As close as I press myself toward Fern, it’s not nearly enough to stop me from rubbing against Finn. He taunts me again and again with his body, moving closer to me every time I move away. An attack from all directions: Finn on one side, Fern on the other, her fingernails digging into my thighs, the ocean all around, closing in. How much longer can I take this?
By the time the tide gets closest, I’m halfway in Fern’s spot, and Finn is taking up his own, as well as most of mine. When the water climbs up the sides of the platform and the waves begin to pound loudly against it, I cringe and try to concentrate on the sky. But there is no moon. Instead, heavy clouds blanket the heavens. And then it begins to rain. Not a heavy, pounding rain, but a thin drizzle that’s enough to make steam rise from the hot ground. Soaked, I shudder and feel Fern trembling beside me. She doesn’t ask me for a story, and I’m glad of that; my jaw is clenched so tightly to stop my teeth from rattling that my mouth couldn’t form the words.
Tiam would always stand at the very center of his circle; he would take advantage over no one. I was smaller and more feeble (not to mention willing), so he could easily have taken some of my space. But he never did. Finn, however, towers over me, and I feel his skin against mine, hot and damp with sweat and rain. Several times I elbow him in the hips, not as much by accident as I pretend it is.
I think about what he’d said only a few tides ago. If I were king, I’d want you to be my queen. That seems so long ago. I don’t look at him. I know it’s better to ignore him. Ignore him and hope we can eventually bury whatever is brewing between us.
When it is all over, the clouds have parted to welcome the bright stars, but Fern is still trembling. Our bodies are sticky and soaked. Someone on the other end of the formation screams as if they’re being murdered, and she grabs me tighter. Burbur is talking with Ana, who is motioning to me. Burbur seems to be shrinking away, her eyes wide with innocence. Something about honey. The word honey, once foreign to us all, is now the hottest topic of conversation since the scribblers learned to bury themselves in the sand. People are obviously comfortable with the word now, because I hear it whispered all around me. And they’re all looking at me as they say it. When Burbur finishes the conversation, she turns to me and her wide-eyed innocence dissolves to hatred. What did you do? she mouths.
And I know. I know my mistake will cost me dearly. The honey will never be seen as a peace offering. Instead, it’s the first shot in this war.
Finn, who’d been talking with a bunch of men, turns to me, his garish pink robe flapping in the breeze. He says, “Honey?”
Oh, I’d do anything to have him, have them, unhear that word. To strike it from their knowledge. I turn to leave, but he catches my arm.
“Coe, where’d you get it?”
I shrug. “From the princess. She was trying to make peace.”
He snorts. “But you know it shouldn’t have been there. Something tells me that we’ll need to go down and see what else is in the empty stores.”
I shake my head. I just want to go away, but there is no escape.
He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Coe, get away from the castle,” he warns. “Go anywhere. But don’t go there. There’s going to be trouble, and I want you to stay out of it.” He holds in a breath and slowly exhales. “You may hate me, but I still made a promise I’d look out for you.”
I shake my head. “What are you going to do?” But I already know. I can tell the way the rest of the men are sizing up the giant stone building ahead of us. They are going to attack the castle.
“Coe, I—”
Desperate, I push up against him. “You can’t hurt the princess. Her guards—”
I stop when I notice the way he’s looking at me, his jaw clenched. He plucks my wrist off of his chest with his calloused hand, very gently despite the menacing look on his face. He can’t believe I’m still thinking about the princess, that selfish, spoiled brat. Of all the words he could use to convey his disappointment, he chooses complete silence, which is probably the most effective response of all. He simply turns and walks to the edge of the platform, leaving me to wallow in my guilt.
Fern is sitting on her circle, waving her magic wand in the air with one hand and clutching her tummy with the other. She’s hungry. “Come with me,” I say, grabbing her by the hand and rushing toward the ladder.
She looks confused, but follows anyway. When we reach the entrance to the castle, Fern’s eyes widen. “I can’t go in there. I have to clean the craphouse. And where’s the shovel? Ana will be so mad.”
“Fern, don’t worry. I will look out for you.” We hurry up to the castle doors. I have never known a time between tides when two guards weren’t stationed outside the doors. But they’re not there now. We pass right on through. The hallway is empty.
“What are we doing here?” Fern asks as we climb the stairs.
“We have to get the princess.”
I’m halfway up the staircase when one of the guards, who I’m sure used to be in the service of the princess only a tide before, appears on the landing above. He catches sight of me and immediately turns and runs in the other direction. “Finn!” I hear him shout.
Oh, no. “Change in plans,” I whisper, taking her by the wrist and leading her back down the stairs. The princess will just have to use some of her royal superiority to fend for herself, for now. We creep down the deserted hallway toward the stores. “Let’s go find Tiam.”
“But he’s dead,” Fern says as I find the key in my bag. My hand is slick with sweat as I reach for the door and realize that it’s already open. Somebody is already down here. Perhaps it is Burbur, but now, it could be anybody.
“Quiet. Hurry,” I whisper, ushering her down the staircase. In the distance, I see firelight bobbing in the darkness. Someone is in the corridor to the right. I steer Fern to the left, toward the honey room. It’s nighttime, and even the moon seems to be hiding, anticipating the terror to come. The dark presses against us until I know how Tiam must feel in closed spaces. Everything in my bag is damp as I rifle around, looking for my flint.
“It’s so dark here!” Fern’s voice is high and fragile.
“Do you have anything to make a light?”
“Uh-huh.” Fern’s platinum head bobs as if it’s on a fishing line. She reaches into her own bag, a little too slowly for my liking, and pulls out her flint.
There’s a bit of moonlight streaming through a high window in the wall, farther down the corridor. That’s what we’ll have to go by. My eyes have adjusted a bit more, and it’s not as bad. “Come on,” I say, tugging on her sleeve.
“Aren’t you going to light that?” she asks.
“Not yet.” It’s not safe yet. But I don’t tell her that. She’s worried enough as it is.
The dripping noise sounds like footsteps sweeping down the staircase behind us, so every few steps I look over my shoulder only to see nothing. We make it to the honey room, and I quickly open the door, then slam it shut when we’re inside. In the dark.
“It’s so dark in here! I can’t see anything!” Fern squeals, grabbing my hand tighter. “Where are we?”
In here, it’s impossible to tell. We’re not ten paces away from the entrance to the lower level that I’d spotted earlier, but it might as well be a million miles. I tear a piece of cloth from my tunic and strike the flint against the wall furiously, finally igniting the fabric after five or six tries. Then I find a torch on the wall. Immediately, a halo of gold light stretches out into the dark chamber, illuminating the metal disc in the floor.
“What is this?” Fern asks, taking a can and inspecting it. “Is this some kind of weapon?”
“It’s food. I know you’re hungry. I will give you some in a little bit,” I say, pocketing a can for later. I can’t remember when the last time was that I ate, and there’s no telling how long we might be looking f
or Tiam. Or what kind of food might be available where we’re going.
She shakes a can near her ear, suspicious. “Where did it come from?”
“It’s been here since the floods began. Hurry,” I say, thinking of those terrible creatures. It may have been my imagination, but I’m almost certain I heard them here, as well. I lead Fern to the entrance to the subbasement, the small raised disc in the floor. I wasn’t sure before, but now I can see her tiny little fingers will be perfect for this job. “Can you open this?” I ask her. “Just put your fingers in there and see if there’s a release? Or if you can pull the cover up?”
She squats and surveys the thing. “Sure.” Moments later she’s dug up the metal cover and I help her heft it the rest of the way and slide it to the side. “Easy,” she says, smiling broadly.
There’s a strange smell coming from down below, not so much moldy as earthy and decaying. It’s familiar. I think it’s the same smell I’d noticed in the old laundry room. And the laundry room was chilly, too. This air that rushes up to greet us is colder, and the steady dripping of water is louder now. Dripping...in a watertight compartment. That is what the guard had said; that the subbasement was watertight. Something tells me it’s not so watertight anymore.
I shine the torch down and see two small rungs of a ladder, nearly rusted through and coated with greenish slime and barnacles, and then...nothing. I reach my arm in and swing the light around. Just blackness, from all directions. Beyond those two steps could be a bottomless pit, for all we know. Still, I know this is where Tiam is. I hand Fern the torch and lower myself down slowly. Before I’m halfway down, I know something went wrong here once. I slide into dank water, stagnant and ice-cold, up to my waist.
I stand there for a moment, shivering, wiggling some slimy substance between my toes. Something grazes my calf. A weed. A piece of underwater plant life, that’s all. I hope. I wait, cringing, but feel nothing.
“What’s going on?” Fern cries down. “I hear noises at the door up here.”
“Come on down,” I say. “Quickly. Pull the cover shut if you can.”
“I can,” she breathes heavily, working hard. I hear the metal screeching against the stone as she pulls the cover over the opening, locking us in here. I try to shake the feeling that it’s forever as I pull her waifish body from the ladder and set her down. Everything beneath her armpits disappears into the black water. Her eyes bulge out perfectly round, and her lips curl. “Oh! It’s water. It’s so cold!”
“It’s not so bad once you get used to it,” I lie. It’s icy. I can no longer feel my toes, my ankles. I wonder how long this water has been down here. I wonder how it came to be down here, whose mistake it was. We’re in the center of a narrow corridor. I hold the torch up high and squint down each way, but the path disappears into darkness only a few yards ahead. I try to determine where above us my quarters are in relation to our position, then motion down the corridor. “Let’s go this way.”
“Ohhhkay,” Fern says, as if she’d rather not, but follows behind me anyway, shivering. “Tiam is down here? Why?”
“Yes,” I say. “Long story.”
My foot rams into hard metal, and I yelp before realizing there’s another cart down here, like the one Burbur wheels through the halls. It’s just a rusting, rotting skeleton, leaning badly over to one side as if it’s come here to die and doesn’t want to be disturbed.
The passage begins to slope downward, and the ceiling does with it. I look up ahead, where the entire passage delves underwater. Not passable. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s the other way. I turn and motion for her to do the same. “On second thought...let’s go this way.”
Fern’s teeth chatter as she nods, her eyebrows raised suspiciously.
We come to a door on the left side. There’s a raised metal panel in the center, with a patchwork of a dozen or so circles punched into the frame. It’s a pattern I’ve seen before. The door to the laundry room was like this. We’re getting close. I raise the torch to illuminate a plaque on the wall that says BOILER. It’s a word I don’t know. But it’s not LAUNDRY, so we move on.
This corridor begins to slope downward, too. I turn to Fern as we walk. Her teeth chatter in rhythm, and her eyes have now taken on the shape and luster of the full moon. The water is now nearly to her shoulders.
Suddenly, she rocks to the side and catches her breath. “Coe...” she begins, but stops.
I turn to her. Her mouth is frozen in an O. “Yes?”
“Something...” she begins in a whisper, but her teeth are chattering too hard to form the words. Finally she spits it out, the thing I’d had an inkling of all along. “Something is under the water!”
I shake my head. “It’s just seaweed,” I say, trying to keep the doubt out of my voice.
She doesn’t move except to shake her head vigorously in disagreement. The rest of her body is stiff. “It’s a scribbler!”
“Don’t be silly. How would it get down here? And what would it—”
I stop suddenly when I hear it. It’s a sound that seems to come from everywhere, rising and falling and echoing through the corridor, just as it does in my worst nightmares.
Hissing.
Fifteen
Round the Prickly Pear
All right, I tell myself. Calm. Think. Somehow willing myself to think only makes the hissing louder.
I lift the torch and scan the ceiling. It’s comprised mainly of poles of all sizes, running parallel with the corridor. They’re of all colors—red, blue, black, silver—and continue along the length of the corridor, disappearing into the darkness. No, not poles. They’re pipes. I’m not sure what the others are for, but there were black ones of the same size in the laundry room. I raise the torch higher, and it casts a shadow of the pipes on the stone far above them. There appears to be at least a little space between the piping and the ceiling.
I force the torch into Fern’s hands and wade through the muck to the old skeleton of a cart. I try to wheel it, but it doesn’t move, so I yank it up and it creaks in protest but follows. “Come here, Fern,” I yell. She breaks from her statue pose and hops her way through the water with the speed and grace of a dolphin, then begins climbing onto the cart before I can even tell her to. It groans and rocks some more, but I hold it steady for her so she can get her footing. Once she is standing on it, the water is only up to her calves. She looks at me, confused. “See if you can climb up. Over those pipes.”
She looks up, grabs a pipe and tries to wiggle herself up. Squeezing the torch in the armpit of my bad arm, I grab hold of her leg and hoist her up. She slides up easily, and I hand her the torch and follow behind her. There isn’t much headroom; lying flat on my stomach with my chin on a pipe, the back of my head scrapes the ceiling. But we are safe. The hissing continues for a bit, the glossy outlines of the creatures winding through the black waters below, making small ripples. “Okay,” I say, still trying to catch my breath. “So, there are scribblers down here.”
“What do we do now?” she asks, looking past her toes at me.
I thrust my chin down the corridor. “We crawl. That way.”
We can’t even crawl, really; the best I can do is wiggle. Fern can lift up onto her forearms and knees slightly and manage a low scramble with her legs slightly separated. She moves ahead of me like a little spider. After a few moments, she calls back to me, “I think I would rather be spending time with Finn.”
“Is it bad out there?”
“He’s horrible!” she squeals. “I don’t know what got into him. He is the one who told Ana not to feed me when I lost the shovel.”
I bite my tongue hard. He knew the shovel wasn’t lost. He knew I had it. My blood starts to boil.
“And he was the one who had the idea of having a competition to win Tiam’s spot. He killed the twins.”
I gasp. What h
as gotten into him? Something tells me he’s taking this idea of survival of the fittest a little too far. “Both of them?”
“Uh-huh. The competition was between Mick and Finn. Finn won, but he wouldn’t stop kicking Mick. And when Vail tried to step in to stop him, Finn turned on him. Everyone was saying that Wallow was a bad leader, and they all wanted Finn. Well, Finn is worse! People are starting to get scared of him.” She shudders. “And then I heard Ana talking, and she says there are only four hundred of us left. Can you— Oh!”
She’d been gradually inching over to the left, until the last time she brought her knee down, it slipped on the leftmost pipe. What happens next occurs in a heartbeat. Balancing the torch in my good hand, I watch helplessly as her midsection, then her chest, then her blond head follows. When I finally manage to cast aside the torch and free my good hand, I reach over and grab strands of her hair and her bony wrist.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” she screams, her sticklike legs flailing beneath her. “Don’t let go, Coe!”
“I won’t,” I say. But without another arm, it’s impossible to lift her up. She’s forty pounds of dead weight, and I don’t have the strength in my good arm. “Calm down, try to pull yourself up.”
“I—I can’t,” she moans.
She’s looking down. The hissing is louder. The once-calm water is frothing below her. I can see the outlines of black bodies of scribblers as they slither beneath their next meal. “Fern, look at me.”
She doesn’t look up, she just squeals and cries, hysterical.
“Fern!”
She turns her head to me. He eyes are wide and fearful.
“Fern, I will not let go,” I say to her calmly. “I’ve always thought of you as my sister. Do you know what a sister is?”
She shakes her head vigorously.
“A sister is someone who will protect you, no matter what. And I am not letting go, do you hear me?” I say. “Now, you can do this. The wall is right behind you. If you kick against it you can pull yourself up.”
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