Hander: When have you ever needed to breathe underwater?
Handler: Figured I’d let you know when it’d help.
Handler: Btw, Maya is waiting for you.
Lori jerked her head up from her phone and looked into the pool. Tapper had swum off, but Maya was treading water a few feet below the surface, her short blond hair glowing in the water. She waved as Lori looked.
Lori felt herself blushing, and shoved her phone into her pocket.
“You okay?” Hawk called softly from back by the fence. He’d slipped through and was carefully pulling the chain links back together.
“Fine.”
Then she slipped into the water, which apparently she could breathe.
It was going to be a day full of new things.
MAYA
Maya wasn’t sure what people who knew they could breathe underwater looked like, but Lori wasn’t one of them. She slid into the water holding her breath, and Maya watched the little bubbles spray away from where Lori’s feet kicked as she scrambled against the wall to stop herself from floating back to the surface. After a moment, she let out a long bubbly breath, then inhaled with a kind of full-body shiver before settling down. Her long black hair, still in its ponytail, bobbed behind her as she shook her head.
Finally she waved back to Maya with a smile that looked forced, although it was hard to tell underwater.
Maya gave her an encouraging thumbs-up, then looked back to where Iara circled Hawk, who had splashed in after Lori, while Tapper hung in the water up ahead. Neither of them could swim like Iara could, but they were doing all right. Maya checked to make sure Lori wasn’t going to die or anything—she was still flailing around a little bit like someone who didn’t do a lot of swimming—and then Maya kicked her legs and headed after them.
Maya had done swim team back in Nebraska, which had been so much better than wrestling or football, and she’d known she could breathe water right after the change. She didn’t know how she’d known. It had just been there, another skill she hadn’t had before but was now available and as natural as anything else as a problem-solving response. Make people laugh. Run away. Camouflage self. Go bendy. Breathe underwater.
She had never gotten to swim in the ocean, though. And, well, the canals weren’t exactly the open water, but they were seawater, at least. The pool was even more of, well, a pool than the canals were, but it was seawater as well. It felt different, feeling salt water in her lungs—it was like the difference between being in an air-conditioned room and being outside with the wind in her face. The water felt cool and thick and right sliding through her fingers.
Now that she thought about it, she thought she remembered that some fish could survive in only salt water or freshwater, but not both, and that would probably have been a good thing to think about earlier, but it wasn’t killing Maya now, so she decided not to worry about it.
It was the first time she’d been in the water close to miracoral too, and as she swam in a nice lazy breaststroke, arms and legs flowing easily and maybe just a tiny bit more flexibly than they had before the change, she looked down at the stuff that was replacing oil all over the world.
Her first thought was that the miracoral looked like a brain. Maybe not what an actual brain looked like, but whenever you saw a movie with aliens who had creepy big heads and oversized brains visible, that kind of brain. Each of the brains was the size of a backpack, and there were clusters of them all along the floor of the pool, along with seaweed and little fish that were probably what the coral ate.
The miracoral itself gave off the golden glow. Maya had expected it to be like one of the old night-lights she’d had as a kid, like it was translucent plastic with a cheap bulb behind it, but it was sharper and clearer than that, as though the light was coming from the skin of the miracoral itself. It was bright enough that it should have hurt Maya’s eyes, but instead the light felt warm and soft and kind, somehow.
The pool was around twenty feet deep, and Maya was swimming near the midpoint, deep enough that she wouldn’t make big waves on the surface but still safely away from the miracoral itself, since everyone had been superserious about it giving you an electrical shock. Again, though, it didn’t look like something that would shock her. The same feeling that had told her she could squeeze between the bars of the gate to get away from the guys at school was telling her that the miracoral was safe.
She looked back at Lori, who was catching up finally. Lori paused and raised her hands in a what is it? motion.
Lori’s long-sleeved shirt was superclingy underwater, and Maya stared for probably just a bit longer than she had to, hoping the water hid her blush. Then she remembered about the miracoral and pointed down at it.
Lori gave Maya a blank look.
Maya decided to go with it.
Turning over in the water—and wow, the best part about being able to breathe underwater was not having to worry about water going up your nose when you did that—Maya kicked down toward the bottom of the pool. Behind her Lori made a warbly bubbly noise that was probably something about this not being a good idea, and darn, it was a shame that Maya couldn’t hear it.
The glow was even brighter as she drew closer to one of the bunches of miracoral, bright enough that if it were any other kind of light, Maya would be squinting, unable to see anything, but here it was still just natural. If anything, she could see even more clearly, the little ripples and ridges along the outside of the coral that gave it the brainy look, the tiny motes in the water that caught the light, all of it. In fact, the light was changing on the patch she was approaching, moving from the steady gold into a friendly pink as Maya drew closer. Little fish darted out of her way as she eased down toward it.
Then a hand clamped down around her ankle.
Maya looked back—well, up—and saw Lori grabbing her.
“Wharbrrryoodoing?” Lori yelled. Even under the water, Maya picked that up.
“I think it’s like us,” Maya said, or tried to. It came out mostly as bubbles. She gave Lori a reassuring smile. “Look!” She grabbed Lori’s hand and pulled her down. “It’s okay!”
Lori flailed for a moment, but then she saw Maya’s look, and after a long stare, during which Maya realized that Lori had really strong hands, Lori stopped struggling. Squinting against the light, she let Maya pull her down.
Hands linked, they moved toward the miracoral.
“See?” Maya said, or tried to, anyway, as they closed to within a few feet of it. “I think it knows what we are!”
Then the water went cold and sharp around her as the miracoral’s glowing light went an angry red, and dozens of tiny lobster-scorpion things with angry-looking claws began to pour out of the ridges of the coral.
HAWK
Hawk didn’t swim a whole lot faster than he had before whatever had happened to him, but now he really liked cruising. Back in Austin, he had loved to swim, and when his abilities had come to him, he’d started going through the reefs that had once been the southern edge of town. The cold hadn’t bothered him—honestly, swimming in the gulf was barely what you’d call cold anyway—and the water hadn’t stung his eyes anymore, and for like an hour, he could just drift under the water in silence.
That had been cool, but there hadn’t been a hot green-haired girl swimming alongside him, either, so even though he was still a little nervous about the miracoral glowing down below him, he was counting this as a step up.
Iara was literally swimming circles around him, her arms pulling her through the water in an effortless glide. When she saw him look her way, she paused and waved. Her hair swirled around her sweet curving smile, and then she darted away to swim another loop.
Up ahead Tapper had reached the far wall already and was treading water and glaring Hawk’s way. Hawk jerked his head to convey sup, bro in a way that was universal between dudes, but Tapper didn’t seem to speak dude.
Maybe Tapper was into Iara and was one of those guys who had no chill when he had it bad f
or a girl. That might explain why he was always glaring at Hawk. Hawk, who had grown up with sisters at home, could at least kinda talk to girls like they were people, even if he did spend a lot of that time wondering what their necks would smell like right at that part where they met the shoulder. He looked over at Iara again as she swam by, grinning his way.
Her neck probably smelled really good.
Up ahead Tapper climbed out of the pool. Iara flitted forward, then circled back and waved for Hawk to go first. He nodded, reached the wall, and surfaced as close to it as he could.
“About two feet of clearance from the beams,” Tapper muttered. He was already on the other side of the railing, and his cargo pants and sweater already looked dry. How the heck did he do that? “Security by the door, so try not to make noise.”
Hawk pulled himself up, nearly slipped on the side of the pool, grabbed the railing, and splashed over awkwardly. “Sorry, dude,” he said as Tapper shook his head in disgust. The guy’s clothes were already dry. The sweater even looked fluffy, like it had just come out of the dryer.
“At least you won’t be as bad as her,” Tapper said, jerking his head toward Iara, who was circling in the water below.
“Dude,” Hawk said, “uncool. She can’t help needing a wheelchair, and she’s better in the water than any of us.” He waved down at her. “Also, just ’cause you’ve got it bad for her doesn’t mean you’ve gotta be rude. Pulling the pigtails is, like, middle-school stuff.”
“You think I—” Tapper started, and then Iara leaped from the water in a glistening arc, jackknifed over the railing, twisted in midair, and landed like a ballet dancer in Hawk’s frantically outflung arms.
“Thank you for catching me,” she said, wiping her hair back out of her face with one hand as she put the other arm around his neck. “Without my ride, I am afraid I may need a little assistance.”
“Hey, no worries.” Hawk grinned. “Superstrength, right?” Tapper snorted, and Hawk realized what that sounded like and added, “Uh, but I mean, not that you’re like heavy or—”
“Excuse me,” came a call from over by the Lake Foundation building, and Hawk breathed a sigh of relief even as he turned around and saw a security guard coming toward them. He was a big black dude, and his outfit was about as close to cop as a security uniform could get. “What’s going on?”
“I am very sorry,” Iara said, shifting her weight in Hawk’s arms in some kind of secret girl way that turned her from awkward hunched-up cold wet person into innocently seductive lounging babe like when Princess Leia is lying on the bed in the white dress right before Luke comes into the cell to rescue her in A New Hope, but specifically the white dress, not the gold slave bikini, because that one is sexist.“I fell over the railing, and this brave man rescued me.”
“You fell over the railing?” The security guard frowned. “Into the generator pool? This is a private area. How did you even get in here?”
“We were invited,” Iara said, still smiling, and leaned in against Hawk. In a tiny voice, she added, “Get me close to him, please.”
“Right,” Hawk said, and then, as the security guard looked at him, Hawk said, “Right!” again in a more believable voice. “We were invited.” He stepped forward. “Plus if we could get inside, I think she needs a doctor to look at her, uh, ankle.”
Iara shifted again in Hawk’s arms and did something that didn’t make a noise Hawk could hear, but kind of made her throat vibrate a little against his chest, and that wasn’t distracting at all.
“So yeah,” Hawk added, “you should have a thing saying we can come in without a badge or a pass or, you know, whatever, one of those things that . . .” Still moving forward, he looked over at Tapper, who was standing there with his arms crossed, looking at Hawk in utter disdain. “Dude, did you wanna . . . no? Nothing?”
“You’re the smooth one,” Tapper said, and it was still pretty dark, but Hawk thought there might have been the ghost of a smile on his face now.
“Whatever is going on here,” the guard said, “none of you are going anywhere.”
Iara’s throat did its weird thing again, and then she said, “You were told to let us in with no official record,” and her voice made Hawk’s whole body tingle.
The guard blinked. “Oh, you’re the ones I was told about! I’m so sorry, miss, are you all right?”
Iara shifted again in Hawk’s arms, and he couldn’t see whether she was smiling, but he guessed it was pretty good, whatever it was. “The instructions were for five of us in total.”
The guard blinked again. “If I remember right, there should be another two of you, shouldn’t . . .” He broke off, looking past Iara. “What’s happening to the pool?”
Hawk turned around and looked at the pool, which had begun bubbling. The light coming from the glowing miracoral on the bottom had been a pretty gold when Hawk had been swimming in there, but now the light was an angry red, and it was definitely an angry red, hitting Hawk’s eyes in a way that made him want to pull back with the same instinctual fear gripping his muscles as he’d have gotten from seeing a bright-colored spider crawling toward him on the table.
A moment later, Lori and Maya uncoiled from empty air and collapsed onto the pavement in a boneless wet heap.
“What is that?” the guard shouted.
“You gonna make him think this is normal?” Tapper asked Iara.
“Ahhh . . .”
“Didn’t think so.” In a flash Tapper was beside the guard, fist extended, and the guard was on the ground unconscious.
“What happened?” Hawk demanded.
“Cold and big, cold and big,” Maya was saying over and over again, which Hawk thought was probably a bad sign.
Lori was already back on her feet, and while there was water on the ground around her, she seemed entirely dry. “Something went wrong with the miracoral. We had to change the plan.” She looked at the guard. Her face didn’t have any expression in it. “Tapper, drag him someplace less obvious.”
“Like where?” Tapper asked, but Lori was already walking briskly toward the door.
Hawk hurried after her, shifting his grip so that Iara would be more comfortable. It would have been easier to do a fireman’s carry, but Hawk figured that would be rude.
“What happened to the miracoral? Did it zap you?” he asked Lori.
“When we got close, it moved to defend itself,” Lori said. Then she paused, winced, and shook her head, the first real expression she’d had. “Listen, Maya is a little shaken up. Can you . . .” She looked over at Hawk and seemed to realize for the first time that he was carrying Iara. “Okay. I’ll see if she’s all right.”
“I’ve got her,” Tapper growled, and Hawk saw that Maya was back on her feet, holding his hand as they came to join Hawk and Iara and Lori. “She doesn’t need you doing anything else weird to her right now.”
Lori opened her mouth, but whatever super-rude thing she would have said was cut off as Iara said, “Another guard.”
This guard was a heavyset white guy with a big mustache. Hawk turned to him and cleared his throat as the guard pushed the door open and looked their way.
“Everything okay?” he called over in a casual relaxed voice that was not at all the voice Hawk had been expecting. He was looking past Hawk, and Hawk glanced back over his shoulder.
The big security guard, the black guy that Tapper had just knocked unconscious, was somehow standing next to Tapper where Maya had been. He nodded and gave the heavyset guard in the doorway a jerk of the head that conveyed all good, bro, in universal dude language, and the guard in the doorway nodded and stepped back inside, letting the door close behind him.
“Tapper, did you by any chance get the guard’s security card?” the big guy said in Maya’s voice. Tapper held up a thin slip of white plastic between two fingers.
“Dude, Maya, that is awesome,” Hawk said. “Also, you speak dude really well for a girl.”
“Yes, nicely done,” Iara said. “How do yo
u make your clothing change its appearance?”
“Oh, I can’t,” Maya said.
“Wait.” Lori blinked. “So what are you actually wearing right now?”
“Umm, we should get moving. Thanks.” Maya took the security card from Tapper.
“Alemã, I bought you clothes!” Iara said.
“You did, and it was supernice of you, and it gave me a lot of great ideas!” Maya said brightly.
“Good to know,” Hawk said, and felt Iara laughing silently against his chest as they headed inside.
05
MAYA
The lights inside the Lake Foundation building were glaringly bright after the darkness outside. Maya kept herself looking like the guard as she used the key card to open the door, and then waved them inside with what she hoped was a normal hand-wavy motion a normal guard would make. “So we’re in,” she said as the door closed behind them, and looked at a small kitchenette with doors leading off to either side. “Did we have a plan for after, which I wasn’t paying attention to, or . . . ?”
“They went to a great deal of trouble to get us. Hopefully in a building with so many computers, there will be some record of why,” Iara said. She still looked comfortable in Hawk’s arms, which, good for her, Maya figured, even if Hawk looked a little less like a burly fireman than someone trying to carry too much laundry so as not to have to make a second trip. “If we locate a mainframe, I may be able to find out why they came after us.”
“Hang on,” Lori said, and fiddled with her phone. A moment later, it began playing an audio stream.
“We’re here this morning with Tia Lake of the Lake Foundation. Thank you so much for joining us.”
“It was my pleasure, dear. The miracoral is a vital part of our lives today, and the Lake Foundation is committed to developing our new resources to the fullest.”
“All right,” Lori said, and dropped the volume. “We’re clear as long as she’s doing the interview.”
Everyone went quiet while they thought about that. At least Maya assumed that was what everyone else was thinking about.
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