“Please tell me you have motion sickness pills we can borrow,” Yuri said.
Chapter 24: What we do for love
Echo found herself wandering the Amazon palace late that evening, full from dinner, fighting off waves of anxiety, as she always did lately. Her thoughts revolved around what was to come, with upside-down cities, river gods, mythic artifacts for binding old gods.
I worked in an icehouse a few months back, she thought. How do I feel too old for this already? I feel like my heart’s been racing non-stop for months.
She could hear Barnabas and Muireann downstairs, talking with several Amazon cartographers about the best way to find the yacuruna. Neither the magician nor the ondine could sail a ship to save their lives, but Barnabas had proven a strongly effective navigator through his connection with the ley lines, and Muireann had a supernatural sense for direction on the open water. Echo felt mostly useless in the conversation and left it to the experts, seeking quiet away from everyone else.
There were few lanterns on the floor she wandered onto, most of the light filtering in through massive windows along one wall. She walked up to those windows and found that they were part of a set of tall, unlocked doors, leading out to a stone balcony overlooking the sea. She pushed a door open and was hit by a gust of sea air, refreshing, cool in darkness, slightly damp. She inhaled deeply and stared out over the water, looking for the Endless moored somewhere below.
“You’re all such interesting beings,” Orithyia said, emerging from the darkness and startling Echo, joining her at the stone balcony overlooking the harbor. “A collection of creatures never meant to exist.”
“I don’t know why I’m not insulted by that, but I’m not,” Echo said.
Orithyia looked over her shoulder into the castle, her expression teetering on judgmental.
“Your father is Atlantean,” she said. “What do you think of them?”
“I think they’ve built something wondrous and most of the time they don’t know what to do with it,” Echo said.
Orithyia studied her face, suddenly focused.
“He sent you away,” she said. Not a question.
“Sent might be the wrong word,” Echo said. “But he abandoned my mother, or seemed to. There was always someone watching over us. The last of whom was Barnabas, who my father hired when he was very young. But I didn’t know it. As far as I knew, my father never existed. It was just my mother and me.”
“I didn’t… throw him away, you know,” Orithyia said.
“He thinks you did,” Echo said.
“I don’t blame him. I always knew where he was, or I did until he left with you,” Orithyia said. “I wasn’t going to hand my child over to strangers. We’ve always known of that place. It calls itself the Island of Unwanted Things, but by all the gods, it is filled with such wonders.”
“I know,” Echo said.
“It’s a place where you send beautiful things the world wants to destroy,” Orithyia said. “We think we’re so advanced here. And we are. We are. I’ve seen the mundane world, and we are not them. Neither is Atlantis. But we are not without our flaws. No one is.”
Echo said nothing, just listened.
“I know the myths. That we throw our boys into the sea. That’s a complete fabrication. We don’t have boys anymore. We haven’t for centuries. We don’t need them. We don’t throw babies off cliffs. That’s barbaric.”
“How did Artem happen, then?” Echo asked.
Orithyia slipped, a sly smile crossing her mouth.
“I fell in love with a stupid man,” Orithyia said. “Oh gods, was he a stupid, lovely, impetuous idiot. Now he almost found himself thrown off a cliff. I bargained for his life, for the chance to set him loose on the open sea with a small boat and some food so they wouldn’t kill him, to protect the island. He would have deserved it. He was here to rob us.”
“But you fell in love with him,” Echo said.
“I know you’re young, but surely you’ve fallen for an idiot who didn’t deserve your affection,” Orithyia said. “We’re mortal. It’s our job to fall in love with the wrong people.”
Echo felt something twinge in her chest, a strange realization she’d never had before. Her life in the icehouse, her adventures, her youth. I don’t think I’ve ever fallen for anyone, she thought. It was just never something she needed. Never something that happened. I suppose it just happens for most people, she thought. You run into someone who doesn’t deserve your affections. But standing here, looking over the hidden island of the Amazons, Echo realized for the first time she’d never really fallen for anyone. And it had never bothered her before. She had too much else to do to fall in love.
Good, she thought. What a waste of time, anyway.
Why do I suddenly feel so lonely?
She caught Orithyia watching her, the older woman smiling sympathetically.
“You just had a profound thought,” she said.
“It’s not important,” Echo said, forcing that loneliness down into a place where she could process it later. “You regret sending Artem away, don’t you?”
“I have never loved anyone as much as I love my son,” Orithyia said. “But look at this place. As beautiful as it is, as peaceful, as advanced, there was no place for him here. I didn’t want him to grow up as a footnote. That’s all he would have been here. A note on a ledger, a passage in our history books, about the Amazon general who was derelict in her duties and fell in love with a thief. I gave him to the Island of Unwanted Things not because he was unwanted, but because I wanted so much more for him.”
“He’s a hero, y’know,” Echo said. “He saved Atlantis. He saved me. He’s the greatest swordsman anyone’s ever seen. And he’s lost so much, and has a big broken heart he doesn’t know what to do with, which makes him kind of an ass sometimes, but we all know why. And I think everything he does leads back to you. I think he misses his mother.”
“But Echo, all those things he became… they happened because I got him off this island. Where he could be something more,” Orithyia said. She exhaled, the breath catching in her throat sharply.
The two women leaned against the rail, listening to the waves crash against the shore below. Without facing Orithyia, Echo spoke.
“I guess I’m a hero now,” she said. “And I’ve got these powers, and apparently I’m a princess, and it’s my job to save the seven seas or something stupid like that. But when all this was happening, I lost my mom. And ma’am, let me tell you, if you asked me honestly, I’d give it all up to have her back. Artem doesn’t have to make that choice. He could have both. But that’s on both of you to make that happen.”
The waves continued to crash rhythmically below. Orithyia said nothing for a long while.
“You’re smarter than the others Atlantis has sent to our door,” she said.
“Maybe because they sent me away,” she said. “Maybe because of my mother.”
Echo pushed herself away from the railing.
“We set sail in the morning,” she said. “I assume we’ll be back, because your son will be with us, and saving the world is what he does. Maybe think about what you’d like to say to him when we return.”
She walked inside the castle, leaving Orithyia alone, the ocean swaying beneath her like a song.
Chapter 25: Blood in the water
Anson Tessier stood on the deck of his rented ship, watching bodies bob in the water below.
Money buys a remarkable amount, he thought. They’d passed through that brutal storm and nearly lost several men, washed overboard by hundred-foot swells. The ship was designed to withstand terrible conditions, but we were never meant to master the sea. Any man who thinks we might control the ocean is a fool. We can only survive it. But money bought a ship that could withstand the worst of what the ocean could throw at them, and money made the men onboard stupid with greed, willing to risk their lives for cash.
They exited the storm and found themselves alive, exhausted, in still water that
smelled of death.
The captain, a burly Englishman with a beard that seemed to grow directly down his neck into his shirt, thought they had stumbled across a capsized ship, a large fishing vessel caught in the same storm. He pointed with the cigarette between his fingers to a wrecked ship, tipped on its side and lazily drifting on the current, a sizable hole punched in its hull.
“That storm was a killer,” the captain said. Tessier nodded, pretending to agree, but Tessier saw something the captain either did not, or was steadfastly ignoring. There were gouges on the bottom of that ship, deep wounds like claw marks. Something big had capsized that ship from below.
The bodies in the water were savaged as well. If you turned a blind eye to them, it was almost impossible to ignore, and the crew worked hard to do just that. Tessier had no such compulsion though. He stared and studied from the deck while the crew made a perfunctory search for survivors. It seemed unlikely, given the damage, the smell, the silence. What a silence, Tessier thought. Just the rocking of the waves, the occasional creak of metal from the ship. Even the seabirds seemed content to leave these corpses alone.
He thought about bringing a body aboard to examine, but that might give too much away to the crew.
“Who do you report this to, if at all?” Tessier asked. “We’re in international waters.”
The captain gave a half-hearted shrug.
“No survivors, no salvage to speak of,” he said. “If we can spot an identifying feature on the ship to notify its country of origin, we could reach out, but I thought we were to keep this excursion as quiet as possible.”
“That’s true,” Tessier said.
“Then I suppose we leave it for the next ship to call it in,” the captain said. “Not like these guys are in need of rescuing. Wouldn’t be the first folks lost at sea.”
“Commendably cutthroat, Captain Bonner,” Tessier said.
Bonner shrugged again.
“You didn’t hire us for our moral compass,” he said. “So… any idea where the target we’re chasing is from here?”
Anson Tessier inhaled deeply, waiting for the familiar, sharp twinge in his chest. A supernatural homing beacon, his pain telling him where the girl had gone, where she hid.
“East,” he said. “And south. We should look at the charts.”
The captain agreed, both men happy to step away from a sea full of corpses. Captain Bonner called up a digital navigational chart on a table with a large, expensive screen embedded in the top. Tessier indicated where his unnatural senses told him Muireann would be.
“I assume that’s more of a general idea,” the captain said.
“Why do you say that?”
“That’s just empty ocean,” the captain said. “Not that it’s dangerous or anything, but there’s just… nothing out there. Do you think she’s just hiding out on a ship? You won’t find any land there.”
“It’s possible she’s simply on the run on another vessel, yes,” Tessier said. The captain tried to hide a look of doubt on his face but did so poorly. Tessier ignored it.
“Would love to know what trick you’re using to track this person,” Bonner said. “You can’t just be relying on hunches.”
“I have my ways,” Tessier said. “Believe me, my sense of where she’s gone is painfully accurate.”
The captain reviewed the map one more time, then sighed.
“Well, if we’re headed that way, I have to suggest we stop and refuel,” he said. “This ship can go a long time between stops, but that storm beat the hell out of us. I’d like to dock, restock, make any repairs we need to make before heading out to the middle of nowhere.”
Tessier grimaced.
“She’s moving remarkably fast. I don’t want to lose her,” he said.
“We sink or get stranded, you’re really going to lose her,” the captain said. “Where could she be going, anyway? If she’s out there, she’s not trying to disappear in some foreign country, right?”
“Find a stop that will delay us as little as possible,” Tessier said.
“That was my intention,” Bonner said. “I don’t want to slow you down, sir. I just want to make sure we can get home again. Figured that was something we both want.”
Tessier nodded and stepped away from the table.
“I need to check on a few things in my room,” Tessier said. “I’ll be back shortly.”
“Of course,” the captain said.
Tessier began heading for his room, his heart tightening in his chest. The moment he was alone in the hallway, he clutched the wall, fighting a sharp, blinding pain. His physician had told him these were not heart attacks, these bouts of pain, but could offer no explanation. But Tessier knew what they were. He needed the piece of himself she’d stolen back soon, he thought as his vision went gray for a moment.
There were moments when he wanted to forgive her, to simply take back what she’d stolen, remembering the way she’d looked at him before she learned what he really did to make all this money, before she knew who he really was. But in these moments, gasping for air, feeling for all the world like he was dying on his feet, he knew there’d be no forgiveness.
This was not a retrieval mission. This was revenge. She crossed him because she knew the evil he did, and Anson Tessier had every intention of proving her right when he took back what was his.
Chapter 26: Why are you here
The Endless set sail the next morning with little fanfare. Orithyia and Areto led a small honor guard, or possibly security detail depending on perspective, to see Echo and her crew to their ship, the docks shrouded in fog too dense for work to have begun for the day.
“We leave under cover of darkness as usual,” Echo said, mostly to herself, so quietly only Muireann really heard her.
The ondine watched each crew member in turn, reading their body language as they departed. Echo seemed determined but tired, as always, as if dragging a great weight behind her. Yuri was visibly relieved to be leaving the island, the were-shark having been in a constant state of self-conscious anxiety during the visit. Barnabas’ eyes wandered the architecture, taking everything in like a man who knew he’d never see this place again. And Artem was stony and emotionless, barely making eye contact with the Amazons, avoiding his mother entirely.
Muireann watched Orithyia’s response to his behavior. I don’t know this woman, the ondine thought. I don’t know any of these people, really. But I know pain when I see it, and that is a mother living with great regret.
The boarded their ship one at a time, Echo stopping to speak to the Amazon general and commander.
“We’ll be back with the Eye soon,” she said.
“I hope so,” Orithyia said. “Be safe, and be swift.”
“We’re usually one of those,” Yuri said almost reflexively as he climbed onto the ship.
“We’ll do our best,” Echo said. She saw Muireann watching and waited for the ondine to board before her. Muireann complied.
“Okay, everyone. Take us out to sea,” she said to the empty air, which quickly swirled with phantom sailors ready to be on their way. “Barnabas will tell you where we need to go.”
Without a single living person lifting a finger, the Endless gently left the dock, through the fog, and out into the open ocean.
Artem slipped up to his frequent perch in the crow’s nest. Echo wearily found a spot in the prow and sat down. Yuri wordlessly joined her. Muireann watched as Barnabas headed up to the quarter deck alone and followed him.
The magician leaned against the wheel for a while, not so much steering as feeling the movement of the ship as the ghosts safely sailed them out beyond the Amazonian illusory terrain. Once the magical environmental effects were behind them, Barnabas opened a wooden chest that had been somehow fastened or nailed to the deck and withdrew a piece of chalk. He began drawing arcane symbols on the wood, muttering to himself—no, not himself, Muireann corrected. He was talking to the spirits, telling the ghosts where they needed to go, which faerie lan
es they needed to find to cross great distances faster.
She observed the process for a while, surprised at its simplicity. Muireann knew instinctually how to find those mystical pathways on the ocean, but she’d never seen them written out so others could understand them.
“It looks like art,” she said.
Barnabas smiled up at her, wiping the leftover chalk on his pants.
“Magic is art,” he said. “My mother thinks it’s science, but she’s a diviner, an alchemist. Her magic frequently requires mathematical precision. Mine’s more improvisational.”
“Your mother, the nereid,” Muireann said.
Barnabas nodded, tossing the chalk back into the wooden chest, avoiding stepping on the magical symbols he’d drawn on the deck.
“It sort of makes us alike, you and I,” Muireann said. “That your mother is a nymph.”
“I don’t know about that,” Barnabas said. “Please don’t take that as an insult. I just think the things you’ve been through and the things I’ve been through probably don’t overlap much.”
Muireann observed his face, the way he hid behind the beard and ink and scars, the false way he carried himself.
“I can’t figure you out,” she said.
Barnabas raised an eyebrow curiously.
“Really,” he said. “Interesting statement coming from a mystery woman we picked up on a ship full of dead sailors.”
Muireann shrugged her shoulders and looked down at the deck below where Echo and Yuri sat, then up at the crow’s nest where Artem pensively watched the horizon.
“Them I understand,” she said, ignoring Barnabas’ sarcasm. “Echo might not like it, but she feels responsible for her people. She takes action to protect them, or at least to protect the world from the harm her people seem so capable of causing.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t say she’s happy about that, but it’s the state of her,” Barnabas said.
“And the were-shark. Even in just a few days I can tell that his own interests matter less than what he needs to do to be by her side. Whatever danger she’s running toward, he’ll be there.”
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