  Skylar closed his eyes and concentrated, and just as he had cautioned, both of Phoenyx’s ears popped and began to itch deep inside. She stuck her fingers in them and wiggled in order to soothe them, waiting for Skylar’s results.