Challenger Deep (24 page)

“Preventative measures are the bane of spontaneous action,” he said. “I prefer the glory of heroism amidst panic.”

Well, now he has panic. Whether or not heroism will save the day is yet to be seen.

The captain sees me standing there with no particular orders.
“Take the helm,” he tells me, pointing to the upper deck. “Man the tiller. Turn us into the waves!”

I am shocked that he has actually asked me to take control of the ship. “
Into
the waves?” I ask, not sure I heard right.

“Do as I say!” the captain yells. “These waves are thirty-footers if they’re an inch. If they hit us broadside, we may capsize—and I prefer to sail this ocean right-side up.”

I leap three steps at a time to the helm, grab the tiller, and struggle to turn it. The parrot swoops past me, squawking something, but I can’t hear him over the thunder and crashing waves.

I finally get the tiller to move, pulling the stubborn rudder, but not soon enough. A wave hits us at an angle, crashing over the starboard bow. The crew is washed across the deck, grabbing on to anything they can for purchase.

Finally the ship comes about, challenging the waves. The bow pitches downward into a trough, and a wave hits us head-on. I can’t help but think of Calliope and how she’s faring through this. Do the waves batter her as they batter the rest of us? If she feels everything, does she feel the pain of the ship as it struggles to stay in one piece?

White water floods the deck, then drains away, leaving behind crewmen coughing for air. I have no idea if anyone has been lost to the sea.

I feel a sudden pain in my shoulder. The parrot has rounded back and landed on me, digging his talons in to keep from being torn away by the wind. “It’s time, it’s time,” he says. “You must dispatch the captain.”

“What? In the middle of this?”

“Kill him,” insists the bird. “Throw him overboard. We’ll say he was lost at sea, and you’ll be free of him.”

But my allegiance is still uncertain, and right now, saving my own life is more important than ending someone else’s. “No! I can’t!”

“He is the cause of this storm!” shouts the bird. “He’s the one who tore you from your life! This all begins and ends with him! You must do it! You must!” Then a gust of wind tears him from my shoulder.

Whether he’s lying or speaking truth, I don’t have time to consider. Another wave hits us. This time I’m pitched off the helm and down to the main deck, becoming one of the many struggling to remain aboard against the pull of the sea.

When I look up, I see something the sea brought aboard. A creature that stares at me from the mainsail boom. The thing has a pointed equine face with flaring nostrils and angry red eyes. It’s a horse—but it has no hind quarters. It has no legs at all, just a prehensile tail coiled around the boom. It’s a sea horse the size of a man, with bone-hard spikes up and down its body.

“Crestmare!” someone yells.

Then the captain leaps to the boom and in one smooth move slits its throat. The thing falls dead, dropping at my feet, its eyes going dark. “I should have known,” the captain says. “We are in Crestmare Alley.” Then he orders me back up to the helm. “A new course of action,” he says. “Our backside to the waves.”

“Retreat?” shouts the navigator through the window of the map room. “My maps say we must pass this way.”

“I said nothing of retreat! This is a duel—and a duel begins back-to-back.”

Once more at the tiller, I force the rudder to one side, and the waves do the rest. We are easily spun 180 degrees.

I know I should be looking forward, but I can’t help but turn my eyes aft. In a long flash of lightning, I see another wave coming at us from behind, higher than all the others—and at the wave’s crest, I see too many fiery red eyes to count. Apparently the crestmares don’t know the rules of a duel.

I hook my arm around the tiller as the wave hits. The stern disappears beneath the wave, the main deck is flooded, and the surge hits the helm, submerging me. As I hold my breath for what seems like forever, twisting with the force of the water, I hold tight to the tiller. I think we’ve been taken down and are on our way to the bottom, but then the water clears, and I’m gasping salty air.

When my eyes clear enough to see, I witness something hell itself could not have conceived. Dozens of crestmares maneuver around the deck, their tails giving them the agility of monkeys. They wrap their sharp bodies around crewmen like snakes. One creature opens its mouth and reveals sharklike teeth that plunge into the neck of its screaming victim. Then it takes the dying sailor over the edge and into the sea.

A crestmare leaps toward me and I swing my fist, knocking it aside, but it curls its tail around my arm and twists its body, and in an instant, it’s there breathing into my face again. I think it will take off my head in a single bite, but instead it speaks.

“It’s not you we want . . . but we’ll go through you if we have to.”

Then it head-butts me, leaving me back down on the deck, and swings away.

That’s when I see the captain. He’s set upon by three crestmares—one constricted on each leg, and a third around his chest. He holds the third one by the neck as it snaps at his face. He tries slicing at it with his dagger, but it knocks the dagger away, and it clatters to the deck.

You must dispatch the captain,
the parrot had said—but maybe I don’t have to. Maybe the crestmares will do it for me. If they kill him, though, and drag him into the sea, what of Calliope? Without his key, she can never be free.

Before another wave has a chance to flood the deck, I scramble for the captain’s dagger, then plunge it into the back of the head of the crestmare trying to bite him. It falls dead, then I go after the two on his legs. Another one leaps at us, but I knock it down, and crush its head beneath my heel.

Freed from the crestmares, the captain is disoriented. He gasps to regain his wind. If ever there were a time he’d be too weak to fight me, this is it. I grab a board from a broken crate, and swing it at the back of his head so hard that the force of it sends the peach pit flying out from behind his eye patch, along with a small silver key that clatters on the deck. The captain goes down. He doesn’t know what hit him.

Another wave looms behind us—the crest full of red eyes like the leading edge of a lava flow. Let the crestmares get the captain now, I don’t care. I have what I want.

Before the wave hits, I hurl myself forward toward the locked trapdoor of the forecastle, and fumble with the key in the padlock.

I feel more than hear the wave hit the stern of the ship. The rush of water moves closer along the deck, but I don’t turn to look. Finally the padlock clicks open. I pull it free, lift the hatch, and throw myself in just as the wave reaches the bow, washing me down into the forecastle.

I stand up. There’s water to my waist—the forecastle is half flooded. Mooring ropes are curled on either side of me. Then, right in front of me, dim, but clearly visible, I see a pair of legs protruding from the point that marks the tip of the bow. Calliope was right! She is more than a part of the ship; she has her own legs, but they’re badly corroded from being so long in this dank place. Then I see why she can’t free herself—there’s a bolt through her lower back, keeping her attached to the bow. I can set her free!

“Calliope! Can you hear me?” I shout. In response she moves her copper foot. I struggle with the bolt, but my bare hands aren’t strong enough—and I curse the shipbuilder who left her like this.

Then from behind me I hear:

“You might want this.”

I turn to see Carlyle holding out a wrench, like somehow he’s been here all along, just waiting for me.

I take it from him. It’s the right size—and I know I’ll have enough leverage to loosen the bolt . . . but I hesitate.

If I do this, what will happen? Tearing her from the ship could condemn her to a watery grave. She’s made of copper, which means she might sink like a penny in a fountain. But what if she doesn’t sink? What if she swims? If I free her from the ship now, will she
take me with her? Can I continue this voyage without her?

“Hurry, Caden,” says Carlyle. “Before you’re too late.”

With the sound of crestmares above and the raging sea below, I hold the wrench on the bolt, struggling to set Calliope free. I put my full weight behind the wrench, and the bolt begins to turn. I jerk harder until it’s loose, then work the wrench until the bolt falls free.

As soon as it plunks into the dark water of the flooded forecastle, Calliope begins to wriggle in the tightly cinched hole, pulling herself forward. I can imagine her straining her arms, pushing against the ship as if birthing herself from the bow. She frees her hips, her legs follow, and in an instant she’s gone, leaving only a porthole-sized gap where she had been.

I look out through the hole to see that she has not sunk—but neither does she swim. Instead, she runs, her spirit lighter than air, lighter than the copper of her flesh, more willful than gravity. She runs on the surface of the waves! A single ray of sunlight pierces the clouds like a spotlight to follow her, and her corroded, oxidized shell peels away, revealing shining copper from head to toe. I want to cry for joy, but a dark shape falls from the ship up above into the waves, then another then another. The crestmares! In a moment the sea is infested with them, racing like a cavalry charge toward a single shining figure in the distance.

It’s not you we want, but we’ll go through you if we have to.

It wasn’t the captain they were after—it was Calliope! The captain must have known! That’s why he turned to face her away from them.

“Run!” I scream, even though I know she can’t hear me. “Run and don’t ever stop running!”

In a moment she is like a tiny flame on the horizon chased by the surge of crestmares, then I can’t see her anymore, and I pray that she has the strength to run for as long as she has to.

When I climb out of the forecastle, the storm has ended, as if a switch has been thrown. The waves subside; the clouds begin to break apart. The captain stands midship with arms crossed, his good eye fixed on me. His dead socket is bare and dark, but somehow staring as well.

“Am I to be keelhauled?” I ask. “Or worse?”

“You had the gall to steal something from me,” he says.

Around him the crew tenses in anticipation of what he might do.

“You had the gall to steal from me—and by doing so, you saved us all.” He claps me on the shoulder. “Heroism amidst panic.”

The navigator comes to him with his peach pit. “I found this. Does that make me a hero, too?” The captain takes it from him without answering. He pops it back in place, but somewhere in the storm, the eye patch was lost. There is nothing to hide the awfulness of his peach-pit eye.

“Bring us around,” the captain says. “A westerly heading once more, Master Caden.”

“Master?”

“I’ve just promoted you to Master of the Helm. The wind no longer guides us,” he says. “You do.”

134. On the Other Side of the Glass

I hear from Skye that Callie is leaving.

“She’s in our room, packing right now,” Skye tells me as she works on the same puzzle she’s been working on forever. I wonder if she remembers giving me a piece, and if she’ll ever ask for it back. “You’ll never see Callie again. Poor you.” Skye seems to take both delight and misery from the fact. “Life is about suffering. Deal with it.”

I don’t dignify her with a response. Instead I go to Callie’s room. On the way I run into Carlyle, and I can tell by the sympathetic look on his face that it’s true. Callie is leaving.

“You may want this,” he says, and reaching over the nurses’ station, he pulls a rose from a flower arrangement. He hands me the rose.

“Hurry, Caden,” he says. “Before you’re too late.”

Callie is in her room with her parents, packing up what few belongings she has. I have never met her parents. On the days they’ve come during visiting hour, the three of them retreated to a corner of the Vista Lounge and talked in hushed tones, letting no one in their little circle of three.

When Callie sees me, she doesn’t smile. In fact, she seems almost in pain. “Mom, Dad, this is Caden,” she tells them. Was she going to leave without saying good-bye? Or was it so painful she just didn’t want to think about it?

The rose in my hand seems such an awkward gesture now, I lay
it down on her bed rather than handing it to her.

“Hello, Caden,” says her father in an accent much stronger than hers.

“Hi,” I say, and turn back to Callie. “So, it’s true—you’re leaving.”

Her father speaks instead. “Discharge papers are already signed. Our daughter comes home today.”

In spite of his attempt to speak for her, I direct my words at Callie. “You could have told me.”

“I wasn’t sure until this morning. Then it happened so fast . . .”

Skye’s words are still in my head.
You’ll never see Callie again.
I am determined to prove her wrong. I pull a crumpled piece of paper out of the trash, then ask her parents for a pen, because I know I won’t exactly find one lying around.