Dark Life: Rip Tide (3 page)

“Lots of people have bad diving experiences,” I said as we zoomed toward the shimmering bubble fence that surrounded my family’s ocean-floor homestead. “But then they try again and—”

“I did try again,” Gemma said. “And again. Anyway, it’s not about one bad experience.”

The cruiser hit the dense stream of bubbles and burst into the pale golden light on the other side. The boundary lamps around our property had begun to dim to simulate nightfall.

“Then what is it?” I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something she wasn’t telling me. I steered the cruiser toward my house, which floated like an enormous jellyfish over our fields of seaweed and kelp.

“I just …” She lifted a hand and dropped it as if words were useless—as if I’d never understand. “The ocean is filled with terrifying things,” she said finally.

“Like red devil squid.”

If I’d just stayed in the sub today, she wouldn’t have
seen them and wouldn’t have had another “terrifying thing” to add to her list. And to tell her the ocean was safe would be like asking her to believe in mermaids. The ocean was a wilderness filled with beasts that viewed man as prey and plenty of creatures that could kill a human with a single bite, prick, or sting.

“Squid qualify,” she agreed with a shiver. “But they’re not the worst.”

I nodded, knowing that she was afraid of being eaten by a shark, even though I’d assured her that it didn’t happen very often. She’d said that my response was “less than comforting.”

“But all of this …” she said, gazing at the acres of green and the schooling fish, whirling like jewel-colored cyclones or gliding in coordinated precision. “I miss being here.”

Good,
I thought.

As pleased as I was that Gemma had agreed to come home with me for the night, it wasn’t like I got much out of the deal. We spent the evening playing cards with my parents and my nine-year-old sister, Zoe. I figured that was more than enough time spent in our “quality-time room,” as Gemma loved to call the living room. But then Gemma had to help Zoe feed her pets, which took awhile because my sister’s room was crammed with dozens of
aquariums filled to the rims with sea life. When Ma started braiding Gemma’s hair in some intricate style as Pa read aloud to Zoe, I gave up hope of getting any time alone with her.

I retreated to my bedroom, wishing my parents would disappear for a while. Take a trip to the Topside. Something. But Gemma popped in my room soon enough.

“Polishing your treasure, Captain Bluebeard?”

Embarrassed, I put the cutlass I had been restoring back on its shelf alongside the other artifacts that I’d dug out of the seafloor. Dirks and china, chalices and jewelry. All stored neatly on shelves that lined my room.

“I can’t stop thinking about that township,” she said while pausing by a stone deity that I used as a stand for whatever necklace or medallion I had yet to research and tag. She lifted a rope of pearls from the statue’s neck and draped it around hers. “I think the ’wealth did it.”

“Killed off a whole township? Why?”

“Why force boys to live in a reformatory on the seafloor?” she replied, referring to the reform home her brother had once been sent to—Seablite.

I couldn’t argue with her. From the little I’d heard, the experience would have scarred any kid—emotionally and physically. The doctor who’d been in charge of Seablite Reformatory, Doc Kunze, had discovered that the incarcerated boys were gaining new abilities on
account of living subsea. He’d made it his mission to find out why … only he’d gone about his investigation with a scalpel.

“Know how Representative Tupper explains what happened in Seablite?” I asked her as I settled back on my bed. “
Lack of oversight.”

She stopped poking through the stuff on my shelves long enough to shoot me a look. “Oh, really?”

“According to him, the Commonwealth is not an evil government—just overextended, and sometimes things fall through the cracks. Lack of oversight is what let Doc get away with experimenting on the boys in Seablite.”

Gemma frowned. “A lot more than lack of oversight anchored that township and left those people to die.”

“I’ll say.”

When she took a seat at the foot of my bed like she used to—facing me, tucking up her legs—a thousand sea anemones bloomed inside me, tentacles fluttering and firing. As thrilled as I was to have her to myself, suddenly I could think of nothing to say.

After a moment she asked, “Are you nervous about tomorrow?”

“Selling crops to Drift? No.” Which was true, even though Drift’s sachem was straight out of a nightmare, with his face and scalp erupting with skin cancer. “What
can go wrong? They need our greens. We want to sell them. Simple deal.”

“What about the rations the ’wealth sends them? That was part of the Surf Treaty, right? If people agreed to move on to the townships, the government would supply anything they couldn’t grow or make.”

“Drift’s sachem said the ’wealth is sending them half of what they got five years ago.”

“Must be a lack of oversight,” Gemma said dryly.

Even when piqued, she was pretty. With her sun-streaked braids pinned up like a crown and her sea green caftan tucked around her legs, she could pass for a mermaid. Though I’d never seen one pictured with freckles….

“You know it’s cruel to lead Jibby on,” I said, broaching the subject that kept hijacking my thoughts. “Unless you’ve changed your mind about him.”

She smiled. “Nope. Still not ready to get married.”

“Then why’d you say yes to the boxing match? To see Shade?”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “That’s why.”

I’d suspected as much. He was her brother and it made sense that she’d want to see him. But I couldn’t forget that living with Shade on the
Specter,
his gang’s submarine, had been her first choice four months ago. She’d only agreed to live with us after he’d refused her.

“Your parents are going to say it’s getting too late for talking any minute now.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “We’re rendezvousing with Drift at dawn, and I have to fetch the wagon before that. You want to come?”

“Sure,” she said, sounding deliberately casual.

“You don’t have to get out of the sub.”

“It’s not that.” She paused. “Well, it is that. But I was just thinking, I don’t want to find another township in the trash gyre. Though I suppose now you’ll be able to stake a claim down here with your half of the money.”

“Yeah. When I’m of age.” There was no doubt that finding Nomad had gotten me a lot closer to realizing my dream, which had seemed unattainable ever since the ‘wealth stopped subsidizing new homesteads. Because of the terrible thing done to the surfs on Nomad—the cold-blooded murder of an entire town—I hadn’t let myself take any pleasure in finding such a valuable salvage. But now, without the derelict township bobbing nearby, dark and silent, a giddy warmth spread through me. My own land. One hundred acres of subsea frontier—gorgeous and teeming with wildlife.

“Must be nice to know exactly what you want,” she mused.

“Need,” I corrected. “I wouldn’t survive living Topside, crammed into a stack-city with a million other people and no nature.”

“And no monsters trying to eat you. You’re right, you’d die of boredom.” As she got to her feet, her smile
turned rueful. “I’ll go with you tomorrow, though I’ll probably regret it.” Leaning in, she gave me a quick hug.

“’Night,” I said, purposely casual, so she wouldn’t know that her touch had sent my pulse into overdrive.

“Oh, and by the way,” she called over her shoulder as she headed for Zoe’s room, “you’re glowing.”

The fog surrounded us, giving the surface of the ocean a ghostly feel. Until the sun rose and burned it off, I didn’t dare drive the cruiser any faster for fear of scraping the rim of the submerged atoll. Even the shipwreck posed a threat in vapor this dense—we had to be almost on top of it.

Popping the hatch, I stood on the pilot seat to get a better vantage. “Drift looks like a giant Portuguese man-of-war with a blue-and-purple flexiglass dome,” I told Gemma, who amazingly enough was wearing her diveskin for the second time in two days.

“I can’t see anything in this fog,” she said.

I sent a series of clicks into the haze—pitched too high for Gemma to hear—then considered the picture that the echoes formed in my brain. I could make out the grounded transport ship ahead, creaking with each wave, but no township, which was strange. We weren’t late. I’d chosen to hide the wagon in the trash vortex in part because it was close to the rendezvous point.

“Maybe it’s submerged.” Gemma joined me in the open hatch.

“Doubtful.” I knew that the surfs aboard Drift were fishermen and seal hunters. The township could travel subsea, but mostly it kept to the ocean’s surface while dragging electrified nets below.

“Maybe your parents changed the meeting place because of the fog.”

“No, I’ll bet they’re inside the wreck, still waiting for Drift to show.” Dropping back into the pilot seat, I steered the cruiser alongside the wreck and turned on the autopilot. “I’m going in to see what Pa wants to do with the wagon.” I hoisted myself out of the cruiser. “Grab a speargun from the back.”

“You’ve got one in your holster.”

“I mean for you. A precaution in case surfs show up and try to take the crop without paying.” Catching her look of alarm, I asked, “Remember how to load it?” When she nodded, I slid onto the cruiser’s narrow side deck. “Give a shout if you see anything.”

I eyed the shadowy outline of the shipwreck within the fog. The bow and stern towers rose over the waves but the flat deck in the middle was under the waterline. At one time this ship had been a luxury transport vessel that took people up and down the East Coast on a regular schedule. But a storm had pushed the ship off course,
and a rogue wave had dumped it on top of a submerged atoll. Since then, it had been stripped of its velvet seats and leather paneling, but the Seaguard left the hull in place to keep other ships from running aground as well.

Gingerly, I leapt from the cruiser’s bumper onto a balcony in the bow tower, splashing down in water up to my waist. Wanting a better vantage point, I climbed up to the next balcony, using the holes in the rusted hull as toeholds. The railing was long gone and the floor looked anything but solid. I stepped through the opening that had once been a sliding glass door, moved quickly through the private cabin and into the hall beyond.

The corridor opened onto a large atrium in the center of the tower. Leaning over the low wall, I looked for the gaping hole in the floor one story down, where the boiler had exploded when the ship crashed. Now ocean waves lapped in the pit. If the wagon hadn’t been attached to the cruiser, I would have surfaced there. As it was, I expected to see the Slicky bobbing in the char-rimmed hole, but there was no sign of our minisub. Strange, since my parents were right where I thought they’d be—off to one side of the atrium.

They were talking with a wiry, leather-skinned man, whom I recognized as Drift’s sachem, Hadal. As always, his gnarled appearance stopped me cold. The half ear Hadal had lost to skin cancer wasn’t even his most
alarming feature. That distinction belonged to the two small horns, sprouting on the left side of his hairless head. Cutaneous horns—shriveled and yellow like old fingernails. Another horrible effect of too much sun over too many years. Shoving down my disgust, I noticed that Hadal was alone, which seemed even weirder than our missing minisub.

Before calling down, I scanned the atrium. Broken panes in the filthy skylight created a few scattered patches of light below. Enough that I could make out figures moving silently around the perimeter. My Dark Gift didn’t work nearly as well in air as it did subsea, but I sent out a series of clicks and waited for its echo to bounce back to me. The picture it formed sent an icy shiver down my spine. Those were surfs slipping along the walls, surrounding my parents. I doubted that Ma and Pa even knew they were there.

The lurkers were bare chested, which rebounded as a much sharper echo than clothing did, and gripping tridents of all sizes—some short and clubbed on one end, others long and wickedly spiked. Tridents were a common surf tool, but these men were wielding them like weapons. Looked primed for bloodshed. Would Pa be shaking hands with Hadal now if he knew? Not a chance.

Not daring to breathe, I unholstered my speargun and edged forward. As I lifted the tip, movement in the hole
below caught my eye—a rising sub, which must have entered through the breached hull. Too big to be the Slicky.

“Pa!” I hollered as I took aim at Hadal. “They’ve got you surrounded!”

As my parents whirled, looking for me, the surfs dashed into the light. The shock on my parents’ faces confirmed my suspicion: They hadn’t known there were more surfs in the atrium. Before they could react, Hadal leapt behind my mother and twisted her arm up her back. A move that turned my panic into rage.

Loping forward, a sun-fried surf hurled his trident at me. I dropped into a crouch just as the weapon whistled past my head and smashed into the wall. I popped up again in time to see another surf sprint for the stairs, while the rest closed in on my parents. Would skewering a couple of them make things worse? My trigger finger itched to let a spear fly. I wouldn’t aim to kill. Still, I nixed the idea. There was no way to disable them all before one did serious damage to my parents.

“Ty!” Pa yelled. “Take off!”

Behind him, the submarine surfaced in the break in the floor. Green and wicked looking, with a prow that ended in a spiraled drill bit.

“Ty, go!” Ma shouted as Hadal hauled her toward the waiting sub.

I followed the crust-skinned savages with the tip of
my speargun as they forced my parents aboard. Footsteps pounded up the stairs beside me. Trying to fight off the horde by myself was sure failure. But if I followed their submarine in the cruiser, I could radio their coordinates to the Seaguard and get my parents back that way.

Just as the footsteps reached the top of the stairs, I took off.

Feeling sick and fighting back paralyzing fear, I raced back to the cabin and locked the door. It wouldn’t keep the surf out forever, only slow him down. The sun was up now and from the balcony, I spotted Gemma in the thinning fog. When she waved, I shouted, “It’s a trap!” and hoped my words weren’t lost in the wind.

The door banged open behind me as I studied the churning sea below. Climbing down would take longer than I had, but the two-story jump was a risk. Aside from the undertow, who knew if rocks or wreckage lay hidden beneath the waves? Wishing I hadn’t left my helmet in the sub, I felt for a handhold in the rusted hull.

“Move and I’ll spill your guts,” said a harsh voice behind me. I turned to see a surf with blisters erupting across his bare chest. “Inside.” When he jerked his trident toward the door, sunlight gleamed off its dagger-sharp tines.

Watching Gemma drop into the cockpit, I considered my options. She had the cruiser primed to go. The jump might be worth the risk now.

“Inside!” the surf repeated. “Or I’ll—” His threat ended in a yelp that turned into a scream, while his trident clattered to the floor.

Baffled, I watched him sink until he lay sprawled in the doorway, howling and clutching at his naked back. Behind him stood a messy-haired little girl in a diveskin. Zoe.

“What did you do?!”

She held up a slender spike. “Rockfish spine,” she said. No doubt plucked off one of her pets. Tossing it aside, she stepped over the crying man. “He won’t die.”

No, but the pain from the fish toxin would make him wish he had. I knew, having stuck my hand in the wrong crevice once. “Why didn’t you just shock him?” I asked.

She shot me a look and I knew. She couldn’t control her Dark Gift. Always worried that she might cause permanent damage or even kill someone.

“Come on,” she said. She grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the surf, who was now curled up in pain. “Pa told me to leave in the Slicky. And that was before the scary guys showed up. Are we going to follow them?”

“Where’s the Slicky?”

She pointed across the water where waves swirled around the aft tower. Zoe had been piloting subs since she was six. If I could get her over there safely, she could zip out of here.

Looking around, I spotted a cable hanging from
the deck above. Following it with my eyes, I saw that it ended under water at the other end of the ship, not far from the minisub. Unfastening her dive belt, I tossed one end over the cable and tugged it closer to the balcony, taking out the slack. It seemed sturdy enough. Knowing what to do without being told, she flipped her helmet into place, sealed it, and took the ends of the belt from me.

“Get in the Slicky and go to the Trade Station,” I told her. “Call the Seaguard.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going after that sub.”

“Me, too!”

“No! The Slicky can’t outpace anything.” Not that that was the point. But telling her it was too dangerous would guarantee she’d try to follow them. “If you don’t tell the Seaguard that surfs took Ma and Pa, how are we going to get them back?”

Zoe paled. Nodding, she launched herself into the air. I scrambled to the edge to watch her. Holding fast to the ends of the dive belt, she flew down the makeshift zip line as it bucked in the high winds. Within seconds, she sluiced into the waves and disappeared in the spray. A moment later she appeared inside the Slicky’s cockpit.

Quickly, I bent over the writhing man. The wound was just a prick. His pain would last a week at most. Not
that I should care. Drift’s cancer-riddled sachem had just kidnapped my parents. Yet the words tumbled out of my mouth. “Put a hot compress on it. Heat breaks down the venom.”

I started to unfasten my own belt, but a flash of green caught my eye. My heart quickened. The sub had torn out of the wreck and was now closing in on the cruiser. “Gemma!” I pointed to the vehicle headed her way and motioned for her to submerge. But then I realized that even if she could escape, she wouldn’t know to follow the green sub, didn’t know that Drift’s sachem had forced Ma and Pa aboard.

Footsteps echoed through the corridor, heading my way. I studied the waves, aimed for the one wink of blue amidst the geysers of spray, and dove off the balcony.

The second I knifed into the water, relief swept through me. No debris or rocks broke my fall. I slowed my descent and flipped over. Once I located the cruiser bobbing above, I blasted high-pitched clicks upward. The cruiser’s control panel would pick up the sound and, I hoped, Gemma would guess the source.

I swam for the wagon. As soon as I got a grip on its back rail, I clicked again loudly and the cruiser took off, tilting as it went. Shooting sonar over my shoulder, I sensed the green sub coming for us. After our crops or me? I didn’t know. But we couldn’t exactly follow the
surfs if they were chasing us. An even more pressing question: How much longer could I hold my breath? Not much. I had to get Gemma to surface, and soon.

The cruiser lurched and bucked. Clearly, Gemma hadn’t had much practice driving the family sub—and none with a wagon of crops hitched to the back. I tried clicking at her again, but moving this fast, my sounds weren’t reaching her.

Grasping the rubber straps that enclosed the wagon, one after the other, I pulled myself to the middle of the lid. Then I held on and tried to kneel, but I couldn’t fight the slipstream. If I didn’t get my head above water in the next thirty seconds, I’d have to drop off. In a last-ditch effort, I waved frantically at the cruiser’s rearview camera.

Gemma must have gotten the message. The cruiser charged for the surface so fast that it rocketed past the waves with the wagon flying behind. Both were too heavy to arc and so smacked down with enough force to knock the wind out of me. But I didn’t have time to curl up in pain. The green sub surfaced right behind us. With its long drilling ram and cigar-shaped body, it could be mistaken for a sickly green narwhal. The two green windows at the waterline were the beast’s eyes.

Where had surfs gotten such a state-of-the-art submarine?

I didn’t have time to ponder that mystery. If they took us hostage, too, we’d be no use to Ma and Pa. If it was the wagon they were after, better to let them have it.

Again using the straps, I pulled myself across the lid to the front of the wagon, which was no easy task. The wagon weighed so much less than the sub, it skipped over the swells and smacked down in the valleys. Knowing my grip would break on the next drop, I lunged for the back of the cruiser, only to zip across the slick fiberglass, grappling for a hold until finally I snagged the splash rail—just before flying past it.

Without stopping to catch my breath, I unclipped the towline and looked back to see the wagon bob in our wake for an instant and then disappear under the waves. Valuable seaweed and two days’ worth of sweat were packed in that wagon, but I didn’t care. So long as sinking it got the surfs off our tail.

Sure enough, their sub circled back. Through the twin green windows, I saw several shadows but could make out no faces. I wished I could see if my parents were all right. Then as fast as it had appeared, the craft submerged once more.

I crawled along the cruiser’s narrow deck, and Gemma opened the hatch for me. She scrambled aside so that I could drop into the pilot seat. Then, though I was soaked in sweat and shaking with fatigue, I shoved the joystick
forward and took us into a near-vertical hydroplane. Something brushed my hand, and I looked down to see Gemma slip her fingers through mine. Any other day, I would have been thrilled. But now, I felt numb with despair.

“What happened to your parents?” she asked.

“The surfs took them.” Ma and Pa had given Hadal the benefit of the doubt, but Drift’s sachem had proved that surfs were as savage as everyone said. Slowing, I leveled off the cruiser. “I don’t know what to do.” My voice cracked as I spoke, which shamed me as much as my indecision did. “I don’t know whether to follow them or go get help.”

“Ty.” She jabbed a finger at the monitor.

One glance had me sharing her alarm. The green sub was zooming upward, heading right for us. Jerking the joystick toward me, I altered our course. But so did the sub—and it slammed into the cruiser’s belly. The sharpened spar punctured the hull and jammed in so hard, its point drilled through the floor between our seats. Then the sub retracted its spar, leaving what I could only imagine was a gaping hole in the cruiser’s underside.

“Get your helmet on,” I yelled, flipping mine into place.

As Gemma sealed her helmet, I saw that her hands were shaking, and that added worry to the jumble of
feelings inside me. Would she be able to handle the plunge into the ocean? Or would she freeze up like last time?

Water spurted through the hole in the floor. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “We’ve got a raft.” It was in the drawer under her seat, but before bending down to get it, I took one more look outside. Good thing, because the green sub had circled back and was zooming straight for us, clearly intending to crack our viewport.

I red-lined the cruiser’s throttle. The engine was slow to respond but not dead. I aimed for the seafloor, dipping just as the green sub rocketed over us. I stayed on course. If the surfs thought we were sunk, maybe it would buy us enough time to escape.

Nudging Gemma to one side, I located the drawer under her seat. Though the water was now up to our knees, I managed to yank out the raft. Thrusting the folded square into her arms, I took control of the cruiser again, pulling up its nose just as we hit the seafloor. We plowed through half an acre of ooze before coming to a stop. Now we had a new problem: With the viewport buried in muck, I couldn’t see if it was safe to get out. And the sludge was too thick for the wipers. The only good part: Water had stopped leaking in through the hole.

“We have to get out now,” I told Gemma as I switched on the cruiser’s pulse so that I could find it later. “Fill up your lungs with Liquigen.” Plunging my hands beneath
the water on the floor, I slid back the hatch cover. The cruiser’s body was mounted on top of its two engines, so there was space to crawl out from underneath. I shoved a foot through the hatch, into the ooze. It was plenty soft. We’d be able to burrow our way out easily enough. I just hoped the green sub wasn’t hovering nearby, waiting for us.

“I’ll go first and clear a path. Follow me as quickly as you can.” Taking the folded raft from her, I met her eyes. “We won’t be outside long. Just stay close to me. As soon as I get the raft inflated, it’ll take us to the surface.”

She nodded, though her expression was bleak.

I wished I had something more comforting to tell her. I unspooled a short length of cord from my belt and clipped the end to the raft in case I needed two hands to dig out. After sucking Liquigen into my lungs, I pushed out of the hatch arms first. Even for me, being buried in muck underneath the cruiser was a scary sensation. But I wiggled forward, burrowing like a hagfish through the ooze until I reached the end of the cruiser’s body.

Getting to my feet, I rubbed the mud from my helmet and used my Dark Gift to look around. About half a mile back, I saw the narwhal sub hovering over the seafloor as two divers attached the wagon to the back. We had to get out of here before they finished the job. Working quickly,
I located the cruiser’s tank of compressed air and attached the raft’s nozzle.

As the raft began to inflate, Gemma crawled out. She stood, only to then keel to one side and grab for the splash rail. Clearly, our skid of a landing had shaken her up.

I gripped one of the raft’s looped handles with my left hand. With my right, I freed the cord from Gemma’s belt and clipped it to mine. As the raft inflated, it was harder to hold in place, and I didn’t want it pulling me to the surface without her.

Gemma looked over her shoulder and then whipped around as if she’d seen something. I tried to get her attention, but now I needed both hands to keep the raft by the air tank. I nudged her with my foot, but she didn’t seem to remember that I was there. She turned again, peering into the darkness. Even with her crown lights on high, there was no way she could see very far. But using sonar, I knew there was nothing nearby but a shoal of eagle rays.

The real threat was from the green sub, and one series of clicks told me that the divers had finished attaching the wagon. Luckily the raft was nearly inflated.

When I faced Gemma again, I cringed. Her whole body trembling, she crumpled and curled into a ball in the ooze. With the raft pulling me off my feet, I braced myself against the cruiser and reached for Gemma but could only graze her thigh with my fingertips. She didn’t
notice. I yanked at the cord that joined us, finally getting her attention. She extended her hand, and I caught it. With a tug, I pulled her to her feet and held her close.

Just then, the nozzle popped out of the air tank and the raft burst upward, nearly jerking my arm from its socket as I held on. Our combined weight slowed the raft’s ascent but didn’t stop it. Eyes closed, Gemma looped her arms around my neck. With her helmet pressed to mine, I could see her eyes fluttering under the lids, as if she were in the midst of a nightmare. She didn’t even open them when we crashed through a school of tuna. I tightened my grip on her as the fish—each weighing at least four hundred pounds—buffeted us about in a flurry of blue bodies and yellow fins. Finally the tuna whirled away and I spotted the first shafts of sunlight penetrating the darkness. “
Hold on
,” I told her silently. “
We’re almost there.”

As soon as the raft burst through the waves, I rolled her aboard. By the time I hoisted myself in, she was curled up again.

“Gemma,” I said as soon as my lungs cleared. “We’re out of the water.”

With her helmet still sealed, she shook her head. Not in answer to me, but as if to get rid of some awful vision. Pulling her hands from the flexiglass, I struggled to unsnap the seal. She erupted into choked sobs.

“Breathe!” I said, though I knew it wasn’t the Liquigen
that kept the air from entering her lungs. I threw aside her helmet and held her face between my hands. “You’re all right. We’re in the raft.”