“Thank you,” Becca said, taking the mug. She felt reassured enough to try it.
“I hope you like it,” Elisabetta said, frowning. “I’m not quite sure how moon jelly soup should taste.”
Becca took a sip. “It’s delicious,” she said. “But I meant thank you for more than the soup. Thank you for saving my life.”
“You’re welcome,” Elisabetta said with a shrug. “Part of the job.”
“You made the Williwaw pretty angry,” Marco said. “Did you get what you were after?”
Becca hesitated. It wasn’t safe to say too much about the talismans.
“It’s okay, Becca. Mahdi told Nero about the talismans, and Nero told me. He trusts us. And we trust him,” Marco said.
Becca instinctively reached for her pocket—and realized with a start that she wasn’t wearing her jacket. She looked around anxiously.
Marco must’ve understood what she was searching for, because he lifted something from the bench behind him. He motioned for Becca to give him her mug, and in exchange he handed her the jacket.
It dawned on Becca that he and Elisabetta could easily have helped themselves to the locket if they’d wanted to.
But it was still in the pocket. “Yes,” she said with immense relief. “I got it.”
“That’s great news!” Marco said excitedly.
“And bad news, too,” said Elisabetta.
“How so?” Becca asked, draping her jacket over the side of her tank. Marco handed her mug back.
“When we picked you up, the death riders were only three leagues from the Achilles,” Elisabetta explained. “I’m sure that by now they’ve staked out the wreck and spied on the ghosts. They’ll have heard them talking about a mermaid who took something from the Williwaw and was rescued by humans in a boat. Vallerio will be informed. He’ll get word to Rafe Mfeme, and as soon as he does, Mfeme will be after us. If he’s not already. He has speedboats, too.”
Marco smiled at his sister. “But his drivers aren’t as crazy as you,” he said.
Elisabetta laughed. “Still, I’m not taking any chances. We’re only in the southern Atlantic and we need to get all the way to the North Sea. Boats will meet us along the way so we can refuel, but we’ve got to keep going.” She gave her brother a look. “Okay, Marco?”
“Okay,” Marco said. Elisabetta headed topside. Marco turned to Becca. “I made her stop and cut the engines so she could eat something and rest. But she’s right. Mfeme could show up at any minute. It’s best to keep moving.”
They both heard a deep thrum as Elisabetta started the Marlin’s engines. She opened the throttle and a second later, they were off.
“I should leave you,” Marco said, “and let you get some rest, too. El forgot her coffee mug. I’m going to bring it to her.”
“What’s coffee?”
“The drink of the gods. To terraggogs, at least,” Marco joked. “And nothing you should try if you want to get some sleep.” He smiled, then added, “It’s okay to sleep, you know. You’re safe now.”
Becca nodded. Her eyes felt so heavy. Her body was aching and exhausted.
You’re safe now.
As she looked into his kind eyes, Becca believed, for the first time in many months, that she was.
THE DARKNESS WAS a living thing, watchful and crouching, all eyes and teeth.
Creatures moved about in it, seeing but unseen. Ling could feel them. She was in the Abyss, about two leagues from the prison camp, where her father had told her the puzzle ball might have drifted.
She held a fat moon jelly in her hand. It was her only source of light. She couldn’t cast the most basic illuminata. She couldn’t cast anything. The sea wasp’s venom had sickened her so badly, she’d lost most of her magic. Even her omnivoxa powers were weak. She could speak only a handful of simple languages. Ling shone the moon jelly’s glow over the Abyss’s jagged south side, looking for Sycorax’s ancient talisman. She moved back and forth along a section of wall and, finding nothing, descended farther.
As she did, a sharp pain stabbed at her brain.
Depth sickness, she thought. It’s starting.
She wasn’t surprised. She’d been searching for ten hours straight. She knew the symptoms—headache and nausea, followed by disorientation. Then things got really bad. Victims struggled for oxygen. They coughed blood and became uncoordinated. A brain bleed usually finished them off. Either that or suffocation.
After Ling and the manta ray had parted company, she had crawled into a cave and stayed there for two days—sick and shivering—waiting for the swelling in her tail to go down. On the third day, hunger had driven her out to forage. She’d found fish eggs and some bitter seaweed that she’d choked down. The food gave her energy and strength. On the fourth day, she set off in pursuit of the puzzle ball.
Ling knew she was lucky to be alive. She didn’t feel lucky, though. She had no idea how long it would take her to regain her magical powers. What if they never came back? That thought was so terrifying, she couldn’t bear to dwell on it.
She kept moving down the south wall of the Abyss now, sweeping her tail fins over clusters of tube worms to see if the puzzle ball had landed in their midst, peering into small caves and niches.
A wave of dizziness washed over her. She closed her eyes until it passed, then started laughing. She was searching for a ball, no bigger than the palm of her hand…in the Great Abyss!
“I’ve lost my mind,” she said out loud.
The puzzle ball could have landed on any one of a million ledges that lined both sides of the Abyss. It could be buried in thick silt or wedged into a crack. Or it could be leagues below her, and still falling. Legend had it that the Abyss was bottomless.
“This is totally insane,” she said out loud, still laughing. “It’s impossible!”
She laughed so hard she started to struggle for breath—which made her realize that her depth sickness was getting worse.
“You’re becoming hysterical,” she told herself. “Knock it off. Right now.”
Ling was strong; she knew she was. And strong mer didn’t lose it. They didn’t come apart. They got the job done. She descended again. A small hollow lay in a rock below her. Holding the jelly in one hand, she grasped the edge of the cavity with the other and peered into it.
She didn’t even have time to scream as a bony face with gaping jaws lunged at her. The giant fangtooth’s sharp teeth missed her face by a hairsbreadth. Panicking, Ling raised both hands to protect herself from the fish and dropped the moon jelly. The current carried it away. The fangtooth shot toward it.
“No!” Ling cried.
But it was too late. The fish snapped its jaws shut on the tasty jelly and swallowed it whole.
Ling didn’t know what the fangtooth did next, or where it went, because she couldn’t see anything. The water around her was still and silent, the darkness overwhelming. It felt to Ling as if it was swallowing her whole, the way the fangtooth had devoured the jelly.
All she could hear was the sound of her own breathing, rapid and shallow. Dizziness gripped her again. It was so bad this time that she became violently ill. When the racking spasms finally subsided, she realized she had no choice but to ascend. Her breathing was too ragged; it had to normalize. She had to find another source of light.
She swam upward, but after taking a few strokes, she realized the water was getting colder, not warmer. Was she swimming down instead of up?
Dizziness struck again. Ling swam in the direction of the wall, hands outstretched. If she could find it, she could steady herself against it and hopefully beat back the spinning in her head. But the wall was nowhere to be found. Ling was flailing in the black depths now, completely disoriented.
And then she saw a light.
“Oh, thank gods!” she said, swimming toward it. “Hey!” she shouted. “Wait! I’m over here.”
The light glowed more brightly. It came toward her. Ling put on a burst of speed, rushing to meet it.
&nbs
p; And then she stopped short, unable to believe what she was seeing.
A man was carrying the light. A human. He had blond hair and empty eyes. He wore a black pearl at his throat.
“Hello again, Ling,” he said.
“No!” Ling cried.
It was a face from her nightmares. The face of a monster.
Orfeo.
“NO,” LING WHISPERED. “It can’t be.”
Orfeo was here with her in the Abyss.
Crying out in fear, she turned and bolted away from him—only to be brought up short by the appearance of someone even more terrifying.
Morsa.
The goddess was swimming toward Ling, her serpent’s tail twining in the water, her lipless mouth twisted into a smile. The scorpions wreathing her head raised their venomous stingers.
“Have you brought me a sacrifice, Orfeo?” she asked in a dry, dusty voice. “You are ever my faithful servant.”
Ling screamed. She tried to swim away from Morsa, away from Orfeo, but wherever she went, they were there, reaching for her.
Whimpering, she closed her eyes and curled into a ball, waiting to feel Orfeo’s rough hand clamp down on her, or Morsa’s lethal sting.
But she felt nothing.
Slowly, she opened her eyes. Both Orfeo and Morsa were gone.
“They were never here,” she said to herself. “You’re hallucinating.”
Ling knew she had to ascend. Now. If only she could find a creature that wasn’t a predator, one that could tell her which way to go. She needed help but was afraid to call out for it. What if her pleas summoned another fangtooth…or something worse?
I’m going to die down here, she thought. Totally alone.
Ling thought of Serafina and the others, waiting for her, depending on her. She thought of her father in the prison camp. His hopes were pinned on her, too. She thought of her brothers. Would their village be raided next? Would they be hauled off to a labor camp?
And then she thought of her mother. Not being able to say good-bye to her hurt the most.
Ling had parted from her on bad terms, angry at her silence. But now she realized that the way she felt here in the Abyss—scared, alone, and desperate—was how her mother felt every single day of her life.
Ling valued toughness and strength—in herself and others—but she saw now that even the strong couldn’t be strong all the time. Everyone was frightened or lonely or heartbroken sometimes, and when they were, they needed others to be strong for them.
For the first time, Ling understood.
She took a deep breath, then shouted at the top of her lungs, “Please, is anyone here? Anyone? Can somebody help me? I was looking for a puzzle ball, but now I’m totally lost and I’m sick and I’m scared and I need to get out of here!”
No one answered her.
Not at first.
But then Ling heard something. A few seconds later, she saw something, way below her.
A strange creature, with a slender, spiraling body and thousands of glowing tentacles, rose up from the depths. More creatures, just like the first, followed it.
Ling had seen the things in the night skies, things the goggs called fireworks. These creatures looked like that, like shining bursts of light in the darkness. They spoke as they rose, and their language sounded like music, mysterious and beautiful.
“Look!” the creatures said. “Look! Look! Look!”
I must be hallucinating again, Ling thought.
More creatures came. Their light illuminated the dark water. Ling saw that she was very near the wall.
“Are you real?” Ling asked.
“Look!” the creatures said. “Look! Look!”
Ling did so. Though her head was pounding and she felt sickeningly dizzy, she swam back and forth, searching in cracks and crevices. As her body cried out for oxygen, she dug through silt-filled depressions, waved aside a school of tiny needlenose fish, parted a thicket of ribbon worms. And then, finally, she saw it. It was only a few feet away, resting on a ledge.
A small white ball.
Ling tried to swim to it, but a fit of coughing, painful and harsh, overtook her. She spat out a mouthful of blood. She tried again, and this time she made it, smiling as she picked up the talisman. It was carved of coral and contained spheres within spheres. A phoenix decorated the outermost one.
Closing her hand around the precious object, Ling tried to swim up, but failed. Her strength was gone. Another fit of coughing gripped her. When it subsided, she could barely breathe.
The strange light-filled creatures began to descend again.
“No!” she rasped. “Stay! Please! I need you. I can’t die here. Please help me.”
As the words left her lips, another fangtooth loomed out of the darkness. It was twice as large as the one that had attacked her. Its teeth were six inches long.
Ling closed her eyes and waited for death.
But it didn’t come. The fangtooth swooped down behind her and grabbed hold of her tunic with his fearsome teeth. Ling felt herself being lifted off the ledge and carried upward.
An anglerfish appeared, too. A thin, fleshy stalk protruded from its forehead, and a blue light glowed at the end. It started for the surface, lighting the way, and the fangtooth followed. As they ascended, the tightness in Ling’s chest eased. Her dizziness faded. She gripped the talisman tightly.
Half an hour later, she was back at the edge of the Abyss. Lights glowed in the distance. Ling knew they were from the labor camp. She needed to make wake and get far away from it.
“Thank you,” she said to the fangtooth and the angler. She was so overcome with emotion—gratitude, relief, awe—that, for once, she felt tongue-tied. “You…you saved my life.”
“We know why they’re searching for the white ball. We hear them talking,” the fangtooth said, nodding at the camp. “They mustn’t win. Go, mermaid. Save many more lives.”
Ling nodded. She watched the two fish return to the deep, then started her long journey. She would travel to Miromara, to find Sera. To prepare for the coming war.
But she would make one stop first. To give her strength to one who needed it. To set things right.
Ling turned and headed for home.
“MARCO, ARE YOU sure you’re not really a merman disguised as a human?” Becca teased.
They were in the ocean, swimming. Marco, floating on his back, raised his feet and wiggled his toes. Becca saw webbing between them.
“Wow,” she said, laughing.
“It’s a genetic mutation,” he said. “All the males in the Contorini line have it.”
He dove under the water, came up a foot in front of Becca, and splashed her.
“Really?” Becca said, giving him a look. She raised her tail fins and slapped them down, nearly drowning him.
He shook the water off his face and they swam together. He insisted that they anchor the boat for an hour every day at noon, so he could make lunch, Elisabetta could nap, and Becca could swim.
“You need to move,” he’d told her. “You need to work all the sore bits, or everything will cramp up.”
Becca left the boat through a small water lock in its hull, directly underneath the saltwater tank. Today, Marco had pulled off his T-shirt and jumped in with her, bronze and bare-chested. Becca marveled at how strong and graceful he was in the water. She had no idea humans could be those things.
The wind had picked up now and the waves were choppy, but even so it felt wonderful to Becca to move through the ocean after being in the Marlin’s small tank. It was even better since Marco had joined her.
They talked as they swam. Becca had known Marco for only four days, yet she felt like she’d known him her entire life. They never ran out of things to say to each other.
“Any word on Ava?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “The American Wave Warriors reached the Mississippi, but they haven’t found her yet. The swamps are enormous, and she could be anywhere. I know their leader, Allie Edmonds. She
won’t give up.”
“And Ling?”
Marco shook his head.
Becca’s heart felt heavy. She feared the worst. She tried to convoca all her friends whenever she got back into the ocean, but she never had any success. The spell was insanely hard and tended to work best when several mer were casting it together.
“We have heard that Astrid’s okay,” Marco said. “And that she’s making her way to the Karg with Desiderio, Sera’s brother.”
“Some good news! Finally,” Becca said, encouraged.
“We’ll get you to the Karg, too,” Marco said. “Don’t doubt that for a minute.”
“I can’t thank you both enough for all that you’ve done for me already,” Becca said.
Marco shrugged. “You don’t need to thank us. It’s what we do.”
“I do need to thank you,” Becca insisted. “I wouldn’t be here without you.”
Marco turned to look at her. “I don’t even want to think about that.”
His gaze, suddenly intense, held Becca’s as he spoke. For a second, she thought she saw something in it—something more than friendly concern. She quickly looked away, feeling flustered and self-conscious.
“What will you do?” she asked, changing the subject. “After you get me to the Karg, I mean.”
“Head back to the Pacific,” Marco replied. “We were helping marine animals there. The elder of Qin and his forces are overwhelmed. It’s a bad scene, Becca. Birds are swallowing pieces of plastic they mistake for fish. It makes their stomachs rupture. Dolphins are getting tangled in fishing nets and drowning. Turtles eat plastic bags that they think are jellyfish. The bags block their intestines and they starve.”
Marco’s eyes hardened as he spoke. Becca could hear the anger, and the sadness, in his voice.
“People don’t get it. Because most of them don’t see ocean pollution. If anyone dumped garbage in the Alps, on the Serengeti, or in the Grand Canyon, there would be hell to pay.”
A sea turtle swam close by them. Marco reached out his hand, skimming it over the graceful creature’s shell.
“Isn’t her life worth more than a plastic bag?” he asked, watching the turtle swim off.
Waterfire Saga, Book Three: Dark Tide: A Deep Blue Novel Page 23